I didn’t think I would ever get to a place where the days would stop feelinglike obstacles and start feeling like steps. Small, uneven ones, but forward movement all the same.
I still miss you something fierce, and the cravings still come, but they’re quieter now. More like background noise than a blaring siren I can’t ignore. When it gets loud, I pause, breathe, and remind myself that it will pass. And itdoes. Not instantly or magically, but it rises and falls like a tide instead of a wave crashing over me.
The hardest part is the grief and missing you, but even that feels, or is beginning to feel, different. My first thought each morning is still you—I don’t think that will ever change—but it’s softer, less like being punched in the gut, and more like a steady ache. It still hurts, but the pain is no longer blinding.
I’ve been going on walks around the property after dinner. There is a trail that curves behind the building, lined with tall trees that rustle in the wind. The air back there smells of pine and dampearth, and I love the simplicity of it. Sometimes, I close my eyes and imagine you walking beside me, your hand brushing against mine while I tell you about my day. I can almost see your warm smile, beaming with pride about the progress I have been making.
I want to make you proud, dreamer. The only thing I want more is you… I came here fearful of the man I was becoming, but I want to be sober because I want to be the man you knew. Someone you would still love.
I started playing my guitar again. Just a little late at night when the common room is empty. My fingers were stiff at first, the strings biting into my skin that has gotten soft, but the music came. Slowly. I can’t make it through more than a few verses of any songs about you or us, which is most of them. But I keep trying. Apparently, I haven’t completely hung up my guitar, and that feels like something.
Dr. Patel asked me who I am without alcohol or you in our session today. I hated the question the first time she asked a few weeks ago. It felt like she was trying to erase you, like I’m trying to erase the booze. But that’s not what she meant. Loving you can still be a huge part of who I am. It just can’t be the only thing I live for, and I’m starting to understand that.
You were my partner, my best friend, and the person I planned out my entire life with. Losing you and our future shattered me, but it didn’t erase me. I am stillhere. I am stillbreathing. And I am capable of something other than self-destruction.
She’s pushing me to imagine a new future for myself. Not a replacement for the one we wanted. Never that. Just… different.
Dear Rosie,
Tomorrow makes day fifty-five. Even as I write this, it feels surreal. It’s almost time to leave.
For weeks, this place felt like a cage. Structured days. Scheduled meals and counseling. Therapy sessions that peeled me open. Now it feels like support beams holding me upright while I’m still under construction. And I’m about to walk out of here without them, suddenly being forced to stand on my own two feet.
I’m not sure where I’m going or what I’m going to do. All I know is I can’t go back to our home. It’s a museum now, nothing more than a shrine for a life that doesn’t exist anymore. If I try to live there, I’m going to freeze myself in time. I’ll sit on the edge of our bed and drink myself to death, waiting for a future I know isn’t coming.
I’ve been talking with the discharge planner. There are options… A sober-living house for a few months, an apartment in the city, or moving in with a friend, like Mason, until I find my way. None of them feels right. Not that any of them feel wrong, either.
I can’t return to our life, Rosie. Not because I don’t want to. Fuck, I want to more than anything. I want to rewind to a random Sunday, with you humming on the back patio. I want the mundane back. Give me the ordinary and the safe. But that life ended the day you died.
What I’m starting to understand—slowly and very reluctantly—is that staying frozen in time won’t bring you back. It will only bury me beside you.
Fifty-five days ago, I thought strength meant not falling apart. I thought to prove I love you meant I needed to hold it together at all costs. Now, I’m starting to think that strength might be finding the courage to build something new from our wreckage, carrying you with me, instead of trying to crawl back to what we were.
I’m hopeful. That word feels scary to say out loud, but I am. Hopeful that I can stay sober one day at a time. Hopeful that I can still love you fiercely without it completely tearing me apart.
In a couple of days, when they hand me my sixty-day chip, I’m going to remember that, as much as it hurts sometimes, I survived. And I’m choosing to keep surviving every day.
I don’t know where I’m going after here, I just know that I’m headed there sober, and I’m taking you with me. Not as a weight pulling me under with grief, but as a compass, pointing me in the direction of the man you believed I could be.
The road is laid out before me. The sky is wide and endless, a constant soft blue, broken only by the low, drifting clouds casting shadows over the acres of countryside surrounding me. I have been driving for hours, the steady hum of the engine beneath me, and my hand relaxed on the steering wheel.
This time, the road isn’t an escape route. I’m not running. I have a destination, a plan. The sign stands a little crooked on the side of the road, the white letters against a green backdrop, slightly weathered by years of the elements.
WELCOME TO LIVINGSTON, MONTANA
POPULATION 9,290.
Well, now 9,291.
This is home… Not the house I shared with Rosie, or even where I spent my childhood, but this is my roots. Before Nashville, Rosie, the tours, or the spotlight. Before life swallowed me whole and spat me back out with calloused fingertips and a whiskey habit that was going to end it all, this was my life. Dirt roads. Wooden fence posts. The smell of hay, manure, and sun-warmed leather. Muddied boots and hard days of honest work.
Dr. Patel suggested it a few days ago, right before I left rehab. “If you can’t go back to the life you built with Rosie, go somewhere that reminds you of who you were, the man she’d be proud of and fall in love with.”
At first, I thought it was ridiculous and sentimental, running backward instead of moving forward. But the longer I sat with it, the more it made sense. I can’t go back to our house, sitting in rooms filled with her absence, and expect to build something new. I also can’t drift from city to city anymore, pretending motion equals healing. So, I made a few calls until I was connected with James Wilson, owner of the Wilson Family Cattle Ranch. With spring coming, he is short of a ranch hand. And with a little convincing—and maybe a bit of begging—he agreed to give me a shot. Well, more correctly, he decided to give Easton Callahan a shot.
The town is a stretch of low buildings along the main road, a quaint diner with a faded red awning, a general store, and a hardware store with dusty windows and a hand-painted sign. Pickup trucks angle along the curb, like they hand them out upon arrival. I roll through at a slow pace, taking it all in.
No one knows who I am here, and I’m hoping the slight change in name, clean shave, and large brim of a cowboy hat will keep it that way. The only thing I want to be judged on here is whether I can mend a fence or saddle a horse.
