Total pages in book: 24
Estimated words: 22667 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 113(@200wpm)___ 91(@250wpm)___ 76(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 22667 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 113(@200wpm)___ 91(@250wpm)___ 76(@300wpm)
But being an independent content creator is only getting more competitive. Most of the people I started travel blogging with fifteen years ago quit a long time ago. They couldn’t handle the constant evolution, the keyword training, the ad spend, or the increasingly cutthroat culture of an industry where there isn’t enough room for all the people who want to paddle their canoe through these waters.
Though, most people don’t actually paddle canoes anymore. They hop into the canoe in a sexy thong with their makeup and hair done, have someone snap their picture, and jump back out again to start promoting the post on social media.
This job has become more performance than experience.
More hierarchy than community.
More and more, everything feels fake, surface…hollow.
I confess, I’m depressed about it. Maybe clinically. For weeks before this storm swept in, the world looked grayer than usual. Food didn’t taste as good, my vibrator held no appeal, and not even the “shimmy, shimmy, it’s a damned fine day for oatmeal,” dance Pippa does for me every morning on our way to start breakfast could make me smile.
That’s the only explanation for why I thought it would be a good idea to come back to Minnesota. Bad Dog hasn’t been “home” in fifteen years and even before then, it wasn’t a place where I felt safe or welcome. I’m the black sheep of my family—extra scandalous when the family in question are actual sheep farmers—and was pretty shy until I started my travel channel and came out of my shell.
I didn’t have a ton of friends in junior high or high school. I preferred to spend my time working in the garden club’s community plot or volunteering at the senior center.
I’ve always loved older people, the cool ones who understand that life is short and there’s no time to waste being anyone other than who you are. They know that the worst possible end is one where you’re lying on your deathbed, looking back at a life filled with lies and pretend.
A life where the truest story of you, the one no one else can tell, was left untold.
That’s the real reason I’m in Bad Dog in late November, a season of rain, stick limbs, and despair, camped out in a hunting cabin my family never uses because they’re too busy working themselves to death to take a break and enjoy a weekend in the woods…
There’s a part of my story I’ve left untold, one giant regret in a life filled with adventure, exploration, and commitment to the things I believe to be important and true.
Theo McGuire.
It wasn’t love at first sight that day at the senior center, where we were both new teen volunteers. It was something deeper than love. It was an instant knowing, a profound recognition.
Have you ever looked into someone’s eyes and just known they were meant for you?
Neither had I. Never before and never since.
Back then, I’d realized it was a special feeling, but I didn’t know how special. I had no clue that I’d never feel the way I felt with Theo with anyone else. I didn’t realize that kisses would never taste as sweet, laughter would never be as easy, and sex wasn’t always a transporting experience.
I wouldn’t say I saw God with Theo, but it was something pretty close.
Our nights together were so beautiful, and many of them were spent here in this very cabin.
We were so close, so in sync, so innocently, profoundly in love.
If I’d asked him to, he would have come with me on my big adventure. He would have abandoned his commitment to caring for his sick grandmother—the one who’d raised him, who he loved beyond all reason—to be my forever man.
And it would have killed him.
Just like staying here, betraying the bone-deep calling to explore the world, to finally see who I could be away from the family who’d always thought there was something wrong with their daughter, would have killed me.
I learned that love isn’t always enough when I was only eighteen, driving out of Bad Dog with nothing but my van and a soul torn between two diverging paths.
I guess, deep down, I thought if I came home…even if I was too afraid to reach out to the man my first love has become, that Theo would just know I was in Bad Dog and show up on my doorstep.
But he didn’t.
And he won’t.
No one comes out to this part of the woods when the weather is this wet, not even the most hardcore hunters, and Theo was never one of those. He might do a little duck hunting with his cousins, but that’s it. There is literally no way in hell he’s going to know I’m here unless I tell him.
I should, but the thought of learning Theo is in love with someone else might kill me. I know he isn’t married—I’ve stalked the town paper’s archives enough to be certain of that—but that’s it. He could have a long-term girlfriend or a fiancée.