In the solitary miles of an extended road trip there comes an unexpected companion in loneliness, a relentless follower along the ribbon of road that stretches unendingly forward. It is in these moments, suspended between the familiar and the frontier, that I come to know the true weight of separation from my person, my soulmate, my home.

Each town passed, each landscape that slips by the window, is marked not by what is seen, but by what is missing. The vacancy beside me speaks in a language of silence, a tongue understood only by those who have loved deeply and are now parted. The road, once a symbol of freedom and adventure, becomes a measure of distance, an ever-lengthening tether stretching back to her, the anchor of my heart.

The ache for her is palpable, a longing that manifests as an empty space beside me that no call or message can fill. I crave the simple, profound pleasures denied by miles: the touch of her hand, the sound of her laugh, the comfort found in the quiet of shared spaces. At night, in the stillness of the rolling metal shell that is now my refuge, I hear the loneliness mirrored in her voice over the phone, each word one of shared solitude.

The ache for her is palpable, a longing that manifests as an
empty space beside me that no call or message can fill.

Our conversations are lifelines, thrown across the expanse, but they are also reminders of the vastness between us. I reassure her with words that feel increasingly inadequate, washed out by the static of distance. We speak of endurance, of temporary separations, of the reunion to come, but the words tremble under the burden of distance. 

Loneliness is a landscape that changes the traveler. It is not merely a void but a presence that shapes and molds. The absence of my partner is felt not just in moments of solitude but in the laughter of strangers, in the beauty of a sunset observed alone, in the quiet night skies under which I lie awake, imagining her beside me.

The promise of our reunion holds the fragments together. The anticipation of return, of arms thrown wide, of tears and laughter and the collapse of distance, is a beacon that guides me. It is the thought of her smile, the imminent dissolution of the miles between us that propels me forward. And in this forward motion, there is a kind of hope, a belief in the resilience of love that can stretch across any distance, endure any silence.

The road teaches the fierce lesson of what
it means to be apart, yet together in spirit.

The road teaches the fierce lesson of what it means to be apart, yet together in spirit. And as I drive, each mile taking me closer to her, I hold tight to the vision of out reunion, knowing it will fill the spaces hollowed out by absence, knowing, too, that the foundation we’ve built will bear the weight of this trial, for it is love, deep and enduring, that makes any return home worth the journey.

In the end, perhaps this longing serves a purpose, a reminder of what truly matters. The road may have taken me away, but it also leads me back. And when I finally cross that threshold, when her arms wrap around me and the world rights itself once more, the ache will fade, and what was battered will begin to heal. Until then, I carry her with me—in thoughts, in dreams, in the unshakable certainty that she is my home, and every mile brings me closer to it.

I had been on the road for hours, the kind of long, winding journey that lets a man ponder the vastness of the land and the smallness of his place in it. Josie, my trusted companion of steel and rubber, purred along the highway as we crossed into Arkansas. The sign read "Siloam Springs," and something about the name beckoned me to slow down, to take a pause from the relentless push eastward.

Siloam Springs sits in that curious space between a small town and a burgeoning city, its population just over 1,700. The presence of John Brown University lent it a youthful vibrancy, students milling about, manning the cafe’s and restaurants, dreams in their eyes. Yet, as I steered Josie into the historic downtown, time seemed to fold back on itself. The sidewalks were lined with red bricks, each one a testament to those who had come before. Some bore inscriptions—names, dates, messages—a mosaic of personal histories etched into the path beneath my feet.

I found a spot to rest Josie along a narrow street flanked by old buildings that whispered stories of a bygone era. As I stepped out, stretching limbs stiff from the drive, I noticed that some of the streets were cordoned off. Barricades stood like silent sentinels, and a man in a reflective vest directed cars with the casual authority of someone who belonged.

"What's happening?" I asked him, curiosity getting the better of me.

"Veterans Day Parade," he said with a nod, a hint of pride in his voice. "It's just about here." He tilted his head toward the distant strains of a marching band, the music lilting over the rooftops and settling softly into the cool, overcast afternoon.

