A ROAD OF HER OWN
t f S A Written Creative Work submitted to the faculty of San Francisco State University 1 G \ ? In partial fulfillment of lUCnCuO the requirements for the Degree V.Z
Master of Fine Arts
In
Creative Writing
by
Kimberly Marie Gomes
San Francisco, California
January 2019 232
“It’s okay, Mira. Go ahead. I’ll save some dessert for you later if you want any.”
Jim grabbed the rest of Mira’s hot dog before she even left the table and shoved it in his mouth.
“Geeze, somebody’s hungry,” Lorraine said, coaxing his arm. He squeezed the thick of her thigh.
Something just didn’t feel right.
“She’s been acting strange every since we drove up.” I pushed my plate out towards Lorraine. “She rarely acts out on trips. How was she last time she was here?”
Lorraine took a swig of beer and slammed it to the table a bit louder than necessary.
“She seemed fine to me. The girl’s growing. You remember how your emotions were back then? It’s just puberty pains.”
Jim got up and cracked another beer. “Are we just going to sit here and dwell over this pouty kid, or are we going to enjoy ourselves? Whose up for Jim Rummy? We can wager with shots.” Lorraine laughed, hopping from her chair to his lap.
“I’m going to go talk with Mira.”
“Oh just let her be,” Lorraine said. 233
I found her down at the neighbor’s dock. The thing that struck me was she wasn’t looking out at the lake. Her back was to it. Instead, she was gazing up at the stain glass windows of the neighbor’s home. A giant red sun arched across the translucent wall. The real sun setting behind her.
She saw me coming, offered a little grin, like she wanted me there, but didn’t really want to show it. I sat behind her.
“You want a chair,” I said outstretching my arms for her to lean back on. She reclined, resting her hand in my lap, fixing her gaze to the sky.
“What’s going on, honey? What’s bothering you?”
She stayed quiet.
“Come on, Mira. I know something’s up. Something happen at school?”
“No.”
“Well, do you want to talk about it?”
“No.”
“So, something is wrong?”
“Everything’s fine.” A thin sheet of water welled across her eyes. 234
I put my thumbs to her temples and softly rubbed back and forth. A little thing I’d started when she was just a baby. It always soothed her no matter where we were. A thread of steady amidst constant change.
The sun started creeping beneath the mountains. The temperature dipped to a harsh chill. She shivered. I rubbed her arms.
“I don’t like Jim,” she said, low and sharp. My stomach contorted. I could feel my nostrils flaring, storm clouds swelling in my chest.
“Why?”
“I just don’t like him. Can we leave tomorrow? I don’t want to stay anymore.”
“It’s only been two days.”
“Mom, please. I promise, I’ll never ask for anything again. Can I just go home?”
Home. To me, home was parked out front of the cabin. To her, it was back in San
Francisco. If there was ever any question about it, it was clarified right there.
“Why don’t you like Jim?” 235
“Can we just go home? I mean what’s the big deal? Why do we have to be here just because Lorraine wants to be here? We’re not even real family. Why do I have go everywhere and act like we’re one.”
My heart sank in my gut. It was the first time I’d ever heard her say anything like that.
“Honey, we are a family. I know we’re not the typical looking one, but we love each other, don’t we? And we’re there for each other, aren’t we?
“Lorraine doesn’t care about us, Mom. She just cares about Jim. I don’t know how I’m the only one who gets that.” She pulled herself up off my lap, crossing her arms.
“Mira, what is going on with you?”
“I just don’t want to do this anymore. I don’t want to keep pretending I want to be places just because other people want to be there. I’m sick of it.”
“Okay, okay.” I rubbed her back. “We can leave tomorrow if it means that much to you. I’ll talk to Lorraine, okay?”
She breathed in heavy. “Fine.” 236
I combed my hands through her hair. She let me. “You never answered. Why don’t you like Jim?”
I could feel the back of her chest rising against my palms faster and faster by the second as I braided the tips of her hair.
“I just don’t like being around him.”
Gut flipped again.
“Why?”
“He’s just gross. I just don’t want to be around him anymore.”
“Is there anything else to it?”
“No. What else would there be to it?” Her voice started to crack.
“You sure?”
“Mom, can we just drop it? 1 don’t like him okay? I’m allowed to not like people.
I allowed to want to go home.”
