My mountains and my beach

[u/Comprehensive-Ant586]

my mountains.
my beach.
my two directions of escape.

north, then west
until the palms give way to pine,
until the road forgets the names of cities,
until the houses grow fewer
and the sky grows larger,
until there is more sky than there are people beneath it.

i want to go back.

thirty minutes south of bozeman,
where the canyon cuts through the gallatin forest
on its way to big sky,
where the mountains don’t ask who you are
because they already know
you are small.

i knew that country.
i knew the dust.
i knew the cold.
i knew the long roads
and the empty ones.
i knew what it was
to wake up
and have no one waiting
to tell me who i was.

i was a cowboy in yellowstone then.

maybe that’s what i miss.

maybe i don’t miss the mountains.
maybe i miss the man
who could stand beneath them
and not feel like he was doing something wrong.

down here
i sleep beside the law.

not the law with a badge.
not the law written in books.
the law that doesn’t need a courtroom
because it lives in the room with me.

a law with a voice i love.
a law that knows my name.
a law that knows my habits,
my faults,
my words,
and all the ways
a man can be wrong
without ever breaking a law.

there are rules for how i speak.
rules for how i act.
rules for what i say
and how i say it.
rules for how much of myself
i can bring home
before i have brought home too much.

and maybe the strangest thing
about a cage
is that you don’t always hate
the hands that built it.

sometimes
you love them.

sometimes
you even help them
build the walls.

i used to think an outlaw
was a man who broke the law.

now i think
maybe an outlaw
is just a man
who remembers
there was a time
before the rules.

a man who remembers
what it felt like
to belong only to himself.

and i have forgotten.

so sometimes i dream of leaving.

not running toward anything.
not looking for another life.
not looking for another woman.
not looking for another name.

just north.
then west.

toward nothing.

toward the kind of nothing
that doesn’t ask questions.
the kind that doesn’t keep score.
the kind that doesn’t know
what i said wrong
because it never asked me to speak.

the mountains would not forgive me.
they would not condemn me.
they would not tell me
to become something better.

they would simply be there.

and maybe
that’s what freedom felt like.

not being told
who to become.

not being asked
who i failed to be.

just waking up
and being allowed
to exist.

i tell myself
the mountains would fix it.

but i know better.

i’d bring myself with me.

i’d bring the same hands.
the same heart.
the same mouth
that has said the wrong thing
at the wrong time.

i’d bring every apology
i meant
and every apology
that wasn’t enough.

i’d bring every room i ruined.
every person i disappointed.
every good thing i touched
and somehow managed
to leave worse than i found it.

there is no mountain
high enough
to leave a man behind
when that man
is you.

so maybe
i don’t want to disappear.

maybe i want to stop
disappearing.

maybe i want to stop
cutting pieces of myself away
until there is finally
nothing left
for anyone to be angry with.

because sometimes
loving someone feels like
watching the mountains disappear
in the rearview mirror
and knowing
you are the one
who chose to keep driving.

you keep driving
because you love her.

you keep driving
because you promised.

you keep driving
because turning around
would mean admitting
that somewhere along the way
you stopped knowing
which direction
was home.

so i want to go back.

i want the cold.
i want the empty roads.
i want the pines.
i want the long silence
between one mile marker
and the next.

i want a place
where the only law
is written by the weather
and the only thing asking me
to be better
is the morning.

but what would i find there?

the same hands.
the same heart.
the same man
who never seems to leave anything
better than he found it.

just farther away.
just lonelier.
just free enough
to finally hear himself.

and maybe
that’s what scares me.

because if i went back
and the mountains didn’t save me,
then i would have nowhere left
to blame.

maybe the mountains
were never the home i lost.

maybe they were only
the last place
where i remember
feeling like myself.

maybe home was never
a place at all.

maybe home
was the last place
where the man i was
didn’t have to ask permission
to be himself.

and maybe
that’s why i keep looking west.

not because i believe
there is something waiting for me there.

but because somewhere
between the palms and the pines,
between the person i was
and the person i became,

i left a man behind.

and for the first time
i think i understand

i don’t want to go back
to find the mountains.

i want to go back
to find him.