Anita – yes, I miss those easier times when I was younger. Yes I’d like to be free of my marriage as it now stands– or to fix and transport it – I don’t care about my job, but in no way do I want to be “free” of my son. I only want to understand and somehow integrate this inner longing with my outer life. I’d not trade him or my daughter for anything, I want to keep them and still resolve this need.

Joey – I think you may well understand that tearing feeling when the inner longings don’t match the outer world, and how I am trying to integrate my heart and my head. Actually, I am more than 1,000 miles away, and there is no simple way to get out there.
I’d like to get out there for a visit, but that would be hard. I’ll probably soon enough be willing to ante up the price, though.
I so powerfully recall one day out there, when my-then closest friend (how painful to write that, another topic for another day) came out to visit. He asked why I was so drawn to the place, so I took him to my favorite spot, atop a limestone butte. I gestured toward the West, where the sun sat low in the sky, over a wide-open tract of land, creased by buttes and canyons, from where the wind blew softly in our faces, the shades of brown and the blotches of dark green. “That’s why,” I said, “why I would never be happy anywhere else.” And he agreed that, for me, it seemed perfect. And it was.
And it was less than a year later that I stood in the pressroom of the small newspaper where I worked, chatting with the teenaged boy – an American Indian whose extended family was on a nearby reservation – and told him how I liked wandering in those hills and thought about maybe going further west. “Then why,” he asked, “are you going back east?”
And I had no answer. Still don’t, obviously. But I wish you the best, too, Joey.

• This reply was modified 7 years, 6 months ago by Graham.