Cam rentsch

An essay I wrote in the spring of 2022 about moving to Montana in 2021. Names have been changed.

“I’m in love with Montana. For other states I have admiration, respect, recognition, even some affection. But with Montana it is love. And it’s difficult to analyze love when you’re in it.”

― John Steinbeck, Travels with Charley: In Search of America

I like to tell people that I moved to Montana just because I wanted to. How they react to that tells me a lot of what I need to know about them, so for 99% of people, I talk about being in love with the mountains and wide open spaces and wanting to live in them, instead of in Ohio, and I had a remote job, so why not? Why I really moved to Montana is a much longer story – one that, like a lot of the stories I tell, has too many tangents and starts with a woman breaking my heart. I’ll try to stick to only the information you need. And, luckily for me, when Ridley sat on the corner of my bed in Columbus, Ohio, and told me that she couldn’t hurt me any more, that wasn’t the first time she had broken my heart. In a fight that ended with us on a “break” which lasted an entire day and a half, I rode my bike one-hundred and twenty-six miles across Ohio to the little town where I grew up, to pick my car up from a mechanic there after it had blown it’s transmission on Virginia’s Blue Ridge Parkway and had to be towed all the way back. She drove six hours from her apartment to the Great Smoky Mountains, posted a picture from Clingam’s Dome on Instagram, and then liked my Strava post about the ride as though nothing was happening, as if I wasn’t so heartsick that I’d made the entire ride without eating. No big deal, I thought at the time. If I lose some more weight maybe I’ll finally be attractive enough so I can stop thinking about why she would tell me about how beautiful all her ex-boyfriends were. The night before that fight, in my bed in a shitty apartment I hated but was all I could afford, she’d whispered in my ear to ask if I wanted her to take my last name after we got married. When the fight started, she told me I was taking our relationship too seriously. 

Clearly, we were right for each other in all the wrong ways. And that kind of breakup is the one that leads you somewhere you’d need courage to go to. 

I first learned about Missoula as a scared and lonely college kid, tired and with bags under my eyes, in Elissa Washuta’s office, talking about grad school. She thought I should consider getting an MFA; my classmates in the English department could only talk about “MFA or NYC?” as though it was the only question for us to consider; meanwhile, I was wondering who would pay to get the brakes fixed in my 1996 Toyota 4Runner – I couldn’t afford it. Fixing the broken air conditioning was a laughable idea; the windows still rolled down. I made no decision about grad school then, but I did Google “Missoula Montana Ultrarunning” as I’d ran my first trail race that spring and stumbled into some YouTube videos and magazine articles about Mike Foote. He’s a North Face athlete and general kind of Missoula guy who self-described as a “chubby kid from Ohio who played baseball and wasn’t a runner” – and how was I supposed to not feel seen by that? I remember that summer following along the Spot trackers as he ran the Hardrock 100, chewing on my thumbnail, enticed by the extreme action of watching dots move on a map at a speed of roughy 4 miles per hour. I ended up going a different direction for grad school, but I slipped the idea of Missoula into my back pocket, a card I didn’t realize I had there until I needed to play it. 

And then, a few years later, three days after Ridley broke up with me, during a lull when I’m volunteering at the Run Bailey’s Trail Races in Chauncey, Ohio, I see an Instagram post from Mike Foote talking about moving to Montana from Ohio seventeen years ago to the day and not knowing anybody there, and about what a good decision it was.

Well, it’s decided, I thought. I’m moving to Montana.

Well, shit. It happens just like that, huh?

My job, even though I didn’t have to leave it, didn’t matter. I’d work at a Starbucks, at a bookstore, digging ditches if I had to. Mike’s post talked about how spending time in the mountains filled him up, and I know time alone in wild spaces does that for me too, and so I was going to chase being filled up. I’d gone from free school lunches in Appalachia to the University of Chicago – Montana, despite having more bears, would be far less scary than falling face-first into the privileged nightmare of elite academia. Besides, I’d spent too long pouring myself out for something that wasn’t working, desperately thinking if only I could do or say or just be different, that then things would work the way they were supposed to, the way I thought that they were going to. It was time to go get filled up again. I could never have imagined how true that would become. 

