Foxes are shy animals. I have come to love many of them recently, not metaphorically, but real ones, in a kind of big natural park where I get to see them often. when I’m there they approach me quietly. they don’t announce their intentions, and perhaps they themselves don’t know why they come closer. curiosity without a name. a pull without a reason.

They always keep their distance. they never arrive without caution, pausing, reading the air, deciding whether to trust the moment or retreat from it. and when I watch them I see something I recognize. I approach the things I love the same way. I don’t sit with people forever, not because I don’t want to, but because something in me is always measuring the distance between safe and exposed. just like the foxes, I run from time to time. not out of cruelty. out of the same ancient instinct that makes a wild thing hesitate at the edge of someone’s hand.

The reason is simple, and it took me a while to say it plainly. foxes want to be tamed. so do I. taming is not control, it is not capture. it is the slow and patient process of making something wild feel that staying is not a surrender. it is showing up the same way, day after day, until the animal inside stops calculating the exit. if I have never found someone who could do that for me, who could make me feel that it is safe to stay, then I could not stay. it was never about not wanting to. it was always about not yet feeling it was safe enough to want to.