Tag Archives: love and loss

The Wanton’s Lament ©️

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I was born in a valley that never forgets a voice. Every cry, every prayer, every lie—it all settles into the folds of the mountain. My mama used to say, a woman’s heart ain’t her own till she’s too tired to use it, and I think she was right. I learned early that love and pain came from the same hand, that men could bruise you without meaning to and still say your name like it was a promise.

When I got pregnant the first time, I thought I’d finally found what women like me were built for: a man to stay, a child to hold, a place in a story bigger than my own. But he left, and the house filled up with ghosts of what could’ve been. The silence grew teeth. Meth found its way into my bloodstream like mercy disguised as lightning. It made me weightless, careless, quick. For a while, I believed I was flying. But meth don’t lift you—it digs. It hollows.

When they took my baby, I didn’t fight. The woman from the county had kind eyes, and that made it worse. She called me sweetheart as she buckled my daughter into a seat that wasn’t mine. I watched them drive away until the dust turned the road into smoke. After that, I didn’t need much of anything. Just a place to sleep, a way to stay numb, and enough money to make it to the next day. The men came, and I let them. It was easier that way. Call it survival, call it sin—it all paid the same.

But once—just once—there was a man who looked at me different. Not hungry, not pitying, just seeing. We didn’t talk much. He touched me like he was afraid I’d disappear, and for a few hours I believed I could start again. I let him all the way in because I wanted to keep a piece of that gentleness, something living. When he was gone by morning, I didn’t cry. I just lay there watching the light move across the ceiling, thinking maybe that was how love was meant to come for women like me—brief as a breath, gone before it could rot.

Now the nights stretch long and slow. I walk the edge of town where the neon hums and the road smells of rain and oil. I still see his eyes sometimes when I close mine, that quiet steadiness like he saw the woman I was when the mountain took me. I carry that look like a small ember in my chest. It don’t light the dark, but it keeps me from freezing all the way through.

The Girl Who Taught Me Love ©️

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Good morning, Cicely.

There’s a kind of silence that doesn’t come from the wind or the snow—it comes from the space someone used to fill. From the sound of their laugh that hasn’t touched your ears in years, but still rings like it was yesterday.

Today… this one’s for her.

She was a girl from a small town. Nothing flashy. Just real. The kind of girl who knew how to slow down time with a look. Who didn’t need to chase the world—because she was the world to the people lucky enough to know her.

She taught me what love was. And not just the kind that feels like fireworks. I’m talking about the kind that lingers. The kind that holds. The kind that stays with you when the lights are off and the road ahead is long.

I left.

I was young. Unsure of myself. Hungry for something I couldn’t name. I thought there’d be more, thought the world had something bigger waiting out there. And maybe it did. But it didn’t come with her hand in mine.

And I’ve spent a lot of nights thinking about that choice.

I think about how she loved—strong, hard, no fear. I think about how I didn’t know how to hold something so good, so honest. I let her go because I thought I needed to find me. Turns out… I left her behind to do it.

And now the years have rolled on. I don’t know where she is. Maybe she’s got a family. Maybe she still lives in that town with the gravel roads and the big sky. Maybe she still remembers the way I looked at her that last night. Or maybe she’s long since let go.

But if I could do it again—just once—I’d hold her in my arms, our kids asleep upstairs, the sound of life humming gently in the house we built together.

I’d tell her I finally learned how to stay.

That I became the kind of man who wouldn’t run.

That I’d never let go again.

But the past is a road with no return.

So this is Chris in the Morning, sending this one out into the sky, into the wind, into the places where old love still lives.

If you’re listening—if you ever hear this—just know:

You were the best part of me.

And I loved you.

I still do.

From a Grateful Son ©️

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Good morning, Cicely.

It’s quiet this morning. The kind of quiet where the trees seem to lean in just a little, where the coffee tastes more like a ritual than a drink. The kind of quiet that makes you think about where you came from—and who helped you get here.

I want to talk about my mom.

She was with my dad for forty-nine years. That’s longer than most buildings stand. That’s longer than some rivers hold their course. That’s love… tested and weathered and still somehow tender.

