Where the Mountains Break Against the Sea: Chapter 2

September 2018 

It felt as if I traveled back in time when I drove across the border into Washington. It was warm, mid-seventies, and blissful. Yet, despite the warmer weather, or perhaps because of it, the sense of discomfort that I’d felt so strongly in Banff was still with me. 

The previous summer, my loneliness deepened to a level I’d never known. Its presence was like the static on an FM station when you’re just out of range or the toilet bowl that never seems to fill, hissing from the other room. It went quiet when I busied myself, filled my schedule with social events, work, or travel, but roared in my ears whenever I was alone. It didn’t matter if I was on a drive, hiking through mountains, or in the quiet of my own apartment, it welled up inside me and surged with the power of the ocean. It felt like I was breaking apart, detaching from the world, disintegrating, like the curl of a wave splitting apart on the rocks becoming mist. 

The previous summer, I’d fallen in love with a man, a friend of mine, and I never told him or anyone else. The sensation was thrilling and terrifying, as if I’d lost control of my body. It took everything in me to swallow the words I wanted to tell him, to hold back my hands and the ways I wanted to touch him. My identity was splitting apart. I presented as a straight man but I’d been swallowing the truth of my sexuality since I was just a kid. I didn’t want the complications that being anything other than straight could bring. And this secret piled on all the lies that made the weight of me seem unbearable.

I’d had a lot of practice holding myself together.  

At ten years old, my family swiftly uprooted ourselves from the suburbs of Portland and were transplanted into the solitude of a forested homestead in rural eastern Washington. It was my parents’ dream to live in a place where they could raise their children without interference from the government, public education, or culture. My parents were pious evangelicals who homeschooled me through high school and kept a tight lock on my spheres of influence until I left home. My social life was limited to church on Sundays and I lived the majority of my teens without a single friend. When I graduated, I got a job; college wasn’t a feasible reality. At twenty, I moved to western Washington for a poorly paying position at a concrete plant because of a burning desire to go, get out, and be anywhere else. Other than the older man who’d helped me get the job, I didn’t know a single person in the region. I was alone. So, I worked and worked and worked some more and tried not to think about everything from which I was trying to run away. 

When I managed to make connections in Seattle, I always felt like an alien. No one had a physically demanding blue-collar job like mine or understood what it was like to wake up before five in the morning most days, work until dark, come home muddy, exhausted, and bruised from the day. So, I didn’t talk about work or what it did to me. None had grown up rural or had been homeschooled, so when friends asked about the years of my youth, I smoothed over the complications with little lies that led to dead ends. Growing up an outsider had taught me that it was better to fit in than be left out and I built social networks in which I could participate but go relatively unknown. 

I thought I could hold it together, that I could go on living this way indefinitely, but something about falling in love with my friend, who I’d quietly shoved out of my life when my feelings for him threatened to make their way into my reality, felt as if I’d followed a road all the way to its terminus. The only way forward was backward, but I wasn’t ready to admit that yet.

In a way, writing fictional stories had become my refuge. The novel I’d created was about two people who escaped their waking worlds through their dreams. Writing the story gave me a place where I could go, where I no longer existed, and didn’t have to tell the truth.

Regardless of what writing had become for me, I believed that it would become the means of my literal escape. I believed that if I could just string the right words together, then it would make everything worth it, that I could transcend the conditions that shaped me. My damaged childhood, the years of my twenties I’d spent working myself to death, the loneliness, my complicated sexuality, all of it would be solved if I could just make this dream a reality. 

But maybe that’s the problem with dreams, sometimes they’re meant to help us face the world we see when we’re awake–they’re not a place to stay. 

I didn’t know what to do, I just had to get somewhere I could finish editing the novel, to see if it really could save me, and then maybe I could think about the mess my life had become. My sister had invited me to stay with her and her family in Colorado and I accepted. So, I kept driving until Wyoming where I stopped to meet up with a friend and, that night, nearly died on the road out of Jackson Hole.