Letters

January 10, 2020

Dad,

You showed up in a dream last night, which got me thinking.

I think it is a mistake of our culture to suggest that when a person becomes a parent, their own individual human needs are somehow less important than the needs of the child. It is a gendered mistake, of course, prescribing the lives of women more harshly than men (the all-inclusiveness of “motherhood”), but its tone diminishes the very real and large identities of everyone. I dislike words like “mother” and “father” when used as identifiers of who someone is entirely.

You are simply a person, too, first and foremost.

But it is another mistake—your mistake—to pretend that the child’s needs are not as important, even if differently so. The things you exposed me to before my brain was fully developed (affairs, pornography, Gina…) shaped so much more than my impression of you. They taught me about female value. They taught me that trust can be mostly a disguise, or a band-aid, something that serves a purpose in incremental moments but isn’t expected to be permanent or reliable. They taught me about myself, and what to fear, and what to expect of myself if I want to be a good, valuable woman.

In other words, by prioritizing your needs, you still shaped my own.

One of my biggest fears is that, in sending this letter, I am replicating something I don’t mean to replicate; most likely, it will stay unsent. I know what it feels like to be on the receiving end of distinct words typed on a page, showing up as if breaking through the boundaries of my home space and making me, the reader, feel less than. Your letters, when they came, always did very little to disguise their hurtfulness.

And so, as one can’t help but do when barraged with hurtful things, I sometimes thought the letters were in fact all about me. My faults, my insecurities, my terribleness, and how it was linked eternally with my mother’s. Were we really that terrible, as terrible as you claimed?

One of the hardest things about growing up a young girl is the dizzying reality of knowing, atop your two stable and upright legs, that you are good and decent, only to find yourself pushed repeatedly into the deep end of self-doubt. For too many years, I found myself swimming in it.

Your letters pretended to be about me, but my highest most knowledgeable self knows they had nothing to do with me, that I and my mother were a placeholder for your anger and your self-disappointment and what I can only assume is a lifelong lack of resolution, all that unresolved pain between you and your own mother. Now I, in turn, find myself sitting here plagued with the fear that I might be enacting the very thing that once caused me so much pain. I am trying to justify to myself why I would not simply write this letter but send it to you, keep trying to do the emotional labor of imagining how it might feel for you to receive it. It is the basic work of thinking about others, the work of owning not just my actions but their consequences, too, even the unintended ones. In most cases, it is good emotional labor.

But I cannot do that emotional labor for you, not within the boundaries of an entirely unreciprocated relationship. The truth is that speaking up can be its own useful end, for processing and expressing and making peace within and about oneself. And another truth is that this letter isn’t about you. It is about me, and the things I am learning:

I am learning that relationships, romantic ones, are not more important than friendships (women don’t need men any more than they need each other).

I am learning that men’s needs are not the highest priority, that the fulfillment of desire is not a linear, one-way shape, going from women –> men and stopping there.

I am learning about the ways that distrust quickly transforms into paranoia, which drains all healthier needs for human connection and compassion.

I am learning to speak up, but I am also learning that speaking up can be its own significant result. That such a thing as “self-validation” exists. That there will always be people, rooms and rooms full of them, who will disagree with what I say and think and feel, no matter how sincerely and cogently and creatively I say, think, and feel them.

Of course my mother is good. Of course I am good. You are, too, deep down. But because you have chosen—at least in relation to me, and everything I have had access to—to bury your goodness, this means that you, in turn, don’t have access to being a true recipient of this letter.

I write this letter and address it to you, but not for you. Now you are the placeholder.

If you are receiving this this letter exists, it is because I have begun the long hard work of coming to terms with the fact that I can do or say nothing, not even the most right and perfect thing, to change your mind. I can only change myself. I am a person, too. And that is worth saying, to anyone and no one.

Sarah

THE DREAM: You showed up. We stood and faced each other on the second floor of a large, extravagant building. A banister behind you, the ground floor far below. Immediately horrified by my own thinking, it occurred to me to run into you fast enough to push you over the ledge. But why? I had no reason. The scariest thing about life is that sometimes we have no reasons. Then you attacked me. I knew it was you even when your representation turned into that of a long-haired woman, witch-like but only in demeanor (and only if the word means something bad, which I will come to understand is not the case). She was not unlike what I picture when I picture one of the many other women who were once yours—the long hair gave it away. She attacked me but it was still you, and I responded by instinct, pushing back fiercely so that, yes, she, you, fell over the banister. When I flung my torso against the edge to look at my consequences, it was not your body I saw plastered below, face down. It was hers.