I’d never felt that way before, felt the surging fire rip through my chest, all the while knowing I needed to look soft, feel soft, be tender for her in that moment. I pressed 237
her close, squeezing her tight. A tear rolled down the side of her cheek and landed on my
arm.
“We’ll leave first thing in the morning.”
“Can we sleep in Sunshine tonight?” she said, turning her head towards me for the
first time. Her eyes were wide and glassy. I knew right then I would kill Jim.
“Of course. Why don’t you watch the sun set and then go get settled in there? I’m
going to go talk to Jim and Lorraine for a bit.”
“Mom, just don’t make a big deal out of it, okay? Just tell them I don’t feel well or something. Please? It’s not a big deal.”
“Of course.”
When I walked up the steep driveway I felt what it was like to have everything strip out of you in one sweeping moment. To feel regret balloon in your belly for every second you weren’t there when you should’ve been. To feel wildfire rush from one vein to the other. To feel strong enough to kill. There was a small wooden plank leaning against the basement door. I picked it up in and slammed open the front door.
When I came in Lorraine and Jim were lying on the couch his lips against her neck. 238
I swung the wooden plank, swiping a framed photo of Jim dangling fish against
the wall.
“What the fuck did you do to my daughter, Jim?”
Jim shot up, neck cocked back to wall.
“Are you crazy? What the fuck do you think you’re doing? You’re in my god
damn house.”
“Gigi, are you nuts?! What the hell?” Lorraine yelled, jumping up from the couch.
“This pervert motherfucker did something to my daughter.”
“I didn’t do shit you crazy bitch.”
I swung the plank again, this time crashing against his beer bottle.
“What the fuck did you do to my kid?”
“She’s a little liar, Gigi. Kids make up stories all the god damn time. I didn’t do
shit.”
“What’s she talking about, Jim?” Lorraine turned towards him, shoulders
slumping.
“Are you serious? You too?” 239
“What’s she talking about, Jim?” Lorraine’s voice deepened.
“How am I supposed to know? Clearly the girl and her mom are fucking crazy.”
“Lorraine, we’re leaving in the morning. We’re going to sleep down the road tonight. I don’t want to be near this motherfucker. I know you did something, you creepy son of bitch. And the moment she has the courage to say, I am calling the cops on your ass.”
“Fuck you. Get the hell out of my house.” Jim jolted up, spreading his shoulders wide.
Lorraine fell silent, head drooping to the floor.
That night I held Mira the whole night, the way we used to when she was a child. I realized that night she still was in many ways. She still needed me in moments I wouldn’t know about until later. I tried subtly and not so subtly to get it out of her. To have her say what happened, because I knew something happened. But every time she just got colder and colder. Each time her eyes watered less and stiffened more. I knew the moment had changed her and I felt so like achingly empty, like all of the mothers in the parking lots, 240
on the col de sac, maybe they were right. Maybe I wasn’t fit to be a mother. But I think at one point or another, every woman feels that way.
After awhile I think we both tried to tuck Donner away, but it’s impossible to forget. After that summer, I couldn’t tear her away from her camera if I tried. She talked a lot of less and photographed a lot more. She asked to get a summer job and spend much of her free time there, socking away cash in her the coffee can I gave her. She started looking into scholarships for college even though she was three years from graduation day. She had grown up far faster than she should have. And there was nothing I could do about it. Mira and I spent most of the nights together in the van after that, using
Lorraine’s kitchen and bathroom as a part of home base. It happened gradually. An occasional night here and there turned to three or four per week. None of us talked about the growing space, but we all felt it in more ways than one. 241
Chapter 25
Day 11: Salt Lake City, Utah
A voicemail blinks on Mira’s phone. Missed call from Lorraine. A subtle string tightens in her chest. Lorraine. She had trouble returning her calls these days. Trouble talking to her, sounding genuine, like she really cared about the exchange. She tried to forget.
Countless attempts. She wanted to forget it. It had been more than fifteen years. She figured it was childish to hold onto things this long, to be so unforgiving, to look at someone and feel like you’re constantly looking through them. But lately, it started coming back again. The more she resisted, the more the vision stayed, haunting comers she thought were empty.