Now, my dad—he was a doctor. He stitched bones and mended wounds and carried the weight of other people’s pain home with him more nights than not. But my mom—she carried him. Carried the rest of us too. Not in some dramatic, spotlighted way. No. She did it the way great writers do things. Subtly. Line by line. Always building. Always listening.

See, she’s a writer. Not just of books or essays—but of people. Of moments. She taught me that a well-placed silence can be as powerful as a scream. That stories don’t need to be loud to last forever.

And she was—still is—the best mom a kid could ask for. She didn’t just raise me. She saw me. Even when I was trying hard not to be seen. She let me stumble, let me figure it out, and she always had the porch light on when I came back around.

And now that Dad’s gone… I find myself looking at her with new eyes.

She gave so much of herself for so long, and now I just want the rest of her life to be hers. I want her to write again—not for legacy, not for others, but for joy. I want her to feel how much she still matters, how much there is still waiting for her. Because she’s still got stories. Still got fire. Still got time.

Mom, if you’re listening… you don’t owe anyone a single thing anymore.

What I wish for you now is happiness. Pure, selfish, sunlight-on-your-face happiness. I want you to travel, to write what scares you, to laugh until you cry in places Dad never took you.

You carried us all for so long. Now let the wind carry you. Let the future be gentle and wide and yours.

This is Chris in the Morning, KBHR 570 AM, signing off for now. Sending love to the woman who gave me everything—and who I now wish everything for.

You Beautiful Bastard ©️

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I hate Bozeman.

I hate it like you hate the street corner you bled on, like you hate the room where she said she never loved you, like you hate the silence that followed. I hate it because Bozeman holds the ghost of who I was when I broke—utterly, completely, and publicly. You don’t forget pain like that. You don’t forgive a skyline that watched you fall apart.

I remember heartbreak so vivid it twisted the seasons. Betrayal so sharp it slit the hours in half. I was younger, dumber, and I believed in people too much. And in Bozeman, those people let me bleed. I hate the way the wind still smells like her hair in winter, and how the mountains seem to echo my worst mistakes. I hate the way every café and alleyway is haunted with flashbacks I didn’t invite.

But.

Even in the rubble, I found something sacred.

Each disaster became a badge. Every failure, a kind of scarred-over victory. When people saw a man falling apart, I was really being carved out into something newer. I learned to laugh again—darkly, crookedly—but genuinely. I learned what it means to survive, not in the poetic sense, but in the “get up and keep breathing even when you don’t want to” sense.

And Bozeman—damn Bozeman—gave me back my brother. Somewhere in the mess, through smoke and frost and silence, we found each other again. Maybe we were both ruined, maybe we were both trying to pretend we weren’t. But something about that city pulled us into the same room at the same time and said, Talk. And we did.

So yeah, I hate Bozeman. But hate is too simple a word.

It’s a wound that grew teeth. It’s pain that taught me how to rebuild. It’s a love letter I’d never write, but I keep tucked in my coat pocket anyway.

Bozeman didn’t kill me. It crowned me.

Heart Shivers ©️

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Montgomery, Alabama, summer 1951, the air a syrupy haze, heavy with jasmine and regret. In a boardinghouse on a street nobody remembers, Hank Williams, lean as a switchblade, sat at a table pocked with cigarette burns, his eyes bloodshot, his soul frayed. Twenty-seven years old, a voice that could make angels weep, but tonight, no stage, no Opry spotlight—just a man, a bottle, and a melody that clawed at him like a cat trapped in his chest. The whiskey was cheap, the room cheaper, its walls papered in faded roses, peeling like the promises he’d made to Audrey, his wife, whose love was a fire that warmed and scorched in equal measure.

He’d fought with her again, their words sharp as broken glass. Audrey, with her blonde ambition and her wounded pride, had flung accusations—too much liquor, too little heart—and left him in the morning’s heat, her heels clicking down the stairs like a countdown. Now, in the dim flicker of a single bulb, Hank felt the ache of her absence, not just her body but the idea of her, the dream of a home that never took root. A radio murmured next door, some brassy tune that mocked his mood, and he cursed it under his breath, reaching for his guitar, a Martin so worn it seemed an extension of his bones.

