Mountain Removed: On Queer Grief

Some days it still feels like I can’t survive without Kehontas.

Each week, The Queer Love Project publishes an original essay. Want to submit your essay and add to our growing archive? Find our submission guidelines and more here.

Illustration by Julienne Kaleta, an artist with a desire to expand our capacity for imagining new futures and building networks of care and solidarity. More at JulienneKaleta.com.

To hike Max Patch, in western North Carolina, plan for about 30 minutes up and 30 minutes down. You may stay on the top for hours like I do. Bring a journal, leftover birthday cake, and water. Remember to pay attention to the details of the mountain. She is generous with her beauty. She is wise when you listen.  

The first time I climbed the mountain it was early summer. I was alone. My feet moved easily over the compact trail. The wild blackberry bushes were abundant with fruit. I imagined bears, deer and beetles doing the same as me. Pulling jewels from stems. The fruit made my belly growl and contract with each sour and tangy swallow. 

It is August, many years after the first and second and third climb. The air is clear and blue. A butterfly flits around my face. 

Butterflies travel me back in time. Kehontas, my first girlfriend’s eyes were amber like their wings. We met and loved in a span of a day. Our first date over a decade ago was cheap tacos, then karaoke at the Tavern. I didn’t want our day to end. Inside my apartment, she wrapped her leg in between mine, pressed my hand into her palm. 

That first year we ate lunch on a blue frayed blanket in the park. We raced to climb the extended branches of an oak. Resting against its steadiness, she leaned to kiss me. I could not be sure where her limbs ended, my limbs extended and where the tree began. I wanted to feel the force of us forever. 

Our love and attraction continued over the 14 years we loved each other, changing shape fluidly from friendship, to lover, to partner back to friendship. My polyamory and her monogamy prohibited us from maintaining a consistent partnership.

Monarchs visited us during our park outings, as if blessing our love. Scientists have recorded that monarchs are going extinct. Kehontas and I counted every orange butterfly. We tallied 100 our first summer together. She tattooed the insect on her arm. 

It’s been 14 years since I’ve counted butterflies with her. It’s been a few months since she’s died. 

The hardened trail holds my weight easily. The berry becomes a ghost in my mouth. I travel higher along the mountain’s ridge. White meadow grasses replace the berry bushes. The trill of a song sparrow, melodic and light, is a mismatched soundtrack for the sorrow seizing my limbs and legs. Without realizing it, I have stopped mid-climb.  

I remember the phone call. 

I hate to bring you bad news, but Kehontas is dead.

Her name and dead, the most terrible sentence.

I was buckled in the car. In the driveway. In the backseat, my youngest child cried. I was not turning the key to start the car because I had answered the phone and was yelling fuck and becoming a cut in half human. I screamed fuck over and over again. My body ruptured without anyone touching me. 

Mommy, mommy are you okay?

Yes. No. What could I say? A part of me had suddenly gone missing. I wailed and we both held onto each other. 

A hawk glides overhead. It draws spirals above. I urge the blood in my veins to flow into my extremities. To jolt them awake. I need to reach the top of the mountain. I need to spread my body on a blue blanket on soft grass. I need to count butterflies. 

The animals and insects on the mountain continue with their lives as though nothing has changed. They don’t feel the wreck of Kehontas’ death. The meadow grasses bow in the breeze. The birds sing. You should mourn as I do, I want to yell. My anger propels me forward. Legs and breath heavy, I begin the ascent again. 

I long for the mountain meadow to alleviate my grief. I am also bothered by the breadth of my needs. Grief creates volumes of space inside of you, it’s endless. Fill me with something so I don’t have to feel this way anymore, grief begs. I reach for another berry but realize they are far behind me. My fingertips graze the rough grasses, she responds in tiny cuts. 

Kehontas painted. During the summer when I was in a relationship with someone else, she gifted me a small square heart. She asked me to move with her to the ocean. 

We will sail in the early morning light. We will walk the shore. We will be together, she urged. I considered her proposal for a week. We met under oak trees in the park where we shared lunch spreads and counted butterflies.

I cannot go with you, I said. 

You have my heart, she said. She handed me the canvas. The exposed valves were delicately rendered in the color of blood. A square heart the same size as her own organ.

Nothing changed when she died. Except everything.

Every time I hike the mountain, I am different and the mountain has also changed. The humming insects do not reflect the gruesome mess inside my human shape. But my grief has shifted from a month ago. Sometimes it towered like Max Patch. Today, her death is a mountain removed inside my body. 

Kehontas’ mother asked me to write a poem for the memorial. At the podium my voice quivered. I studied the crowd in neat rows dressed in purple, blue and white. Had a service ever been this beautiful? How many times had I kissed her mouth? In the church I was only a mouth memorializing her life. 

There is death on the mountain, too. Eleven years ago, Richard Butler was moments away from asking Bethany Lott to marry him. He had planned a surprise proposal. I imagined them both in pastel hiking clothes. Richard suggested they hike Max Patch because Bethany loved the mountain before sunrise. Bethany, like me, felt kinship with the birds and wildflowers, coveted the wind at the top, the sea of mountain ranges. Bethany could have been me and Richard could have been Kehontas.

Instead of planning their lives, Bethany was struck by lightning at the bald top. She did not survive. Some days it doesn’t feel like I will.  

As my feet travel forward, I almost miss the bird carcass, twisted in an open winged form pressed into the soil. No longer in flight. Dead. I wonder if before lightning struck on top of the mountain, Bethany was happy. If Kehontas slipped away like a butterfly. 

