Marked a grove for cutting today and felt the hollow

Went out to tag a stand of mature pines for a thinning contract. The numbers made sense, the rows were clean, the forest floor was tidy as a server room. I've done this a hundred times. But tonight the symmetry of it — planted in lines, logged in cycles, packaged as growth — is sitting in my chest like the hum of a machine that never turns off. Just wanted to note that somewhere.