A couple months later, volunteering at the Light the Way 5k in Missoula, I’d tell Mike that story while pouring schnapps into the complimentary hot chocolate for runners. I’d leave that night so happy, almost giddy in the December chill, just for having gotten to volunteer making some little, honestly probably forgettable, 5k happen. I texted Ann immediately to tell her all about it. 

*

I met Ann the first Friday I was living in Missoula. She was tall, barely an inch shorter than me, with a buzzcut and big smile under clear-framed glasses. She’s thoughtful and smart and beautiful and so much more that I want to list here, although most of all this I wouldn’t find out until later. She’s a wildlife biologist who I’d matched with on Hinge the week of my move to Missoula. She was my first match in Missoula, actually, which prompted me to send screenshots of her profile to my friends saying “well I definitely can’t back out of moving now”, as if the double security deposit I had paid to secure an apartment during a housing crisis in a mountain town I was set to lose didn’t factor into the equation at all. If Missoula was full of women like Ann, what reason would men have to ever live anywhere else? When we actually met, I drank an IPA I was a little too nervous to actually taste at Tamarack Brewing downtown, but succeeded in being myself as best I think anybody can on a first date. And, can you believe it, she liked it. Laughed at all my lame jokes and everything, showing a smile that would temporarily cause my brain to shut off. We left the bar after a few hours to walk around downtown and she gave me an informal tour. We walked along the Clark Fork river and talked about grad school. She lead me to Brennan’s Wave, and standing by the water in the dark I figured she was the kind of person who could lead a horse to water and would never in a million years have to worry about making it drink. I was feeling full and warm and happy, all from the inside out. She told me her last name was French for “from the mountain”.

I live in Montana and I’m on a date with a woman from the mountains, I think to myself, and it feels something I would have thought when I was a child, if I’d had any interest in dating then. At the end of the date I kissed her by her car and as I walked back towards mine they were shooting off fireworks, as if the message hadn’t been clear enough.

*

I’d had a crush on Montana for a long time, probably since I was a kindergartner and reading about all the dinosaur bones that could be found there. But, like any crush, it was merely based on my ideas about the state rather than what the state actually was. I first saw the state after one of the longest days of driving in my life, from the northwest Chicago Suburbs to Miles City in a day. I’d spent the entire day listening to true crime podcasts and getting very paranoid about the fact that most of my life had been jammed into my car, so full that I didn’t even have room on the passenger seat to sit down fast food bags when I would stop at drive-throughs for meals. For the majority of the state of North Dakota, I sat with my arms crossed, cruise control on, barely needing to be awake or alert at all the highway was so straight. I woke up in Miles City, having only stopped there simply because it was right off the highway and there was a motel. I was blown away that morning, and not just because the rest stop I stopped at just outside of town had a sign warning me to stay on the path because of rattlesnakes in the area.

And now, I had a crush on Ann, if you could call it that considering we’d been on a date, and like I was trying to learn about her I was trying to absorb the whole history and environment of this state I was learning was more real than I could have ever imagined as a boy, or even in my askew MFA dreams. The first two weeks I lived there, I had a near constant nosebleed because of the dry air.