It had surfaced like a flash flood. Mira was taking a photo of child, the girl was about ten or so, her hair long and braided in the way like her own often was. She had a little toy
Polaroid in her hand. The girl crouched next to a bird, clicking the oversized button. At first it seemed too perfect, like she was capturing a miniature version of herself. And that’s when she remembered it vividly in ways she hadn’t in years. She saw herself on the dock, her first camera in hand, looking up at the stain-glass window, staring at it so long she imagined herself being part of it - the edges of red and glimmers of orange fusing with her olive skin. 242
She thought about it often even though she never brought up to Lorraine. It was one
of those moments where a person makes a decision that shows you who they are, or at
least who they were right then. Sometimes it’s kind moments, like when you see someone
offer a homeless man a sandwich as they’re likely on their way to eat it. Other times, not
so much. Glossed over fragments like where the twenty-something sitting on the packed
bus pretends not to see the pregnant woman standing in front him. Small dots create a
line, and once the dots widen into a window that glimpse tints the room with a hue you never knew was in them. It’s the kind of moment that could make some walk always altogether, or push it deep down into the belly, and build catacombs for the parts they’d
like to forget. Makes them squint just a touch before they offer up a smile to that person.
Because despite how long you shovel, how well you think it’s buried, you know what they’re capable of. You’ve witnessed that moment. And even though it could’ve been just
a poor choice in an uncanny moment, there’s always that little tap in between your
shoulder blades when you start to get close to them again. That moment reminding what was and what could be.
Jim had passed away just few years after that day at Donner Lake. Liver cancer,
karma, hard to say. And while his death was a bit of a relief, it left gaps in the
conversation, vengeance that couldn’t be had, apologies that would never come. Blame
floating uncomfortably beneath the light fixture in the room. So, it was easy to blame 243
Lorraine for bringing her there, for staying behind, for not acknowledging it after it
happened. With the quiet comes a shifting of pointed fingers, Mira pondering whether
she should have done more, responded quicker, screamed, yelled no, but instead just
stood there, eyes wide and frozen, lips flaccid, letting him happen to her. It was the quiet
that sowed the resentment. The quiet that let it grow from a seed no one wanted to talk
about to thickening bricks, one piled on top of the another, the makings of a wall between
her and Lorraine, between her and touch, between her and the world.
Later in college, when the vision surfaced more often than it had it years, she made herself feel better by saying it was just unwanted touch, just a series of unwelcomed kisses. Just a sloppy, disgusting, wet hose down forced down the throat. Just hands that lost their way. That so many of her close friends had been raped by uncles, cousins, boyfriends, that she was lucky. It could’ve been worse. But, the shame would quickly cloak. Face flush. The self-berating questions would chuck up like jackhammered concrete. Could have pushed him away. Could him stopped him after the first time.
Could have said something earlier. Could’ves churning, lifting lake water like a seiche wave, crashing against the cabin’s pier and the neighbor’s stain-glass window, swallowing everything that could’ve been beautiful. 244
She tried to love Lorraine in other ways. Tried to focus on the times she was kind, extended her home when she didn’t have to. Turned her living room into a bedroom, made dinners on the nights Gigi stayed out late, cut off the crust of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for Mira even though she hated wasting any bit of food. How she was there for every school milestone, from small moments like the talent show where Mira tried to play the ukulele to fronting money for dance class and soccer when Gigi couldn’t afford it. She always felt like she should be grateful, and many times she was. And during those it was easier to say it wasn’t Lorraine’s fault. She never could have known it would’ve happened that way. She was just a woman in love, not the one pressing Mira’s ten year- old body onto his. But even so, she never forgot how when that morning came, when she and Gigi drove away, Lorraine stayed. She didn’t even come to the window.
It was the loudest thing she never said.
Mira clears the voicemail from her phone and puts in the glove box. She walks down the slope to the river as the sun sets, feeling the soft earth give with each step. She flings off her sandals and walks right in. The cold trills up her legs, past her hips right through the spine. Her feet, cloaked in dirt from the day’s journey, now looked clean. She wades further into the water its current coaxing her close. As the water rose to her thighs, she kneels down and leans in, feeling the water kiss every inch of her back until it holds her head, chilling every part of her as the sun warms her face. The juxtaposition of 245
temperatures. The splitting of selves in a moment. The way buried secrets rise to the surface and bloom from wrists, reminders of how easily the body floats when she remembers nothing is actually weighing her down. 246
Chapter 26
Day 12: Little America, Wyoming
The morning sun creeps onto Mira’s face, sliding over limbs left outside of the afghan.