October 16, 2017

Okay.

I have these short short hairs on the side of my head I cut them one by one, my head being like a Bonsai tree, my head being the imperfect pursuit of perfection.

I do not believe in external permission, let’s just get that out of the way. Or rather, my body spent so much time revolving around these things that it had never considered, these external centers of control, these prescribed encouragements, that it has occasionally become necessary to disbelieve my own origins. I am turning away from all accidental sources. Sources of accident.

Dear V, when I am around you, I orbit you. The system of interlocking planets. We count them name them watch them disappear behind the others, you and others and nobody knows how to line up anymore, I used to line up according to the interlocking system of my height against the height of those around me, small body thrown into relief. I used to line up according to the interlocking system of names and the letters they are comprised of, last name first, first name last, small body highlighted by the symbol that tells it where to go. Nobody knows how to line up anymore and I spend most of my time advocating for silence, which doesn’t really work when you are a quiet small short hardly-named girl in a room full of men with things to say, doesn’t really work when most folks see quiet as its own quiet undoing. By most I mean men, really, all circumference and muscle and symbolic majority.  Loud men, men with strong hair, forests and forests of men and their haircuts and their collars and their sentences, period. They say things and I listen and I line up.

One must learn to be a person. It is not innate.

Cut to the present: I spend my time trying to take up space, and sometimes I take that up through silence, and sometimes I take that up through the very strategic facilitation of making more space for others, of space called accommodation, of space called no regrets, of space called here is the thread of my body it sometimes hums and it sometimes sleeps. And sometimes I take up space like I take up a sentence: slowly. I need pauses, stretches of slower time. There are different ways to take up space and some of them are consistently invisible while others are consistently troubling.

I have never been myself more than in this moment, with my short short hairs and my mouth full of bad things about many men, mouth full of the occasional exciting not much.

I do not want to orbit any other person, anything that moves, not even my own body, usually still but occasionally so wild. I want to orbit my cats, at most. Want to orbit the at most of my post-body ideal, want to dismiss the idea of orbit altogether, want to take a closer look at this body, here. Want to replace orbit with intersect. With hi, hello.

The thing is I sometimes can’t keep up with other people. The thing is I sometimes take my time. The thing is me, being my slow authentic self, coming out on occasion.

One time you met me and I had a boyfriend only he was just the idea of a person, a person not with me in real time, a person you never met. In many ways he was always an idea: The Boyfriend. But he was also a real person even though he existed outside of your encountering him. Our relationship was troubled, the boyfriend and I. I went from one troubled relationship to another, all of my life, girl disguising her sad daddy feelings as the desire to seek validation through her body. All girls learn this: the quiet validation of a desirable body. It makes life feel brainless, or else it makes you feel like you could live forever, or at least keep living until tomorrow, because it never quite becomes today. I once pushed my body I grew my body I said to my body, be the body you wish to be seen in the world, body, and I let myself be seen by anyone willing to see me and I counted the cracks in my body and my hair, long at the time, was counted too, curled, blowing, framing the crack in my head so as to keep being seen, pliable, available. To the validating men.

One must learn to be a person, and this is a process. It is the opposite of death, in that you pick up and hold and become accountable for your own.

I have never quite been myself around you, but I have always been more of me, with every visit, with every vacation. Once you knew very little of me, and then you knew more, and then you knew even more and I am here to say that it is still so very little, in some ways. Sometimes I give myself permission to disagree. I disagree with you sometimes.

I have never been given permission, by any man, to be myself.

Sometimes I disagree with myself so as to agree with others.

There is so much you don’t know about me and it has nothing to do with [X], or [X], or [X]. It has to do with my ideas. It has to do with the way I speak and laugh and pause. I am hard to experience in real time, in real life, because my brain won’t sit still in the present moment: it loops, juts forward, circles around. It is not normal, not perfect or otherwise, it is not easy. From the outside, this looks like silence.

Silence, too, is one type of social skill. As with encouragement. As with listening.

Sometimes it is important to push back against visual culture but sometimes it is also important to watch.