*

Montana is clearly a paradise of sorts, and you don’t have to have been to Yellowstone or Glacier to be sure of that. I had never been before I moved, but I don’t think I made it through my first sunrise here without falling in love. I just didn’t realize how deep that love would get until I settled down from the cross-country drive in Missoula. One of the first things I did was run, and I ran, a lot, finding joy again in simply moving my body through a space – how much just the move changed everything, since when I was in Ohio I’d fallen back into the trap of seeing a morning run as something I had to do and the only meager happiness I got out of it was being told how many calories I had burned. Now that was the furthest thing from my mind, and the sound of my feet on the Earth was the choral hum that lets you know you’re experiencing the divine. Mt Sentinel, Mt. Jumbo, the Rattlesnake, Sheep Mountain, Waterworks Hill – all these places just out my front door, an embarrassment of riches compared to the bike paths I’d been trying to find some solace in over the last few years. I drove down 93 in the Bitterroot Valley, holding up traffic because I couldn’t help but stop and stare. There were no more of the fall colors I’d been used to be, but golden larches were a revelation. I heard an elk bugle for the first time and it felt like being plugged into an electrical outlet – my whole body lit up under the sound. I’d hear the hooting of grouse long before I’d jump them up on narrow trails, and the bear spray I carried in my little running vest bruised my ribs; I looked at the blue-green-ish mark with the pride a teenager has for a hickey. Whitetail deer were, like always, everywhere and nowhere, looking at me and knowing, remembering all our lives together. Once my nose adjusted to the dry air, I could smell the dust and earth, the pines, everything all at once, but in exactly the amount I needed. 

I started writing again after nearly two years away from it. I didn’t have any choice in the matter – same as singing in the shower, sometimes you just have to do it, it just spills out of you, you’ve got no more room to hold it in. I dug through my old external hard drive and started piecing poems back together, turning moments into messages, hoping to bring somebody else into my head and heart. All my classmates in undergrad had been writing their coy jokes, small elbow gestures about their intelligence and how difficult their lives had been. I’d spent that same time trying to grab people by the shoulders, shaking them and screaming: is it okay that I’m like this? Is this good damage? Is this normal? Does any of this make any goddamn sense? Now, I sat down and just wanted to paint a picture. Can you see what I see, smell what I smell? Can I sit you down in my shoes, and will you be full of wonder too? Will you fall in love with Montana the same way that I have? 

*

I sometimes think that I’d decided to fall in love with Ridley before we actually started dating and tried to work backwards from an end game of retirement, grandkids, and a little farm out in the county. I’m sure you don’t need me to tell you this, but that’s a stupid way to do things. She checked all the boxes I thought needed to be checked for a successful relationship, she liked running and hiking and camping and road trips and reading. And of course, at first I thought she was cute, which, the more I learned about her and the closer we got, slowly turned into me discovering that she was the singular most beautiful woman that had ever or would ever exist. It took months for me to forget that after we broke up, feeling each time I saw her picture on a mutual friend’s social media account like somebody had pried my mouth open and poured hot lead down my throat. Will I ever forget that Hamlet is her favorite Shakespeare play? Or that her birthday is December 16th? Or that every time she’s on a college campus she buys a t-shirt from the campus bookstore. She had twenty-six when we broke up, if I remember correctly. Every morning she has a banana and peanut butter for breakfast, and I kept my apartment stocked with them always so she could always have something to eat if she slept over. 

Nothing like flooding yourself with happy little memories when remembering something that went very wrong. What do you do with this knowledge? I can’t ever imagine myself forgetting it. 

She didn’t hit me, and hardly ever raised her voice towards me. I’m sure she never even imagined hitting me, to be honest, but I couldn’t stop imagining being hit. I felt like I deserved it. And after seeing my parents for how many years, I thought that not being hit was enough, even when it was clearly not working, even when we both were at fault, I still thought that I could change enough to make it work. Whatever she wants, whatever she needs, that’s what I’ll make myself become. Cause that’s what she deserves. She’ll push me away again, like so often in our cycle, and I’ll jump back immediately, desperately trying to prove myself. Do you know why? Because sometimes, when she wanted to kiss me, since I’m taller than her, she’d put her hand on the back of my neck and literally pull my face down level with hers. 

I could have died happy every time she did that. 

* 

I set out to write an essay about mountains, and here I am talking about exes. “Essay means I have a break in me.” – Elissa Washuta; the only craft advice that has ever made sense to me. My therapist tells me that I don’t need to turn everything I do into a research paper. I think that’s good advice, but I’m still here. One day I’ll finally be a real nature writer; one day I won’t need to poke around in my bleeding insides, pulling out shrapnel to inspect in front of my keyboard. But that day’s not today, and I’m not that man yet, so you’ll have to hear more about love before I talk about elk again.

