A modern day Lorax.

Once, I lived among the city's trees, working as an arborist in Baltimore—with calloused hands and a heart full of sap. Every tree has a voice if you listen long enough and I made it my work to hear them. Though I never formally earned the proper title of a forester, I found myself again and again standing between the trees and men who wish to silence them. A Lorax, if you will — though not quite as confident.

Currently, I live deeper in the backwoods, far from the noise of traffic and buzzing city streets. Here, moose outnumber people.

Beauty and brutality sit side by side: untouched ridgelines with expansive vistas one moment, clear-cut logging scars the next. I often want to write about it — to capture the way the light hits a stand of Red Spruce after a rainstorm, or how silence tastes during a snowfall — but my mind often scatters like dry leaves in the wind.

Borderline Personality Disorder, my doctor tells me, can mimic the chaos of ADHD — splintering focus and tangling thoughts. Some days, words come easily, pouring out in rushes that feel cathartic. Other days, I sit for hours, trying to stitch even one coherent sentence together while my brain runs in a thousand diferent directions.

There is a story inside me — a love letter to the trees and the hiking trails they line; a battle cry against the scars left by thoughtless forestry practices— but sometimes the connecting line from heart to brain to hand is so broken it feels like it might never come out in a way that's properly translated.

Still, just like the trees I love, I am learning to grow around my obstacles. Crooked branches still reach for the sun and imperfect stories are still worth telling.

Maybe I am the Lorax. Maybe I am the trees. Maybe I'm just crazy.

Perhaps, I am all of the above.