Night after night the mountains keep me,
ridged like old scars under a sky that forgot the sun.
Mist clings to the hollers, thick as regret,
and every dirt road ends the same—
a rusted mailbox, a sagging porch,
a dog that barks at nothing forever.
Rain needles down through the poplars,
cold, patient, endless.
It soaks the quilt on the iron bed
where I lie counting the leaks in the roof,
one drip for every year I wasn’t leaving.
The coal stove hisses like it’s laughing at hope,
and the wind through the cracked window
smells of wet leaves and something dying slow.
I walk the ridge at false dawn,
boots sinking in red clay that wants to hold me.
No horizon—just more green walls closing in,
more gray sky pressing down like a lid.
I scream, but the fog swallows the sound
and gives it back as silence.
Then the dream tears open—
a sudden slap of colder air,
the low roar of waves instead of wind.
I wake gasping on a shore I know by heart:
Superior glittering under a hard, bright sun,
sky rinsed clean, wide and mercilessly blue.
The light is almost violent after all that dark,
pouring over the dunes like molten glass,
burning the mountain damp off my skin.
Gulls wheel overhead, white knives against the glare.
The sand steams where last night’s dew is dying.
I press my palms to the warm stones
and feel the lake’s deep pulse beneath them,
five hundred feet of cold truth now lit from above
like a promise hammered in gold.
Here the sun doesn’t coddle;
it strips the rust of those mountain nights from my lungs
and leaves me raw, alive, blinking.
Here the weather is a verdict, not a cage:
clear, cold, absolute.
I belong to this shore,
to this iron water catching fire in the morning,
to this sky that never pretends to be kind
but never pretends to own me either.
Let the mountains keep their locked valleys
and its slow, suffocating dark.
Every time I close my eyes it tries to drag me back,
but every morning the sea blazes awake
and says,
You’re already home.
Stay.