*

I can tell when I’m getting ready to fall in love; it seems like the person’s name is sitting on my tongue, the way you might hold a piece of hard candy in your mouth. Suddenly, the name is different when I’m ready. There’s weight underneath, heft, and there’s not room for anything else in my mouth. Maybe this is why I can’t eat when I’m heartbroken. When I was a kid I never had the patience to just let hard candy melt in my mouth. I would always bite down on it, even the caramel ones my grandma always kept in her purse to give me during church. Sometimes, if I’m alone, I’ll even start just whispering the name each time it comes up, as if I could cast a spell and make it known that I was here and I was ready for them to commit to me.

*

What else about Ann? She always says thank you after I share anything even remotely vulnerable, grew up in the country in Colorado although her parents are Australian, drives a stick shift, and once played guitar at Red Rocks. She’s kind of a smart-ass, which encourages me to say dumb things so she can make fun of me, cause I know it’ll make her laugh. One time we were walking along the Clark Fork with ice cream and a stranger asked us if the lights west of Caras Park were the University of Montana football stadium. When she told them no, it was the Missoula Paddleheads stadium, she held her hands to her head to pantomime the antlers of a moose. I don’t think I ever told her how cute I thought that was. We went to book stores and coffee shops and a mediation group and baked homemade dog treats for her ancient German Spitz, Molly, a dog that always barked at me whenever she first saw me, even after I’d been around her plenty, even when she was walking into my own apartment.  

Even with all that good stuff, I hemmed and hawed about Ann. I asked my friends if I should friend-zone her, since I didn’t have any friends in Missoula yet, and the pressure of asking somebody to be my partner when I had nobody else in town would be a lot. I went on dates with other people, but nothing clicked in the same way for me. In September I went camping alone in the Sapphire Mountains, after sitting down and realizing that I hadn’t gone camping alone yet that year, something I used to do as often as possible, if only because I had nobody to go camping with me. And on that trip I cried at eight-thousand feet on a mountain ridge because I missed my Grandma and wished she was around to see the man I’d become and I was listening to a Sturgill Simpson song I love, All Around You. I have to tell you I was at eight-thousand feet in the mountains because that’s what makes it okay for a man to cry. 

And that night in my tent, re-reading The Dharma Bums, beginning to feel fully like myself again, the thought comes into my head without warning or any pretext as I lay down next to my bear spray. 

“I wish Ann was here.” 

Well, shit. It happens just like that, huh?

Later on, she’d mention that when I was telling her about my plans for that trip on a date before that weekend, that she was jealous that I didn’t invite her and that she’d wanted to go with me.

* 

One time she was dog-sitting on a little hobby farm outside of Missoula, but when she invited me over I really wasn’t sure if I was coming over to spend the weekend or just do farm chores, so I brought my barn boots along just in case. 

“Did you think I brought you out here just to rake out stalls?”

She held my hand instinctively when we walked down the path to put the chickens and goats in for the night, and that made my heart sing a tune I often forget that it can. We cooked each other dinners in a big house full of family photos with grown-up kids, feeling very much like we pressed the fast-forward button on our lives and skipped from having known each other for a few months to having been together for thirty years. She didn’t even complain that I wanted to sing Waylon Jennings songs to her in the kitchen; I’m a terrible singer. I was ready to fall in love, even though I knew we would never quite get there. The week before she’d told me she was planning to move from Missoula to Charlottesville for a new job in a new lab, and after my cross-country move chasing a new and fuller definition of fulfillment and happiness, how could I blame her and ask her to stay in Missoula? 

Ann shaved my head on the back porch at that house. At the time, I had long, curly hair that hung down below my shoulder blades. I love having long hair, but hate the attention that I get from it. Sometimes it feels like my hair is the only thing people are interested in saying nice things about. Cutting it all off again put me back in control, and really changed my experience on Bumble, now that women couldn’t message me about how beautiful my hair was. 

