Love Stories: Introducing MOWRS
Apr. 19th, 2026 01:54 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
genderjumperIt's not just that I've been trying to get back into writing here and get used to putting words on the page again; some of the bittersweet stories I've wanted to record have been building to something, a story too big to tell all at once, and I needed some practice to even fathom the stepping stones that would get me there.
As many of my stories start with a title, sometimes these stories only come to me once I've thought of a perfect alias for the person. One that encapsulates something about their personality, might make them identifiable to a select few, but that would in no way make them recognizable to most.
While mapping out "nearby towns" from our finalist cities in my GTFO project, I had some music playing and I remembered an alias for the biggest story, the one that will be hardest to tell. It points directly to the last project in her life where she fully let me in, and what's better she chose it for herself AND YET she never used it.
Her name is MOWRS, pronounced "mou" as in "mouse" and then just the RS: mou'rz perhaps. I'm not a linguist. Anyway, this familiar song came on and reminded me:
Now the world is small, remember how it used to be
As many of my stories start with a title, sometimes these stories only come to me once I've thought of a perfect alias for the person. One that encapsulates something about their personality, might make them identifiable to a select few, but that would in no way make them recognizable to most.
While mapping out "nearby towns" from our finalist cities in my GTFO project, I had some music playing and I remembered an alias for the biggest story, the one that will be hardest to tell. It points directly to the last project in her life where she fully let me in, and what's better she chose it for herself AND YET she never used it.
Her name is MOWRS, pronounced "mou" as in "mouse" and then just the RS: mou'rz perhaps. I'm not a linguist. Anyway, this familiar song came on and reminded me:
Now the world is small, remember how it used to be
with mountains and oceans and winters and rivers and stars.
Facing down 50 from a bit younger than I am now, MOWRS developed a passion for the Appalachian Trail, a 2,000-mile trek where seasoned hikers walk one of the longest continuous trails in North America while racing the arrival of winter. It takes around six months to complete and most hikers train for years before attempting it. Her plan was to take a leave of absence and execute the entire thing in one go, the year she'd turn 50, giving her about 5 years to get into shape and prepare. As she began planning, she had zero hiking experience and only negligible experience camping. But she was like that: she set her mind to something and then she did it. She'd once completed a multiday biking marathon on one month's training, had recently spent several years regularly attending hot yoga classes, and when I'd met her still carried the walk from her pre-professional bodybuilding career.
She never said exactly what drew her to it so badly, but we freely daydreamed about me visiting her somewhere along the trail, helping her with provisions or a day off, and of course to celebrate the birthday itself. She got a membership to REI and started investing in shoes, poles, packs, and the smallest tents imaginable. She talked about how it could be social -- packs of through-hikers (that's what they're called, and they don't stop for anything!) developing a rapport from sharing a similar pace or camping ethic -- but mostly it was one person, their bodymind, and the trail, one step at a time. As if it wasn't evident enough that you were leaving behind your day-to-day life, you were supposed to pick an alias for the trail, so you could connect with other hikers before/during/after but to the extent you preferred to be alone, you were. You bring nothing with you on the trail. Just your pack and your alias.
She picked MOWRS because she loved the power of that line, that song, but significantly that album was a powerful symbol of our relationship. My first long-term "secondary" (back when we were less critical of hierarchies in our nonmonogamy) had sent me Big Whiskey and the Groo Grux King when we were fighting a lot; I'd assumed it was a bit of an apology for some of her harsher moments, but even the day I received it we ended up arguing by phone (it was a long-distance relationship) and almost didn't listen. She suggested it in the silence of hurt feelings, when she wasn't ready to hurt me further but wasn't ready to let go, either. "Listen to the album, and I'll sit with you on the phone." I hadn't bought it because I'd been underwhelmed by DMB's previous three albums, which wavered experimentally between a new, poppier production and a more traditional style that placated longstanding fans without inspiring us. I was afraid of being disappointed again, but the cover art was clever, and there was buzz around the homage to deceased band member LeRoi Moore. There seemed to be a New Orleans Mardi Gras vibe, with LeRoi's face prominent on a leading float.
