With & Without
I rocked on my heels on the shoreline, watching clouds move in over Kintla Lake. The stones were slick as I stretched out my hand to feel the rain. Stormy water lapped at my boots as the clouds slowly unrolled their saturated fingers down the distant mountains. I watched them unfurl as all but the loons took cover from the drizzle. It was only the chill that made me finally turn back to the truck.
The road back was rough dirt bordered by dense woods that blocked out all but the clouds overhead. I watched yellow leaves blur as we splashed through dips in the road, wondering how many eyes watched us from the shadows. It was just the two of us, the rhythmic squeak of the wipers, the patter on the windshield, and the roar of the engine as we descended into the alpine prairie.
I thought about how I wasn’t thinking about the things that usually make me anxious. I thought about how light my heart felt. I realized I was happy, and not that the weekend had suddenly made me that way. But that I had always been that way, and it was only here in the mountains that I remembered it. That the grind of the city, of working, of living day to day had a weight to it that took precedence over feeling happy.
I thought about how I can be without a lot of things. Family, nice things, familiarity. How I can be without small talk to pass the time, or someone to share my bed. How I can be without a large social media following or social status of the same caliber.
We stopped once halfway home, for coffee and bearclaws from the mercantile. We ate them in the quiet of the parked car while campers dashed through the rain and college football scores filtered through the satellite radio.
I thought about my bare arms, about how I wanted to ink my story into them. And what that would look like: a road carving through the mountains, a band of wild horses running through the grasslands. A swirl of storm clouds, a lightning storm over the prairie. A rippling current, a flock of birds, a lone canoe lashed to a dock.
I thought about Santa Fe, and how I wanted to travel there again. How there were other places I wanted to see, but I didn’t know how to get there. About the howling of the wolves that echoed across the lake the night before, and how they cried as one, but seemed to be so very lonely. And the crackle of the fire that night, how every campfire starts the same but the nights they warm are as unique as snowflakes.
I thought about the things that I cannot be without. A roof over my head, and food of any kind. Of laughter and tears, spirits and nicotine. Of campfires and wolves and shitty camp pillows that remind you that last night was not just another night waiting for the clock to wind down. I thought that I probably could not live without love for very long, or sex for the same amount, or friendship in any form.
How I cannot be without a book to read, or paper to write on.
And that I cannot be without woods to run away to in order to remember all of those things and remember, if only once in a while, that I am happy with everything I am.
