course

twenty years suddenly felt like a moment, hijacking my eyes in that familiar room into flashbacks of the past, shaking me with that heavy dose of nostalgia stretching back from my teenage years in the bible belt suburbs of the american south to my liberated thirties on the nocturnal rooftops of berlin—capturing the millions of beautiful moments in between. to think all that happened because a teacher had an idea, a kid saw a poster, a boy took a leap, an eighth-grader walked into a classroom on a gravel road behind a middle school in his hometown with an open, if sometimes sleepy, mind. i can still remember struggling through the alphabet that year, staring blankly at the whiteboard as neurons labored hard to forge new pathways of understanding, stuttering to pronounce those long germanic words with the sleepy eyes of classmates sputtering around me. today i fall asleep not knowing if my mind will take me into dreams of english or german, and sometimes when the levels in my head are balanced, when the inhibitions of perception dissolve over cold ones, when i find myself able to speak under the influence of the present moment, locals will occasionally ask me about my hometown in germany. i smile with flashbacks to that humble classroom in america, i salute destiny discreetly with a nod, and then i pause to take another sip above the planks of that floating bar in east berlin. across the pond, i tell them. i'm a long way from home, but nowadays home is where i lay my head. whatever your dreams, my child, stay the course

—jk montane