I want to feel heard. I want to orbit space, not bodies. I want to cut the rest of my long hairs into short short ones and wear imperfection like cold breath in any season. I want to continue having high expectations but I want to stop pretending that expectations are objective, that my expectations are your expectations, that yours could ever truly be mine, that context isn’t the air always scooping us up, whether we button our jackets more tightly in response to its presence or whether we loosen up our sleeves & our hairdos. That is the trick: sometimes, not responding to a presence can facilitate a reality in which the thing isn’t even there, can turn presence, symbolically and therefore fundamentally, into absence. Symbols are like stars: I dare you to imagine life without them.

Sometimes I feel absent around you. Expectations are always subjective. Who gets to decide them?

I feel tired. I feel full of words and channels and ideas. I feel discouraged by competition. I just want to take up space.

Dear V, I owe you so much, I admire you, of course I orbit you—it is a natural reaction in the face of strength, and certainty, and self-determination. But I cannot orbit those whom I wish to love, truly love: because love is about contradiction, and it is always about compromise, and it involves locating and stretching and expanding our safe spaces, separate and together, where they intersect and where they don’t. And because love is, first and foremost, about mutual attention.

Because love takes up space. Because love is not two halves interlocking together in the system of pieces and parts. Because love is messier than that, bigger, ill-fitting, makeshift, DIY, a process. Because love and friendship are two worlds getting bigger. We are not tracing paper we are watercolors. Marbling, fragile, resilient. The more one tries to control the thing the harder it is to make progress with/in it. But when you let go, when you open up to more than your own expectations: you make the perfect pastry, you stumble into faces and remarkable shapes and patterns, you make space for things beyond the known you. The knowable other of our each. So many.

Wind, cold breath, hair like a small owned pet. These things make up my day and I often call the day difficult. We did not take one single picture when you were here. Are you sad about it? I am not. Here at the intersection of difficult and determined; here at the quiet outpost called devotion.

March 28, 2018

Dear Z,

The first time I read “The Husband Stitch” I felt, in the mildest sense of the word, repulsed by it. Literally pushed away. By the narrative, perhaps, or the reality that each story within the story kept returning to, no matter what loopdeloop or twisting or subtle paths it took to get there. It was the same hard truth over and over again, and I thought it really painful to look at, and I found it a little bit sickening.

There are things in this world that I want to dislike, scared by how they threaten to change me. This is how sensitivity morphs into pessimism, how a body that’s spent its whole life wide open can come to feel sleepy and done, your belly full of everything external, everything you’ve swallowed up. Often, I want to pick up every single thing around me, even the things already on me, and examine the ways they could be my fault. Tell people the things I think they should do, what I think about them, what I wish I could be better at, or others. Putting everyone I know, myself included, up on a pedestal, until there’s only enough room for us to take turns falling off.

I worry about coming off as too controlling and I know almost always that I’m not controlling but perhaps I’m just out of control which is a cute trick of language, of gender, how women can end up two things at once while feeling like mostly nothing, how words construct, or at least contribute to, these cute, tricky realities. And I know that for some women and the women who love them and the men who they orbit, control and expression practically camouflage each other. Language is heavy. Most days I just hope my sentences are at least coming or going, and I write while haunted by the floating “too.” How it needs no context, how it can go straight through walls and timelines. My body has never been able to fully escape it, the too-much-ness of girlhood, which grows both slowly and quickly into the too-much-ness of womanhood, though girl history is one that never really leaves you. And there is a way that, scared or anxious or unsure of yourself, you can run so adamantly away from something that the shape of your absence only lends it a clearer border, practically highlights the thing you’re trying to leave behind. Like a cartoon body that’s smashed through a cartoon door and left a perfect shape. Cartoons make space for smashing and cutting and falling and keeling over, you can suspend your disbelief while watching them because you know they aren’t real.

I read “The Husband Stich” again the other day, and it was perfect–even the voice directions, even how graphic it has to be in places, even the end. I didn’t want to like it because I didn’t want to acknowledge the truth of it. I wanted to protect, so to say, my own ribbon. But I wanted to protect it in that way that is like having someone look at you and ask, “hey, what’s that ribbon,” and you think you’re doing a good safe motherly job of protecting yourself by responding, “what ribbon?” Denial is not meant to be a long-term coping strategy, not without doing some serious damage to the body and the brain relying on it.

I think Machado’s writing reminds me of the small stone I carry around in my gut everywhere I go. Call it “anxiety,” or expectation, or, I suppose, post-trauma feelings. It’s hard to even allow myself to use that word…trauma…I work with these homeless youth and youth in foster care, these kids, they’re kids!, who have seen such harrowing things, have been abused and raped and manipulated on such blatant levels. What is this sick compulsion to feel like I have to earn my trauma, have to earn or suffer through enough in order to gain access to a certain way of talking about it?

