Flagstaff
I don’t know what I expected. Just because the back of a cell phone is flat doesn’t mean that it’ll skip across the water. Maybe I wanted to see whether or not the laws of density actually applied. Was it that I wanted to have an excuse for why I didn’t call or respond to texts?
I’ll say, “Sorry I didn’t get back to you I dropped my phone in the lake.”
Sounds a little better than, “I can’t afford the minutes.”
I fell in love with Flagstaff the second I’d arrived. I’d never seen so many stars in the sky. Their celestial dance was only interrupted by the resolute faces of the Kachina Peaks and wisps of clouds. The full moon burned through the infinite darkness like the Summer sun and illuminated Route 66 more than the sepia-tone streetlights could. At some point, the wonder was lost in the day-to-day shuffle. Maybe I fell in love with her because this is where I ran to. It’s hard not to romanticize something when it’s all you’ve got left. Still, it’s damn hard to appreciate when you’re sleeping under the stars by force, not choice. This was what I always said I wanted, but it didn’t feel right. I was empty and adrift. I was a tumbleweed in a perpetually sloping desert. I was alone, devoid of any humanity, a shell of what I once was.
“It isn’t my fault,” I’d choke out between bowls, bottles, and sobs, “They did this to me.”
The bed of my pickup wrapped me in her cold, metallic embrace. It tried its best to keep me warm, but how does an inanimate object reanimate the dead?
It doesn’t.
I was a caricature of the poster boy for conditions that I didn’t even consider I had. Hopeless and abandoned, tossed out in the cold. I burned every bridge to feel the heat, to feel something. The flames were catching up to me, turning what was left of me to ash. Finally, my sanctimonious, misguided martyrdom began to take shape. Their violent delights had reached their violent ends. What was left of me was twisted into whatever weaponized me best. I escaped the fallout by following I40 as far west as my part-time dollars would take me. I attempted to recreate Sherman’s march to the sea, leaving a blaze of severed ties and painful memories behind. Instead, I was left with nothing and a pack of demons right behind me.
I’d spent all I had running.
Money.
Energy.
Time.
And what was I left with?
The love for a place that became a temporary escape from everything that dragged me down before. A spider hole for a worn-out soul with nowhere left to go. I didn’t want to face the truth so I tried to leave it all behind, but instead of going away for good, they all popped up when Granny died.
Then the demons knocked,
and I opened the door.
