November 9, 2023:
On the road between Billings and Butte it all falls together. The structure, the pattern. An entire life — six and a half decades — determined in substance by another's trauma.
Books, isolation, depression: they lived in their heads. Him as much as her.
Where her life was entirely passive, his has flashes of grasping activity. Not merely art. Rather his attempts to fulfill his own destiny through the rescue of others. Impossible — total failures. But genuine. Where she was always the model for the suffering he hoped to salve.