I'm thinking again about the inarguable mathematics of return. Sometime in late autumn, I find myself in Arkansas. A place both familiar and strange, where the landscape speaks in hushed tones of reconciliation.

Beige ( Beige )

Cafe (Brown)

The air here has a texture. Not like California's harsh coastal breath or New York's compressed urban exhalation, but something more elemental. Here, the air has a texture of forgiveness..

Sweet like Baccarat Rouge

Am I healing or negotiating?

I think about pain the way one might consider weather—a temporary condition, shifting and unpredictable. Here, among the browning leaves and soft elevations of the Ozarks, something inside me begins to settle. The colors remind me of a carefully composed still life from Henri Fantin- Latour, brown and beige nuanced as a Lemaire fabric, as complex as a perfectly layered tiramisu.

Charles Portis knew something about men like me. "A lot of people leave Arkansas, and most of them come back sooner or later."

Velocidad de escape ( Escape Velocity)

Escape is a mathematical impossibility in certain terrains. The Ozarks do not permit complete departure. They accumulate personal histories like sediment, quiet and restless. Much like a black hole, its gravitational pull is too strong, attracting dreamers and loners alike.

God. Jesus. Good ol' American values sound like a lullaby I might be ready to actually listen to. The gospel radio here plays like a constant reminder that redemption isn't about location but about some interior accounting I'm still learning to understand. My therapist would call this "processing." I call it surviving.

Pain, I have discovered is geographical. It accumulates in the landscapes in the soft folds of the hills . In the spaces between the trees. Taking refuge against the sporadic and unpredictable weather.

Bible Belt America

Te Amo ( I love you)

Brown and beige hills. Colors that suggest neither hope nor despair but make liminal space where a man might actually look at himself without flinching. What we call healing is often just a negotiation with inevitable return.

I find myself negotiating.

I did not so much choose Arkansas as Arkansas chose me. Or perhaps I did, in those moments between intention and instinct. These Ozark hills do not demand explanations. They simply offer

Refugio (Refuge).