My partner Hanzi and I have arrived in Bozeman! He looked at me yesterday and said, “it is almost too much for me to grasp how much we’ve been through to get to this point… do you get what I mean?”
We left Truckee, CA, a mountain town in Tahoe, 4 years ago when we headed to Chicagoland so that I could start naturopathic medical school. Once there, we both endured and celebrated life in the big city. The truly unfathomable part has been these past 4 months or so.
On February 1st I shifted gears completely by moving to Billings, Montana and Hanzi headed to spend some time with his parents. We hadn’t been apart for more than 2 weeks in about 7 years. Two months apart was absolutely, positively enough. We reunited a month ago in mid-April when Hanzi joined me in Billings to help with the next big step; traveling back to Chicagoland to graduate medical school.
We had an emotional whirlwind of a graduation week with family and friends, and then escaped in the night up to Northern Michigan for a fortnight of recuperation at Hanzi’s parents place. In Michigan, we fished and went for walks in the woods. I studied, and Hanzi edited photos. We tried not to over-think what was going to happen next.
Six days ago we hugged and waved goodbye to Hanzi’s parents and set off for Chicagoland again to retrieve all of our things, pack them into a trailer, and trek off to Montana. Yesterday we chugged up the pass into Bozeman in our heavily loaded cars and headed directly to a storage unit to unload and get that trailer off our truck. Since then, we’ve eaten cheese and crackers on the tailgate, sipped wine next to a fire, and dozed off next to the rushing waters of the Madison River. It’s been a really big month. At this moment, I’m sitting at a comfortable desk in the bright Bozeman Public Library, I turned 29 two days ago, and… I’m just about home!
More thought and less bland update coming soon!