When the new medication finally started to work, it was like the tide washing out. I’d felt for the last few weeks like I was catching my breath, standing on the damp beach of myself. I have always known I am getting better when things that are beautiful start to feel relevant to me again. The trees green and rich against that slap of vivid sky, all of it still and unreplicable. The truth was that even despite everything with Harry I was doing better than I had been in months. Sadness is different when it is coming from a place you can make sense of.

Harry wanted me to tell her she wasn’t shitty at relationships, but I wasn’t going to. I was looking at the trees. Later that year the Amazon rain forest would be burning, which doesn’t really have anything to do with anything.

* * *

We were both looking forward to Glacier National Park. With Portland behind us, the first day of driving had been long. I was beginning to feel so dreary about the rest of the road that the park seemed like the last beautiful thing I was ever going to see. Harry had started talking more and more about school. The classmates she’d been emailing with, the courses she was excited for. I pulled out my phone and swiped through Tinder just to have something to do with my hands. Funnily enough, there were not that many queer girls in this part of Idaho, or at least not that many with Tinder profiles.

Harry was still driving one-handed. I minded it more than I had the first day of the trip. “You’re weaving,” I said. She ignored me.

I wanted to think that Harry and I were a matter of timing. That we both regretted something. After her girlfriend broke up with her, she wasn’t dating, and then she said she wanted to try men for a while. “I usually get along better with other women,” she said, “but I don’t know. Maybe it’s easier with men. I think men expect less from you, as long as they’re getting sex.”