A Jungle Tale

The jungle does not wait. It breathes. It watches. It speaks in tongues of rustling leaves and shuddering wings. And when she steps into its embrace, the earth shifts beneath her feet; not to reject her, but to taste her spirit.

I see her first where the rivers carve deep into the flesh of the land, where the canopy shields us from time itself. It swallows the sun and spits it back in splintered gold. She stands right there at the edge, her city-skin too pale, her eyes too wide; not with fear, but with hunger. The jungle knows this hunger. It has called her here. She seems hesitant yet drawn by its pulse. The dawn hums softly around, the air alive with the secrets of a world too quiet for the rush she has left behind.

I guide the long-tail boat through water that is not water but liquid shadow, with the blush of the waking sky. The dipterocarps groan above us, their roots like the knotted hands of ancient shamans. Here and there the banyans twist into bridges and plunging into the earth's veins. She touches the bark as we pass, and I see it —the moment the jungle slips into her. Her breath hitches. Her fingers twitch. The trees whisper, and she listens.

Thale Noi opens before us, a dream of green and gold. Hyacinths clutch at the boat, their purple throats gasping. Buffalo rise from the water like mythic beasts, their hides glazing with sunlight. She leans over the edge, and for a heartbeat, she is one of them —half-born, half-wild, baptised in the swamp’s thick breath, in a space untouched by time.

Birds scream in constant motion. Not songs —screams. The malkohas flit through the dense foliage, their wings slicing the air into pieces. The swallows keep arcing in graceful loops, the barbets echo softly in her eyes. The spiderhunters flicker like ghosts between branches, too fast, too fleeting. The malkohas move farther away. She follows their flight in tune with the wild, her head snapping side to side, her pupils upward. The jungle laughs. It is testing her.

I push faster. The lotus gardens rise —pink mouths gaping at the sky, their hearts wet with nectar. I tear one open, press it to her lips. She sucks the sweetness, and her eyelids flutter. For a moment, she is not woman but creature, licking the jungle’s offering from her fingers. The storks watch. The herons judge. The owl in the shadows knows. It feels as though we’ve crossed into the unknown.

The mangroves tighten around us, their roots like serpents, their breath salt and rot and life. The air is a wet hand pressed to our mouths. She gasps, but she does not cough. She drinks it. The deeper we go, the more she unravels —her city-shell cracking, her true skin trembling beneath. On the shore of the islet, the egrets and cormorants gather in search of fish. Hidden in the shadows of a tree, a barred eagle-owl watches her. It feels as though the entire landscape has been laid bare.

Then, the waterfall. Nan Sawan, where the water does not fall but pours, seven tiers of roaring light. Dragonflies, pink as tongues, purple as bruises, dart around her head. She opens her mouth as if to catch them. Laughs. The sound is swallowed by the cascade. On a sun-warmed rock, we share a kiss in a moment suspended as much as it's etched into my very being. It feels as though existence is timeless, untouched by the outer.

Pomelos hang like swollen moons. She reaches, strains, her fingers brushing fruit too heavy to hold. The bamboo path creaks beneath us, a living thing, leading us deeper. To the Khao Dang Cave. To the Buddha. To the flickering candles that dance like spirits on the walls. She does not pray. She breathes with the stone, the moss, the ancient dark.

Night comes. The Loy Krathong lanterns float —tiny suns bobbing on the river’s skin. She releases hers in a shared moment of hope, and I see the wish tremble in her eyes before it flees downstream. The moon watches. The river swallows. The jungle remembers.

Back in the wood house, where the walls are barely walls, just gaps between breaths, spaces for the night to slip through, I hold her close. Here we become something else. Not lovers. Not man and woman. But two animals, slick with sweat and moonlight, moving to the rhythm of the cicadas’ scream. When my teeth graze her shoulder, she does not gasp; she hisses, a sound like wind through cracked bamboo. And as the night swallows our cries, I know this is an exchange of souls. The jungle takes what it is owed.

In this sanctuary, her heart stops fighting. Here, within the stillness, I feel the power of her spirit mirrored in the wildness. Intimacy becomes a sacred energy, as natural and raw as the land itself.

She is no longer a visitor.
She is prey.
She is hunter.
She is jungle.
And the jungle never lets go.