The last few weeks were hazy. You admitted that you’d lied to me more than once. You made up a story about fucking a girl in your backseat while parked beside your high school bleachers.
“I wanted to impress you!” you said.
You admitted you weren’t out to your parents, but you’d told me you were. “They basically already knew,” you said. Your mom heard you sobbing in your room one night because your love for me had mixed with your shame and become insurmountable. You told her about me, she held you as you cried, and you told your father, in the morning. Some days, you told me you came out for me. Other days, you told me you came out because of me.
I wanted to celebrate your courage, but I resented you for the lie. I had been a secret for a man ashamed of his sexuality before. I had been told elaborate, falsified stories about early sexual experiences before. I fell in love with you because you were confident, honest, and comfortable with being gay. I’d placed you on a pedestal from the beginning because you were different.
It was difficult to be loving after that. One night, I stubbornly refused eye contact. I assured you everything was fine. You were so proud that you’d finally come out to your parents, and as your support system, it was my obligation to swallow myself and be supportive. I still loved you. I only had to make it to September.
We saw each other every other day during our last week together. You sent me song lyrics, “We’re more than just a summer fling,” something else about being eternal. I told you I loved you, and promised nothing. You cried often — trembling in bed next to me, clutching my hand in the truck, tearing up as you showed me the sneakers you’d packed for school. You made me twenty-three beaded bracelets for my birthday. A blue and white one for Ousel Falls. An all-purple one for the wildflowers. An orange and yellow one for all the sunsets we’d watched.
On our last night, we read our final handwritten letters to one another. My writing had lost the zeal it had in June, which I think we both noticed. We woke up heavily on our last morning and held each other especially tight. I walked you to your truck parked in the same place it had been that first night in May. The hug was tight and long. Your eyes were wet, mine were dry.
You drove back to Wyoming, where you continued to drown in impending space, space I filled just as I had in the summer. At first, you hoped things would continue as they had. We FaceTimed, the “i love you”s continued for a while. You asked if we were still dating. I could hear your voice breaking, and you with it.
“I can’t do long distance,” I told you. “I’m not even going to live in Montana again.”
My texts ceased. Without me, you hardened, wilted, and the loneliness returned. You smoked every night in your room for weeks. You wrote hundreds of letters you never sent: hateful ones wishing me dead, desperate ones asking for me back.
With time, you learned to rebuild yourself and your life. You hooked up with someone else once, but he scared you and it didn’t feel the same. You ghosted him. You wondered what you would do if I ever texted you again.
I forced myself back into the chaos of college life in Providence. Prideful colonial-style houses, yellowing oaks with wide arms, and stomach-fulls of red-capped vodka made it easy to forget you. You were just a summer fling; I’d known that from the beginning, we’d agreed to that from the beginning, there wasn’t space for you in September. Lone Peak was replaced by the Superman building. Roads leading into oblivion were replaced by brick alleyways you could see the end of. Snow-capped mountains were replaced by rolling hills of yellow-capped oaks.
I tried nine new romances that fall. A skinny brown-haired boy with small yellow teeth and horrific cologne kissed me under a black umbrella. A scrawny man in a dirty red T-shirt drove me to Newport and walked me along a seaside cliff. A curly-haired economics major took me on a tour of public art installations downtown. I continued to write about you on the blog, mostly about what our future together would have looked like. I told myself I was making art, expressing myself, publicly purging my heart of you. If it was hurting you, you could stop reading it.
In the middle of November, I drove a muscular freshman to Narragansett Beach. We kissed in a parking lot beside a lighthouse as the stars above sparked like they did in Montana and the Atlantic roared like Ousel Falls. I forced myself to fuck him, but a stone developed in my stomach and I told him to leave in the middle. I cried that night beneath purple strips of LED lights. The blue bottle of your cologne glared at me from my nightstand. Twenty-three bracelets called to me from a box under my bed. The last letter you’d written screamed at me from my closet.
My love for you had been smoldering underground. Montana wildfires don’t always end with snowfall. The hottest ones work their way into lodgepole roots and smolder under the frozen forest floor for months. If they can survive the snowmelt in the spring, they creep skyward and set trees ablaze all over again.
I asked to see you over winter break and you contemplated telling me to go drown in the Atlantic.
November 26, 2023
yes we can see each other
ok yay hehe
🤩
i think about you a lot too
aw nik
i can’t wait to see you
We saw each other in Gallatin County on December 22nd. The cottonwoods were leafless. Indian paintbrush carcasses were buried under feet of snow. Ousel Falls was frozen solid. We parked next to a snowbank in Lindley Park.
