Britney

Albuquerque next week. I leave Saturday and return the next; there is a quick mental recession, and then I bull-charge toward it. I think there are about 30 of us going, or maybe the number is in the 20s, but the sea of faces is so large and so white that exactness doesn’t matter. The desert is where I want to be right now, and the farm we are giving our bodies to is where I need to be, but I know myself well enough to recognize the pattern of the future. (“In the past-future, our way of speaking, and believing.”)

I am daunted not only by all of my possibilities but by the pasts I was not aware of until the present. It is the biggest brick settled in my viscera, to know that time can come at me from any direction it pleases. To find that even though I have accepted the subjectivity of truth, I still believe my own to be concrete, in my tradition of grasping false hands long after they have dropped my own.

Nothing is wrong; I feel like something that is wrong, and those are different weights. He makes me feel like this is silly, a bridge to uncross, but the projectiles embracing my turrets say otherwise. They are plain-speak that I approach like sacred riddles, always the first mistake, always the one I make. I am scared to be over before I start. But I am also in fear of never starting no matter what I try to move out of the quicksand toward, settling into my oft-played role of stalled motor, being the dead horse that is beaten. ♦