Doorun Dongar Saajre

Mountains Look Beautiful From Afar.

What are your biggest challenges?

The phrase comes from a folk song I grew up hearing without ever stopping to translate. Doorun dongar saajre. From a distance, the mountains look beautiful.

I didn’t know then that it was a warning disguised as poetry.

We met the way modern connections often do—through words first. Messages that arrived with intention. Conversations that stretched longer than planned. A sense of recognition that felt less like discovery and more like inevitability. It wasn’t romance in the traditional sense; it was something more flattering to the intellect. A meeting of minds, or so it seemed. He saw my work. I saw his hunger. We spoke the same language of pattern, meaning, depth.

Distance helped. Distance always helps at the beginning.

From far away, everything aligns. The rough edges blur. Silence reads as mystery. Intensity passes for intimacy. I could step into the connection without the burden of the body—without having to negotiate pace, presence, or consequence. From that vantage point, the mountain looked exquisite.

Saajre.

What drew me in was not charm so much as vulnerability. He spoke from a place of longing that felt raw, unedited. There was an ache beneath his words, a sense of having been misunderstood by the world and—perhaps for the first time—seen. I know now how dangerous that feeling can be: to be cast as the witness to someone else’s becoming.

At first, I mistook that role for closeness.

The trouble with being deeply empathic is that it doesn’t announce itself as risk. It arrives as responsibility. I could feel his emotional weather before he named it. His agitation registered in my chest. His anticipation showed up as restlessness in my body. I began to calibrate myself around him—slowing here, softening there—without quite realizing I was doing it.

Still, from a distance, it worked.

The mountain remained beautiful as long as I didn’t try to climb it.

The shift came when abstraction gave way to reality. When the possibility of proximity entered the frame. Plans, however tentative, have a way of revealing fault lines. The ground beneath the poetry began to tremble. What I experienced as saturation, he experienced as withdrawal. What I felt as the need for space, he felt as threat.

That is often how scripts flip.

I became quieter. He became louder. My pauses grew careful; his words grew urgent. I found myself explaining feelings I hadn’t yet finished having. The connection, once expansive, began to narrow. I was no longer meeting him; I was managing him.

From up close, the mountain was no longer ornamental. It was unstable.

There is a particular confusion that sets in when you are told—repeatedly—that your gentleness is cruelty. That your boundary is abandonment. That your attempt to leave without harm is, in fact, harm itself. You begin to doubt your internal compass. You replay conversations looking for evidence of malice you don’t remember feeling.

I stayed longer than I should have, not out of love exactly, but out of a familiar sense of duty. The idea that if I could just explain myself clearly enough, softly enough, the landscape would settle.

It didn’t.

Distance, once protective, had become impossible.

The end did not arrive as a clean break. It came as an unraveling. Words sharpened. Meaning distorted. What had once been admiration curdled into accusation. The same intensity that once felt intoxicating now felt volatile. I watched, almost clinically, as the mountain revealed its true terrain: steep, unforgiving, prone to collapse.

When it finally ended, it did so without poetry.

Just silence. And the dull thud of something idealized coming apart.

It took time for the grief to register—not for the relationship itself, but for the fantasy it had supported. I had believed, perhaps naively, that depth alone could sustain connection. That mutual insight was enough. That distance was a neutral condition rather than an amplifier.

The phrase returned to me then, not as lyric but as diagnosis.

Doorun dongar saajre.

Beauty at a distance is not deception. It’s perspective. But perspective has limits. What enchants from afar can overwhelm up close. What feels like destiny when untested can become danger when embodied.

I think often now about how many connections are born and sustained in abstraction. How easy it is to confuse intensity for intimacy when the body is not yet involved. How many of us fall in love not with a person, but with the version of ourselves we get to be in their gaze.

Distance gives us that gift. It also withholds the truth.

The mountains are still beautiful. I don’t deny that. But I have learned to ask a different question before moving closer.

Not Is it stunning from here?

But:

What will it cost me to stand at its base?

The answer, I’ve learned, is what decides everything.