Sunshine chills the bones in the morning, panels hardly insulated leaving the nose and toes frozen despite how deep they’re hidden in the covers. Through the fogged window, she can see the tips of the pines, their silhouette slowly warming as the sun rises. So close to Yellowstone, she told herself she’d wake at the first sight of light. Wake and drive having heard the park stretches four states, making it far larger and longer than anything else she’s ever seen.
She fell asleep at the edge of Utah and Wyoming - a gravel pull out hidden behind a grove of trees a travel forum had said was safe for road trippers to sleep on without waking to a trooper’s flashlight knocking on the window. The more comfortable she’d gotten on the road, the more frequented free grounds become, keeping her further and further from people, the rush of cars, curated campsites, toilets and sinks to find comfort in. She inches down the back of the van, slips on her sandals and hops out. The cold nibbles at her cheeks, waking the body more quickly than any cup of coffee could.
Grabbing the toilet paper from the passenger seat, she walks to a tree and squats, hearing the birds wake with slow, sing-songs. As her thighs grow heavy baring her body’s 247
weight, she remembers the first time her mother taught her to use the bathroom outdoors, how resistant she was, how it took a least a dozen tries before she walked away without any unwanted drops splashing against her shoes.
“It’s important to be adaptable,” Gigi would tell Mira when she fussed, saying she’d rather wait for the next gas station. “The less you need, the better off you'll be in life. The more places you can go most rarely see. I know it’s not glamorous, but you’ll get used to it,” she’d say smirking to herself as she’d wander back to the van.
Mira finds that same smirk on her face as her back leans against the tree trunk — the little ways she finds herself slowly retracing her mother’s footsteps.
After oatmeal and tea, she’s back on the road. Red rock canyons and plateaus gradually transition into sweeping green plains going for miles and miles until a rare set of mountains emerges in the distance. Entering into Southern Wyoming, she can see the snowcapped set of peaks ahead, a small landmark circled on Gigi’s map - the Grand
Tetons. She pulls over as she reaches a lakeside view. Feet crunching against the dirt, she walks to the water’s edge. A chunky beaver nibbles on wood beneath a bush, fur slick with lake water. A child-like wonder rises through her, snapping poorly lit photos she knows probably won’t turn out. She considers putting her DSLR’s on automatic, but 248
instead adjusts the aperture and takes it anyway. She smiles at the little creature, the way
he pays no mind to her as his paws move from one edge of wet wood to the next.
Through the trees the mountains beam in morning light, the sun warming a single side
of each tightly crammed peak, turning leftovers slits of snow amber and pink. Amidst flat
lands, these five or six mountains seemingly jut out of nowhere, making the scene look
like something out of a fairytale. Mountains rise up from just behind a lake, leaving the
eye to wonder just how much land is behind it, how they got here, why they’re the only thing of its kind for as far as the eye can see. She feels her chest soften, a sleepy smile
stretches by the centimeter.
“Best way to wake,” she says. “To the new and beautiful.”
She pulls out her tripod for a few sunrises shots then leaves the scene behind,
imprinting the silhouette of the mountains in her mind, knowing this is likely the first and
last time she’ll ever see them.
When she reaches Yellowstone, she sees the mass scale of travelers had spoke about -
the way Yellowstone stretches endlessly. For hours she winds through tree-lined roads,
curves behind mountainside vistas, stretching along Yellowstone Lake that seems to go
for miles and miles before reaching the evergreen meadows. Rivers wind through 249
everything here, forming ponds, meeting the edge of waterfalls, splitting the endless
flatlands, inviting coyotes, bison and moose to all sip from their own spaces, visible to
but still a mile from the closest human. Unlike Utah’s parks, Yellowstone feels like it’s
intentionally been left wild. The road winding through the 200+ miles keeps visitors on
the same trail, leaving the rest for the animals that so many come to see. Up ahead
headlights turn red, both lanes of cars pausing. Mira slows, brow scrunching, wondering
how someone could possibly have gotten in an accident when driving this slow. As she
nears, there’s no smashed cars, but a cluster of bison munching on roadside greens, a hint
at why these vast miles of meadows look perfectly groomed. While beastly and hunch backed, this oversized creatures look as lazy and docile as they come. She snaps a photo from the drivers’ seat and goes deeper into the park, passing a trotting coyote in the distance, hornless elk and a moose so large its nearly the size of Sunshine.