We woke up in each other’s arms in the guest room of that house, and I could hear the rooster crowing outside, sun dripping in the window blind. How do I bring you into that moment? It was all at once just a moment and a wonderful eternity, just one deep breath and the end of all time. 

*

My therapist(s) have all tried to help me learn to love myself. I’ve tried my best to follow all of their advice, among that, loving myself enough to take the chance to live out my dreams the minute I actually had the chance for myself. The problem, of course, is that if I’m going to love myself, it’s got to be my whole self, and I can’t piecemeal parts in and out of my life for the convince and approval of others. I struggle to hammer an essay or poem into something sensible, feeling all at once like I’ve flattened the whole thing, wrung anything human recognizable in my words out of the piece, and all at once like I’m too much. Ridley always used to say like she felt like she wasn’t enough for me, but every time she said that all I could hear was that I was too much – and how could she be wrong? 

I can’t express the melancholy of this – of having to fit myself into something comprehensible for others. I want to be known, warts and all, if only because I need you to know what it means to me when I get to live the life I’ve always wanted. How can you know what it means when I sing my sad Appalachian mountain songs and splash around in the creeks (pronounced “criks”, of course) that drain into the Bitterroot? Can you feel what I’m feeling when my legs power me up a drainage, split shorts blowing in the wind, or when my feet are dancing on the pedals of my bike, climbing up a dirt road without a care in the world beyond the moment? Let me explain even more longing now – the dreams that fill me up at my laptop’s keyboard. Memories of venison in flour tortillas and squirrels cooked in Campbell’s Cream of Mushroom. Springtime turkey gobbles like lighting while picking ramps and pheasant’s back, dreams so real I can smell ‘em, gathering ‘em with my barn boots on, wondering what Grandma was gonna make for lunch, the whole while even then tasting them in my mind, fried morels even, even though it’s been far too long since I’ve had those. Add on all those endless books, cracked yellow pages, stale campus library coffee, the cold air the only thing keeping  you awake on your bike ride home, tamales from the kindest old woman in the world wrapped up in foil in backpack? You’ve never met her before, but she calls you mijo all the same. All these things at once are me – Mexican, hillbilly, Missoula hipster, some all-hat-and-no-cattle punk with two fancy degrees half the folks out there would insist were given to me based on boxes I could check. Hell, even with the scholarships, I couldn’t pay for them. How can I put the multitudes in me ever into words, or understand yours? And how, based off some app’s algorithm that showed each other your pictures when you lived a thousand miles away, can you ask another person to work on that impossible task? And when they do their best, maybe the best anybody has ever done, how do you let them go? 

*

Later on, we’re sitting in her car and Ann is talking about moving. “Well,” I say, “it’s not like Missoula’s going anywhere. Or me, for that matter.” 

“But it’s changing.” She said, not taking her eyes off the road as her Subaru slowly pulls across Reserve Street. “It’s already changed so much.”. I’m reading A.B. Guthrie, and come to mind immediately Zeb Caudill telling Boone about how ruined the west had become for mountain men. This, fictionally at least, was damn near two-hundred years ago. It seems every time somebody new arrives in Montana, they ruin it for all the other folks who were already here – the colonial ranchers getting pushed out by Hollywood millionaires, ski bums pushed about by remote workers like me (except we’ll have to talk about who’s wealthier, some Mexican from a holler that ain’t ever even seen a pair of skis or somebody who grew up with damn near the world’s most expensive hobby). Not to even mention Montana’s five Indian Reservations, themselves a poor stand-in for the nations that have lived here since time immemorial, still fighting for basic respect and sovereignty, acknowledgement that they still exist despite the best efforts of the United States. It seems as if Montana is always at once a paradise, the open space a person needs to be free at heart, and always just on the other side of ruin, whoever has arrived last is the first to arrive right after you should have already been here. Maybe that’s pedantic; it’s not like the whole state has been bulldozed for wheat fields and Herefords. Hell, I write this now in a new build apartment, constructed because of the housing crisis here, under the shadow of Mt. Jumbo during its winter closure for the Mt Jumbo elk herd to feed on the saddle, a mountain saved by a coalition of state and local groups from being turned into a high-density subdivision. But still, all the maps and people call it Mt. Jumbo, at least that I’ve heard, and I doubt the city council, despite all their big pretend democratic socialist talk, will pass an ordnance changing the name back to Sin Min Koos.

