my Montana

My Montana is not your Montana. I am here in one-dimensional slivers, experiencing everything as if it is the only thing, that has ever happened to me. My Montana makes me drive for an entire day, leave my state and rush through two just to cross back through again. All for the promise of you. In stories, in class, they wonder what year it is. Where is the rest of the world? And I force myself silent and refuse to tell anyone, there is no time, no year, no world. The trees reach so high and touch the expansive blue sky, this place remains insulated, a stronghold against everything with which we measure “time.” I feel as foreign here as I could anywhere. I don’t speak the language. I don’t know the customs. I am rarely properly dressed. They watch me like I watch them, and we both learn little bits of otherness. My Montana is seas of green that stretch farther than my imagination and swirling rivers of iced water so clean and so cold, I forget there is anything else. In my Montana you learn there is no such thing as silence because true silence is so loud. When this many eons of trees creak and whisper it’s the rest of the world that falls quiet. Held deep inside my Montana is a boy that keeps my heart in a dirty pair of work jeans. He rises with the sun and works his bone tired hands and breathes his grey clouded breath. We carve our names into nothing and go on long drives with no destination, they too exist out of time and space, we have come from nowhere as well. In my Montana I drink whiskey with ghosts and write stories of children and sleep with a cold nose nestled to his back. I lace old boots with cut finger tips and go on walks where no one looks for me.