“So what’s up?” you asked, with a knowing look on your face. I told you I still loved you and you said it back. “Oh thank God,” I said, holding my face in my hands. I clambered over the console and kissed you hard.
“I want to move slowly,” you said. “We’re not having sex tonight.”
We drove to our spot by the creek. We couldn’t pull off the road because of the snow. We sat in the front seats, facing the dashboard, and you told me to get in the back seat.
“I thought you said—”
You silenced me with a kiss.
By the time we’d thoroughly fogged the windows, I was ready to pick up where we’d left off. I went home smiling and dreaming of you. You went home and sobbed for eight hours.
December 23, 2023
i want to tell you what i’m thinking
it feels like you want me to jump right back in with you when you know i can’t. i want to, believe me i do. but you hurt me mason more than i think you comprehend. all i wanted in august was you. i was practically begging you at the time. you had me right there ready to give you my all just like i did all summer. but you didn’t want it. it destroyed me mason. i would cry myself to sleep most nights and i would journal about you for hours. many people made fun of me for how i let it happen. your blog terrorized me and my life. every post you made felt like it needed to be decoded and understood. you made it impossible for me to just do my school work and my grades suffered because of it. i clawed back my life. watching you slowly pull yourself away from me was one of the worst experiences of my life. and what i need takes a lot of time that you’re not willing to give.
I read the text quickly, curled in a ball in my bedroom. My heart thumped and my stomach caved in on itself. I wished I could leave this bitter, barren December behind and go back to when things were blissful and simple at the beginning of August. I called you. We talked for twenty minutes. We agreed things wouldn’t work. I blocked your number. I filled my schedule. I tried to forget.
On Christmas day you emailed me a long, desperate declaration of love. You said it had been the worst two days of your life. You said you needed me. You said you’d talked to your mom. You said she knew, as you did, that we needed to be together. I texted you, and you were relieved. You still weren’t ready for a relationship though, which confused me. It was all too much back and forth. Ousel was still frozen. The skies were still gray.
December 25, 2023
not a great recipe
for success
ok well
regardless
mason i am incredibly greatful for you. you have taught me more than i would have ever expected. if it wasn’t for you i would probably very much still be in the closet. you made me feel smart and interesting. this has been a very humbling and humiliating thing for me but i’m glad that it was you and no one else.
you’re an incredible person i am in awe of how your mind works.
i am very lucky to have you as my first boyfriend.
idk nik
i think once you’re over the pain of the breakup
you’ll be glad that i’m gone
I wanted you to disagree with me.
i hate to say it but i think you’re right
we both want a love that doesn’t exist anymore
i don’t want you to hate me forever
i didn’t hate you and i never will
bye mason
bye nik
i’m never reading the blog again
i’m blocking you
i just can’t have this hanging over my head
bye
bye mason
It’s been almost a year since you sent that text. For me, it’s also been almost a year of failed dates and nostalgic essays about you. And somehow, despite shoving you out of my life and burying the idea of you, despite preparing myself in August for your departure, despite convincing myself out of love and having the courage to ‘choose myself’ and ‘leave you behind,’
some days I’m still trapped in our first kiss at Ousel Falls, I’m still in the tunnel under I-90, I’m still in your truck with the windows cracked to hear the Yellowstone.
I’m graduating in May, and I won’t be returning to Montana. I won’t choose ATV rides through wildflowers. I don’t belong in a bedroom with a view of Sheep Mountain. But in the face of infinite uncertainty after graduation, in the face of a hopeless and romanceless love life, I can’t forget the night when you offered me a future.
When we were together, you were still living in the main house with your parents. But the next summer, you’d move into a two-story white farmhouse across the ranch, and build the life you dreamed of. You presented the house to me hoping that someday, I would share it with you.
It was a white, two-story farmhouse on its own private swath of land, much like the house in Christina’s World. The kitchen was gutted—no floor, no sink, exposed studs. The living room was packed with furniture and boxes, though it was otherwise intact and livable. You brought me to the bedroom upstairs and sat on the bed.
“This will be ours,” you said. I tackled you, pinned you to the mattress, and kissed you ravenously.
As we left that farmhouse in August, I noticed a white swing on the front porch, pointed east toward Sheep Mountain. And Nik, even now, 504 days later, I’m still writing on that white porch swing in Montana, still petting the sleeping Daphne sitting on my lap, still waiting for the sun to rise over Sheep Mountain in the east. And you’re there, sitting next to me, with a smile.
And in the growing light, your eyes look vaguely lavender.