So this is what it’s like, she thinks to herself. To see things wild and untamed, to withering creatures exist as their meant to — to not make ourselves the center of all things. 250
Chapter 27
Day 11: Yellowstone National Park, Wyoming
Mira had been driving and driving until her neck lost its ability to curve like the road did.
Hours felt like days inching down the narrow one lane road in Yellowstone. Tourists
stacked bumper to bumper in the heat of summer pausing every quarter mile to
photograph a lone bison eating grass on the side of the road as if it’d be the last. Sunset
was just an hour away and all the things she had on her list to see that day lessened and
lessened with each bend clogged in construction traffic. 200+ miles of land to traverse in
a single park and she only had one thing on her mind, one thing she really wanted to see
on that first day — the Grand Canyon. Not the one everyone hears about, but the its
forgotten sister in Wyoming — a smaller, pinker version with a creamy turquoise river winding miles below places feet can reach. It was the colors that drew her. The photographs of a rainbow canyon splitting itself open ridge by ridge, offering new shades
of purple, gray and gold as stone grew closer to the sulfuric waters that flowed through it.
But as she approached the sign for the Rim trail, she saw the line of cars waiting for
the same golden hour sight. Just a bit further stood an orange placard that said ‘trail
closed for construction.’ Mira’s chest tightened, breath shortened, head feeling an
incoming fog. Hunger churned her stomach, having only ate a couple granola bars on her 251
six hour drive through ranch land. Something, she muttered. I just need to see something beautiful. Something outside of this damn van. No matter how many serene pastures you pass, the legs — they need something to stretch to, reach for. The van may be the preferred mode of travel, but no matter what they say, for Mira, the destination matters.
What you see after all that reaching, it matters. Whether the day’s drive feels worth it when sunset comes, the mood you’re left with, the moment before light disappears and you’re sitting alone with your thoughts, it matters how tired, fulfilled, lifted you are from the day’s adventure.
She was just about to give up on the canyon altogether. Drive down Yellowstone
Lake, waters that would eventually reach the Atlantic, according to the woman at the gas station. Drive beyond past the bright green marsh that kissed the mouth of the waterfall turned river, across the grove where the stem moose roam and into the pine-lined campground where families roast marshmallows over fires she wouldn't build for herself alone. But she knew better. She knew when night fell, she’d need something, one strong image to keep her light and content through morning. So, when the small sign for the
Grand Prismatic Spring flashed on her left, she nearly swerved into the empty road, not a single waiting car in sight. No line for the parking lot like the others. Perfect, she whispered to herself. She parked, darted out so fast she forgot to lock the van, forgot to swap her sandals for shoes, forgot to care about anything but dissipating the drive’s fog. 252
It was here she saw what everyone had boasted about - that in Yellowstone, geological phenomena sit behind every bend. Remembered what the rangers had said, if you’re not hearing mud pop and splay up in the air, you’re seeing steam rise from underground volcanoes, nature’s pipes trying to contain themselves. She had seen photos of the hot springs, terraced hills that look like candied marshmallows. She knew from the map that in the center of the park sat Old Faithful, the world’s most naturally explosive foundation, a collection of 180 plus geysers surging from below. She read the bullet point points in construction traffic, how it housed a subterranean waterfall, a cavity the size of a car all of it gushing up and out like hell’s firehouse gone loose for the hundreds of spectators with cell phones pointing.
Feet hitting the boardwalk, she raced past the herd tourists still around despite the soon-to-set sun. She could see it - the earth bubbling, taking deep breaths, holding, holding, holding until it can no longer hold itself anymore.
Winding past the bubbling crystal lagoon, she studies it all, the painted, steaming earth, the deep orange soil just inches away from her toes, the wet, glistening hot springs.
Beyond the orange layer flanking the boardwalk sits a rainbow of minerals. Mira’s shutter fires away, capturing minute variations of the turquoise pool enwrapped in shades 253
of rusted orange, deep crimson, creamy yellows and earthen browns all blurring into one another. A photographer’s dream, she thinks, as she rounds the loop, trying to find openings amidst the herds of selfie sticks and family photos. She fidgets with the camera, feeling her chest constrict, her eyes entrance, her body wanting to press the swarms of tourists away from the five foot wide plank. A kaleidoscope of smells pass, variations of cologne and sunscreen all blend with the stench of rotten eggs protruding from the sulfuric springs. With enough time behind the lens, she feels the fog soften, watches the steam rise and rise from the water’s center. Everything before her seems like a combination of what boils from beneath, stories bubbling within, ones she and the volcano can no longer hold.