Sure enough, I put it on and the album started with an intense saxapella and the lightest of percussion. It was intense and precise and I was immediately drawn in. I put the argument away and stayed present for the entire album, engrossed in how every track took me somewhere specific and delivered on every promise. It was, at the time, the greatest album I'd ever heard. And when it got to the closing track, "You & Me", a folksy-cum-orchestral crescendo of a love song about a couple escaping their obligations and teaching their children to fly, I didn't think of the LDR on the line (she'd break up with me a month or two later in dramatic fashion, but that's another story), I thought of MOWRS. This song was for us. This song was ABOUT us. I'd play it for MOWRS soon after and many times beyond. We'd tune out the world and wail to the song I identified as ours every single time it came on, and we'd hold hands and cry. Every time. Well over three years into our online fling, hundreds of I-love-yous and GOOMHs and inside jokes later, we called each other "doll" and finished each other's sentences and read each other's writings and depleted each other's bodies and shared vocabulary words and dreamed not just of being writers but of having a publishing empire, where I'd edit her books and she'd edit mine, and we had to wait for a song to be written that could encapsulate everything we meant together. Over the next 18 months, we'd launch a facilitation project and uncover literal magic and form a triad with the first nonbinary person either of us had ever met, but we would coast on that song for far longer, and every time we played the album it would be a ritual anticipation to the finale AND it would be one of the greatest albums of our lives. We'd take her kids to see DMB for their first concert, but no moment ever gratified me as a quasi-parent like the time I caught her son singing "You & Me" to himself. This wasn't the kind of love that changes you, this was the kind of love that changes everyone around you. Somewhere in all those enormous tails was the smaller one where she wanted to go for a long walk for her fiftieth birthday and decided that people should call her MOWRS when she did.
At any point from 2006 until the pandemic started, I might have told you MOWRS was the love of my life. (It's a cliche, I know, but I think I was more comfortable with cliches in those days... just wait until I tell the story of "The one that got away" even though Activist Hottie hates that moniker and rightly so... I don't mind unpacking these terms as they come up, but at this point they're holdovers from the past, like a nickname for a statue whose actual identity is irretrievable from time.) For the first five years, she emboldened me like no one else and let me be the biggest, fullest version of myself I could be. For the next five years, we coasted on Existing Relationship Energy and all that surplus joy without really noticing that we weren't replenishing. And then we were kind of over, and for the five years after that, I agonized daily over her absence, first in spirit then in fact, as she slow-ghosted from my life and never said goodbye.
I'm not sure the pain will ever go away, but I can tell you it took a global pandemic before I could accept that it had happened, and maybe even for a reason. Even our break-up and my waves of heartbreak and acceptance have stories upon stories, but here's the last thing I do know: on her fiftieth birthday, she was not walking the Appalachian Trail. There were no Mountains or Oceans or Winters or Rivers or even Stars.
MOWRS went indoor skydiving.
And now that she has a name, I can start to tell you her -- our -- stories.She never said exactly what drew her to it so badly, but we freely daydreamed about me visiting her somewhere along the trail, helping her with provisions or a day off, and of course to celebrate the birthday itself. She got a membership to REI and started investing in shoes, poles, packs, and the smallest tents imaginable. She talked about how it could be social -- packs of through-hikers (that's what they're called, and they don't stop for anything!) developing a rapport from sharing a similar pace or camping ethic -- but mostly it was one person, their bodymind, and the trail, one step at a time. As if it wasn't evident enough that you were leaving behind your day-to-day life, you were supposed to pick an alias for the trail, so you could connect with other hikers before/during/after but to the extent you preferred to be alone, you were. You bring nothing with you on the trail. Just your pack and your alias.
