Aching together

Heartbreak lives somewhere new every season. Summer wears it proudly. It's hidden underneath the crinkling leaves in fall, and I walk over it and can just hear it crying out. But then winter comes and the cold muffles its cries. Thank god, I think guiltily, I can relax my grip on the pieces of my soul until springtime. When the trees are bare and the land is cold and bleak, I'm not pulled so strongly to the more brutal formless bleakness of drowned needs and disavowed dreams and daily monotony.

I feel a calming melancholy in the gray-on-gray bare-treed twists of northern New England's winter highways, in the endless windswept desolation of Wyoming, when I'm windburnt or roadweary or just plain tired. I feel it when I'm miles from the trailhead and the weather turns bad or the path drops far below me and whispers, "just one slip," and my mammalian brain makes sure fear is close at hand. In those moments, the fear and sadness come from mere circumstance, from the sense that I must stay present or I could be gone in an insignificant instant. In those moments the hivemind from which the world's heartbreak pours is closed off, and I am only myself.

In the summer I listen too hard, and the silent screams of those with no one there to hear them reach me through time and space. Well, sometimes. Other times I spend months in blessed-cursed silence, with another cup of coffee or another afternoon of buzzing hunger to drown out the noise that it seems it is my birthright to listen to, the noise that paralyzes me if I listen too long. I've made that mistake before and almost lost myself in it. The weight of every moment of every life I witness hangs heavy in my mind. It matters little if it's a moment that would hang heavy in theirs. Sometimes all it takes to throw me into hopelessness is imagining someone I love washing the dishes for the 10,000th time. Time is passing, and nothing will ever be the same again, except that the dishes will need washing again tomorrow. Then on one of those tomorrows, the dishes will still need washing but someone else will have to wash them.

But the salves of caffeine or lack of food or long to-do lists (they often go together) or hard and fast travel cannot be used for too long, either, or I become someone I don't really know. A man who does things just for the doing of them, who devotes himself to the pursuit of some kind of greatness without asking himself what he's chasing. Some people avoid action to soothe themselves. I avoid stillness.

Another virgin wilderness will turn to a dusty tangle of access roads and storage tanks and hypnotizing oil pumps. Another old growth grove will cease to be a numberless font of interwoven life and become so many board-feet of lumber instead. Another river-whipping salmon run will slow to a trickle, another hundred fish-fed grizzlies will grow weak. Another million souls will die deaths of geopolitical necessity. Then another billion will go the same way, blood sacrifices on the altar of never-ending growth. Their blood runs green like money, green like leaves. Mine, for now still inside my veins, runs black and thin with the guilty relief of the spared, black as the soot on the smokestacks built to supply my endless demand.

And despite all that, here I am, fallen unreasonably and hopelessly in love again. Because what the fuck else am I gonna do? Sit here and let the wonder of life melt away with the permafrost? Surely it's easier to bear witness to earth's trillion heartbreaks and rejoice in its trillion miracles when there's another heart to share them with. It's easier to look over the precipice with a hand to hold.

So I send handwritten letters across continents and oceans, I cross my fingers and wait. Months pass, and I reach the bittersweet knowledge that whatever the outcome I will always love and try to protect this woman, love her as I still do each woman I have ever loved, the women who have given me the gift of care and peace and stillness that I cannot seem to give myself.

I want to tell a story of hope, paint a picture of the future that I believe can still emerge, a future worth longing for. Doomsayers are a dime a dozen, and do little to propel us towards anything but that which they predict. I aim that criticism straight at my own forehead. But I'll be damned if grief and loss don't flow onto the page a thousand times easier than hope and happiness. For me, sadness becomes words and songs while visions of what's possible become action. I am a false wannabe prophet, writing predictions of doom and working towards salvation. I am impatient for the day I read my own writing and have nothing but laughter for its self-important pessimism.

I have a feeling that whatever hopeful stories of the future I may one day tell will not come from a sweeping vision for change or a certainty that things will work out, but rather from the banal profundity of moments of shared existence. I'm not so naive that I think love will solve all my problems, but – as embarrassing as it is to write this most clichéd of clichés – it's solved a good many of them already. The most hope I ever feel is when I’m sitting in silence with someone I love. It's a hope that has no focal point, no goal, no specificity...just the quiet assurance of sharing whatever comes.

So I will keep sending those letters, and keep loving beyond hope or reason, and keep trying my hardest to see and hold the heartbreak that can be found in every pair of eyes and every piece of land. I will keep trying to stay present in the world as I move through it, to feel everything I can stand to feel. The more I manage to feel without turning away, the more the quiet hope of togetherness finds me everywhere I go.