love in the mountains.

For me, love was never something that came easy. It was earned and fought for, cherished and misunderstood, messy and short-lived. For me life started at a downward spiral, from the second I was born I lost myself to love. When I was a kid my dad was poetry and music. There were hundreds of stories and poems that he read to me, and songs he sang to my sister and me that shaped the person I saw him as. To me, my dad was kind, giving, and strong, but to the world, he was sick, hopeless, and hurt. His pain wasn’t his own, it was his father's and his father's fathers, the sicknesses and suffering he inherited were deep-rooted in our family tree. My dad passed his pain on to me like a torch, letting his struggles light the way I saw my life. His past became my present and future.

If love could be deconstructed then I’d say at its core that I know my dad loved me, even when he couldn’t show it. As I grew older my dad became abuse and delusions. It was his addiction that he ended up giving his life over to, it overshadowed anything and anyone else to him. His brain went backward to a time where he had never met me, where I could be a stranger. He told me I wasn’t strong enough to know him, that I had abandoned him in the future when he was more than happy living in the past. To him, I was just the kid in the picture frames.

For me now, love is like a maze with ever-changing rules and walls that twist up any sense of direction. I see love as a tireless force that haunts you even when the other person is long gone. But love could never be trustworthy or smooth, it has always been deceitful and jagged. Something that was only given to the worthy. How does someone who has never been shown love find it from someone worthy? Someone who isn’t the mirror image of what I missed out on. When I was younger I was told that we date people who remind us of our parents because it is something familiar to us. For me, that’s always been true. The similar dark hair or beard or taste in drugs always seemed like home to me, like the missing piece of the puzzle.

I’ve spent most of the past few years begging for love, for just a taste of what I never had. I knew I could never get my dad back, or the childhood I missed out on, so I found his shadow in every man I came across. With them love was never good enough, they always needed more and more until there slowly became nothing left of me. Years of switching masks depending on which one they wanted to see that night. Months of pushing down any complaint with fear they’d leave without any notice. With them, there had never been security, or a promise they wouldn’t break, or a lie they wouldn’t tell. And with every passing year, I wondered why I ever thought chasing after men like my dad would end in anything but heartbreak.

Where I live life is set in the mountains, every valley and small town just a walkway to the awe-inspiring main attraction. Love in the mountains is long car rides through twisting trees, cigarettes on cold mountain tops, and lookouts on the Blue Ridge parkway. Love in the mountains is climbing up on old rocks and seeing the cityscape in the distance, the feeling on the back of your moped, and speeding through neighborhoods that have been vacant for years. Love in the mountains is unforgettable. Now everywhere I go I am reminded of some way that I loved someone. The tea shop we always went to, the wolves howling along to police sirens, old rap songs where the rapper shares your name. Everything is so familiar and haunting. These streets remind me of the good times, like driving in his convertible with the top down late at night. And these stone driveways remind me of the bad times, like when I was 18 and you drove to my house to tell me you couldn’t see me anymore. Love for me has become living in the past while hoping there will still be a future.

Although, I haven’t always been the perfect candidate for love. I try on all my lovers like shoes until I find one that fits giving away any too tight or too loose. In my house, there are pages and pages of love stories I have written with no endings, or love songs with hallow lyrics. Empty words that promise nothing but futures that I’ll never get to see. Love has been envious and jealous, like a thorn that I can't get out from under my skin. While at the same time being irreplaceable and magical, losing a bit of its wonder every time I start over with someone new.

In these mountains, I’ve lived hundreds of lives and loved thousands of people. I’ve watched families break apart because of love and ones that have become impenetrable because of it. I’ve seen people who have touched more souls in their short lives than people who have lived for decades, and I’ve seen those people be rejected by love over and over again. Somedays the memories are too much, I’m stuck hoping that if I remembered hard enough I could bring my friends back from the dead or take my dad's illnesses away. In these mountains, there's nothing to save us.

Love is hoping someone sees the hidden messages in my writings, hoping I won’t see him with her at my new job, and hoping that you think of me in the same way I think of you. Love is the first time my dad said he was proud of me, the pills you were on the first day I met you, and all the ones you had taken years before you met me. Love is asking for a third chance at something you know will never work but trying anyway.

For me, love in the mountains has always been extraordinary.