5. WE CONTINUE TO SEARCH FOR IT

Once we got back on the road again, it’d all be better. I’m a TRAVELER at heart…THAT’LL SHAKE OFF THESE BLUES… I’M JUST STALE… I NEED THE ROAD…

We left Nebraska in March and spent all spring desperately trying to shake it off. We were still attached to this idea that our depression was intimately connected the idea that our souls were not free in this dystopian 21st century…so we lived in a cave. Don’t get more primitive than that. Just N. and me freeing our souls in a cave.

Well, to be honest…the cave was on this Bureau of Land Management land that all these ATV-ers used, right outside Moab, Utah. Tourist Central. So we ran around half-naked trying to free their souls with their big animal-eyes on, prancing around on the rocks, trying to shake this dead-ugly century out of their bodies…and then vROOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOM these moms and dads and teens on vacay would pull up on their ATV monsters, and look at us quizzically, and wave. Hi!

“Fuck this,” we’d mutter. “How long does ‘spring break’ last? How the fuck are we supposed to FREE our SOULS when it’s fucking SPRING BREAK for these assholes?”

We continued West, herding sheep on a Navajo reservation. There is a reason for when people say dumb like sheep. Herding sheep did not help cure my depression. Herding sheep was far harder than anything I ever had to do as a Philosophy student at the University of Chicago. The herd will run from you, separate into mini tribes, disappear over ridges and into forests. But were trying to avoid California. We knew California was a myth. A punk in Chicago told me that line—“California is a myth”—the second time I ran away from California in 2012. What he meant was, all these kids go to California seeking some Bliss that doesn’t actually exist, because Bliss is not a state locatable on a U.S. map.

“But everything will be better in California! It HAS to be better! It’s CALIFORNIA!” we said anyway. By the time we got there in May, I was done. I had terrible rages: I’d be screaming screaming screaming at the top of my lungs as N. inched Home up these crumbling-down mountain roads (roads that are labeled the most dangerous roads in the USA, where they just put up white posts that mean, “This is an especially crumbly part of the road: Watch out!” and if you fall off the road, you tumble thousands of feet down into your mountain valley pure certain Death).

I wouldn’t remember what I was screaming as I was screaming it, and still don’t. N. would shriek Home to a halt and start banging his fist and head against the wheel going, “NO BAYBEE PLEASE BAYBEE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE JUST STOP YOU CAN’T DO THIS TO ME YOU CAN’T DO THIS TO ME NOT ON THESE ROADS I WILL CRASH I ALREADY WANT TO DIE I ALREADY WANT TO DIE YOU CANNOT DO THIS TO ME YOU CANNOT.” His patience for me was wearing very, very thin.

Screams faded to sobs and slowly drown out to an eerie pulsating nothingness, like the ambient noise flicker of one of those overhead lamps at a laundromat. I stared out the window at the Beauty and wished to die. N. huffed a joint. He was supposed to be quitting, but how could he quit when his partner is this. I was supposed to try and not sleep during the day every day, but how am I supposed to not sleep when I am this. Is there any whiskey in the trunk? Lemme roll another American Spirit.

We continued to say, Once we find It, then the fighting will stop. Breaking up “wasn’t an option” and medication “wasn’t an option.” We’d made up our minds to FUCK SOCIETY—it felt like all we had was each other, living in HOME. No friends, no family. I couldn’t go on meds because it felt like I was stuck in my role of being a “hippie”—doomed to be the Cancer, Moon-Child, yoo remind me of the moo-oooon forever.

The thought of going on an antidepressant never crossed my mind. My community out West was wonderful, but they acted like antidepressants were evil. I was pretty wrapped up in their talk, and so it never crossed my mind that I was depressed and could help myself. No no no. I believed I was crying like this because I was a mooo-oooooooon child.

It’s funny, in a not-so-funny kinda way, to look over the few emails I sent to friends and family over the spring. I babbled angrily about the awesome, holy, beautiful quest I was on, searching for the real, freeing myself from all the ugly restrictive confines of the post-post-post-post-post-modern. Things with N. were good… We might get married… I’d babble on about how HAPPY I was… In reality: I was sobbing or shit-faced and wishing It would end.

Eventually It did end, my relationship with N. We are out goat-packing in the mountains with a bunch of kids who felt like The Wolf had grown too civilized (you know, with its cabins and limited electricity, et cetera). They wanted to really really really FREE their spirits, so they were just going out into the mountains with a bunch of goats. The plan was: hunt and forage for food. Wander, forever and ever.

Goat-packing was the last straw. Goat-packing was the most beautiful, most calming, most FREE I could imagine being. We moseyed around bare chested and barefoot in these blue-green mountains with a bunch of chill-ass goats and chill-ass goat-humans, reading the Tao te Ching out loud every night and eating lentil-and-goat-milk porridge cooked over the fire. It was heavenly, and I still felt like shit.

So I told him that I couldn’t do it anymore.

“I don’t believe you. How are you going to be a traveller without me? You don’t even know how to drive,” he snarked, as we hiked up a mountain ridge under the blue sky, cloudless in the 100-plus degree California-drought heat. Whenever I looked down at the canopy of Doug firs below, I thought of how N. periodically told me that he fantasizes about driving Home off one of these mountains that I came to love so dearly; how he told me, out of the blue, after sex or a joint or watching the sun go down, that he thought hard about whether or not to kill himself daily.

“Fuck you,” I responded. “I’ll hitchhike.”

“You’re a Cancer. You’re wishy-washy. How many times have you broken up with me before? How many times have you said you’re going to stop acting like a hippie? Why should I believe you this time?”

Good point. But blaming myself for being a flake is precisely the reason why I stayed in the relationship for so long. I told him that, and that I was so depressed that I couldn’t see straight; that there’s no reason to believe things would change. I couldn’t trust myself anymore, and I needed to get my head straight.

“The scariest thing,” he said, after he realized that I wasn’t about to change my mind, “about the thought of you leaving me… is that you are my Home? You know what I mean? You’re all that I have? Since we don’t have a physical home? But when I see you…even if we are fighting…even if you are a crazy crazy crazy…no matter where we are…when I see you…I know that I am home…”