Reinstall

The water is low in the last Great Lake, its saline banks stretching like colorful salt marshes around the mountains and you marvel that anything ever survived here. The flight is smooth, HEPA filtered, a ltitle kinder than usual. You think perhaps some good things come out of disaster. It's hard not to hug at airports, they hand you keys to a second car and you drive yourself through the mountain pass behind them, feeling that familiar dry heat on your tongue, sinking into waves of a different kind of life. We eat dinner outside, call out behind like a restaurant kitchen and season from different salt bowls, but it seems a small price to pay for everything else being predictable. I sit outside under the stars later, alone under a silent Milky Way, watching little asteroids go up in flame in the periphery and wonder if they'll grant your wishes even if you were not looking straight at them when they went out. My wishes are clearer now, I am no longer lost and grasping after straws, do you hear me? These straws are a jungle now, are great big baobab trees and there's no ignoring them where they grow. You send all your stars my way, I'll will them to shoot across the entire sky, I will dig where they land. I am ready for these treasures, now, leave it all up to me, I am ready.