June 3, 2023
i read the blog
i’ll write about you
you’re so sweet
My first visit to your ranch was two days later. We curved downwards in the truck, into a mini canyon carved by a small creek drowning in moss. Somehow I noticed you hadn’t saved my name in your phone yet.
“Nik!” I exclaimed.
“I’d rather call you my Bozeman boy,” you said, laughing.
The road got rockier as the switchbacks got shorter, and we climbed upward again to wide open fields of yellowing grass dotted with sagebrush and granite boulders. You pointed out Sheep Mountain: a gray cliff in the East I’d always thought was ugly.
“It’s my favorite mountain,” you said.
As you traced your property line with a pointed finger, cows appeared on either side of the road. Some you called by name (to me, they all looked identical), and others you identified as your neighbors’.
“They take terrible care of them,” you said. After you trained my eye some, I could see what you were talking about. Their cows looked scruffier and less muscular.
As the stars emerged, we drove south along I-90 toward your house. Purple lights winked at us through the darkness — “the origin points of the pivot irrigation systems,” you explained. We parked under the interstate in a muddy tunnel. This time was even slower and more passionate, and you said my name like it was a word you’d invented. I’ve lost myself, I thought, as you left soft kisses on my collarbone, jaw, and eyelids.
June 6, 2023
i um
enjoyed that
sorry it was so quick
too bad the sex was pretty good if i do say so myself
We both understood our relationship would have to end in August.
On June 10th I asked what you dreamed your future would be. We were in my bed, spooning on our right sides. I was holding you.
You told me you were going to live alone in a house on the ranch with your corgi, Daphne. You’d have your photography—cows, mountainscapes, yellow hills—framed and hung on your walls. “I love being the only person for miles,” you said.
I doubted this. “Living alone? What about your friends?”
“I’m not worried about that,” you said quickly.
Before I could move, you turned to face me and sobbed into my shoulder. This would have surprised me if I hadn’t known exactly where it was coming from.
The Treasure State is famous for its empty spaces, big skies, and mountain highways that lead into oblivion. There is so much to explore: thousands of trails, fishing spots, clearings brimming with wildflowers. Growing up, I’d run my fingers along tree trunks, thinking I was the first human being to ever touch many of them. The state is so sparsely populated that for every square mile, it’s just you and one other person. But even breathtaking landscapes can’t convince you out of loneliness.
It’s why Montana has the highest suicide rate in the country. The state has a dark underside, one that’s invisible to the millions of tourists who pass through every year to gawk at the mountains and shop for custom leatherwork.
People love it because it’s isolated, and people hate it because it’s isolating.
Being a gay rancher in Montana amplifies this already-inevitable loneliness. I spent my high school years sobbing into the pillow your tears were now falling onto. I escaped east to Providence, Rhode Island where the land is flatter, the people more numerous, and hearts aren’t so burdensome.
But Montana living was your past, present, and future. You were going to school in Wyoming, which was even emptier than Montana. You’d graduate in 2026 with a degree in animal science (the emphasis on cattle) and return to the ranch you’d inherit. You’d accepted you’d never find a husband, so you refused to dream of having one. It’s why I changed your life completely.
When you left that night, your eyes were wet and pink. I thanked you for unloading the sorrow you’d been harboring within you for so many years. You stood, dressed, and collapsed into my arms for another hug.
You kissed me softly, whispered “I love you,” and kissed me again quickly, probably scared of what I would say. But in just two weeks, I’d fallen in love with you, too.
Sometimes, I wonder if a spontaneous love between two young people isn’t love at all. Maybe we were just two lonely Montanan souls who found comfort in the presence of the other. Maybe we both needed an escape from the mountainous, monotonous day-to-day. Maybe Montana amplified our love like it did our loneliness.
Since you, I’ve been stuck trying to objectify love. But the more I try to conceptualize, understand, and psychoanalyze it — the more self-help books I read and journaling prompts I answer — the more impossible a love like ours feels. All my work prevents me from feeling love like I used to. But when love is new, it’s fearless and thoughtless. Pure.
We forged a connection forged between two souls who hadn’t yet been tarnished, who hadn’t been buried by romantic trauma, and who hadn’t already lost themselves in a world of heartbreaks and bad intentions. Since we last spoke, I’ve noticed a change within myself that terrifies me. There’s a gritty reluctance that was nonexistent at Ousel Falls with you. Now, I spend nights clutching new pillows in a new bed out east and wonder how I can return to a time when the world, and my heart, felt endless.
