After a long shower, I am told to pray. Not told per se because I felt a light-bubble in my heart and on average light bubbles don’t talk. They burst. Exploded, but in a nice way like the first time I held your hand and thought maybe I could explode in Central Park. It was cold. So I took you in for some soup near the Plaza and all I could think about was why you wouldn’t look me in the eyes.

After a long prayer, my knees go numb from the carpet and my nose had a burn on it and I tried not the imagine how many particles of bugs I inhaled. My hair is growing longer and with it, my strength.

After I can’t go to sleep past my bedtime, I wonder if I will dream of dolphins again. I should have taken out the trash. I could spend more time alone in the mountains and watch a super moon rise and maybe I’d dream I was exploding in an ocean. As though my body was a bridge to where you want to go, but can’t.

After I tried to mend the curtains which had fallen, I sat in the middle of my room, naked and happy I could do that. My biggest flaws are being shown to me by way of not eating breakfast and almost fainting in the afternoon like I’m some kind of mystic with iron deficiency. I want to love the whole world and be a better person but I end up focusing on my weight instead. This is not an unusual problem for a woman in her twenties who has no real problems in her life. I am grateful to be ordinary.

After a long walk, I decide you are my token animal which is a dolphin made of the hardest wood to carve. Which means someone spent a long time crafting you which means I will never throw it into the sea or a river or any other body of water thinking I wasted any time loving you the best way I know how.

After a long shower I am clean and my mind loves me and the world and everything in it even when I’m sad or impatient or careless light-bubble-deaf and do not pray for what I need. Which means, I need nothing and have arrived at my death happy to have been here at all, with flowers and such in my hand, having failed and fallen and risen again.

I went camping in my sleep and found a red bird half beaten to death by ants. It was already dead. And someone painted a picture of it with twigs sticking out of the frame to “get us there.” I was already there. There in the wonderworld and everyone was screwing each other because they loved to feel something.

Screw the horse in the field on the other side of the fence of the red bird eaten by ants. Broken leg. Speaking.

Wind. Screw it, too. In my sleep, I found my heart doing a dance on a mountain. I was screwing myself next to a carnival. Someone painted a picture of that, too.

A man named Jessie said he had a mandala waiting to happen in his hand for me. I said if it didn’t include the red bird it was shit. Someone painted a new mother bent over a fence. The horse was speaking. Broken leg and all.

Screw the wonderworld without you in it. I love to embrace everything and then break its legs. I am an ant colony carnival. And lights within a mandala screwing myself next to a man named Jessie. Paint a picture of that. Hang it in the Museum of Modern Art.

I have twigs in my hair in the wonderworld. You’ll live in me.

A mandala when I die. Which is already happening, said Jessie.

So we rode away on a horse with a broken leg. The red bird, belly full of ants, new mother, my guide to the other side.

Screw that and paint about it. I’m camping in my sleep which means I’m dead. That’s how I “get you there.” By speaking. I know because I love to feel something bent over a fence.

After the planting, she ran from room to room down hallways into the dark. Each room the same: women tied to windows with their secrets and each in the same dress.

When she began to grow, her body a different shape, she remembered her mother once told her, They will think you’re ready but you won’t be.

The girl swirled her corn and green beans together as if a painting or a field of dots and daisies and knew by the feeling in her stomach her mother had missed the point when the girl crossed over.

At sixteen her mother was planted in the ground. It was spring. She kept growing. Her mother, too, into a field or dots and her father more angry.

Do not look for the dress at the bottom of Sleepless Creek. She gave it to me by hanging it in a tree the night the rooms grew smaller and she could no longer hide. The women untied themselves and their secrets.

It was on this night her father woke and didn’t know how to feel so he felt for her.

She knew she wasn’t ready so she ran to the boat as a girl they had built, her father and her, together. It wasn’t ready either. Never finished because her mother was planted and things keep growing even though they stopped building things.

A boy at the bank had his rifle and a fear of his own feelings.

Because her father had taught her, she knew how to see things that shouldn’t be seen. Like pain twisted into being beautiful and lonely and forgotten.

She laughed, said, Catch me.

At nineteen he was a man, really, but outfitted with a teenage soul stuck in the soil like her mother’s bones and her father’s misplaced passion.