Yesterday, I stayed home sick. I was too hot and then too cold and I couldn’t keep any food down and at one point I saw, I mean I really saw the edges of my brain, like I’d become aware of my body but also my consciousness, in a way that I had never recognized before. I felt the limits of my consciousness, that I can only ever experience this life as me, that my body and my brain are the filter I’m stuck with. I felt buried by my consciousness, like it was both me and also the thing engulfing me. I saw the edges of my mind simultaneously curling and expanding away from me, I saw my thoughts turning into mush. There is this image that hangs on our bedroom wall, this beautiful frame of Maria Falconetti’s face as Joan of Arc, and she’s got that glamorous single tear, and she’s wearing a crown, and I stared and stared and stared at her face until I could only imagine being sick forever, until I wanted to turn backwards into a baby, a held thing, with no more decisions to make, no things to run away from, no words to avoid, or agonize over, or desperately look for, ever again. And then I thought about all the plastic I use…all I could put in my stomach, for so long yesterday, was yogurt. One yogurt and then a second one and then one more, and I had a yogurt this morning when I first got to work. I used to hate yogurt, I thought it was gross and healthy and that I’d never grow old enough to like it, and now here I am, eating cottage cheese and yogurt, thinking about my bones, wondering if they’ve grown pliable yet. And with each of these things I consume I make all this garbage that I put into my blue bin each week, having rinsed everything out obsessively, and pretending to know that the stuff will be hauled off and…and what? Animals are going extinct, recycling itself is practically extinct now too. I don’t know if it’s a problem with death, that I can’t accept it–I do understand that things die and that I too am a thing–but I can barely handle the collective pain that I know we inflict, that I know I am a crucial part of. I go on the internet for work stuff, or to log onto our work Facebook account and try to message one of our youth, and I’m flooded by these pictures of skinny polar bears and dead whales full of trash, I know change is small and slow but even the most collective and widespread effort at slow small change will never catch up with the heap of destruction we’ve so effortlessly accumulated.

There are things in this life that I cannot bear. I cannot bear my father, or trash, or certain instances of nudity–I feel so, so traumatized by my father, by my young brain being forced to reckon with affairs and pornography and other women coming into our house when my mom was gone but I wasn’t, I was still there, not understanding, ever, anything I was seeing, who the women were, in person or online. I’ve spent years, now, writing about bodies, pretending to be okay and compassionate and feminist. I wrote a poem recently that had the word “porn” in it and I thought it was a milestone, a really significant accomplishment. The bears and sealife and grass and cliffs and waters, even the things that are technically not organisms and have no life cycle, are all dying. And these are my milestones: a good sentence, a cup of yogurt. The disparity tears me in half if I think about it too long. I feel torn in half. Fourthed. The numbers go up and I get smaller.

Do you think the woman is relieved in the end, when she sees the world upside down, when her fears and her anxieties line up in such synchronicity with her head bobbing on the floor? When I saw Machado’s signature in the book my friend Ola got for us, it was like my own ribbon had been touched. Not taken off, not made into an oddity, but acknowledged. “I hope you love her.” It was a prayer, or a spell. In moments like this one, it is the closest to something other than despair that I can imagine, these moments where I find my brain full of all the bad and unconscious and cruel decisions, habits, lifestyle choices that we have made historically, that we are zipping straight into the future with, that we have taught the rest of the world through demonstration; it’s all I can muster: I hope, I hope, I hope; love her, love her, love.

Last night, I remember I dreamt, but I only remember it because I woke up repeatedly, fast enough to hear that I was screaming, loud enough to have M reach over and hold me, hush me back to sleep. I’ve dreamt about the apocalypse and I’ve dreamt about my mother dying and I’ve dreamt, god, I spent years and years dreaming of being cheated on, of being left, of being perpetually unable to find the person I needed to find in a given moment of urgency, always a man. Over and over again: he’s gone, he’s left, he’s with her. But last night, it was just water, the ocean, I was in the deep of it. I could not swim, I could not pull up the small animals who were sinking around me. The farther down I went in an effort to grab one, to save even one of them, the farther down I went. Do you hear how that last sentence repeats only to be cut short, like a breath? Everything in my life has been cut short. My parents’ marriage, my own; for years and years, my eating habits, especially around men; my goals, my “career,” my hair. Eventually I will have sheared off so many details that perhaps I’ll be immune to the painfully true stories. The best things I read are always generous, expansive, but I can’t deny that the sharpest stories, the most biting essays, always take a little tiny something away, too. I’d like to figure out how to escape that loss–not death, but loss. I suppose I am still convinced that they’re two separate beasts. Or that a species, or an environment, or a country or a heart might, in the end, be saved. I guess I’m still trying. I put my blue bin on the sidewalk curb each Tuesday. I’ve still got a good head on my shoulders.