There was a certain charm in the air, the kind that only small towns seem to muster. I joined the gathering crowd along the sidewalk—families bundled in coats, children with cheeks flushed pink, elders leaning on canes and memories. The sky hung low and gray, but the mood was anything but somber.

Soon, the parade came into view. Leading the procession was a color guard, local firefighters bearing flags with solemn reverence. Their uniforms were crisp, their faces etched with the lines of both weariness and honor. Behind them, a series of floats rolled by, each carrying veterans from wars fought on foreign shores—some waving modestly, others staring ahead with eyes that held distant landscapes.

A troupe of flag twirlers followed, their banners spinning reds, whites, and blues into the dull afternoon light. The high school marching band brought up the rear, instruments gleaming, the cadence of their drums echoing off the brick facades of the old storefronts. The music was spirited, slightly out of tune in places, but earnest in the way that only a small-town band can be. Conspicuous by its absence, there was no float for the Homecoming queen and her court…

I watched as the parade wound its way down the main street, feeling a quiet kinship with these people. They celebrated not with grandeur but with genuineness, a heartfelt tribute to those who had served. The simplicity of it all was profound—the town coming together, pausing their lives to honor sacrifice and service.

As the last notes of the marching band faded, the crowd began to disperse, conversations bubbling up, laughter mixing with the clatter of resetting barricades. I lingered for a moment, taking in the scene—the red brick sidewalks underfoot, the historic buildings standing steadfast, the university spires peeking from a distance. Siloam Springs, with its duality of small-town charm and the subtle hum of growth, had wrapped itself around me in the span of an afternoon.

I returned to Josie, giving her an affectionate pat. There was still road ahead, miles to cover before the day's end. But as I drove away from Siloam Springs, I carried with me a renewed sense of connection—a reminder that even in the quiet corners of the country, life unfolds with its own rhythms and stories. The parade, the people, the town itself—it all spoke to the enduring tapestry of American life, woven from threads of history, community, and the simple acts that bring us together.

There's a peculiar kind of darkness that comes with addiction, not the honest darkness of night that promises dawn, but a twilight world where shadows have substance and hope becomes a stranger. Cate Gubanov, a woman of 32 years from the small town of Antlers, Oklahoma, knew this darkness well. She lived in it, breathed it, let it seep into her bones until she could no longer recall the taste of clean air or the feel of sunlight on unmarked skin.

They say every addict's story starts somewhere else, in some other life where choices still stood like open doors instead of slammed shut windows. Cate's tale isn't unique in its beginnings—hard times breeding harder choices, each step down that twilight road seeming inevitable as gravity. Where the needle or the pipe or the pill rides shotgun and never gives up its seat.

They say every addict's story starts somewhere else, in some other life
where choices still stood like open doors instead of slammed shut windows.

But Cate's story takes a turn that some would call miracle and others might name stubborn grace. Eight years back, she did what those still in the darkness swear cannot be done. She climbed out. Not all at once—there's no Hollywood moment here, no sudden burst of light and angelic chorus. Instead, it was a slow crawl, every nerve in her body screaming betrayal, every synapse firing messages of want and need and mustmusthave. But she crawled anyway, one minute stacked on another until they became hours, became days, became weeks.

The thing about climbing out of a pit is you have to do something once you reach the top. Can't just sit there on the edge, legs dangling back toward the darkness. Cate knew this truth in her bones. She'd seen too many fall back, their sobriety measured in weeks or months before the darkness reached up with familiar arms and pulled them home.

So she's building something. Starting small, the way most important things do. A program for women fresh out of jail, their eyes still carrying that institutional flatness, and their minds still dancing with demons. Matthew 18 Ministries, she calls it, a Biblical chapter laced with lessons about grace. One year, her program will ask of them. One year to remember how to live in the world of light.

A program for women fresh out of jail, their eyes still carrying that
institutional flatness, and their minds still dancing with demons.

It isn't pretty work. Most times it's like trying to catch smoke with bare hands. The women come to her carrying more than just addiction—they bring histories written in scars, both seen and unseen. Some nights Cate sits alone in her little office, going over notes that read like horror stories, each page turning over another rock to reveal only God knows what.

