The last safe place is getting packed into cardboard.
I run my fingers along the frame of the window in the dining room—the one that looks out onto the gravel-dusted front yard where a stubborn Oregon grape root plant grows. He wasn’t a gardener, but there was something poetic about that hardy, jagged bush surviving all the suburban attempts to tame it. This townhouse sits tucked in the stillness of Centennial, nestled mid-row between two others, three stories tall and just over 1,500 square feet. Grief doesn’t echo here—it settles between drywall and shared beams.
The late June wind sighs through the screen with that same high plains exhale: dry, cold, relentless. It doesn’t caress; it scrapes. And yet, somehow, it sings. That sound has always reminded me of a cello played with a knife.
This house smells like old cupboards and dusty carpet. It carries ghosts in the baseboards and secrets in the attic insulation. I used to imagine this place was a heart with four chambers: the den where he died, the basement where I stacked grief like firewood, the hallway where I paced every night with my dog Angel crying over probate emails, and the garage full of tools I never learned to use. I stayed because I was trying to keep something alive. But it turns out you can’t resuscitate a myth.
They stopped speaking to me. One took the cat. Another said I’m dead to him. What am I supposed to do with that kind of silence? It thickens, curdles, then hardens around the edges of a life. And still, somehow, I keep feeding it my attention, as if love can be coaxed from absence.
I move the last box onto the floor, next to Angel’s food bowl. She’s watching me, three-legged and wide-eyed, always sensing the unspoken before it becomes sound. Her fur still smells like vet bandages and cedar mulch from the yard we never got to plant. There was going to be a garden here. There were going to be sunsets watched from the porch. There was going to be a lease, a deed, a dream with a date stamp. Instead, there was only the grind of maintenance and the slow death of inheritance.
I keep thinking about his voice, the way he used to speak about Atman and witnessing the self. He was tall, wore khakis and a button-up pocket shirt with pens always tucked in the front. He drove a ’93 Camry he had painted green, not for flash, but function. A vegan Buddhist with a complicated heart, a disciplined body, and eyes that held more questions than answers.
He built a life out of principle and breath. He sketched maps of the soul and sometimes flirted with distraction. But he showed up. For his students, his practices, his routines. Now what’s left is brittle paperwork and a war of emails. The home became a battleground where no one showed up for the funeral but everyone arrived for the scraps.
When I lie in bed at night, I replay the funeral playlist in my head. Boston. Jethro Tull. That one track with the flute solo that sounds like a rebellion unfolding in real time. that always makes me ache in a way I can’t quite name. It plays over the hum of the oxygen concentrator that still echoes in my memory, as if the walls haven’t realized he died.
And now I’m moving back to Wyoming, not for the state but for the space. For the sagebrush that curls like old calligraphy across the hillside. For the wind that tells the truth whether you want it or not. For the chance to build something of my own that isn’t just a response to someone else’s absence.
My new place is small, barely 500 square feet, but it’s mine. I’ll have a yard for Angel, a quiet for my work, and a foundation that doesn’t shift under someone else’s name. I’ll keep the loveseat and the bed. I’ll leave the piano and the rage.
This isn’t healing in the traditional sense. I still feel the rot beneath the crown. But it’s forward motion. It’s the muscle memory of hope. It’s the body remembering how to want.
I will not assist in the sale of this house. I will not pretend that what happened here was neutral. I will not sanitize the story to make it more palatable for people who chose to stay away until it was time to collect. Let the court see what the wind already knows: that a storm left unchecked will tear down more than just shingles.
This house was once a haven. Now, it is an elegy.
And I am the one who will write it.
the misfit west 