He strummed, tentative, a G chord that hung in the air, mournful as a widow’s sigh. The melody came, unbidden, a waltz-time dirge, slow and deliberate, like footsteps in a graveyard. He scribbled on a scrap of paper, his hand unsteady, the ink smudging: Another love before my time made your heart sad and blue… The words were a confession, a mirror held to his own failures. He saw Audrey’s face, her eyes bright with tears she’d never let fall, and behind her, a parade of ghosts—his mother, Lillie, all steel and sacrifice; his father, a shadow who left early; the women on the road, their laughter fading as his darkness swallowed them. This song wasn’t just for Audrey. It was for every heart that learned to freeze to survive.

Another swallow of whiskey, the burn a fleeting absolution. He wrote faster now, the second verse spilling out: Why can’t I free your doubtful mind and melt your cold, cold heart? A question to her, to himself, to the God he half-believed in. His back twinged, the spina bifida that dogged him flaring like a cruel reminder of his mortality, but he pressed on, the pain a goad. The room was a cocoon, its air thick with smoke and memory—Opry nights when the crowd roared and he stumbled offstage, drunk on applause and bourbon; mornings waking in strange beds, the faces beside him blurring into one.

Outside, Montgomery drowsed under a moon pale as bone, its light slipping through the window to pool on the floor. Hank lit a cigarette, the match flaring briefly, a tiny defiance against the dark. He thought of the strangers who’d hear this song, in juke joints and lonely kitchens, finding their own sorrow in his voice. That was the alchemy, wasn’t it? To take a private wound and make it sing for the world. He’d done it before—I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry, Lovesick Blues—but this was different, sharper, a blade that cut both ways.

By dawn, the song was finished, four verses and a bridge, a lament that felt like it had always existed, waiting for him to pluck it from the ether. He leaned back, his shirt damp with sweat, his heart lighter, as if he’d exorcised something. He’d take it to Nashville soon, lay it down with Jerry Rivers’ fiddle keening like a mourner, and it would soar, a hit that would outlive him, even find its way to crooners like Bennett. But now, it was just Hank, alone with his truth, the bottle near empty, the paper scrawled with words that bled.

He set the guitar aside, its strings still humming faintly. Cold, cold heart. Hers, yes, but his too, hardened by years of running—from love, from pain, from himself. In the silence, as the radio next door fell quiet, he heard his own breath, ragged but steady. The song was done, but its echo lingered, a shiver in the heart, a promise that somewhere, in the singing, there might be salvation, if only for a moment.

The Unbearable Lightness ©️

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You know, there’s this strange thing about loss. It doesn’t just take something from you—it reshapes the space it leaves behind. It changes how you see things, how you feel things. And sometimes, it makes you question everything: people, intentions, even yourself. I’ve been thinking about that a lot lately, how grief can turn even the simplest of relationships into something… complicated.

When someone you love is gone, the world suddenly feels a little off-kilter, like you’re trying to navigate by a compass that doesn’t point north anymore. And in the scramble to figure it all out, we start holding onto what feels tangible, what feels safe. But sometimes, in that holding on, we can forget the things that don’t have weight or shape—the things you can’t count or measure.

Here’s the thing: people aren’t perfect, but the best relationships aren’t about perfection. They’re about trust. About knowing, deep down, that the person sitting across from you has your back, no matter what. That’s what love is—it’s showing up, day after day, even when things feel messy or unsure.

And maybe that’s where we get tripped up. Because when life feels fragile, it’s easy to misread people’s intentions. It’s easy to wonder if they’re here for you or for what you have to give. But when we let those questions fester, they can overshadow the truth.

And the truth? The truth is that what matters most can’t be bought or traded. It’s the quiet moments. The laughter. The way you feel when you know someone really sees you for who you are. That’s the currency that holds value, the thing that stays long after everything else fades.

So if you’re ever wondering why someone is standing beside you, maybe the answer is simpler than you think: they’re there because they love you. Not for what you’ve lost or what you have to give, but because they can’t imagine being anywhere else. That kind of love? That’s worth holding onto. That’s what really matters.