Jackson, WY 9/18/19
Seeking connection from the fringes.
Dawn.
It’s the waking hours of the day, when most townsfolk still slumber in their beds. He walks the borders of the town square, listening to chickadees in the trees whose song is like blossom on the breeze. His boots trace a solitary route as the beat of each step echoes back off the brick storefronts. He makes a full orbit of the square, past four archways of elk antlers that chart his course in the rising light with all the accuracy of a compass. He stops inside a coffee house pouring hot java into waiting cups. Hot coffee and cold mornings are some of the simple pleasures he lives for.
There are two sides to his life. One, here in this moment trading small talk and sampling connection as he waits for the steam to rise from a cup filled with freshly brewed black oil. The other, out at the fringes of normal lives, where he untethers from the restless rhythm that pounds the pace of life. Where he smells the cold air rising up the mountain and the scent of saddled leather blends with the sweet balsam of the tree-line. That place where the world unfurls and the Tetons pierce the horizon like immense shards daring to tear through that great spread of silken blue.
Dusk.
Their hands rest upon each others shoulders as they slow shuffle to the band. Denim on denim. There’s a richness to the scent of her hair that he swims in as another bar room brawl erupts behind them in a maelstrom of shouts and spilled booze and sweat and laughter, because it’s always the same two old buddies that start the fight. They fight over the girl they both missed their chance with back when they were young and the town was a place where everyone knew everyone. She lives in Texas now. A grandmother with a loving husband and wonderful grandchildren that ask her what she was like as a little girl.
The bars are lined with silver dollars that a drunk paws at lazily as they eke out sips from their shot glass. The resin-coated coins glisten beneath a surface gnarled like tree bark from those hoping to scrape the riches into a waiting pocket. Passing a row of hunched men clustered at the bar like horses in a storm, she leads him out into the night and through the neon glow of the sidewalk. Two atoms drawn together for the night. The final steps of their evening, looking up into the veil of space hanging above the stairs to her motel room, are like ascending to the stars.
Midnight.
They slumber peacefully. At ease with the strangeness of first encounters.
A payphone rings out through the crisp air on the square. Another voice reaching out through cross-country wires seeking a connection.