Note: While small extracts of this writing have appeared in previous newsletters it has not been published before in its entirety
We will travel 1,004 miles in less than three hours, and I’m certain I forgot to pack my heart, again. This arid country, so unforgiving in its perspiration and glare; how something can look so astonishing in one light, so sickening in another. I watch as only the shadows of birds move across the hot concrete, in straight lines and towards that which only they can know. Give it some time, give it some revolution, a few revolutions of the sun—if these good intentions won’t last a lifetime then at least sit with them for now.
You suit me, and I do not need to look in the mirror as I leave the house.
People, small in their surroundings, made smaller still by the glare of the sunlight; they look for weightlessness but it’s as slippery as that green water you swam in. Cultivation has turned the landscape below us white, and we will later eat these things grown in straight lines under hot dripping plastic. I want to follow rivers, but I also want to know what it feels like to be one, and actually we want too much, so I’m quiet as I keep my hands underwater until they crumple, protest. Higher now, the mountains look like the paper I routinely screw up and throw in the bin, all sharp creases and shadows.