Sun Dance

At the end of the highway, at the base of the mountain, the road narrows to one lane curving into the canyon, wrapped in tree canopy, watched by violent cliffsides, shooting into the sky. Suddenly, after climbing countless switchbacks, the road explodes into a scenic turn, millenia in the making, ten-thousand foot mountains emerging jagged and carpeted from the depths of the earth, jig-sawing themselves against each other, pausing in the turns to take deep breaths of high-altitude air. 

We pass the peak, roll back down narrow sweeps of asphalt, brushing up against aspen tides connected by one single root, millenia in the making, everything quakes and tingles. It feels like it's the first day of a thousand new days, like you turned a corner and was finally excited to see what you might find there, after years of fearing what might come around the bend. 

August coils itself behind you, tucks in its hands and feet and rests in its accomplishments. You have no notes, nothing but gratitude. In the car on the way down, he says the end of the dream is hitting me in the form of stressing about retirement, and you only know what he means in theory. The dream still remains with you in your pocket, silent, biding its time, reminding itself through you by little nibbles along your side. You wake restless. 

The sun sets behind the mountains, your table laden with drinks and swills of writing, unfinished stories stretching their limbs and asking what comes next. You're not quite sure the answer, but you're beginning to get a sense. 

You're not quite sure the answer,
but you look forward
to finding it out.

It's the Risk That I'm Taking

Your childhood streets fall away behind the train car, glittering lakes of cool swims, late at night after the club closed, early on Sundays when parents weren't quite awake yet, long Julys when school breaks felt endless, you were born in the land of one hundred thousand lakes and they never left you, you are more water than land, more forest floor than mind. You forgot your to do list, forgot to follow your prescribed course while here, and somehow you got everything you came for. You sit on a train like moss, like generations of calm lie in your chest, it's all still there, you were never reduced to your current state, only ever expanded, you contain multitudes.

The small towns of your ancestors fly past outside the window, remind themselves to you, they whisper your name and pronounce it correctly, such is their power, such is their gift. You are a whole life of layer, a whole world full of treasures gathered, trinkets piled in the corners of your spine, you are a body made of spirit, a spirit made of woods and lakes and sunshine and moss, you are a lifetime of leaving and coming back. 

This is the heart you were asked to own.
Who are you to turn away a heart
when it knocks on your door?

Ends

If you’re looking for an apartment in Stockholm, it’s yours, he says, like it doesn’t ignite your illness four decades in the making. Like you haven’t crossed oceans for attractive real estate before and you know exactly how many steps it is from his front door to a downtown dip in summer waters you could linger in through fall. 

Like you weren’t currently itching for a change and your recent hits aren’t pummeling like they used to. Up the dosage. 

You wander through your final hours in Colorado, wondering at how fast July always insists on running, it doesn’t matter where you are. August approaching like a specter, forever both a summer month and a whisper of fall. You think your life isn't turning out the way you'd thought, but from another angle you realize it's exactly what you knew, all along. 

You can beat yourself against this wall all you like,
you still end up with yourself.

Sun Set

Pack the dog in the car, she is confused because she knows how to tell time and this isn't when we get in the car. Gather extraneous errands, all you really want to do is drive into the valley to see the sun set behind these mountains where you shelter, see if Colorado feels different at an angle, see if you haven't tried hard enough to love what appears lovable on pieces of paper. 

You were always bad about loving what pieces of paper said to love. 

I came to the Rocky Mountains to write. Instead it seems I spent the time carving out my insides with a teaspoon, arranging the muscle and sinew and blood in little piles on the deck, moving them around like chess pieces, desperate to knead them into smooth dough, into malleable clay I could sculpt according to another ideal. But these are the chess pieces you were given, this is the only body you are able to play. You father spends his days dying, spends his time bemoaning all that he didn't do, and here you are, 30 years behind and no better. God dammit woman, play your pieces or shut up. 

Somehow, you miss the sunset, catch it in glimpses along a backroad in a Boulder suburb, the dog sleeping peacefully in the backseat. She has no concerns, has accepted the odd outing, knows that as long as you're at the wheel and she is wth you, all is as well as it could be. You realize the sunset wasn't what you came for anyway. You came for absolution, acceptance, came to allow yourself not to fall in love. Your old landlord writes from Red Hook, says if you want to come back in September you can walk right in.

The thing is you already have so much love your heart runs over. 

For anything else to come in now,
it would have to be
fucking
magic.

Indian Peaks

Arrive early, when only a few cars litter the parking lot, a cool mountain air lingering along ankles. You don't know where you are meant to be going, take screenshots of trailheads before cell service disappears into the valleys below. The dog stops in every stream to frolic, you stare at pine trees and wonder why you haven't fallen in love with this iteration of wilderness yet. 

It's not for lack of trying. 

A few miles in, the trail begins to climb. Up, up, toward the treeline, toward the sky, switchbacks across flowering meadows and babbling brooks, patches of snow strewn like afterthoughts, and then, around a particularly treacherous corner, an alpine lake appears at the feet of cragged peaks. Someone once told me if the Appalachians were comforting grandparents, the Rocky Mountains were unruly teenagers, and I can see the resemblance. So much to prove, so much ending up only half right. 

The last mile before we reach the car, the dog is running: she sees the end in sight. (She sleeps the whole way home.) I was won over, for a moment, by the high mountains, but when we reach the outskirts of civilization, the wildfire smoggy valley floor, the perpetual afternoon overcast, it blows off me like dirt on the trail. 

My time in COlorado comes to an end. 

I haven't words yet for what to make of it.

2016

is it not better to be sad and free,
to be overwhelmed with emotion, 
rather than complacent and restrained,
underwhelmed and numb?

I am not, without thse demons,
and I missed them. 

I have no choice but to bring them along. 

On Writing

(The longer you've been away,
the longer you need to come back. 

But when you do, you'll find,
that all the treasures you left,

are here waiting.)