She will lose more than she wins, that's just the blunt truth of it. For every woman who makes it through, too many will slip away, back into the twilight world where the drugs wait with open arms. But oh, those wins. When they come, they shine like new pennies in the sun. A woman standing straight-backed at her child's school play. Another celebrating two years clean, tears tracking down her face as she clutches her sobriety chip. These are moments Cate can collect like precious stones, keeping them close for the hard days.

Sometimes God speaks in whispers, they say, but for Cate, His voice cut through the clutter of her heart, through the emptied-out spaces of her soul where the drugs had carved her hollow. It wasn't the voice of childhood Sunday schools with their neat rows of chairs and construction paper crosses. This was the unabashed voice that spoke to Job, the burning bush that stopped Moses dead in his tracks—a voice that breaks things and makes them new.

She wasn't looking for God. That's important to understand. In the bottomed-out world of addiction, you stop looking for anything except the next fix, the next handful of hours when the screaming in your blood might quiet down some. But He found her anyway, the way He tends to find people when they've run out of everywhere else to run.

The miracle wasn't just in the hearing. Any junkie coming down hard might hear voices. The miracle was in the answer that rose up from some deep, unburned place inside her, a "yes" that surprised her more than the voice itself.

Now she walks the corridors of the county jail, her shoes clicking against concrete floors that have seen ten thousand desperate shuffles. The women here exist in a kind of limbo—some will make bail and stumble back to their old lives, some will face the judge and walk free with time served, but others are just marking days until the prison transport arrives like some gray-painted chariot of iron justice.

Her credentials were written in track marks, her theology
learned in the hardest kind of night school imaginable.

Cate didn't plan this ministry, didn't train for it in any seminary. Her credentials were written in track marks, her theology learned in the hardest kind of night school imaginable. But there's a power in that, in being able to look into an addict's eyes and see not just who they are, but who they were before, and more importantly, who they might become.

Some days she sits in the jail's concrete-block meeting room, listening to women tell stories that could be photocopies of her own. The details change—maybe it was meth instead of heroin, maybe it was a boyfriend's needle instead of a party gone wrong—but the core remains the same. These are stories of hunger, of an emptiness so vast it feels like it could swallow the world.

And Cate listens. That's her first ministry, maybe her most important one. She listens with the whole of herself, the way God listened to her when she was face-down in her own personal Nineveh. Then she speaks, not in platitudes or easy answers, but in the harsh poetry of one who's walked the road and found the way back.

For in the end, grace is grace precisely because it makes no sense, because it shows up in county jail meeting rooms and speaks through ex-addicts, because it transforms the most unlikely people in the most unexpected ways. Cate knows this now, knows it bone-deep and cell-sure. She is not just a carrier of this truth—she is the living proof of it.

She listens with the whole of herself, the way God listened
to her when she was face-down in her own personal Nineveh.

And so from these simple jail visits, her vision has blossomed, of a structured program that women coming out of jail can transition into, instead of just being poured back onto the street, to their old lives, their old habits, and hallow dreams. It's a holistic program that nourishes the soul as much as it bolsters the life skills needed to jetison old routines and rebuild.

There is housing under construction that can hold up to four women, a safe space to rebuild. The dream is to have a village of such residences. 

Now, Cate'll tell you straight out that she can't do this work alone. This is no one-person show, this calling of hers. No, she's got a whole congregation at her back, the kind you'd expect to find in a place like Antlers—the sort of church that at first glance seems more like a cowboy bunkhouse than your standard white-steepled, clapboard affair.

Jonathon Hooker, the pastor here, is a cowboy through and through, from the hat on his head right down to the scuffed boots on his feet. He looks like he could have stepped right out of Central Casting, the kind of guy the Marlboro Man himself might have called "partner." He's also Cate's mentor and pledges the full support of the congregation.

Cate's assembled a whole crew of volunteers from the congregation—men and women both—to lend their time and their expertise to her program. Folks who know how to teach practical skills and how to nurture wounded spirits. They'll come in week after week, these calloused-handed saints, rolling up their sleeves alongside the women Cate works with, teaching them everything from budgeting to how to change a tire and all the while serving their spiritual needs.

