By Thanksgiving, I was.
After that, things went downhill with the steady efficiency of a truck losing brakes on mountain road.
I sold furniture, then tools, then my truck. I told myself every loss was temporary. That’s the lie people tell themselves when reality is still arriving one piece at a time. By the time I accepted I was in trouble, the landlord had changed the locks and all I owned fit into a duffel bag and a torn hiking pack.
I headed west because my mother used to talk about Colorado like it was the only place she’d ever truly been happy. She’d gone there once at nineteen with my father, back before he ran out on both of us and turned into a handful of stories I stopped believing in. She told me about mountains that made you feel small in a good way. About air so cold it burned. About pine forests that smelled like Christmas and old secrets.
I didn’t know exactly why I went. Grief does strange things to a man. Sometimes it sends him home. Sometimes it sends him nowhere near it.