She picked MOWRS because she loved the power of that line, that song, but significantly that album was a powerful symbol of our relationship. My first long-term "secondary" (back when we were less critical of hierarchies in our nonmonogamy) had sent me Big Whiskey and the Groo Grux King when we were fighting a lot; I'd assumed it was a bit of an apology for some of her harsher moments, but even the day I received it we ended up arguing by phone (it was a long-distance relationship) and almost didn't listen. She suggested it in the silence of hurt feelings, when she wasn't ready to hurt me further but wasn't ready to let go, either. "Listen to the album, and I'll sit with you on the phone." I hadn't bought it because I'd been underwhelmed by DMB's previous three albums, which wavered experimentally between a new, poppier production and a more traditional style that placated longstanding fans without inspiring us. I was afraid of being disappointed again, but the cover art was clever, and there was buzz around the homage to deceased band member LeRoi Moore. There seemed to be a New Orleans Mardi Gras vibe, with LeRoi's face prominent on a leading float.
Sure enough, I put it on and the album started with an intense saxapella and the lightest of percussion. It was intense and precise and I was immediately drawn in. I put the argument away and stayed present for the entire album, engrossed in how every track took me somewhere specific and delivered on every promise. It was, at the time, the greatest album I'd ever heard. And when it got to the closing track, "You & Me", a folksy-cum-orchestral crescendo of a love song about a couple escaping their obligations and teaching their children to fly, I didn't think of the LDR on the line (she'd break up with me a month or two later in dramatic fashion, but that's another story), I thought of MOWRS. This song was for us. This song was ABOUT us. I'd play it for MOWRS soon after and many times beyond. We'd tune out the world and wail to the song I identified as ours every single time it came on, and we'd hold hands and cry. Every time. Well over three years into our online fling, hundreds of I-love-yous and GOOMHs and inside jokes later, we called each other "doll" and finished each other's sentences and read each other's writings and depleted each other's bodies and shared vocabulary words and dreamed not just of being writers but of having a publishing empire, where I'd edit her books and she'd edit mine, and we had to wait for a song to be written that could encapsulate everything we meant together. Over the next 18 months, we'd launch a facilitation project and uncover literal magic and form a triad with the first nonbinary person either of us had ever met, but we would coast on that song for far longer, and every time we played the album it would be a ritual anticipation to the finale AND it would be one of the greatest albums of our lives. We'd take her kids to see DMB for their first concert, but no moment ever gratified me as a quasi-parent like the time I caught her son singing "You & Me" to himself. This wasn't the kind of love that changes you, this was the kind of love that changes everyone around you. Somewhere in all those enormous tails was the smaller one where she wanted to go for a long walk for her fiftieth birthday and decided that people should call her MOWRS when she did.
At any point from 2006 until the pandemic started, I might have told you MOWRS was the love of my life. (It's a cliche, I know, but I think I was more comfortable with cliches in those days... just wait until I tell the story of "The one that got away" even though Activist Hottie hates that moniker and rightly so... I don't mind unpacking these terms as they come up, but at this point they're holdovers from the past, like a nickname for a statue whose actual identity is irretrievable from time.) For the first five years, she emboldened me like no one else and let me be the biggest, fullest version of myself I could be. For the next five years, we coasted on Existing Relationship Energy and all that surplus joy without really noticing that we weren't replenishing. And then we were kind of over, and for the five years after that, I agonized daily over her absence, first in spirit then in fact, as she slow-ghosted from my life and never said goodbye.
I'm not sure the pain will ever go away, but I can tell you it took a global pandemic before I could accept that it had happened, and maybe even for a reason. Even our break-up and my waves of heartbreak and acceptance have stories upon stories, but here's the last thing I do know: on her fiftieth birthday, she was not walking the Appalachian Trail. There were no Mountains or Oceans or Winters or Rivers or even Stars.
MOWRS went indoor skydiving.
Tags:
My story is interesting, not important
Date: 2026-04-21 07:54 pm (UTC)I have never once imagined your life could be small or drab, however!
Re: My story is interesting, not important
Date: 2026-04-22 02:04 am (UTC)Otoh, the choice I made (albeit expecting it to be a month long relationship, as two months was my longest at that point) was getting into a monogamous relationship with Jay when I was 18; and I’ve kept on making it for 30 years now, which is something I can’t regret, even when I wonder sometimes what my life would have looked like otherwise. But I think it’s fairly obvious that I wouldn’t be without him - and he was willing to pack up his life and leave his family behind to move to Cornwall, even though he’d lived in the same place all his life, just because I asked him to, so I think he’s fond of me too.