There's nothing fancy about it; this support network Cate's built. No financiers or gala fundraisers, just a stalwart bunch of believers who know the price of redemption; these people have paid it themselves in one way or another. And now they're ready to pass the collection plate, to pour out whatever they've got—time, talent, hard-earned wisdom—into the lives of women stumbling out of jail cells, women who've stared into the abyss and lived to tell the tale.

Cate carries the banner, makes the plans, and does the day-in, day-out slogging. But she'll be the first to tell you, she couldn't do it without the crew of saints and sinners who've answered the call, who've rolled up their sleeves and gotten their hands dirty in the work of grace. For when you're plucking souls out of the pit, you can't do it alone. You need a whole village, a whole congregation, a whole community willing to get its knees dirty and its heart invested.

Her story isn't unique, but perhaps that's what makes it so powerful. It echoes the struggles and triumphs of many, a chorus of voices that speak to the enduring capacity for change. Cate shows us that miracles are not always grand gestures from the heavens; sometimes, they are found in the quiet determination of a single person refusing to let the darkness win.

There's a town in the southeastern corner of Oklahoma where the wind doesn't howl across endless plains like it does up in the Panhandle, but instead whispers through pine trees and red oaks that blanket the foothills of the Ouachita Mountains. Antlers, they call it—named not for the trophy bucks that still roam these woods, though there are plenty of those (the town’s motto is “Deer Capital of the World”), but for the countless deer antlers that adorned the first train station, a nod to the rich hunting grounds that surrounded it when it was nothing more than a sign post on the Frisco Railroad line.

About 2,300 people call this place home now, though the number changes some with the seasons and the fortunes of the times. They're a mix of people—Choctaw blood runs deep here, mingling with the settler stock that came after, creating a tapestry of faces that tells the story of this land better than any history book could.

The town sits like a patient cat in the heart of Pushmataha County, named for the great Choctaw chief who fought alongside Andrew Jackson and died in Washington, D.C., in 1824. The irony of that alliance isn't lost on the people here—they know their history and carry it in their bones.

Main Street runs straight and true, the way small town main streets do, lined with brick buildings that have weathered storms both natural and economic. Some storefronts stand empty now, their windows like hollow eyes watching the pickup trucks roll past, but others still pulse with life—the kind of family-owned businesses that keep small towns breathing: the hardware store where you can still buy a single nail, cafes where the coffee's always hot and the pie crust's made by hand.

The railroad still runs through, though it doesn't stop as often as it used to. The tracks cut the town like a scar that never quite healed, but like all old wounds, it's become part of the landscape. The locals barely hear the whistle anymore, except maybe late at night when the sound carries across the fields and through the trees, stirring something ancestral in their dreams.

They call this part of Oklahoma "Little Dixie" because of the southern folk who settled here, bringing their ways and their dialect that still flavors the speech of old timers. But that's only part of the story. The Choctaw Nation's presence runs deeper than any settler roots, and you can see it in the faces at the grocery store, hear it in the names of streets and creeks, feel it in the drum beats that still echo from tribal gatherings.

The town's seen its share of hardship. The Great Depression left its mark, like it did everywhere, and in 1945 a tornado tore through the heart of it, killing 69 people and destroying most of the downtown. But towns like Antlers don't die easy. They rebuilt, the way small towns do, with neighbors helping neighbors, raising walls and hopes together.

These days, the deer hunters come in fall, their orange vests bright against the autumn woods. The fishing's good in the nearby lakes, and the turkey hunting in spring brings its own pilgrims. Tourism isn't what keeps the town alive, but it helps, like everything helps in a small town economy where every dollar turns over three or four times before it leaves.

Some come back, drawn by something they can't quite name—perhaps it's how
everyone at the diner knows their name and how they take their eggs.

The poverty rate's higher than the state average, and the young folks tend to drift away to larger places where the lights shine brighter and the promises seem bigger. But some come back, drawn by something they can't quite name—maybe it's the way the light filters through the trees in the evening, or how everyone at the diner knows their name and how they take their eggs, or simply the deep-rooted knowledge that this place, for all its struggles and limitations, is home.