xo,

January 17, 2015

O,

& so i remember suddenly, upon looking for the date, that today is Kid Rock’s birthday. the memory just happens to me.

i am early for the movie so i sit on a bench & wait. i am good at waiting. i had wanted to write anyway.

today everything is blue. the sky, the weather. my bedsheets. my skin tone. these words, my feelings.

blue is meaningful, but beyond that i’m not sure.

this quote, tonight: “The only stability possible is stability in motion” (John Gardener).

i want to believe this in my heart, my body, the way i do in my thinking brain.

this is also blue. this discrepancy in thinking, feeling. my small arms reaching toward integration of the self but lowering, lower, lower, tired. that gesture.

spaghetti arms from exhaustion. spaghetti brain.

/

i almost chickened out at Starbucks—thought suddenly, viscerally, of just going home to continue waiting, from the curled-up space of my bed, my pillows. i am bad at waiting.

i am on display right now as the girl alone at the movies. i can feel how sad this is supposed to look. i can hope, in some small but loud part of me, that people see me & assume i’m waiting for something. it occurred to me to play with my phone in a way that might enhance that appearance.

but my moments of panic are now living next to the beginning of something else in me. on the drive here, there was a moment where i smiled, genuinely. & this made me cry—full of sudden tears. & then they just stopped. this is the blue cycle of beginning to be ok.

i can smell popcorn. i can imagine what soda tastes like. i cannot smell the almonds i have hidden in my purse, can’t imagine drinking my orange juice.

but putting better things into my body right now is a comfort i can imagine.

/

after leaving the coffee shop i stopped by Goodwill, thinking: i will find a special object. i looked at a couple of books, found one—a novel—that seemed cheesy and soft and at the right level for my blueness. i looked at the first page and it begins with a Nietzsche reference so it may also be a good book. the title of it makes me feel blue against my surroundings & my surroundings blue against me.

because things exist around & against me & the point of that is that i am real. i make and take up space.

this is a hard thing to know, which is, in turn, confusing—how hard it is to feel real. and the small space between difficulty and confusion: blue.

i looked for a trinket and found a small ceramic cup, smaller than a shot glass, with an old image of Mt. Fuji on it. i felt like i related to the image. the water, of course, was blue.

but there is also a man. he is on a cliff. i am writing this from memory now. he holds some tangle of strings. he looks as if he is struggling to reel something in, but you cannot see what he is reeling in because the picture ends. Mt. Fuji is in the distance, largely hidden by fog or clouds. it is not the main focus and it also is.

only in language does such a contradiction not make sense.

but only in language do i feel compelled to articulate such.

i might be the only person in this movie theater tonight.

/

at the Goodwill i saw a lighthouse statue from Portland, ME, and was filled with warmness toward you. & i thought how we will maybe get tattoos inspired from such an image, such a structure.

light. ocean. vigilance.

choices as simple as the color of my pen—small things can affect us greatly.

i am here to watch a movie about a bear. i pick up the novel i purchased and read a few pages, learning the words inanity, inane.

but to be empty is such a different thing from being silly. isn’t it?

to be light. to exist. to exist lightly.

the matter of light—not meaning, but its mass.

blue distinctions.

July 14, 2018

Dear Z,

Last Friday night, with my mom in town visiting, I did a great number of things: Drank too much; drove and drove; laughed so hard, and for such an extended period of time, that I woke up to a semi-raw and tender throat, as if yelling and celebrating pass through the body in parallel fashion. The next morning I had some caffeine and very little food and, my psychic pressure sensitive to the raised elevation of Bend, OR, took an aspirin. By the time the swirl of agents in my stomach caught up with me we were seated at an outdoor table waiting for breakfast to arrive, where the thought of eggs and syrups and spices being placed in my direct line of sight sent me lumbering to the bathroom.

