States and Being

Vermont: To someone who told me they loved me

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There’s a space for you to be here, but you’re not. Eight folding lawn chairs slightly unsteadied by the gravel in your driveway, watching Ryan stuff newspapers in the pyre. I’m leaning back enough that something is slipping away from me but I’m not sure what. His back is to me but I can hear the familiar rip of the match against its box. 

He will be striking it the same way he touches everything else—hard, carefully, and straight across. He will cautiously carry it through the night air, tossing it into a crevice where it can catch. The pine needles will convulse where it hits, and the heat will reach us before the crescendo does.

In linguistic anthropology, there is this big idea called indexicality. A sign points to an element, one thing means something else is there too. The prime example is “smoke indexes fire;” you cannot have smoke without fire. 

I’m looking sideways at the orange reflected in Elena’s eyes, a koi fish swimming north across her iris, its tail flickering behind it. Her gaze is trained on the smoke as it billows and rises up and up and up until it folds into the Vermont sky. Maybe she’s watching for something to happen or maybe she knows it won’t. Maybe there’s something romantic in being completely and utterly doomed or maybe there’s nothing at all at the top of the tower of smoke and you were never going to come back either way.

The wind changes silently and the smoke settles on me, scraping my lungs before stinging my eyes or skin. Something has gotten at me from the inside again. I don’t know where the smoke goes when it’s done with us and I don’t know why I never learn and why you still aren’t here. I am used to everything on top of me, to entities I cannot fight. You cannot have smoke without fire.

We sit in our heads for a while watching the blaze. Flames swell like ripe fruit, ready for you to bleed them dry into ash. I’m thinking about destruction and its means and what it does to you when you’re the one doing it. I’m looking at a place that is not here. Months later, I’m thinking of burning you to the ground. 

When he was really little, my younger brother liked to poke at fires with tiny sticks, and when I think more about things that you’ve said to me and burns on calluses I start to understand why. You cannot have smoke without fire.

Sometimes when I picture my father as a child, he is in the backseat of a car. His father’s left hand perches on the steering wheel while his right lights the pipe between his lips. The windows are closed and he remains quiet as the smoke fills the car. Or he’s coughing and sputtering and banging his fist against the window or he’s retreating inside himself or his journals or the lives he could have lived. What do I know about scars, about suffocation?

I’m still in the lawn chair after the fire dies. Owls hoot apologetically from the pines behind me, unable to fill the space in the air. Later, I come to sleep in your bed. But I lay awake for a while, still and silent, watching embers dance on the backs of my eyelids.

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Alaska: To someone who raised me

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I told you I was going as far north as I could, as far up and over everything as you would let me. I said I was hoping I wouldn’t die but I didn’t tell you when I almost did.

My older brother and I are standing at the top, wind careening into our skulls through our helmets. My father thinks the best thing about this place is the way you can look forever in every direction, but I think it’s the way nothing feels real today and nothing has been real until today.

Here, there are pieces of rock and piles of snow and sharp points that no one has ever touched, that no one can change no matter how hard they can clench their fist or how fast they can turn to leave. There are bigger things. Sunlight tucked between snow crystals and valleys that will look you in the eye. There are ways down, so fast and steep that you don’t even feel alone for a second. Footholds and overhangs and ground that can slip and take you with it. The open ocean, almost. There is a lot of space between being wanted and being loved.

I have always felt drawn to summits. I surrender my breath to elevation and watch everything shrink below me as something unwinds inside me. There is a new kind of intimacy, and it’s not whispers on the rooftop or watery eyes in the airport or hands around my neck. Your house or the latch on the back door.

We listen for the fall, the frantic growl of slipping ice that tells us it is safe to go down. I think I could wait forever, hearing cold crowns crumble. The air is getting thinner and the days are dripping down in yellow and I am learning to let go. I am learning that a stranger is not the worst thing in the world to be.

I used to dare myself to keep up with my older brother, to align my footprints with his in the snow, to mimic the corner of his mouth when he said something cruel. I used to swallow my breath when I looked down. I called myself a liar. I wanted to be wanted so badly I think it snapped something somewhere far away from here.

When a slope fractures, they call it an avalanche. Everything is really loud and bright and fast and then it’s over. In some mountain ranges, including here in the Chugach, expedition companies hire avalanche control teams to trigger a slide before nature can, marking the area safe. I imagine men with orange parkas and thick mustaches casting sticks of dynamite into crevices the way Ryan threw his match into the fire. When it’s hit and begins careening downward, the mass of snow suffocates everything in its path back to base. But the site of the explosion looks smooth, soft, and untouched, if you don’t know any better.

I am often perched outside myself measuring the space I take up. My pack is too tight around my waist, my heart too big in my throat. We look out and over and through the jagged mountains as they draw blood from the horizon. Blinding white snow rests quietly on each face, never quite reaching the tops. Whistles and taunts echo down from the bare peaks, tumbling over themselves to pin us against the rock face. The wind does not wait for listeners. This is how you always wanted me to fall. This is where I look when I’m angry, how I feel when I’m small.

On the way down, I think about dancing in gravity, about unconditional surrender, about what you let in. Memories come later, stumbling home like drunkards.

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New York: To someone who became me

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I’m home now, in the place you defend so fiercely you would think it did something for you that it never did. Near moonlit ceilings you’d watch from your twin bed, knowing you’d be eighteen years older when you woke up.

The path is dark and soft until it isn’t. Mia and I are silent, our sneakers softly pressing into the earth as we step over shadows of pine trees and finally emerge from the forest’s lips. I’s a foreign feeling, being spit out but not chewed up. 

The canyon arches its back below us, a murky blue ribbon speckled with rapids. Walls of time, cliffs banded with horizontal streaks, guide its course. Ravens soar towards stars we cannot see, tossing cries between each other. Spruces and evergreens beam from the clifftops in their summer glory, looking small from this vantage point. They line the bottom of these walls too, huddling in curves and climbing up the gentler slopes. At my feet, Queen Anne’s Lace flowers tremble in the breeze, necks extended over the canyon. I wonder if they shake with fear or excitement, and what the difference is. I’m laughing at silver and gold, running my fingers down their vertebrae. I think I could fall up into the sky.

To my left, Mia’s dark brown eyes, shadowed further by her baseball cap, crinkle as her head tilts back. It’s not a gentle crease; it’s the kind of softening that can only come from an external power, from surroundings so crushing that you have no choice but to fold in on yourself a little bit.

My father knows everything and walks softly with his head down. My roommate is very quiet when people say nice things to her. When my mother came to see me in the spring, my spine slackened and bent like a sapling in my her arms. This is the price you pay for things worth holding onto and places worth falling into. You know what I mean.

Mia and I stare upwards, watching branches quiver as songbirds take off above our heads. I’m breathing in her laugh and thinking of all the secrets I told her when we were kids together and wondering what it would be like if we just stayed in August. Maybe there is a thing called sanctity, but it’s tucked in quiet river bends and scatters in treetops and sits on the shoulders of old friends. 

Maybe there is space here for you and me. One birdsong trickles into another and the rocks stand here for another million years and I can be strong even when my body starts to cave in.

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