Dixie National Forest

Drive up winding roads, the mountainside ragged from wildfire and winter. We reach 11,000 feet and my breath falls short in my lungs. He writes temptations into the ether, I don't know where to put it. A light ache remains, but it doesn't know where to go either, everything is a strange state of suspended disbelief. We arrive at the little ski town by dusk, emptied for the season but still with the scent of chlorinated pools and firewood in the halls. 

Make our way to a campground on the other side of the mountain to find the only open restaurant in the park. I sit underneath a deer head. A sign next to it says "probably shot out of season," like a badge of honor. On the way home, we pass enormous elk in the forest glens. Who decides what a season is, anyway. 

The bedroom is dark, silent, warm. I sleep well into the morning. The air is trying to tell me something. 

I'm almost ready to listen. 

Because I've Built My Life Around You

Is that okay? he says, his voice low and soft. I take a deep breath, the air smells of sweat and cologne. I nod. Firm hands on warm skin, ache through it, talk about our lives in brief interjections, like curiosities, like nothing really exists outside this room, we only pretend it does. I emerge from the fog eventually, unsure of the events, unsure of the soft bruising along my back, sit staring at the night sky. Snow in May, I sigh, exasperated, and look for shooting stars again. Happy just to hope for something. 

The thing about night skies, though, is you can spend the hours looking for shooting stars upon which to place your prayers, but you ignore the brightest light of all. 

So I stared at the moon instead, this steady beacon, this reliable light in the darkness. How many millenia have we wondered about its rough shadows, how many nights has it lit my way home? You can look for morsels of magic all you like. 

The answer was always much more obvious than you could have asked for.

But no one can make you see the light but you. 

Renew

Because it's all in my head
"You're too sensitive,"
they said
I said, "Okay,
but let's discuss this
at the hospital" 

"Sure," I said, "let's sign on for another year."

I'm not going anywhere.

Off

By morning, the air is below freezing, dustings of frost across the budding leaves. The cattle are out, little calves jumping around their mothers in the early hours. The creek is full of runoff from the mountains, such a brief moment of life before the scorched earth arrives. I wake early with the blinds up, reveling in disorientation. Begging for the earth to tilt on its axis and shake this jumble of bones back into some semblance of order. I sat on the plane, unrecognizable to myself, and yet no stranger to the feeling. 

Late at night, I sit shivering on the lawn, returned yet again to ask for answers from the Universe. The moon so bright the stars daren't come out. 

Except just next to the moon, where the light is brightest of all, where the sky still looks blue from illumination, one star shone, so bright it would not be silenced by any power around it. I stared at it until my lips were blue, asking what it meant by its steadfast lights. 

The stars do not reveal their secrets. But they will give you the thread that you may begin to pull
yourself.

Monday Morning

May 9 and I wake to snow on the ground. The spring brook outside the window carries on, unrelenting, but it looks colder now, less hopeful. The flowering trees shiver under the dusting, but it's nothing they haven't seen before. 

I know how they feel. 

My To-do list runs long, Monday mornings like a heavy drag across your chest and you wonder what the point is. There was a time when I'd come to this country view only to write the stories of my own whims, but they feel long gone now. I look at nearby rentals and still can't make the mortgage. 

The secret evades me, time after time, year after year. I felt so close a few times, like I could smell its promises on the wind, like if I only stretched my fingers into the sunlight ahead I could touch it. But that was long ago now, lately my fingers shiver from cold, the silence is deafening. 

Questions trickle out of my chest like stolen goods. Nobody is buying. 

They turn to dust on the ground.

Silent

Nine hours of sleep, the country works its magic on tightly wound New Yorkers, the saying is quiet like the grave but perhaps it's more quiet like peace. A spring brook runs past the house, only for these few weeks when the desert is green, the sounds of swirling water, the sounds of returning life, I am mesmerized for hours watching it play. Soon it will be gone again. The chickens look at me, trying to gauge if I am a bringer of treats. 

I'm here full of questions again, myself. 

Departure

You have only a few hours to sleep, so you don't. Lie awake with the radiator pulsating, sounds of East Village Friday nights beaming through the incessant rain. In the early morning, the city is still dark, still slick, I close the door behind me and race across the Williamsburg Bridge. The tingle of travel evades me, but then the tingles of all things evade me lately. I look for light switches in the dark, look for sparks against the flint, anything to start this dead engine again. My landlord raises the rent, says I could've made it so much higher but I like you, and I wonder if there is room left in New York for struggling writers looking for magic. 

At the airport, a young man next to me looks at my bag and says, "Do they have particularly good eggs in New York?" An empty egg carton that doesn't fit anywhere else sticks out of an open pocket. "No," I reply. "But my parents' valley does." Illness eats at you like dry rot, quietly at first, inconscpicous, and suddenly one day you find that your entire insides have turned to mulch, have turned useless beneath your finger. The seat next to you on the flight is empty. You think,

We must find gratitude in even the smallest
of moments.