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speaker who veered back
and forth between the six-figure jobs and the bar stool. But then
again he had already lived twice of my lifetimes. But then again he
had me meet him at Coco Joe’s without a shred of
embarrassment.
    But he was sincere about
what he had just said, I could tell that much. He spoke in sarcasm
perpetually, but behind it I knew he was as invested in my being
happy as I was – he needed my life to be working out, as the only life raft
for him to hold onto.
    I took a big sip of my
beer and sat forward, looking at him, trying to find the words to
spell out some kind of a feeling that was I had been carrying
around inside me all morning. My face felt hot and my throat hurt
as I swallowed down more feelings.
    “ There has to be more than this for me, for us,” I said. “Don’t you
think, Scott?”
    He shook his head,
“No.”
    But I pressed on. “I just
want to be someplace where I feel like… like I’m not missing out on
something, you know? I fucking feel like I’m missing out on everything now, man, and
I want to be in a place where that feeling stops.”
    “ And it’s not here,” Scott
said, pointing a finger down on the table we were at, and then
draining his wine. He looked back at me. “Everyone feels like that
you know.”
    “ Not like this,” I said,
my voice constricted. Regret filled my heart as I thought of all I
had said.
    It was pretty much what
most people felt, Scott was right, but to the same degree that I was feeling
right now? Was the whole world so sick and disappointed, so
angry?
    “ You’re just stuck in the
moment, overreacting,” Scott said.
    No. Holly saying what she
had said just woke up what was already slumbering inside me, and
she woke it up with a vengeance. I thought, as I sat there in Coco
Joe’s, of other girls I had loved before Holly that hadn’t worked
out. I thought of other things I had tried so hard to get or to
accomplish over the years: music, sports… a kind of…
specialness.
    I thought of loss and
disappointment, of past faces and images, and goals, of bitter
memories and embarrassing things. I was quickly spiraling into a
worsening depression, sitting at that table at Coco Joe’s, and I
was supposed to be the life raft! Who could I hang on to now that a storm had
truly come for me ?
Didn’t I need a
life raft?
    From out of the storm
clouds Scott said, “So what you want is Montana.”
     
    He smiled at me as he said that, with a slight sarcasm in his
voice, but this “Montana” thing was an old joke between us. The
joke existed because I had announced, more often than not in
desperation and more than once to him over many years that I was
“moving to Montana.”
    I really had in fact
always been obsessed with Montana since I was young and had
travelled through parts of the state on Boy Scout trip. After
seeing my camping trip slide show pictures after returning, I was
hooked and was thereafter obsessed with what I imagined to be the
visceral struggle and the harsh majesty of living up there year
round – Eden-like summers, hellish winters in the harsh and
beautiful Rockies.
    Montana had fascinated me
ever since that boyhood trip, living in the mountains, living wild
and free; and it had become of kind religious mantra of mine when
things got bad – that I would soon be “moving to Montana;” a kind
of “screw this place!” statement. It was funny also because it was
so damn far from Georgia.
    My worship and cult-life
reverence for Montana was further engrained in me when I was in
college and saw the movie Legends of the
Fall, with Brad Pitt. After watching that I
had decided right there, in the theatre, that I was going to live
in the remote and majestic mountains in Montana and start up a
ranch, somehow, someway, or at least get some kind of job up there.
I had even looked at jobs there my senior year, teaching English
Lit in high school, and had even applied to work on a ranch. I
spent time studying maps that semester, working out