Coming Home After 21 Years

The Unmentionables Writing Lab is back October 23rd. If you’re a free subscriber, learn more here. If you’re a paid subscriber, claim your spot here. I’m speaking at the Boise Entrepreneur Week on October 3rd. Would love to see you there if you happen to be in town!

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On the first day, I drive around town in the hot wind. My hair sticks to my glossy lips but I refuse to roll up the windows. It’s not the desert but it feels like the desert. Concrete and strip malls, two interstates crisscrossing right through the town that has no real center, just spreads aimlessly into the grainy expanse. Wide and shallow.

I’m following the GPS to the grocery store, the car wash, the place I’ll stay for a month. Away from home, out of state. I feel unsettled, my eyes unable to find anchor points in any direction. I feel untethered, like that dry wind will sweep me off this dusty plane like my brother used to sweep my figurine off the board when he lost. There is no root sticking out of the ground for me to hold onto and keep me from sliding off the edge as I tumble past.

I feel dizzy, disoriented, drunk…like I’m grasping at the air, feeling around in a dark room at night except it’s the middle of the day. It takes hours until I finally figure it out:

This place is too fucking flat.

There are no natural landmarks. No mountains standing guard. No rock face at my back, no ancient protectors. Sometimes the stone can crumble and crush and turn cruel and murderous, but it is always a presence. Here, there is only absence. The nothingness is disquieting. Just the plains caving in on themselves, drooping at the edges. Being a flat earther doesn’t seem as insane in this place.

I feel a pulling in my gut, a tiny crack in my heart. This is the first time I miss Montana. Truly, madly, deeply miss it. If this were a 90s Rom-Com, I’d see a montage of favorite moments flash before my eyes while realizing I’m in love, then run through an airport with people cheering me on, or jump out of a cab racing through a traffic jam on foot over car horns honking in the background. Instead, I arrive at the manual car wash and get annoyed that they’re out of bug remover. This would never happen in Montana. Obviously.

I’m used to missing my people, but never really a place itself. Sure, I’ve taken long enough trips to be very ready to come home, driving toward the mountains, or praying not to crash into them, while descending toward the airport with its six gates and carpeted hallways and grizzly statue. But I haven’t been away long enough to truly long for Montana, which, after living here for nearly 21 years, feels like…home.

I complain about Montana all the time. About the climate that wants to freeze me to death and the wildfire smoke that wants to choke me and the animals that want to eat me.

“Do not pet the fluffy cows.” National Park Service IG is the most hilarious official social media page. Trust me.

But now all I can think about is how much the light loved me while I was sitting on my front porch in the morning sun and how the pink petunias grew down from their hanging basket and the purple bush grew up from that spot right in front of the house until it looked like they were going to link arms. And how I was so content, watching the steam rise in faint swirls from my coffee mug.

Earlier this summer when the leafy arms weren’t quite touching yet.

All I can think about is how the mountains let me walk all over them, while my legs burned and my lungs burned and my eyes burned from dripping sweat. The thudding in my bones with every step, over and over, until my spinning thoughts dissolved into the rhythm of my footfalls and the silence of the rock.

Late spring hike

All I can think about is the ridiculous sky showing off while I walked through the grocery store parking lot, mouth open, and taking out my phone to snap a picture that would not look like the real thing at all. Not one bit.

Just a random grocery store trip last year. How does anyone get anything done around here??

All I can think about is how the air always smells like something is about to happen. Something inevitable, so I might as well stand there and breathe in deeply and wonder if it smells like like coal and snow or my childhood.

And I know once I get back, pretty soon, the first snow will fall and I will immediately forget how I feel today and I will curse the mountains and I will angrily pull on 17 layers of clothes I got at the mall on Black Friday last year while acting like it was totally normal (and not next level denial) that it took me two decades to buy a real coat and thermal leggings just to go to the mailbox.

I’ll forget how much I longed to be back home. How much I missed the mountains and the trees and the light and the trails and the stupidly happy dogs everywhere. I’ll roll my eyes thinking, oh another black lab, named Bridger, how original.

A week into my stay here, I say to my friend S, wow, it feels like I’ve been sitting on this bed for a week straight. She raises her eyebrows, says, well, maybe that’s because you have.

I’m much less bothered than I think I should be. I’ve spent the first week mostly in this room, doing what I came here to do, and also working and going to the grocery store and the gym, and talking to my family and my friends who are all far away.

This is normal now. Then I remember my friend A asking “Is it normal? Or just normalized?” I drive around wondering if the other people in the other cars going home to their other lives know that there’s a place out there as beautiful and harsh and capricious as Montana. Of course, they know. But do they really know know?

I thought growing up in another country, another culture, inoculated me against considering my life and my ideas and my environment normal, the standard, the default. But every time I travel, I find myself surprised and thinking, oh, there’s a whole other world out here. How strange. I didn’t know people lived like this and like that and places could look like this and like that and communities could feel like this and like that.

But here, I’ve noticed how hard my brain works to soothe me by making things feel normal. Barely moved from this spot on this bed in this room for a week? Normal. Live in a place of otherworldly beauty? Normal. Stay in a depressing flat place without dogs or bug remover at the car wash? Also normal. Clean air and clear mountain lakes? Normal. Wildfires choking you and forcing you inside during your favorite time of the year? Totally normal. Being surrounded by a giant family, close friends, and a whole recovery community? Normal. Being in a place where nobody makes eye contact and people only speak when spoken to? Yeah, normal.

It’s like my brain doesn’t even care whether or not things are normal or what that means. It wants so badly to average everything out, smooth the wrinkles, make the whole place inside my head fucking flat.

I mean, thanks, brain, for making the weeks I’m stuck here less torturous than they could be. And also, WTF for making me think meh about a place that’s nothing short of breathtaking.

Tumbling across the flats, untethered and disoriented, I asked myself: Is this the best I can imagine? An uninspired asphalt city that feels blank, not like a new page or a fresh canvas, but like a mind dissociating, like a foot falling asleep?

It’s just a few weeks in a place I don’t like. But it’s showing me that I don’t want to live in a place that wallpapers over exposed brick and I will not act like I love the swampy little lake an hour from here with the manmade beach littered with beer cans and dog turds.

I don’t want normal. I don’t want normalized. I want crazy beautiful.

So, when I go back home to Montana, I will pay attention to the beauty and I will be grateful for the mountains that seem eternal but are not.

And I will think:

This is so, so beautiful. And it is still not the most beautiful I can imagine. Not even close.