My dear reader.

I write to you today from a rainy, foggy, early spring afternoon in the mountains of Vermont.

I came to Vermont because I am sad. I came to Vermont because at home in Massachusetts there is a box filled with my dead mom’s ashes, and in the house with the ashes I cannot seem to do anything other than remain horizontal. So on Sunday I got in my 23-year-old car, the one with the bumper sticker that says “don’t honk at me, my parents are dead,” and I left.

I drove for three and a half hours, and after those three and a half hours I arrived here, at a hotel in a small Vermont town that’s quiet and empty at the start of its off-season, and as I looked at myself in the hotel room mirror after checking in I thought, “Shit, now what?”

It seems unlikely that fleeing the state will actually help me to escape the pain I am feeling (‘wherever you go there you are’ and all that), but you know what, my hotel room has a massive bathtub and no dead mom in a box, so.

I figure, if you’re going to scream you might as well do it with your whole head submerged under the soothing hot water of a bath. And if you’re going to cry, what better place than the damp, green woods?