During ABANDONMENT week, I wrote a poem about how I’d left October without saying goodbye. Almost all of my assignments focused on Cal or October, with the occasional bit about Sam or Bob thrown in for good measure. At any rate, Santiago knew a good portion of the backstory from conversations we’d had over pancakes, and at the end of the poem he’d scribbled two notes. The first one said: Loving a woman who can break you is the bravest thing a man can do. The second note said: Go back, you spineless motherfucker. The clock is ticking.

It wasn’t like I’d intended to stay in Montana forever. My original plan had been to head back to California after the dust settled. The night I left, I’d only grabbed what I could load up in a hurry, which amounted to a duffle bag full of clothes, a couple of books, some camping gear, my guitar, and my laptop. I’d fed Diego the leftovers in my fridge, hopped in my truck, and headed north, assuming I would drive around for a week or so, talk to some trees, and end up back where I started, ready to face the consequences. But the longer I was gone, the more distance I created between myself and the mess I’d made. And the more distance I created, the more it seemed like a good idea to stay away.

For a while I was peripatetic, pulling off in parks whenever I got tired of driving. I stopped near Yreka the first day and car camped in the Klamath National Forest surrounded by white firs and incense cedars. From there I went to Crater Lake, Bend, and then up toward Hood River.

What I’m about to admit might be the stupidest thing I’ve ever copped to, and that’s saying a lot, but as I was hiking through an old-growth forest near Indian Mountain in Oregon, thinking about Cal and October—they were all I could think about back then—I found myself wondering why they hadn’t tried to contact me.

I guess I’d assumed they would have a lot to say, and I wanted them to say it. And I decided that as soon as one of them reached out—to curse me, call me a liar, a promise-breaker, a coward, the biggest fucking fuckhead on the planet—I would go back.

Neither of them did.

I wandered around in the woods for a couple more weeks, staying in cheap, dreary motels when I couldn’t find a decent campsite. I drank a lot of coffee, alternated between reading Trees of the Pacific Northwest and Shantaram—the two books I had with me—and played a lot of guitar. And I suppose it would have been something of a romantic existence had I not been so empty inside.

I made my way to Spokane and considered staying there for a bit, to get a feel for where Bob had come from, to see if it provided me with any clues about who he was. But while the outskirts of Spokane were green and beautiful, the city itself was a lot of strip malls and fast-food restaurants, and that kind of banal homogenization only intensified my despair.