Come here, he said, scared at remembering a man named Willie who, much older, had pain of his own and ways of dealing with it that involved prey.

He prayed. She listened. She let him.

Because somewhere inside her a man that was her father took over. And the boy that was a man became the girl in the dress and he let her take it off, swing it on a tree, a flag or a way to find their way back after the damage was done. Whatever it was it was not love, but similar.

Don’t look for the dress at the bottom of Sleepless Creek. It is meant for a baby which between the two became a snake and rage. So beautiful don’t think I didn’t eat it. I did.

Don’t think I’m looking in on the room. Don’t think I’m above it all, on a roof, head bent down so I can see through the bars and hear their secrets.

Time travel is not possible, his mother said over steak and mashed potatoes which had gone cold while he swirled his fork in and out like a pile of muck he used to clean in the summers for money.

He used to clean stalls and ride in a car with a man named Willie who was much older but outfitted with a teenager soul. This was when he learned to hunt coyote and drink liquor made from a trash can. How to spot which girls would go far enough to make it fun, and which would run.

Catching ‘em is a lot like fishing, get it? Willie would say, holding a rifle out the window and squinting into the beam of a spot light. Some dash, he said, and damn, some dance.

Don’t look into the bottom of sleepless creek. I wrote a letter to a boy who, somewhere between Mississippi and Texas lost the feeling in his hands. The only way to feel them again? He liked the grip of a rifle and the tear of a skirt. But his heart was left in a boat painted blue which should never have been taken onto the water, but was. A girl, sixteen, ran away from her father and into that boat.

Not much better, my company, the boy said.

By this time, nineteen was no longer a boy but a man. However, much like Willie,  he was outfitted with a soul stuck in a certain place. A hard place. At the bottom of a creek somewhere.

The girl, sixteen, laughed and said, Catch me.

Her hands pale like his mothers. An image he didn’t remember but recalled like a long sleep and warm glasses of milk.

Underneath, after her, that night, the blue boat, there was nothing left but rage. And the only way to feel his hands was to try and wait it out. Wait out each woman to see what she’d do. Go far enough to make it fun, or run. Either way he’d catch them. He’d stand on their ankles and pray it would be the last time. The last time and then whatever it was that made him do it would fade.

Don’t look for the letter or the women in the room down past the hallways. And don’t think I’m watching. I am.

As it is there is a big sky above me. My diary says that should be enough. That I am a thought-bird in a body which is caged in a corner of a part of the world in which I grew up. And really, I should let the sky transport me.

When I was little I liked the big fields. Still do. I guess. Difference is, when I was little, the big field was more my imagination than it is now. Now, I drive to work and do things that make money and keep me paying bills because I decided education was a good idea. However debt is not. When I was little, the field was a man. By that I mean my horse and I could conquer him, or love him. Sometimes I’d fall off my horse and into his arms. There are stickers in his skin. I live/lived in the desert.

My mountain hermit goat idea was born while living in New York city. I wanted quiet. And space. And goats seemed like good company because I used to go to the mountains as a kid and they have stable footing made specifically for mountains and rocks.

If I drive 3 hours south I can be in the mountains again. Desert mountains. Not like the ones in New Mexico. Sangre De Christo. Blood of Christ. They are my favorite mountains which is why every time I hear the Simon and Garfunkel song “Heart and Bones” I feel like I’m running in a valley near Hermit’s Peak and that makes me happy.

As it is now, I’m still in the desert, which is flat, but at a rather high elevation, which is why there is a lot of porous rock and oil underneath. Which is why I moved back because I was in debt. I help get legal things in order so that people who own the said porous rock minerals can get money when we drill for oil.

I have a fascination with rocks. Mountains. That sort of thing. Goats do, too. Or at least their feet are made to form to it.

Someone once said you could be anywhere in the world and it all depends on your attitude. I like people. And what they say. I believe it. Christ can be two thousand places at once and in different formations at once. Whether it’s in the form geological formations or in the form of a goat.

I’d have to have a horse if I was to be a hermit on a goat farm on the side of a mountain. How else would I carry provisions back and forth? I’d need a cabin, too. And maybe a man to help me build the cabin.

I think you can be a hermit with someone else around. You’d just have to have your hermit time planned out. Like monks. Except if I was to be a hermit with another hermit I wouldn’t expect celibacy. That’s ridiculous.

