Britney

Sue, a woman in her early 60s in Winnie-the-Pooh overalls who works on the farm, is telling us about her lifelong affair with the cacti of New Mexico. “When I was a little kid, I used to stick them into the sides of my Levis like this, so that I looked like a warrior.” The small splinter that is part of her demonstration settles into her denim like second home homecoming, unfazed by the transference. It is strange to think of nature as armor from the time of crib crawl, when I grew up into a fear of dirt and kneeling in patches of uncorrupted city. She picks at her gums with the spikes, before remembering that she forgot her teeth at home, and therefore only had tissue to offer herself. The soft exists in limbo without the bone.

***

Tonight is the night we spill ourselves over the adobe shelves built into the walls. One room holds light, the other dark, and we sit in the latter, passing around our marrow in the clay bowls that the hostel has lent us. At the end, it is decided by forces other than my own that a group hug should be how we find some sort of closure for the night, to soothe the inflammations and coax them back into their coves beneath the skin. I sit still, not breathing because as a child I taught myself that I could become invisible in an instant that way, even though I know that I am 17 and it will not work. Smiles emerge in the dim air like Cheshire cat recession, and I know that I cannot say no to the “join us!” and so I do not, and I turn my face during the hug and the one succeeding it so that my tears do not spread to the girls who are encasing me.

“I don’t know why I’m feeling like this,” I say to Z on the porch, “except I do and I don’t and the conflict makes me angrier than I am sad and I just can’t stop crying because no matter how happy I am, pain will always find me out. I know happiness isn’t constant but I hate it, I hate it.” It feels selfish, and at the time I know that it is and isn’t, but a few days later I ground myself in it being the former, because I know that there is so much left in my life to do and the most important strains of it rely upon carrying that pain to the forefront, and holding it on my shoulders without letting the weight buckle my knees, and that this is far better than any bubble I could ever find myself in. It is better because it is a purpose. It is better because it is birth from death, it is why the doctor that held my new body told my mother that my cries meant I would do something big, and as I have grown into myself I have wanted that large existence to not feed on itself but spill and spill into everything.

***

In Albuquerque, a morning is slick winds that grope us under our coats, turning into an afternoon of sun waltzes with bared skin and sand being beaten from our soles. We hold seasons in a day, but I know that they are not ours to keep, and that is fair to me. New York exists as a past, even though I know that soon this will be my past, and I know that I must live in the moment but also acknowledge this stretch of time as a bridge and not land because I must carry the pieces I have gathered back to my own home.

***

H and I wake up early to scale the hostel and settle onto the roof of the next door tattoo parlor. Our priority is the sunrise. We walk close to the edge of the roof, a smooth white surface haphazardly slapped with the dirt prints of long-gone feet. For the past few days, we have been tracking the Sandia Mountains that trail alongside us in the east, but right now, they are right before our faces like a humble god descending to accept its offerings. To the west, H shows me, sits the Three Sisters, believed by Navajos, Apaches, and Pueblos of this land to have been created by spiritual beings in the past that exists beyond words and recollection. They are the first volcanoes I have ever seen, I think, and I hug the slopes with my eyes until they remain with me mentally. We do not actually see the sun rise, only the difference in the sky enclosing it, and we decide that we have never actually seen it rise. We have only seen the signs. ♦