Living in Medora, North Dakota in Your 20s: The Loneliness Nobody Warned You About

A raw, lived account of small town loneliness, social isolation in rural America, and what it feels like to be 25 and still here.

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PROLOGUE

Medora wakes up early without meaning to. The light comes in sideways, sneaks under the blinds, catches dust that’s been minding its own business all night. There’s a routine here, though nobody calls it that. Coffee poured too hot into a chipped mug. Boots by the door, always dusty even when it hasn’t been dry. Someone — usually Billie Jo — pauses on the porch longer than necessary, like the air might have news.

Main Street looks ready for company it doesn’t yet have. Chairs stacked. Windows clean in a way that suggests hope rather than traffic. A couple of retirees do their morning walk with matching strides and unmatched opinions. Someone waves because that’s what you do when there are only so many people to wave at. The wind edits every conversation, trims it down to what can survive.

Billie Jo moves through this with practiced ease. She knows which floorboards complain and which don’t. She knows when the mail truck is late and when it’s just thinking about being late. She’s got a face people trust, the kind that says I’ve seen winters. Which she has, though not always the way the phrase intends.

There’s nothing dramatic about her days. That’s the point. Work, quiet, weather. A few names that come and go. A few that stay but don’t linger. Somewhere in the repetition, a question hums — not loud enough to be rude, not quiet enough to ignore. It sounds like ordinary life. Which is how the hardest things usually start.

Monologue

Name: Billie Jo Larson
Age: 25
Location: Medora, North Dakota (Billings County)

I don’t even know where to start without sounding like a bitter twit, but I’ll tell it like it is — because that’s the only thing that’s real here.

People think Medora’s this quaint little Old West postcard — cowboy shows, tourists, Badlands sunsets, all that jazz you see on a brochure. And yeah, every summer that stuff’s great for the folks rolling through in RVs and cross-country rigs. But that ain’t my life — that’s just what dumps money in the town coffers for three months.

I’m 25. I’m white. I grew up wanting something — friends, connection, a place that feels like it’s not always half asleep. But what I got here is crickets in the winter and strangers in the summer. Folks pour in as seasonal workers — they laugh, they bond in dorm rooms, they hustle at the Medora Musical, and then they leave. And when they leave, all of us who live here year-round feel it spin back into this frozen hush.

See, there ain’t no subway, no late-night bars, no real hangouts. Once the tourists bounce, the lights dim, damn near literally. I drive six minutes to work, then I come home and stare at the same damn horizon that’s supposed to be so beautiful. It feels huge — the sky, the plains — but inside? I feel tiny. Like I’m just… waiting. Waiting for someone to knock on my door, waiting for a text that never comes, waiting for the season to pick up again so there’s people.

And it’s weird because Medora’s safe, they say. Crime’s low, everyone’s polite. But what good is that when you’re safe and lonely? When everyone your age leaves for Dickinson or Fargo or somewhere with actual options? You look around and most of the folks here are older — older than my parents, older than me by decades. No hate to them — they’re solid — but I’m not ready to be the youngest in a town that feels like it’s aging itself out.

Most days I don’t even speak to another person outside of work. And at work? You get a bunch of seasonal folks who don’t wanna dig deeper than surface level — which is fine — but it ain’t enough. It ain’t a home. You show up in the dead of winter and it’s (deep inhale) fucking bleak. The wind cuts different here — like it scrapes your thoughts clean and leaves you echoing with nothing. It’s quiet to a fault. Quiet until your brain starts talking back to you.

I want to be honest — I’ve cried on my porch watching headlights slip down Highway 85, wondering why I’m still here when every part of me aches for connection. Because every place else seems louder than this silence — louder than the howling of wind against an empty barbed wire fence in December. And louder is better sometimes.

People ask, “Why don’t you just leave?” And hell, I don’t know. Fear, I guess. Or maybe stubbornness. Or maybe hope that something good will stick one day. But right now? Right now it’s just me, the quiet, and the expanding sense that this place might be too small for someone with a soul that’s hungry for connection — for intimacy, for spontaneity, for more than seasonal laughs and tourists’ back-slaps. That’s the truth they don’t put on the tourism sites.

Holiday Solitude

Thanksgiving hits Medora like a bad joke. Everyone says “home for the holidays,” but this is home, and that’s the problem. The town doesn’t swell with family — it shrinks. Snow packs itself into every crack, and the wind don’t just blow, it searches. I wake up Thanksgiving morning and it’s so quiet I swear I can hear my own joints pop when I stretch.

I microwave stuffing because cooking a full spread for one person feels pathetic, even though I know that’s a lie I tell myself. I eat standing at the counter. No music. No TV. Just the hum of the fridge and that smell of sage that reminds me other people are laughing somewhere else.

I scroll my phone like it owes me something. Pictures of cousins in Bismarck, college friends in Minneapolis, everybody wrapped around each other like warmth is free if you live in the right zip code. I tell myself I’m not jealous. I am. I’m jealous in my bones.