*

I’m on a date now at Mar Bar, months after all this that I’m writing myself into an understanding of happened. This woman’s Tinder bio: “looking for a man who can build me a house”. I jump immediately for the bait, and, at a table near the back, I tell her about what I’ve learned in therapy: that my mother’s pain and hate is the river that cut into the mountains that made the canyon that made me, me. I can build this woman a house. I can split firewood and hunt deer, gather blackberries and bake pies, grow corn and hace tortillas a mano, change the oil in your car, unclog the sink, rub your feet after a long day at work, never complain, never ask for anything in return, and never show a single emotion the whole time. I call this my mother’s “pioneer husband” mentality. That’s what she wanted my father to be, who she thought her father was, and men, being human, were always playing the game of disappointing her. I’m just one of many. My date laughs. I do not repeat for her the many other things my mom did or said that made sure I would spend most of my youth absolutely terrified of women, things that still scare me, about me being a pussy, a faggot, a useless piece of shit, a wife-beating spic just like my dad. I’d forget to wash the dishes after football practice or not want to pump gas for her (another one of a man’s duties – a woman should never touch the check at a dinner table or the gas pump), and she’d get wound up and going and wouldn’t stop screaming for hours, no matter where we were or what else was happening, the whole time her phone in her hand, texting one of her boyfriends about how her piece of shit son was turning into his father and somebody needed to come kick the shit out of him so he could get his head on straight. 

My hands are shaking, so I hide them under the table. This bar is named after Thomas Meagher – an Irish revolutionary who, after leading the Irish Volunteers for the Union during the US Civil War, instigated a war against the Niitsitapi or Siksikaitsitapi or Blackfoot Confederacy as the appointed Governor of the Montana Territory. I’m drinking Blackfoot IPAs on this date, but I don’t know anything about IPAs other than that I like them. None of my friends care about all of these facts I only know because I’m trying to make sense of why the world crashed down on me as a boy and never quite lifted up. It’s just their favorite bar.

Does my date care? Unclear. After, we kiss by her car and say we’ll do this again. I go back into the bar to be an emotional outlet for male friends I saw come in when I was there, trying to be as supportive hearing about attachment styles and ex-girlfriends we can’t seem to leave in the past as I want to be when I have to talk about mine. It comes spilling out; it just builds up and there’s nothing we can do to control it. I buy a biography of Thomas Meagher: “The Immortal Irishman”. All at once the anti-colonization colonizer. How can you be both of those things? I should know – I’m a Mexican living in Montana. 

*

It’s Christmas Eve now and I’m dog-sitting a blue-heeler & border collie mix named Dakota – a dog I might, like so many have for me, describe as too smart for his own good. When we get near a park or trails he knows he’s allowed off leash at, he’ll fall dramatically on the ground, roll over on his back, and refuse to move until we go play fetch. Because of this, I talk to him as though he’s a person and capable of understanding logic and how it’s not reasonable to play frisbee for so long that your paws start to freeze. In the summer, the first time I watched him, I had to carry him back from the park, his frisbee still in his mouth, because he refused to leave and was about to make me late for a mid-day meeting. I remember watching someone laugh and turn their head as they drove past, and all I could think was “what a Missoula moment, a guy with long hair and a beard baby carrying a cattle dog home from the park while he still holds on to his frisbee.”. 

