I didn’t know, when I went to Montana, that I was capturing the very images that would later become inspiration points for transmuting the profound grief and trauma I’d experience in the months ahead.
Actually, in some ways, maybe I did.
Someone asked me recently,
“What made you want to go to Montana?” In a casual conversation.
Not knowing the irony that stood behind the weight of that question. And how could they? When you don’t let anyone in. They were asking about the exact point in time where my life, as I knew it, ended before I even understood it was ending.
I told them,
“I just felt called to it. I don’t know… I’d always wanted to see Yellowstone.”
What I didn’t say, was that sometimes I still struggle to explain what happened afterward — not because I don’t remember, but because there are experiences that resist language entirely.
The sequence of events, the magnitude of what it cost me… trying to compress it into conversation almost feels like a massive disservice to the pain itself.
But writing helps.
Shouting into the void.
Returning to it over and over.
Turning it at different angles until something inside it finally softens into meaning. Looking over the tangible evidence shifts its shape into something deeply ingrained in my soul.
Orbiting.
And the truth is, both things were true.
I had always wanted to see Yellowstone National Park. But I also felt pulled there at that particular point in my life in a way I still can’t fully explain. So I planned it all out, I would spend my 29th birthday there, alone.
Looking back now, it feels less like a random vacation, and more like something instinctual — as though some part of me already understood that my life was about to change irrevocably, even before my mind could catch up to it.
The same way I knew, deep down, that my long-term relationship had already run its course.
Unknowingly — or knowingly — is what I’m still trying to figure out.
Because by then, the life I had built and was so proud of, was already quietly unraveling.
My long-term relationship was functionally over, even if we were still sharing the same space.
And somewhere inside that collapse, I met someone new only weeks later — someone who represented possibility, escape, reinvention, or maybe simply even forward momentum.
A few months after that, I went to Montana.
Reflecting now, the trip feels less like a trip and more like a liminal space between versions of myself — one life ending before the next had fully begun.
When I left, I think I was searching for something inside myself. My life, as I knew it, was suspended on the edge of everything I was and everything I wanted to become.
I set off hoping to clear my mind, hoping that somehow clarity would arrive subconsciously — that I’d return home with answers.
There was never a master plan or grand scheme. Just a desperate attempt to buy myself time.
And there, on those hikes, I remember thinking quietly:
I love being by myself. I could get used to this.
Then, almost as soon as I packed my bags to return home — stopping at Target before dropping off the rental car — I got the text that Rosie had passed.
On my birthday no less.
And so it began.
An agonizing series of events over the next year and a half that permanently altered my brain chemistry.
It’s strange to reflect on now. It almost calls to mind the line from Home by Daughtry:
“Be careful what you wish for, ’cause you just might get it all…”
…and then some you don’t want.
Now I’m left with the footage and photographs from my first solo trip — my first real step into the unknown.
There’s something deeply symbolic in revisiting the landscapes now: the massive rivers resembling the river inside of me, all of my love flowing with force and fluidity, yet with nowhere to go.
The rivers feel different now than they did then, as though somewhere inside that moving water existed every version of me at once. Looking into them feels like looking into a reflection of who I was then, who grief transformed me into, and the person I am still becoming after all that’s happened.
I think now, too, about the lone coyote I filmed in a field on my way out of Yellowstone.
At the time, it felt insignificant. Just another quiet moment captured through the window of a rental car somewhere between one version of my life and the next. I remember being drawn to the stillness of it enough to stop and press record, though I couldn’t have explained why.
But after everything that followed, the image began to take on a life of its own.
This past year, I’ve often felt like that coyote myself — moving through unfamiliar terrain alone, surviving off instinct, learning resilience out of necessity rather than choice. Alert. Weathered. Continuing forward anyway.
Months later, someone I loved sent me Morgan Wallen’s “I’m a Little Crazy,” and I remember feeling almost physically startled hearing the line:
“I’m a coyote in a field of wolves.”
It’s difficult to explain why certain things lodge themselves so deeply into your spirit. Why some images, some lyrics, some moments seem to recognize you before you fully recognize yourself.
But something inside me immediately understood it.
Maybe that’s part of what unsettles me when I revisit the footage now. Because when I look at that coyote, I no longer just see solitude. I see survival. Resilience. Adaptation. A creature learning how to endure harsh terrain alone long before it ever wanted to have to.
And somehow, through all of it, there was somewhere for all that fluidity to go.
Back into myself.
Across those rivers, I can almost see her sometimes — the version of me who returned after everything unraveled. Standing firmly on the opposite bank, rooted in the soil, waving back at me as if to say:
You survive this too.
Not untouched.
Not unchanged.
But alive.
As though the landscape itself bore witness to the tragedy before I could.
As though it called me there to return to baseline.
To return to the undercurrents of my soul.
Nature always reclaims what is hers.
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