My VISTA office is abnormally large: I’m allowed an overhanging light fixture and two wall sconces. I have two desks, two monitors, a table to host meetings and a loveseat to have one-on-ones. My desk even raises for me to stand at it if I want. Before I saw it for myself several future coworkers had hinted and teased, “oh, she’ll be in Marissa’s old office? That’s really nice.” And while they were and continue to be right, it’s also spacious enough to be more than a bit distancing from the world outside. 

In my first months as a VISTA, I felt swamped with the adrenaline and stress of fitting into a new place. I found my age became its own weapon, to other staff I looked like a student worker, to students I looked like staff. So for a passer-by to cross my office and see a brand new, student-appearing, face staring out into the hall from a once vacant office after waving “hi, Maggie!” to my office neighbor, goes “hi, Corine!” to my boss, to see me suddenly they don’t know how to react. And I have no room to blame them, it is difficult to adapt to a new face the best of times, and being on a small, close-knit campus certainly increases it. Before too long, I realized I could apply these instances to how I felt about the land as well. It felt that if the state of Montana is a small town with long roads, my office is Montana in comparison to my life: big, remote and isolating. Multiply the day-to-day scenarios of unrecognition in the office to a 150,000 square-mile plane.

The last time I cried on my birthday, I was 17 years-old and had rammed my car into a cement block and was stupidly trying to urge it down the road, Bruno Mars’ album still playing on my radio. At 23, I sobbed while opening a sticker laden shoebox my mom filled with candies. Albeit, I felt she could have sent me a dead rat for as much as I still would have been moved by the gesture of third-degree touch it instilled in me. “We love you, Chloe! We are so proud of you!!” 

Who in their right mind would leave behind someone so selflessly loving? I can’t avoid asking myself as I’m bawling over a plastic pack of gummy bears like they’re relics from a culture I was never certain existed. They’re artifacts from home; remnants of items my mom touched to place in this box and send a thousand miles away, thinking of me all the while. I think, on a microscopic level, they may have some stray dog hair on them from my pets.

Of course, this reaction stemmed from the lonely, homesick kid just under my skin that had never known separation like this before. This from the kid whose college apartment was not 13 miles away from her parents’ house. Sure, I told myself I had my own place, that I should only go home on breaks or otherwise for urgent issues, and certainly knew I’d experienced bouts of homesickness before– I’d served in the Appalachian mountains for 2 months the previous summer, certainly that was comparable, right. But it all fell away like skin melting from a nuclear bomb when put up against my birthday; put up against week 15 and a dry spell at work and suspended contact with friends back home.

This has been the price of my service, the low points of trembling sadness, loneliness and money anxiety. And while I fell to my knees in gratitude for my wonderful family I missed so much, it is only in moments such as these that show me how deeply I care for other people, be they family or friends. Placing myself in my office again, while my projects have grown legs and I osmosized into my workspace to build camaraderie and trust with those who share this with me, I sting of being an outsider has faded. I’m able to see that for as wide, rolling and secluded as Montana is, it is unquestionably my second home.

Sometimes I’m overwhelmed by both how much ownership over my life and responsibility over my well-being I have been forced to stare in the face since beginning my service and I am also grateful beyond words for the experience and agency it brings me. It’s through hardship, and a bit of fear, that allows me to form the most important relationship I can have, which is one with myself, the land and with the indigenous people I stand in solidarity with.

A week after my birthday I’m able to go skating in only a light jacket and scarf. I’m here partially mourning the news that the woman close to my age, whom I spoke with every time I went to the store, is moving back to Sacramento. I feel like I’ve lost a close friend. I’m also counting down the weeks left until I leave for a training with my VISTA cohort, looking forward to ride sharing my way there, connecting with my other service members, maybe even shaking some hands. As I skate I’m very aware of the wound in me that is always begging for friendship, sometimes crying desperately, or in only a whisper.

But when my eyes take in the sprawling landscape of my home, when I see the mountains that have been carved and left behind by glaciers thousands of years again and painted amber by the sun in the early evening. When I look around and see the road that gives to fields of cows, to a train passing by, and again to the mountain that looks over the town like a friendly ant hill teeming with life; I can’t resist but to blow it a kiss. There is a secret knowledge here that I’m finding through either service or the land or both, but I have discovered it here in Montana and I’m not going to walk back on that now.