A patch of clover has sprouted above the skeleton of the bird. Death is another opportunity for life, the mountain mummers. But I don’t want her insights. 

I am grieving, See me grieving. Comfort me. The mountain is quiet, the clouds shift above. Slightly.  

A broken heart is like a fault line. When you love. When you lose a loved one, the break is ancient and it is altering. Mountains rise from fault lines. I feel the ways I will never return to my former self, how my interior landscape has rearranged. My serrated insides cultivate a new sharpness. Feelings, softness, sadness are not welcome. I bear the marks of loving. 

Today, as I climb up the mountain, I do allow myself one reprieve. I have met someone, a potential new lover. The Mandolin Teacher makes me laugh. Yesterday, in the Dollar Store parking lot, I flirted with them on the phone. They asked me to taste myself and tell them about it. 

I’m in the car! I told them. 

Good, they said. 

I was turned on by their low voice. I moved my hands into my faded jean shorts. I slid my palm across my thin underwear; I pressed my finger into the folds of myself and then pulled out and sucked. Sweet, tangy, earthy. 

After the phone call ended, I returned to my wetness to finish, but I could only think about Kehontas. Her mouth rose mountains in me. I used to scream her name in our bed. She turned to me after sex. I am scared,  she told me. Everyone leaves me.

I cupped her face. I said, They leave me too. 

Evenings I played a pixelated home film of me and Kehontas on our first New Year’s Eve. In the video we sat in orange candlelight at the formica kitchen table. We made paella, a slow and tedious dish. We laughed our way through my impatience. She scooped my hips into her body. My legs trembled and the heat emitting from the stove matched my ignited pelvis. She swept my brown hair from my back and kissed my neck. I wriggled out of her embrace. 

We will burn dinner, I warned. She didn’t care, but I did. I wanted our new year to be unforgettable. I asked her what her resolutions would be and she shrugged. 

I don’t know. Then, I heard her video voice tell me over and over again,  I really love you. Do you know?  

Every time I pressed play, she was alive again. 

If you climb the mountain, you may feel a subtle stirring. This happens in grief, a flutter of joy, a moment of relief. Something will tremor through you. The vibration could be the possibility of love again. It is a strange feeling to feel pain and pleasure in the same step. 

I met the Mandolin Teacher one month before this climb. I had recently turned 42. I will take up music, I decided, because I needed something different to do than grief. At our first lesson, they placed their long fingers over mine and spread them across the hard mandolin strings. 

This will callous my hands, I told them. They shrugged and held up theirs, covered in faint yellow mountains. I need soft hands, I told them. 

I blushed as I imagined touching their musician’s strong, graceful hands, inhaling their warm sweat, lavender at their neck, combing my student fingers through hot sun lingering on their blond strands.  

As I hike, my thoughts wander. Will the Mandolin Teacher be patient with me? Will they want more from me than my body is able to give? These are not usually my questions with new lovers but after Kehontas’s death, I am cratered. I think about being with the Mandolin Teacher. I do not know if they will want all of my broken parts.

Have you ever seen a mountain top removed? I have once. It haunts me. It is a gray and vast scene. A deep hole. It’s embarrassing, the collapsed soil. The bulldozed dirt. Nothing grows on the site. It’s miles of brown. So eerily quiet. It’s shameful. I have hated humankind and myself for many evils and this is one of them. To kill a mountain, to remove a mountain. To excavate a god brings destruction upon us all. If a mountain can be removed, nothing is guaranteed. 

I reach the top. On the bald, layers upon layers of the Appalachian Mountains surround me. I usually feel free. Today, my questions weigh me. I unwrap the plastic from leftover birthday cake. Coconut vegan cake with icing the color of sea foam. I’d frozen the leftovers until now. As I chew, the cake is batter in my mouth. Glue threatens to close my throat. This is what happens in grief. I bring cake up a mountain and almost vomit the very thing that’s supposed to make me feel better. I wanted to celebrate my birthday, like I wanted to climb the mountain, like I wanted to go on a date with the Mandolin Teacher—all attempts at feeling my heart expanding in my chest, blood moving through my limbs, my body feeling less like a removal site and more like life. The cake betrays me. Tense throat. I swallow. How long will I be heartbroken? Who am I now? Who could I be with the Mandolin Teacher? How long does grief last? 

The meadow around me is gentle and open. If I love again, will grief end? I sit and listen to the low hum of the wind. The mountain finally rocks me. Or perhaps I am ready to feel her. Maybe she’s been holding me all along. The mountain doesn’t eliminate pain, but she accompanies mine. She isn’t afraid.  

I walked up the mountain with questions, they remained unanswered. I walk down the mountain and consider how I will find hope despite inevitable endings. Humans are inconsistent. Humans leave. Humans die. The mountain also changes. 

My finger brushes a berry bush and tears the skin. I suck the scarlet dot. My mouth fills with the taste of iron. Tangy. Sweet. I wonder if Kehontas tasted me the same way I tasted myself? If the Mandolin Teacher will ever feel me in their warm mouth like she did. Or if our body changes with every new person we give ourselves to. 

I levitate in the clouds on my descent. A golden-winged warbler calls for her mate. Purple asters stare, a crowd of upturned faces. There is a steady hum of bumblebees. Iridescent blue birds zig zag across yarrow and goldenrod. A butterfly lands on Queen Anne’s lace. The meadow quivers.

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Each week, The Queer Love Project publishes an original essay. Want to submit your essay and add to our growing archive? Find our submission guidelines and more here.