That winter, we live on a perpetually deflating air mattress in a nearby friend’s cold, stony basement in the smack middle middle middle of the country. Pure nothingness flat forever. And the cows in the semis go mooooooooo.

Not that I saw the cows. I couldn’t really leave the perpetually deflating air mattress at all: Everything was sobbing and sleeping, and sobbing and sleeping, and sobbing and sleeping in a dark basement. Perhaps if I had settled down on a farm instead of floating to Nebraska with N., it would’ve been different. It’s hard to say when exactly the sadness started haunting me again. It nags at me because there’s a voice inside me—I call it “my parents’ voice,” because of its high intellectual expectations of me. But it’s my own voice, and it’s saying, You have to do something MORE with your life! MORE MORE MORE! The voice pushes me forward, pushes me back, pushes me into big cities. And so I keep floating, never satisfied to stay still…

It’s just a constant feeling of rushing throbbing loud gushing pain. You need to drown it out. So you stuff yourself with processed crap from the store. Stuff stuff stuff until your head feels high and until you feel like you can’t think about the rushing gushing pain and all you can think of is that your belly is going to burst. Sorry, hippies, but at this point the hippies felt like a myth, because the hippies were supposed to teach you to be Happy, and you don’t feel very Happy, or even happy, now do you.

Can we drive to the store and get some chocolate ice cream and gummy worms and Half Baked and M&Ms and chocolate syrup and then super-burritos from the Mexican place…

I began making myself throw up because of my immense feelings of self-hatred. I was trying to puke out the self-hatred that RUSHES really loud through my head like a fucking pounding waterfall and drowns out my ability to be in the world. This was embarrassing: I thought being a hippie had cured me of all that ego-y crap (and it’s true—most of the time, when I’m at the Wolf, or living in the mountains, hiking around, doing farm work, not seeing mirrors or being in cities, the feelings of self-hatred melt away. I’m simply too wrapped up in caring for the land, or the animals, or the community around me, and I feel genuinely happy).

I felt infinitely guilty because when I could force myself to get off the perpetually deflating air mattress, I was trying to research the Back-to-the-Land Movement, and Wendell Berry, and other stuff about being kind to the land, not being wasteful, and getting close to the Mother. It’s like there’s this gap between what I want to believe and how I feel inside (gut-wrenching).

The deeper I crawled inside my own cage of misery, the harder it became to envision an escape. I didn’t speak with my parents. When the phone rings, and I saw one of my old friends calling, (it’ll ring less and less as the months go by), I didn’t pick up. N. is the only person I ever talked to, and N. not much of a talker. I feel totally dependent on N., the only one who is patient and good enough to deal with a sick fucked-up fuck like me. He reaffirms my theory.

I’ll be lying in the basement sobbing for how many days/weeks/years in a row now? Ocassionally, I’ll ask him if maybe I should go home to my parents, go on antidepressants, talk to a professional, somebody who is not N.?

“No you’re just a Cancer you remind me of the moon you’re a moon-child you’re just moody this is who you are you’re a moon-girl like the phases of the moooooon my moon-baybeee,” he says, ripping the bong, again. “And I am the only one who is patient enough to take care of you.”

“Thank you.”

RR-RR-RRRR-RRIPPPP.

When we were traveling, we had common interests to keep us together: goats, rock formations, did-ya-see-that-funny-looking-cloud. In Nebraska, N. gets really into The Legend of Zelda and baking pot brownies. I try to write, but more often than not, I find myself curled up in a ball in tears. N. tells me that I need to give up: “What is the point? Why are you writing if it’s making you anxious?” So, instead, I lie around. His solution, when I start to cry, is to offer me pot. I don’t want to smoke pot, but what the hell—I do. Maybe it’ll get me to stop crying so much. I need to stop crying: if I keep crying like this, N. won’t love me anymore, and without N., I’ll have nothing. I am desperate for N.’s love and extraordinarily anxious that I’ll lose it. He tells me I’m a nut-job: that he loves me—I just need to believe him and cool it.

I need a second opinion about my life. I need to hear someone’s voice, other than N.’s or my own, but I don’t have real friends in Nebraska. I used to read, right? I used to have opinions, right? Was it a stupid idea that I used to want to be a writer? At least it was an idea that got me out of bed each day? I need something to get me out of bed each day. I am scared of what I’ve become: somebody crying in her pajamas all the time as her stoned boyfriend feeds her pot brownies. I’m scared that calling my old friends will remind me of an old version of myself—one that I feel like it’s too late to return to.