When everyone in my life fled to the cities and the coasts, their existences unfolding like the maps in their hands, I stood still. I kept their gorgeously-written letters, the quaint postcards, inhaled the glamour right from the pages and slid my fingertips over the slick surfaces: Paris, New York, Los Angeles. And my reality, which had always depended on a narrowness of vision, expanded; I stood ankle-deep in lakes so vast I could see no sight of shore, lazed in the buttery afternoon light of dingy diners, drank from whiskey bottles in unending midwestern seas of grass.

There’s a beauty in places only half-wild. It’s so easy to find a home in all the empty spaces: little forgotten hovels of the past. Once I stood under the eaves of a stone church in the flat Michigan countryside and saw the sky turn before my eyes, an eerie aurora borealis that seemed close enough to touch.

It was always like that, when the storm came low and everything looked like death.

Not even the animals are caged there. The sheep wander sleepily from one edge of earth to the next, the dogs run loose and the housecats watch like sphinxes from beneath the rows of hedges. I would wake up in the preternatural stillness before morning and throw off the bedcovers, pace the cottage and drink coffee in silence, calmed by the easy peace of solitude.

Sometimes — and this was how I always rationalized it, always — it was just a little easier to love places than to love people.