Adam’s been losing his mind over tax season and I’ve been losing my mind over writing this damn memoir so together we decided, as is our annual tradition, to find the minds we’ve lost somewhere together.

This year it’s Twin Peaks, partially because I fell in love with that bizarre Netflix show, and mostly because it’s two hours from home. Also mostly because I found a badass cabin where I can lock myself in and finish editing this jumbled fractured story of my life (so yeah, still losing my mind).

When we first pull up, the siding of the cabin has these odd ribbons of silvery material clipped to the side. When we walk up the steps, Adam, ever the city boy, thinks it might be a bear. I think it’s meant to replicate the sound of rain.

When I was a little girl, my father knew I loved the sound of rain drifting down upon the rafters; he told me the story of a Hollywood producer who was dying. He told his wife that his last request was to hear the sound of rain—so she buys a sprinkler and lets it pour out on the roof. He passes peacefully to the rhythmic musings of the sky. It’s my favorite story, and probably the one I most fondly recall. As a child, my father would wake me at 5:00 AM, just so I could fall back asleep to the sound of him showering in the bathroom down the hall.

Water is music. I’m sorry if this is a thing that you have not discovered yet. Go sit by a river, close your eyes, and let it saturate your soul.

In the cabin, there’s a doorway leading to a semi creepy basement we discover quite on accident, but what’s a cabin in the woods without some ghosts? We keep the door locked at my insistence that it must be haunted, because I am a writer and so imaginations know no bounds. Adam scoffs, then waits until I leave the room to light a candle he pretends he has not lit. I am certain this will go on for days. In the middle of the woods, bears are not the thing I fear.

The cabin is a work of art. Quirky with its painted red floor and mismatched, yet perfectly suited, vintage chairs, I listen to the sound of rain as I rest upon a bearskin rug before the fire. I am, finally, despite the past few weeks, at peace.

Adam and I talk before the fire, about our early fights and our love for one another.

Just one more log and we’ll go to bed.

Five logs later, we are still here, bearing souls and trading secrets. It’s like we’ve always been here together, beside the fire, beneath the backdrop of the evergreens. There’s something about the wild. Everything we are becomes wrapped up in each other.

When we wake up in the morning, there is snow. I go outside to collect it on my tongue, while Adam claims the warmth on my side of the bed. It lasts for a moment, just a flicker in space. Like a wrinkle on the white sheet of a timeline it is there and it is gone, leaving dampness on the porch and magic in my head.

Sometimes place affects a grieving heart. In fact, I’d argue that our placement always does. When I feel too restricted and confined by rules and regulations and the cat that cries at 6AM each morning for her food, when I am too exhausted by routine, when I am plagued by deadlines, due dates, and matters of the 9 to 5, a place like this becomes salvation. It becomes the other. The space set aside for knitting up the tattered heartstrings that have wound too loose. In between the canopies of trees, there is always healing to be found.