This is Antlers, Oklahoma—not a place that'll ever make the headlines much, but a place where America's stories of migration, survival, and the mixing of peoples play out in quiet ways, day after day, under the watchful eyes of the Ouachita Mountains and the endless Oklahoma sky.

The late afternoon sun cast long, languid shadows across the dusty road, the kind that seemed to stretch on forever, much like the memories that crowded my mind. The news of my mother's impending death had arrived like an unwelcome traveler, settling heavily into the corners of my consciousness. Days, perhaps a week, my sister said—a measured allotment of time that felt both cruelly brief and agonizingly prolonged.

I found myself grappling with the notion of becoming an orphan, a term I had always associated with children lost and alone, not grown men weathered by half a century of life's tempests. It was an odd feeling, unsettling in its unfamiliarity. My father passed several years ago, his absence carving out a quiet void. But the thought of my mother leaving—her spirit extinguished—felt like the final severing of roots that had tethered me to the bedrock of my existence.

She had always been more warrior than nurturer, a hardened shield against the world's injustices. I recalled vividly two instances from my youth when she had leapt into the fray, physically confronting older boys who thought to torment my brother and me. Like an enraged mother bear, she'd waded into the chaos, her heavy purse swinging with righteous fury, words sharp and unyielding. The harassers retreated, cowed not by size but by the sheer force of her will. In those moments, she was invincible—a fortress of protection and defiance.

Now, the warrior lay frail and weakened, her body besieged
by the relentless advance of three converging cancers.

Now, that warrior lay frail and weakened, her body besieged by the relentless advance of three converging cancers. A perfect storm of pain and decay, it consumed her from within, reducing her to a shadow of what she once was. Hospice had enveloped her in its clinical embrace, and my sister has become the steward of her final days, administering morphine in measured doses, each one a step further along the path to oblivion.

We had visited not long ago, my wife and I, when we were in town for my 50th high school reunion. Her mind had been sharp then, eyes clear and bright, a flicker of the old fire still dancing within. We reminisced about the "good old days," stories flowing like familiar rivers carving through ancient canyons. There was comfort in those shared histories, a temporary suspension of the inevitable.

But her decline had been swift, a cruel acceleration toward an unyielding fate. Communication dwindled; her hearing faded like a receding tide, and conversations became one-sided echoes. When I spoke to her last, her responses were stilted, halting—a stark contrast to the formidable woman who once commanded rooms with her presence. I sensed that each word cost her dearly, a testament to her enduring resolve to connect, even as her body betrayed her.

"I don't want you to remember me like this," she'd said when I offered to pause my travels and be by her side. There was a finality in her voice, a quiet insistence that brooked no argument. She wanted me to continue my journey, to carry out the mission I had set for myself—to seek out lives illuminated by hope and generosity. Obedience was the only gift I could offer her now, though it left a hollow ache where action yearned to be.

Obedience was the only gift I could offer her now,
though it left a hollow ache where action yearned to be.

And so I am left to wander these roads, the miles stretching out before me like questions without answers. How do I carry on when each step is shadowed by the weight of impending loss? How do I seek the light in others while a part of my own world darkens irrevocably? My emotions are frayed, unraveling threads of a tapestry woven over a lifetime—a tapestry now marred by gaps that cannot be mended.

There is no vessel large enough to contain the flood of memories, regrets, and unspoken words that surge within me. They swirl and collide, searching for release, yet finding no outlet sufficient to the task. I am adrift in a sea of introspection, the familiar landmarks obscured by the fog of grief not yet fully realized.

Perhaps there is no answer, no neatly tied conclusion to this chapter. Maybe the only path forward is to embrace the uncertainty, to let the uncharted terrain of sorrow and duty guide me toward a place of understanding. 

As the sun dips below the horizon, casting the world in hues of gold and shadow, I take a deep breath and step into the gathering dusk. The road beckons, and with it, the stories yet untold—the ones that will, in their own time, help fill the silent spaces left behind. And perhaps, in walking this path, I will find where all these feelings can go, and what to do with them now.