Signs all around the boardwalk talk of the life boiling beneath, reminding tourists that beneath these grounds is a volcano trying to breath itself back to center, trying to stifle the steam that keeps splitting rocks, trying to stay down, down, down, knowing its rightful direction would blow the land to pieces. How hard it must be, she thinks, to be on the explosive edge, trying to lid your potential for the sake of another. But, despite its best efforts, the boiling steam creeps through fissures in the rocks. Mira reads every fact as she passes. Some things, she thinks, some people, aren’t meant to be contained. But when the waters rise to the surface, their pools attract fractals of light, take on colors no one could have been anticipated. Minerals sitting on this ridge run off into the steaming 254
waters. Soon they become part of it, creating impossible to replicate colors, picturesque
layers people from all of the world come to see.
But that steam, that water, that story will find a way out. Find its way to the
smallest crack, create the slimmest fissure and slowly, steadily expand it like an open
palm widening doors to sweet relief. She sees in its the colors. She feels it in herself. The
same heat she felt up the center of her spine the day she first saw her mother wedged in the sofa chair, shades on, body immobile. She saw a new version of Gigi right then and
felt the guilt of putting her in a home meant for people far older, not knowing if this place would help or hinder her progress.
“I don’t belong here in this damn cage,” Gigi said sharply on that first day. Lorraine had already left, not one to stick around for uncomfortable moments. Mira sat there, holding guilt like a broken-winged bird. She hung photos of her mother’s adventures across the walls - an 8x10 of her and Sunshine near the Appalachian Trail, another along the Bayou of the deep South, Gigi hugging two Mexican women, the trio of heads
pressed together as they said goodbye from their home in the Yucatan. Sometimes you
surround someone with something in hopes its presence will rub off, sprinkle some kind
of fairy dust on degenerating eyes, a dwindling body, hoping whoever is looking down
can see all she was and bring her back to a fraction of those days. 255
Slowly walking along the wooden plank, Mira sees Gigi in the comer of the spring, in the distance far beyond the intended trail, walking along the pines where the wolves would, finding her own way to see a sight so many flock to. She lets the ache rise and rise up her chest.
She sits on the bench gazing in the steaming turquoise lagoon.
“It’s something isn’t it?” a woman’s voice says from her right. Mira’s eyes meet a silver-haired woman, back hunched in a wheelchair, voice strong and steady.
“It really is.”
“Your first time here?” the woman asks.
“Yeah, first time in Wyoming altogether.”
“Oh, you’re lucky. The first time is always the one that grabs you the most. I’ve been coming here for ten years straight now. Every summer my son and I come back to
Yellowstone. These boardwalks,” she says pointing beneath her feet. “They keep it accessible until your last breath. One of the few parks in the country that do that.”
“Yeah, I can see that.”
“Where you from?” 256
“San Francisco.”
“Ah, left my heart in San Francisco. Isn’t that what everyone says? Great city. You must hear that a lot though,” she says with a smirk. “How’s sights like these compare to land you have out there?”
“I’ve never seen anything like it.”
“Yeah it’s pretty incredible, huh? You know there’s a volcano underneath us right now? Shoots up 500 gallons to the surface every minute. Can you believe that? 500 gallons. Blows my mind every time.” Both the woman and Mira trail the colorful layers surrounding them, watching the steam rise and rise into the clouds.
“You know this is my favorite spot in all of Yellowstone,” the woman trails on.
“Over two hundred miles and I always find myself right back here, because of just that. It reminds me not to keep everything so locked in. To keep letting my desires, doubts, you know all the things people think fade with age, but don’t. I let them come up here. I like to share them with my son, grandkids. Looking at these kind of things, it brings up new truths. Every time we come, I try and pass on one of those things with my family, while
I’m still here.”
Mira smiles at the woman, at the possibilities her mere presence offers. 257
“You’re an inspiration to them I’m sure.”
“Oh I don’t know about that,” she says. “I have a lot of opinions about a lot of things, but the only thing I’m sure of is that life, time, age it all keeps moving. Gotta move with it.”
“Can’t argue with that.”
