It's dry here and I am too

It's dry here. My breath comes filtered through boogers that intermittently crack and congeal and gush, because of the crying. I'm crying a lot. I cried a lot in North Carolina for reasons that turned out to be the same. I'm calling it my hero's journey even if I end up as the tragic kind that I haven't studied in keen depth. I just know about it, because everyone does. The last I heard about the hero's journey was the guy who did Rick and Morty explaining why his episodes are so good. Nuts to szechuan sauce: the formula works.

So we can pretend that I came "home" for more cosmic reasons. We can pretend about manifesting and intuition even though my gut begged me to stay. I won't gloat if this goes to shit (saying this now)(memorializing) but I want to, because my brain is back home in the blue ridge, on a rainy December to January night, slung over a creek in a hammock, shivering in my goose down coat, with Kyle's oversized ushanka shoved straight down to my eyebrows.

And thinking: I could shit in a five gallon bucketful of sawdust for the rest of my life.

I could cook stone soup shakshuka in a cast iron over the fire and watch Kyle whittle a bowl with a blade christened Bed Knife. Let the girls roam free. They like it here. I'm not projecting. I'm not.

I'll die under this green, or I'll die trying. I want to suffocate in the life that effuses from every leaf.

You can't, Kyle says in my imagination. It's oxygen. You'll only live more.

Which is why I feel like I'm dying here. Why pretending the prairie is good and fun and cute and spiritually fulfilling takes so much energy it drains me empty. Empty as the stupid dusty dirt and stupid yellow grass that can't even manage to claim every square inch of it. Where are the dogwoods, dammit! Why are the highways not lined in daffodils! I heard the North Carolina state government plants them along the side of the road for deceptively wild beauty. Color me deceived. And happy. Is it tiger lily season yet? Or should I just end it already.

I'm thinking of ice plants. My prayer, even though I know they grow down south just fine, because everything does. So then I think of columbines, the periwinkle, rocky mountain kind that bloom big as a fist and hide at high altitudes. God is in the fairy trumpets, the scarlet paint brushes, the legitimately wild irises that grew in the field where we shot guns before Mike died.

That was a day heaven came dangerously close to earth.

Same with the day I climbed my tallest mountain, Peak 10. We were shooting for Peak 9 but missed: me, dad, mom. It's the last adventure we'd go on alone, the three of us. Maybe I knew; maybe the crystalline source stream with those tiny, red-berried succulents boasted of it, divorce. The leaves were red-tipped after all. Barbed with blood.

Divorce is an ugly word.

Divorce should be called the daddy issues starter kit, because if dad doesn't love mom, then there's no fucking chance he'll recognize the beauty in my twisted feminine. I'm a cunt, dad. Not a flower. Give me something to judge and I'll judge it until I suck the last scrap of oxygen from this shitty, stupid state. See—I'm doing it again. You spawned me on the right side of the Mason-Dixon line but with the wrong attitude.

When I've pilfered what air I can, I'll be back. Can't you see I'm scarce? That my roots have a slim chance to take and a slimmer chance to thrive? These mountains boast fresh geological violence, crusted over, riddled with beetle kill carnage. I crave blankets of kudzu, a faster, though equally fierce strangle. I don't know why. Actually, the answer is simple: green is my favorite color.

(I can't help but to think here, as I edit, of the frozen waterfall on our drive down the 70, our first dip in the Rockies since moving. There was copper in the cliff. Thirty foot ice stalks, green.)

I drowned in green New Year's night in Marshall. I wished it had swallowed me then. To spare me the sting of ripping out my morning boogers, and pretending I don't get sick delight from it, my masochistic return. You're a booger and I'll rip you out too. Maybe I'll get a nosebleed like I did that day in the front seat of your Honda Civic. There was so much blood,you told mom later, you'd think someone died in there. I had never seen so much of my guts come out.

If only I had known what would happen last Sunday at the reservoir!

It's beautiful out here, I tell myself, car keys jabbed in the meat of my palm. The sky is a vacant half dome. I can see too much of it. There's no one around and the car is now four miles back down the paved path that winds circularly for eight miles more. I can make a false trail run of this path, I think, looking at the mowed strip of yellow grass beside the concrete. It's the kind of stiff, jagged stalks that could poke holes in my feet if I was barefoot. For some sensory fun, I picture it. I'm crying.

I don't do this in front of mom. I'm afraid she'll judge me. Her calculations stop for and spare no one, save for distant acquaintances, who will always look good, because only intimacy strips haloes like those damn beetles strip pine. Here I am, naked and porous, is this what you wanted to see? Oh, you wanted entire reddish brownish mountainsides of what was, what could have been deep green, what could have lived for centuries? Here I am, fam. Use my chewed up parts in some cutesy sustainable art project. Beetle kill, how quaint! How good!

Naked is good if you're about to die, because naked about feel likes death. The holes have been poked. The guts spill forth. Pour some love in me please; please think that I'm pretty when I wither; tack me onto the ceiling of a sanctuary and praise the way I fell, haloless.

Put my halo back on. I'll beg.

I thought tonight of what dad would have done if I had gotten on my knees in that sharp as shit yellow grass. What if I said the etch-a-sketch line then: I'm not that girl anymore. I'm not bitter, I swear. I'm ready to love. Let the judgment stop. It's judgy to judge judginess. Judge not, lest ye be judged. I keep saying that in my head. I really, finally understand it. Maybe you don't have to have strong opinions on everything—I read that somewhere on the internet. It'd be funny if dril said it, but I don't think he did. Maybe it was Hank Green. Or his brother. I forget which one of them is more popular.

I'd like to think that if I didn't have any opinions then everyone would love me again. Problem is I'd still have this charming personality. Someone call in the beetles! Ha-ha. Just kidding.

But seriously, I had to stop counting the number of times people told me they'd kill themselves if they moved back in with their mom. Thanks guys. I am keeping track of the number of times people have complimented my style. We're at four right now.

And oh Freud, you motherfucker. The best compliment came from dad: I know I shouldn't pick favorites, but I always thought you were the most capable. I hope writing it down doesn't strip it of its potency. My brain is bare and all I can think is praise me, daddy! God only knows how long I can ride the high, how far and how fast, because daddy told me he thought I'd start an enterprise; he thought I'd have a farm. And here I am, guts out, shot straight into the sky, or the sky came down. It's the same but different, validating in both directions, all at once.

The sky is bigger out here.

The sky is so big I can't tell if I'm in heaven or hell and either way I'm damned. Either way I'm crawling through ragged buffalo blue and spiny cacti with snot to my chin, petitioning anyone who will listen: I still have earthly dreams. Please believe me. Return is not submission—disregard my present position. Disregard the fluids that weep so readily from wounds that were god-given. I have so many holes. It's no surprise I'd evaporate, here, more than anywhere else in the world.

Maybe I'll start a forest fire. Maybe I'll burn. I'll take five hundred houses down with me and drive up property prices so thoroughly my poor widower will never own. In ash I'll blame you: it's dry here. How could you.

Or maybe I'll land face first in ice cold virgin water and let it gently slough away my biohazards. By the time I stop breathing my gunk will have trickled down to feed bunnies and bighorns, who might taste something funny but don't have words for what's off. It's me. I'm in your waters, up top. Reconstituting and dying at the same time. I don't need as much oxygen as I thought, so long as I'm this close to God.

I saw daffodils outside of d bar and nearly shat myself. The Colorado government doesn't plant them on the side of the road. I have to work harder to find flowers. I might have to grow them myself.