Christmas is worse. Christmas here feels abandoned. Tourists are gone. Seasonal workers are gone. The musical’s dark. Main Street looks like a movie set after everyone packed up and left town in a hurry. I put up a tiny fake tree because real effort feels embarrassing when no one’s gonna see it. I sit on my couch in sweatpants at nine p.m., staring at lights blinking for no reason, and I think, If I disappeared tonight, how long would it take before anyone noticed?

That thought sticks. That’s when I know the loneliness isn’t just loneliness anymore — it’s starting to rot.

Summer Chaos

Summer comes in loud and fast, like Medora’s trying to pretend it’s alive. Tour buses cough out retirees and families with matching t-shirts. Seasonal kids show up tan and loud and full of plans. There’s music every night, laughter floating down the boardwalk, beers cracked open like promises.

For a minute, I almost forget how empty winter feels.

I make friends easy in the summer. Everyone does. You trade stories on smoke breaks, flirt a little behind the gift shop, swear you’re gonna keep in touch. There’s bonfires, cheap whiskey, late nights where the sky never really gets dark and you feel like something might finally happen.

But it’s fake-deep. Summer friends are like paper cups — good for the moment, useless when things get heavy. Nobody wants to talk about panic attacks or long-term plans or how trapped they feel. They’re here for a season. They don’t want roots. They don’t want weight.

By August, I can feel the clock ticking in my chest. You start hearing, “So where you headed next?” And every time I answer “I’m staying,” it lands wrong. Like I admitted something shameful. Like I failed a test nobody told me I was taking.

When the last bus leaves and the last dorm room empties, the silence comes back meaner than before. Because now I remember what it felt like to not be alone.

Winter Quiet

Winter in Medora isn’t peaceful. It’s oppressive. It presses down on you like the sky’s got hands. I’ll go days without hearing another voice. Not exaggerating. Days.

I talk to myself just to check that my voice still works.

The landscape turns gray-brown-white — no contrast, no softness. Just wind dragging itself across the Badlands like it’s tired of being here too. I drive to work in the dark. I drive home in the dark. Sometimes I don’t bother turning on the radio because even noise feels like effort.

This is when my mental health takes the hit. I sleep too much, then not at all. I start making deals with myself — just make it to spring, just make it to May. I get anxious for no reason. Or depressed for every reason. I cry over dumb stuff like an empty milk carton or my boots not drying fast enough.

I try dating apps. Big mistake. The radius maxes out fast. You swipe past the same three guys over and over, all holding fish, all saying “love the outdoors.” I want to scream, I know you love the outdoors — that’s all there is.

Loneliness here doesn’t feel dramatic. It feels numb. And numbness is scarier than sadness.

Relationships

Living here wrecks relationships before they even start. People don’t want long-distance. Or they don’t want this distance. I’ve been told, straight up, “I just don’t think I could live there.” Like Medora’s a disease.

Friendships fade because there’s nothing to reinforce them. No shared routines. No casual hangouts. You gotta schedule every interaction like it’s an appointment. Eventually people stop trying. Eventually so do I.

Even family relationships strain. They don’t get it. They think quiet equals calm. They think simple equals healthy. They don’t see the way isolation gnaws at you, how it makes you doubt your own worth. Makes you wonder if you’re choosing this or if you’re just stuck.

Future Plans

Here’s the part I don’t say out loud much: I’m scared this place is teaching me how to disappear.

I tell myself I’ll leave someday. I look at apartments in other cities like it’s a hobby. I imagine versions of myself who wear different clothes, meet people after work, have stories that don’t start with “Well, there ain’t much to do here, but…”

But leaving feels like jumping without knowing if there’s ground. And staying feels like slowly turning into part of the scenery — another quiet woman nobody notices once the tourists leave.

I don’t hate Medora. That’s the messed-up part. I love it in a way that hurts. But love doesn’t fill the silence. Love doesn’t text you back. Love doesn’t keep your mind from spiraling at two in the morning when the wind won’t stop howling and your life feels paused indefinitely.

So yeah. That’s my lived experience.
Not tragic.
Not dramatic.
Just lonely enough to change you — inch by inch — until you don’t recognize who you’re becoming.

EPILOGUE

After a while, the quiet stops introducing itself. It just sits down. Billie Jo notices this one evening when she doesn’t flinch at the wind rattling the windows. She’s learned its moods. Learned which noises mean nothing and which mean even less.

The fake Christmas tree is still in the corner, folded back into its box, lights wound with the kind of care you give to things you might need again. She hasn’t thrown it out. She hasn’t put it back up. Objects, like people, sometimes exist best in limbo.

She still watches headlights slide down Highway 85, but now it’s less of a question and more of a habit. There’s comfort in habits. They don’t promise anything. They just show up. A couple of the summer kids text once in a blue moon. The retirees still walk. The mail truck is still late on Thursdays.

Nothing has resolved itself. That’s worth saying plainly. But some edges have dulled. Not because they disappeared — just because she knows where they are now. Loneliness, it turns out, doesn’t always ask to be fixed. Sometimes it just wants to be acknowledged, like weather.

Medora remains what it is: beautiful, empty, stubborn. Billie Jo remains too. Tomorrow looks a lot like yesterday. Which sounds bleak until you notice she’s still here, still noticing, still keeping the lights wound carefully, just in case.

— The Seasoned Sage