Kalispell, MT 6/19/16

Riding the loop.

You visit that town again often. On a day you took your first steps out into the great nature of the north and your boot treads clutched at snow and gravel and high country dirt. Where you perched beside creeks swept by glacial air and watched torrents of water carve their course through Precambrian rock. A tract of silver shone a guiding path for you back through the forests into town, where a smiling waitress served you rare steaks and complimentary drinks on account of your exotic accent.

In that town, you walk a motel’s parking lot talking to a girl you’d met in Texas, discussing the day and pondering the future. A neon sign above the office guides you to the empty road and a used car dealership on the opposite side of the street that must be going out of business. Each vehicles’ dash is piled high with crumpled Pall Mall and Lucky Strike cartons like faded chapters from their former owners’ lives. It’s rare to spot a car there without at least one broken headlight or flat tire.

The cheapest room in town offers a home for the night. The price buys you a chamber filled with the remnants of old stories; cinder block walls pockmarked by bullet holes and mirrors smeared with streaks of old lipstick. It’s a space where you bathe in the flickering blue light of endless true crime shows and dream of constellations that whisper your future. You time travel in sleep, prospecting countless threads that lead off before you. Like looking into the last streams of daylight cutting through the atmosphere; each atom holding onto and letting go of a piece of time in an instance as you gaze at that spectral glow.

Time travel is risky. Easy for some to lose themselves to nostalgia. But still you ride the loop that circles through past, present, and future realities. Exploring different versions of yourself on the way to something new.