It’s been a while since I started trying to tell this story and I’m still not done with this essay despite the space it takes up in my brain, and I start drafting in my head while taking Dakota out for a walk at night. Slipping through deep snow in my barn boots, we follow his nose around Missoula’s Northside, a neighborhood of old weathered homes built for railroad workers who don’t live here anymore and garish new builds meant to hold a new generation of families in all their right angles and exposed metal. Under my breath I’m singing the song I play on repeat as I write now back at the house, Jersey Giant: 

Cause it’s just 2 hours to get there babe/I can make it back about an hour or so/Hold you close against my skin/I need a little warmth on a night so cold/Signing songs you use to sing/The one about the lady in the long black veil/Should have seen the warnings signs/But Lord I love to hear you wail/High and lonesome hard and strong/Even if it was a little out of tune/Hotter than socks on a jersey giant/Lord I thought you hung the moon

Whether from light pollution or the moon and stars, or both, Missoula has a way of staying lit during the winter that no other place I’ve ever lived has. Dakota and I walk and I think about the people in these houses, whether they’re alone on the holiday like I am, if they’re lonely and thinking about sending a happy holidays text to an ex, like I’m not, if they put up the Christmas lights to keep up appearances or because they love them. I’m thinking about how I say I want to be a nature writer, a travel writer, but I think deep down what I really want is to try to communicate something deep inside me that probably can’t be done with words. I’m sketching portraits over years of a young man in just a moment, trying to capture everything that could mean anything and explain it all to you, but at the same time I can never quite sit still enough for a picture.

I have to tell you about love to tell you about Montana. I have to tell you about Ann, about Ridley, about so many other people I haven’t and won’t mention here. What else is it that you feel when the canyon opens up and the sharp hard rocks inside you are in front of you now, pointed at the bluest and biggest sky you could ever imagine? What else is it when your nose draws in the deep rich smell of a passing elk herd, when you see bear cubs playing on the forest floor while their mom watches you unflinchingly? And more than just telling someone about love, I want to share it with them – find a person who knows what a sunset in the Tetons means, or the dreams you can only have under red rock hoodoos. And then, how can I act that love out for them, for the little eternity that my life is becoming? How can I remember that love is an action verb – because there is going to be a time when I’m sick but they are too, and somebody has to make soup. Or when we’re both tired, that somebody has to take the dog out? How many first dates until then? How many new matches, Hinge conversations that go nowhere? How many first dates at Gild till the servers catch on to me, that I take all my Hinge matches there? How many Hinge dates until I can delete the app, like their ad copy promises?

How many until eternity? 

* 

One of the stories professors like to tell to anthropology students that I think about a lot is about how many different groups of indigenous people would think anthropologists who do things to “connect to nature”, like trail running or hiking, would find it inconceivable and just entirely confusing because their lives were already so rich and full of connection to the world that to seek out “nature” didn’t make any sense. In fact, a lot of languages don’t even have a word for nature, because there isn’t an “us” and “it” distinction between humans and the natural world. 

How do I get back to that?

How deep is that love? 

* 

I saw Ann for the last time in Missoula the Sunday of the week she was leaving; it made sense to not do some big goodbye as she drove off into the sunrise, especially considering we weren’t dating anymore and were trying to be friends. We ended her tour of Missoula with a trip to Rockin Rudy’s so she could buy a card for her boss thanking her for all she did for her while she was back in Montana, and then had dinner at the James Bar after. I walked around Rockin’ Rudy’s behind her, hands in my pockets and a lump forming under my heart and crawling up my throat. How do you say a goodbye that might only be forever? I guess that’s this life that we chose. She told me that – this is just what happens when you move around this much, but then added “Or you could buy a van with me.” 

“Don’t tempt me.” I responded, then looked down into the last swallow of my beer. 

As Jason Isbell and Talia Shire sing, maybe time running out really is a gift. We’re driving one day through Ovando and talking about things, and she reminds me that no matter if we never saw each other again after that day or did every day till we died, things would still end. A few months or forty years, it’s all temporary anyways. We get out of it, what we get out of it.