“The more I get outside, the more I’m grateful to still be here. And on the days the body keeps me down, I ask my son to go do something exciting for me. Go on a hike, try something new, talk to a stranger, whatever. And then come tell me about it. Second hand living, I call it. It’s better than no living at all,” she chuckles. A middle-aged man walks towards them, pausing just a few feet away from the wheelchair. Within seconds the woman feels his presence.
“Charlie, Charlie dear come meet this nice young lady. She’s from San Francisco.
You’ve been to San Francisco, haven’t you? She’s a brave, little, solo traveler like your mother was.” A sly grin creeps up the side of her wrinkled cheek.
“Still are, mom,” he says, patting her shoulder. “I’m Charlie. Thanks for keeping her company,” he says outstretching a hand.
“Oh, my pleasure. And I’m Mira by the way.” 258
“Mira,” the woman chimes in. “Never knew a Mira. Things are always the most beautiful the first time around.” She winks and reaches for Charlie’s hand. “Ok son, I think we can let this nice gal be now that I’ve talked her ear off. Let’s head over to river.
I’d like to see some of those dragonflies.” She rests her hands against her lap as Charlie turns her wheelchair. “And Mira, do me a favor will you?”
“Sure.”
She takes off her sunglasses. Her eyes light like gray, speckled moons. “Do some real secondhand living for me, would you?
“I can definitely try,” she says, cheeks blushing.
“Don’t try. Try lets the fear linger. Think less, live more. Not for me, but for yourself.” She raises her hand waving as Charlie rolls her away. “Maybe I’ll see you next year,” she hollers from over her shoulder. “And if I do, I’m looking forward to a good story.”
As the woman disappears behind the lines of tourists, Mira thinks of Gigi. How although life changed, it hadn’t ended. That experiencing the world was still entirely possible. That maybe they were seeing things from a narrowed view. Maybe her mother could still have a version of adventure, and during the times she couldn’t, Mira could offer up her own as tribute to the spirit Gigi passed on just by being herself. 259
Mira picks up the phone and walks down the wooden plank.
“Hey mom, you wouldn’t believe what’s in front of me.” 260
Chapter 28
Gigi, Summerset Assisted Living
Last night I had a dream — well more of a flashback. I was lying in the back of my van, comforter tucked to my nose, feet wrapped so tight it took minutes to find their way out.
It was the last trip I took before I nearly careened Sunshine into a fire hydrant. If Lorraine hadn’t been in the passenger seat I would’ve kept pushing. But I saw it in her eyes, the way they widened like a flame struck by lighter fluid. We both knew it was the last time
I’d sit that driver’s seat and I hated her for it.
It started like strobe lights, muddied rays, blurred edges pulsing at the corners of everything over and over and over. The first time I noticed it I was driving to a ranch in
Pescadero, pasture land with wide open cliffs a friend recommended as a space to get away. It was summer and money was tight, so I had starting working sporadic nights shifts at SF General, checking people in. When I’d get off the morning sun would hang, amber glow stretching over buildings full of people that hadn’t woke. Beside the siren darting here and there, the city stood silent. The day was full. And although my body hung with a tired slump that coffee couldn’t fix, it always made me want to make the most out of the time I had before I returned. So, I’d make some food in the back of
Sunshine and drive to the coast, going up or down depending which direction looked 261
brighter. That day it was south. I put on Creedance Clearwater and let Susie Q serenade me from San Francisco to Montara before switching to storytime with Bob Dylan past
Gray Whale Cove until reaching the marina where boats and surfers floated near the shore.
It wasn’t until after I picked up a bowl of chowder from the comer stand that my eye started to twitch into this aching pulse like the heartbeat that had traveled up the spine, past the cheekbone and into places it wasn’t meant for. The smell of creamy crab ruminated in my cup holder. A web-like haze flew in front of my right eye and stayed, beating to the rhythm of my pulse. I rubbed, squinted, kept driving through it. But it stayed firm, refusing to budge. When I reached the ranch, Lorraine and I climbed atop
Sunshine and just lay on the roof, looking up at the sky. Clouds with frayed edges slowly moving across the scene. If I stared long enough, the pulsing light almost looked like it fit up there, like the splotch of fear had found a fitting home. I don’t know how long I stayed up there. Could’ve been fifteen minutes, could’ve been an hour. I just stayed until the pulsing drifted away with the jet stream not saying a word..
