Dear Trudi.

Dear Trudi,

I think that you would love this place. Not because of the adventures it allows, or the ways the trees change colors before your eyes, or how the cold evening air smells so crisp you can almost touch it. It isn’t the colors in the sunsets, sneaking cigarettes, and smashing beer bottles that would do it for you. endless cairns on top of a mountain, or the view from the top that would do it for you. Gvhbs;fiogsnejgba

Dear Trudi,

I think that you would love this place. There are lots of rules. You would break every single one of them. Its quiet, you would pierce the silence.

Dear Trudi,

Im supposed to be writing about the Adirondacks, but my mind keeps wandering back to you. Somehow, I think that’s because they’re so closely connected. You would love it here for so many reasons, but mostly because you simply loved being. You were so good at it. You broke every rule, ended every silence, drank every last drop.

Sometimes I meditate now to make the world around me slow down. I don’t have a single memory of you not moving, exploring, pushing the boundaries. Ive been here for weeks now and Ive yet to make it up any of the mountains that wait for me in my own backyard. You would have streaked to the top and smoked a joint on the summit of each one by now. I think living like that was your way of screaming back at this world, tempting it to go harder on you. Sometimes I wish you hadn’t pissed it off so badly.

Part of the reason I came here was because of you. A piece of me was trying to find you again, and the rest of me was trying to run the hell away. I accomplished both. You’re in the faces and spirits of the people I have met, and floating around on everybody of water I see. For the first time, you exist in silence and in solitude. And yet, your square in the world remains unoccupied, it always will.

I believe that the heart of these woods is good, and like you, they deserve do overs and second chances to no end. For that reason, I pick this place. I leave you here, I take you with me.