When I returned—to M and our two mothers, sunglasses barely disguising their worry—I excused myself in order to walk around the block. And by “walk around the block” I mean I got out of their frame and around the corner so I could sit down on a bench and let myself look sickened and nauseous and pale, where I could slump and frown and admit privately how sick I was. M came with me, and I was less embarrassed to show him my true state, though I still had to fight my instincts to hide everything, impulses like a bunch of birds, secretive and occasionally misguided and protective of their frailty. M helped me lay down in the passenger seat of our car, parked nearby, with the seat bent back as far as it could go, and the windows rolled down enough to allow for a breeze while still letting me feel contained, and I waited for the others to finish breakfast so we could get on the road and head northwest toward home.

As I laid there, my eyes closed because death felt closer with them open, I heard threads of conversation from the people walking by, people who were window shopping or on their way to meet someone or just leaving from having met someone, groups of friends and older adults commenting on their surroundings or younger adults relaying something unusual or funny to the friends they walked with. I felt as if my body had lifted up out of the car and I was watching all these conversations happen, though my eyes were closed and my back was to the sidewalk, fighting the limitations of our small car to achieve a makeshift fetal position. I was sick and afraid of opening my eyes and I felt all this joy in everyone’s overheard voice, and I was grateful to be hearing their sentences, which all sounded joyful and only odd at their worst, and I was happy for these people and their language and their interactions, the small walking communities of them and how numerous they were. I saw them but I saw them with my ears, and with my body, registering temperature. I was happy for them and in this way felt happy, too, so nauseous that the thought of talking seemed entirely physical and upsetting, and I felt very pleased that the rest of the world could go on talking without me. Without me but near me.

During the biggest chunk of the ride home I slept, or held my eyes shut and left the purview of my seated body through something close enough to sleep. But in one flashing moment I opened my eyes and saw my mother’s right elbow, bent at a driving angle, and it was the first moment I considered my mother’s age, that my mother is someone growing older, and here is her old elbow, positioned just so, where wrinkle and bone blend and make it hard to distinguish the sharpness of the original body part. Here was the first body part of hers getting old, and it told the future of the rest of her body, and I knew it was an elbow though my knowing and my recognition was just as much about body memory, and mother-daughter trust, and the shared history between two people whose bodies have been joined and estranged in rotating turns as it was born of the experience at hand, her elbow in front of my ill, drowsy, observant face.

Why does it take being sick to make me remember about my body? I slept most of the drive home—something dreamy and inarticulate and restful enough to be like sleep—until we stopped for a quick break in Maupin. When I opened my eyes and started crawling upright, there were 20 shirtless young men huddled around my side of the car, staring and cackling, their embodiment of anti-homoeroticism so staunch that they’d practically painted their own silhouettes in a queer shimmer. They teased each other and took turns calling each other gay, and they gazed with their eyes and gazed with their mouths and gazed right back at the sun that made their bodies sweat and thump and belie all the softness and inconsequence stuffed deep down in their muscles and swim trunks and hidden beneath their short boy haircuts and ridiculous macho skulls, and the second our car stopped moving I jumped out and ran to the bathroom and vomited. The pleasure of good timing is one that, on occasion, syncs me up with the world around me.

Afterwards, during the home stretch of our drive, I sat upright and looked at cows and alpaca and birds, wheat and orchards and sagebrush. The Dalles is made up of every yellow shade of the desert, sure, but also mint green and green that looks like water and green that moves like water, too. Everything in this town is relational, and up on a hillside, or within close proximity to one, the land can be stubborn, lightning strikes and burns 10 acres overnight, people love and dislike each other and I like to think we’re doing right by the city by staying here through it all, gathering, listening or at least not ignoring, performing our selves, not wishing the shrub-steppe were a dark, damp, majestic forest when there’s so much need for dry places, and sagebrush, and yellow places, and light. What looks bare is usually a different kind of lushness. What is not me is, likewise, mostly so at the level of surface only. The roads at the edge of town are all numbered similarly—7-mile, 15-mile—a historic gesture. I like that there’s space between things and I like that space has its own reasons for not becoming full, I like some small amount of distance between us and I like getting to walk toward the river, the sunset, you, in order to do something about my desire and my love. You can cradle distance, or silence, or longing, like a pile of wheat in your hand. Things untended will get lost in the shuffle, but my life here is a garden. Wild, resistant, soft, weedy. When I got home I put off unpacking our overnight things and instead watered our sunflowers, and let the cats out to roll around in our grass, which is really just weeds, and I drank two cans of fizzy water and sat on the porch, my top half shaded, my hands dirty in the air.

My mother went home two days ago and I am returning to my usual routine.

<3,

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