With lonely hearts and empty worlds (or empty hearts and lonely worlds), there was ample space for our relationship to take root and grow quickly. We unfolded to each other, as cottonwoods shed their white fluff at dusk, as wisps of clouds were illuminated orange above the Bridgers, as the days got longer — and then, just as we’d been dreading, got shorter again. We got more desperate as time passed, we fell in love with and around and above and under and all around and all over each other.
By the middle of June, our routine solidified. We saw each other every two or three days, taking turns braving Livingston Pass to reach the other. I learned to love that hour-long drive. Nothing was more peaceful than moving in the direction your heart, soul, mind, and body are all pointing you toward. We’d meet at about 6:00 PM, which left you time to finish your work on the ranch and “get pretty” for me. We watched every sunset together. Each one was a powerful reminder that all this was temporary.
You developed a propensity for my PlayStation, and I for your corgi Daphne. We cooked for each other, ordered take-out, and sat at restaurant tables by August while fat, red-faced men dawning patriotic baseball caps glared at us. We used “baby” ironically at first, but it quickly became the most recommended word in my phone. You wanted more writing made for you; I wanted more wildflower bouquets made for me. I obliged with flowery love letters I posted on my blog. You obliged with expensive bunches from farmer’s markets and roadside Dame’s Rocket. We smoked weed regularly, which I now hate to do.
We were at our best at the beginning of August when I was working as a camp counselor at Luccock. The end was close enough to make our love desperate, but too far for all those lingering, unanswered questions to get between us. You started a memoir of us, sending me one page each day. The service was spotty, but I’d wander away from the cabins each night and read your writing while the Seven Sisters glittered above my head.
So in my world, through my eyes, you’re the subject. No picture or video can come close to capturing you the way I see you. It just makes being with you that much better. Looking at you makes me feel warm and it makes me want to cry because you’re mine, my pretty boy.
I don’t want people to see less of me because I’m with a man. A man who stormed into my life, changing how I see and feel about the world. There are going to be countless questions, but I know someday it won’t matter because I have you. So for now, I’ll spend every last second I have with my boyfriend.
I got another tour of the ranch, then another and another. There was so much to see—barns, tool sheds, giant pieces of machinery, the slaughterhouse, six different houses, at least four creeks, the Yellowstone, sprawling hills, mountain ranges that looked new from every angle. You took me on rides on your ATV—we’d roar skyward, disrupting wildflowers and dry soil. You whooped and I screamed as we hit every knoll. Only my death grip around your stomach saved me from tumbling off and down the mountains.
We toured a huge, vacant, multi-family ranch house on the your property. It was easily a multi-million dollar home, with 6 bedrooms, a servant’s staircase, and spectacular views of the Absarokas. Groves of cottonwoods and thick colonies of grasses crept close to the house, filtering the light flowing into the windows and leading adventurers like us to the creek lying just a few yards from the back porch. I could understand why you’d never leave this place.
As August lumbered on, the lodgepoles dried and the rivers became a shadow of what they were in May. Smoke billowed in from the north. In recent years, wildfires have become part of the landscape, ravaging forests and mountain homes until the first snowfall. Our expiration would come with the snowfall, too. Your love raged red-hot until then. Your gift-giving intensified, your dreams of our future together materialized, you tried to pack all your love into a few weeks. Your love, which had started as a trickle, became as torrential as Ousel was in May.
Only once did we stay together for two nights, for a weekend in mid-August. Your parents were in Big Sky for the rodeo. We made dinner together the first night (Annie’s white cheddar shells) and ate at your wide and high kitchen counter. You took me on a walk you considered sacred — one you did every night with Daphne.
“It’s a big deal I’m letting you come,” you said.
The air was crisp and warm, the creek running past your house was roaring softly. The air smelled of mowed grass, smoke, and lilac. The sun hadn’t set but we were doused in shadow from the mountains looming overhead. The tips of the towering cottonwoods were tall enough to be blessed by the setting sun. Daphne led us to the horse stables and you swung the gates open, freeing the horses to graze for the evening. We walked behind them for a while, listening to the swish of their tails and watching their muscles flex. They trotted out into the fields where they belonged, and we retired to your bed where we belonged.
The next day we took the tunnel under I-90 to yet another part of the ranch, where the land was flat enough for off-roading. You showed me towers of cylindrical hay bales you’d spent the week stacking with a giant tractor. They were three stories tall, which made standing beside them unsettling. We parked by the Yellowstone and kissed in the back of your truck. You cracked the windows and muted the music so we could hear the water.
Montana calls itself “The Last Best Place.” I consider that weekend our Last Best time together.
