my strongest reactions to the country are aesthetically connected to driving through the woods, which is a strange one… it is being in love with something that you usually only look at through lacerations in it: the trees from the road are beautiful like a wound. A francis bacon landscape painting.

‘One for Sorrow’ is set near Youngstown, OH, which has more of that dying-rust-belt-urban-decay-thing than we did (well, the boro had it a bit more than my side of the mountain) but otherwise it’s the same.

You’re the perfect confirmation of what I was saying – I grew up in the trees, all the mountain and empty logging roads stretching out behind the barn for hundreds of acres, of course they’re in my psyche. But you lived in town. And the trees still got you.

I’ve never really read anything that sounds like our homeland besides _The Perks of Being a Wallflower_ which read *exactly* like the boro.

No one in my current life understands how misty I get when I’m in my real home, out with the low mountains and the woods. How crazy I get about trees, especially, the concentric halation of the light through the bare winter branches, the way they have chosen to fill the space. Everything.

Same as it ever was I had no idea what it would be about that place that I missed the most.