Robert and I were remembering Yellowstone today. It already seems a lifetime ago. The butt-end sharpness of that horrible lawsuit stands between this time and that time. I could hardly remember anything, and the things I did remember had to do with us and our togetherness. (To be honest, we did spend most of our time together.)
I think when we're both graduated we're going to spend a summer there again. I never thought I'd say that--the company that we worked for was quite awful. But Yellowstone was beyond words. It'll pull us back. You just wait and see.
Both of us want to settle down in Montana someday. It's such a beautiful country.
I remember the day Scott Harrison (the pedophile who raped me in the church) was deposed for that lawsuit Robert rolled his windows down on his Grand Marquis, stuffed another three friends in the backseat, force-fed me xanax, and took us all on a dirt-road to Bozeman. I even remember what I was wearing: Robert's long johns, a high-slit black slinky skirt, and some Romanian top, my head crowned with daisies that made me sneeze. We stopped off at a house where one of our friends lived. They moved a bunch of stuff around while I entertained a little blonde-haired boy with daisy chains and play tractors and reminded myself why I was going through with everything. When I left this little boy clung to my skirt and wept. I wanted to do the same, pick the little guy up and squeeze him, protect him, make sure Scott never got to this precious sweetheart.
Our goal was to get to Bozeman and watch the Dark Knight. When we got to Bozeman the whole sky exploded in hail, lightning, water. I've never seen a storm quite like this one--so bad that it made the front page the next day. Bozeman lost power, all the theatres closed down. Robert and everyone else stood in the theatre overhang and pouted, while I ran into the middle of the parking lot, mud-slush to my knees, and twirled, twirled, twirled. I just stood in the middle of this rain river, tears running down my cheeks, laughing at the same time, shaking in fear at what Scott might do to me now that he knew who was naming him, shaking with sheer exhaustion, but also shaking with love and hope and that cleansing rain.
If ever there were a rain just for one person, that storm was for me.
