The Three Who Walk West

If you are here, then you are listening.
Or maybe you are doing the quieter thing—reading, which is a kind of listening that asks for stillness.

This is not how the brave woman would begin. She would start with action, with boots already on, with the horizon cracked open like a promise. But the shy girl insists on explaining herself first, and the feral one doesn’t care how it starts at all. She only cares that it’s honest.

They are all me.
They always have been.

Winter has a way of thinning inspiration until it feels translucent, like surface frost on a lake after a frigid early winter night. The days are shorter, the light less forgiving. This is the season when the world turns inward, and so do I, whether I want to or not. I used to fight that. Now I try to listen.

I tell myself this story because I’m afraid of forgetting it.

Memory has always been slippery for me. Some days it feels like trying to hold water in my hands—cupped tight, still leaking. I’ve wondered, not unkindly but honestly, whether I dulled it myself. Too much weed in high school. Too much resistance to a system that felt rigid and gray and uninterested in who I actually was. I hated school. Hated being told when to speak, when to sit, how to think. I was a natural rebel with nowhere to put the fire, so I smothered it instead.

Or maybe the forgetting comes from somewhere older. Somewhere inherited.

My grandmother forgot my name, amongst most things. “Oh your name is Abby?” she asked as her glacier blue eyes pierced mine. “Oh just like our little Abby.” She looked at me as if admiring that little Abby, but did not know I was her little Abby standing before her. Heart shattering. She would look at me in recognition but no label, like a song you could not place. And yet she could place her hands on the piano, and the melody she taught me when I was small came back flawless, as if it had been preserved in ice. That scared me. That comforted me. That taught me something I didn’t yet have words for.

Some memories don’t live where we expect them to.

That is why I write. Not because I think I’m a writer, but because writing pins feelings to the page like butterflies—gently, reverently—so I can return and remember how it felt to be alive in that moment. A photograph captures light. Writing captures temperature.

So how do you begin when the illumination of love has gone dim?

It had been a while since I fell in love, and I didn’t realize how much I relied on that glow until it was gone. Love, for me, has always been a kind of compass. When it disappears, I feel unmoored.

That’s when the brave woman takes the wheel.

She goes west.

There is a particular magic to traveling west at sunset, when the road stretches forward and the sky keeps pace with you. It’s as if the sunset will last forever. It hovers, suspended, as if curious about how far you’re willing to go. The asphalt hums. The air smells like dust and possibility.

How far can I go? I used to ask that question like a challenge. Now it sounds more like a prayer.

Can anywhere feel like home?

Home has never been a single place for me. It arrives in flashes, unannounced. I smell it in the vanilla warmth of ponderosa pine forests in Arizona, where the trees seem to breathe with you. I feel it standing still in the gentle, persistent rain of Southeast Alaska, where the world is green and unapologetically alive. It wraps around me on humid summer evenings on the East Coast, when the air is thick and thunderstorms paint lightning on the landscape.

Each place touches a different version of me. None of them ask me to be smaller.

What I was looking for changed over the years. Once, it was peace. I had to let go of so much to find it—people, patterns, versions of myself that were built for survival rather than joy. Peace didn’t arrive like fireworks. It arrived like a quiet room after a long argument. Empty. Sacred.

Lately, though, I’ve been looking for love.

Love asks different questions. Love doesn’t want you hollowed out. It wants you full. So now I wonder: what do I need to let go of to receive it?

The universe whispers answers, but never in plain language. It speaks in symbols, coincidences, and dreams. I’ve always leaned into the occult—the tarot cards that feel like mirrors, the slow logic of astrology, ancient philosophies that remind me none of this is new. Freud had his theories about dreams, but I trust mine the way sailors trust stars. Why don’t we listen more closely to what the mind says when the body finally rests?

We spend a third of our lives asleep. There is an entire other realm we visit nightly and abandon each morning like it was nothing.

Lately, my dreams have been loud.

I keep seeing a single leaf frozen upright in ice and snow, defying gravity, refusing to bow. It’s impossible and yet unmistakably real. Nature does that sometimes—creates a moment so unexpected it feels like a message meant only for you. The leaf appears again and again, and each time it fills me with a quiet, stubborn hope. Even in winter, something stands.

This winter I’ve spent at home, and here I am grateful to be surrounded by family. People who have known me my whole life. People who can tell stories about me that I don’t remember, that belong to earlier drafts of myself. And lately, I feel a chasm between who they remember and who I have become.

Do they see the change?

Have they heard me gasp at the sudden appearance of the moon behind a cloud, a rebellious sliver of light in the deep dark sky? Have they seen me unleashed in the wild, feral and laughing, where my body remembers what freedom feels like? Have they watched me cry when an autumn leaf falls and hits my chest like it meant to find my heart? Or smile, involuntarily, when the sun warms my skin after days of cold?

I don’t think they have. I don’t think anyone has.

The shy girl notices this first. She carries the ache of being unseen, of holding entire galaxies inside her ribs while the world assumes she is quiet because she is small. She wants to be understood without having to explain. She wants someone to look at her and recognize the language she speaks in silence.

The feral one doesn’t mind being unseen. She belongs to the moments with no witnesses—bare feet on cold ground, laughter swallowed by wind, tears that fall into soil instead of hands. She trusts the earth more than people. She knows how to survive alone.

But the brave woman wants more.

She wants to be seen and loved in her fullness. Not adored from a distance, not edited for comfort. She wants someone who will kiss her in the dark, not to erase the dark but to honor it. Someone who will stare into the unknown with her and hold her hand steady. Someone who will dance with her under an open sky, unafraid of how big love can get when it’s not contained.

She desires a love that nourishes—not consumes. A love that tastes like water melted from ancient glacier ice: clean, cold, and earned through time. A love so vulnerable that nakedness feels like safety instead of exposure.

Her heart has been broken before. Not shattered—broken open. It happened not too long ago, close enough that the lesson is still warm. Loss taught her where she had been hiding, where she had been bargaining instead of choosing. It hurt. It also refined her.

She is grateful for that gift.

Now, standing somewhere between winter and whatever comes next, all three women agree on one thing: they are ready. Ready to share what they’ve learned. Ready to be wrapped in warmth and to endure the flame that comes with it. Ready to love without disappearing.

That is why this story exists.

So you can see me too.
So I can exist, fully, in a place that holds me.

And if you’re listening—really listening—you might recognize parts of yourself walking west alongside me, chasing a sunset that never quite ends.