Absence Makes the Heart Grow

8 November 2019

I’ve been in Montana four years now. Up here with May snowstorms and November elk hunts. Up here a thousand or more miles from family member or old friend.

While everything I have here is still new to me, what lasts and what changes is the history of who I am, who made me, and where.

From here in Montana, I look back often—not for fear of being caught, or fear of being chased, but for fear that all the distance I’ve covered will become too complicated to recall.

(If the water is muddied, they say, move it around a bit to see the bottom.)

Absence is a word I rarely ever use—tending more toward “gone” or “away” in conversation and journal entries.

Absence, I think, is a more somber word. A heavier word. One that seems to imply a place or person even memory can’t move through, or at least find a way to visit.

When I moved here, I had too many ideas, too many plans. I wanted to climb everything and walk everything. I wanted to float all the rivers. I wanted to camp along all the creeks and watch a glacier melt.

Above all, I wanted to feel that feeling of staying in one place, of knowing a place, of sticking around one town long enough to know a certain tree has lost a limb or the one street corner on Main Street where the water pools the worst when it rains.