Once I went to the mountains of Utah because I wanted to find myself. I was part of a tribe. And there were “Elders” which really means they were the ones who had already been found and were teaching us how to survive in the wilderness. Two of the elders were married. One was named Black Wolf and his wife’s name was Spirit Knife. I was jealous because they got to live their lives together helping teenagers find themselves and in the middle of the night I know they made love in their A-frame.

I thought about them last weekend while driving back from a river to the desert. I could see bits of hills, the last bits, before the flatlands opened up. The sun was going down. And sunsets in the desert are about as beautiful as whatever poet tries to describe as beautiful by mentioning a bowl of cherries after having already built on an image of children and heartbreak and his lovers hips. Subtle yet powerful and done in a way that you don’t even realize it’s being done to you until you stand there or sit in a car and see the colors change and widen its mouth to encompass the whole horizon and your skin at the same time.

Maybe it doesn’t matter I’m not on a mountain with a herd of goats. I keep writing into these ideas because I keep wanting to be somewhere I’m not. But if you keep walking in circles, without your eyes open, you’ll get dizzy and disoriented and you’ll forget to fall in love with your own angel that set you down, said, Shut up, you’re at this location for a reason.

That’s why I love maps. Love letters from a compass in your bones. The body knows better than any imagined field trip in your mind where you’re supposed to be.  And I am going. As I’m writing, I’m going. So are you.

You don’t yet understand how to see. How to look. Often you dream of snakes and oceans because you cannot trust yourself. There is a door and people are in your way. Thoughts. Try again.

Someone left you a note in your closet. It reads:

Take yourself. Look in the mirror. Place oranges in front of her reflection. Light a candle. Repeat the process of breaking your own heart, then feed it.

Let’s start over. Imagine the snake devouring its own tail. This is what the lost do. They keep hurting themselves, though they speak themselves false, until one day the door opens.

When it does, there will be another, then another. Look at your reflection. Destroy her. Then feed her something sweet to keep going.

Enough of that.

WaysWeAreLost is linked on The Useless Critic’s Website. And so is a picture of me as a kid standing not too far from where I am now. Just down the street. Funny. I still don’t believe I’m back in the one place I spent the majority of my life trying to run away from. I’ll leave again. But I think the hometown has something good to offer me. Some lessons that I think I’m starting to learn. It’s weird that the place people usually feel most at home and “themselves” is home, where as I feel most my self when I’m out in the world, anywhere, other than home.

Check it out: HERE

The bracken is thick. My throat is sore. These things are related. I have a pen but no knife. I left it in a box near the kitchen so you could find it. I was afraid. You know what I mean. There are snails in my shoe. I put them there. You may find some in the cabinet next to my grandmother’s napkin rings. They like the dark. Give them a bit of moss. Though you may find it hard to gather any in the desert. It may rain. I think I felt it in my bones before I left. The desert welcomes it then floods. That’s what I’m doing. I stayed in the house too long. I need too much to go. This isn’t a normal story of being lost. I am not afraid. I was afraid, though, which is why I left the knife. While I’m in the bracken, I think of breasts. The kind that as I kid I wanted to learn to cut open. I never did learn, not really. I watched the other men do it. I hear you have to start at the bottom and work your way up. Careful not to cut the intestines or it will contaminate the meat. Mostly I was good at reading books and diagrams and instructional manuals on the porch in the heat drinking Big Red soda that I stole from the freezer where the men kept rabbits and rattle snakes. I liked the look of things frozen. Whole. Sometimes there were trails of brown that used to flow in veins of whatever rodent or reptile, on the freezer door handle. Worlds came off their brown gloves. Bodies. I was fascinated and frightened, which I suppose should have scared me. But instead I felt alive. Even as the shots rang out. The men walked through the brush in heat. Happy. I knew in my bones a kind of thrill they breathed. Though I was a girl and sat on the porch and drank Big Red and threw horseshoes. I have a knife hidden in the cabinet. At night I’m afraid I’ll swallow it. There are reasons the desert swells after a long drought. And it floods because it cannot accept too much of what it longs for. Because of this I had to leave. My throat hurts. The bracken is thick. But lost I am safer. You know what I mean. Keep the snails away from the sun.