Katie and I had spent the first half of the flight watching the feminist masterpiece Magic Mike XXL on the plane until she fell asleep. I did what I was doing now—staring out the window, looking for the meaning of life in the fast-passing clouds.

I hadn’t found it then and I didn’t think I was going to find it now.

Moving to New York to be with Jeremy had been a mistake. I was fairly certain that going to Montana with Gabe was also a mistake. A different kind of mistake, but a mistake.

If I was smart, I’d never leave California.

Even though I’ve never once in my life been able to fall asleep on an airplane, the private jet manages to lull me into sleep and I don’t wake until I hear the pilot say we’re beginning our initial descent into Cooper, Montana.

The first thing I see once we pass through the clouds is the cathedral. It’s a proper one with a tall, reaching spire and a wide spread.

Cooper is small. The airport is at one end of the town and from this distance the whole place—Gabe’s hometown, the keeper of his childhood adventures—feels like it could fit in my palm.

Whenever I would fly back to L.A. to visit my family, I always felt this relief that I hadn’t known I had been missing. As if I’d become accustomed to breathing out of one lung.

It feels like that now. Like I’d been operating on half-oxygen for who knows how long.

I take a deep breath.

Below me, everything is covered in snow.

I’m glad I borrowed a huge, extremely puffy coat from Katie that I had to strong-arm into my suitcase along with a pair of snow boots she insisted I buy. The world looks brisk and vast and unknown. I shiver, but it’s not just from the imagined cold.

It’s almost like I’m coming home. Not to a place, necessarily, but to a feeling. To a possibility of more.

And that completely and utterly terrifies me.

VANITY FAIR

OLIVER MATTHIAS:
He Is What He Is
[EXCERPT]

BY CHANI HOROWITZ

We’re sitting in Oliver Matthias’s backyard and he’s telling me about the first time he fell in love. It’s the perfect setting to hear a love story. It’s fall and the air has just the right amount of crisp in it. We’re sitting on lawn chairs, covered in Pendleton blankets (“a gift from a friend”), drinking hot apple cider.

Halloween is just around the corner. Halloween is when Oliver first fell in love.