I miss those days. When I could find a part of the world to disguise things in. When life hadn’t fully changed. When no one knew the breadth of things I wasn’t seeing. 262
When I woke up from the dream, Mira had called. She was in Yellowstone, staring at
the Grand Prismatic Spring.
« “Mom, you wouldn’t believe what’s in front me!” she said with a lightness in her
voice I hadn’t heard in years. I could hear it right there, her stretching beyond the woman
she left as, opening a little more each leg of the trip.
“It’s so good to hear your voice,” I admitted. “Tell me, what does it look like, the
spring?.”
“I’ve never seen colors like this. Bright colors everywhere, reds, rusted oranges, yellows all circling this bright blue lagoon. Steam is everywhere. Coming up from an underground volcano. A volcano! It’s incredible.”
“You’re taking photos I hope?”
“Oh yeah, can’t stop. It’s hard to capture it in the same way though.”
“What’s the rest of the park like? Never did make it to Yellowstone.” There’s a pause
on the other end of the line. The phone crackles with bits of mountain static.
“Well, people. A lot of people. This is kind of like the Disneyland of national parks
I’d say,” Mira chuckles. “But I just met this woman, an older woman in a wheelchair
whose here with her son. She comes here every summer.” 263
I can feel it right there, the anxiety slowly rising, tightening. Starts in my fingers works its way up my arms to my chest. The sofa chair creaks and creaks interrupting
Mira’s voice.
“Oh?”
“I was thinking,” Mira starts, clearing her throat. “I was thinking maybe when I get back we could do something like that. Get you outside and walking more.”
I pick at the frayed ends of the afghan on my lap, imagining myself out there on the cement stretch of Embarcadero, hearing all the ding of the light rail and the rush of the cars without being able to witness any of the bay’s beauty.
“I don’t know, Mira. I don’t like to do much on my bad days.”
“Mom, we can’t just bank on the good days.”
“Maybe. Let’s just leave it at a maybe.” Silence stretches across the line. I can hear the tourists in the background, chatting in different languages, taking me to bits of their homelands with each line. If I pause long enough I can almost see myself there, crouching down to get closer to the color. Easel propped in a distant comer where people can’t reach, painting the hues exactly as they are. 264
The sofa chair squeaks again. The room dark, not a sliver of light peering in from any side. I can hear a walker dragging down the hallway, a woman’s high-pitched trill sneezes again and again. I can feel the fog coming in, the mind getting thick with haze.
Images flash. Hard to focus. I see myself again, cane in hand, trying to make my way down a city street without freezing. Water wells. Mind dashes.
“Anyway, how are you doing? How are the migraines?” I say, filling the buzzing silence.
“Good actually. I mean, nonexistent really. It’s strange. Not the slightest pain for the last five days - ever since I went skydiving with Chloe, it’s been good. I don’t know I think all this time in nature. Just being away from everything, the city, I think it’s really good for me.”
I want to be leaping through the moon for her. I want to grateful that she isn’t destined to the life I’m living. Really, I do. But I can’t help but feel it. Bitterness.
Jealousy that she’s out there and I’m here. I’ll always be stuck here. But I know this isn’t the time, not now, not when she’s out there feeling so good.
“I’m not feeling too well, honey. I think I’m going to take a nap.” 265
“Oh, ok. Well, I’ll call you when I get service again out of the park probably.” The welling rises. I can hear the disappointment in her voice. The same tone I’ve heard over and over, a tone so easy to miss when you’re not paying attention.
“Great.”
“Alright, well I love you, Mom.”
I want to tell her I’m proud of her. I want to tell her watching her live makes me feel both vicariously alive and deeply gray. I want to say all of this, but I know this is her moment.
“Mira, enjoy this. Enjoy all of it. Every minute of it, okay?”
“I will. I am,” she says softly. “Looking forward to telling you all about it when I’m home.”
“Love you. Bye now.”
I feel so far from Sunshine. The thing I loved about her most was I could hop and go whenever I needed. That’s the thing many people didn’t understand. It wasn’t a want, it was a need. A need I had to fight for. A single woman wanting to uproot and live in a van was one thing, but a woman in a relationship on the brink of building a home was 266
another thing altogether. Something the neighborhood women I’d inevitably meet up for
the occasional coffee would never understand. Where they saw instability, I saw
opportunity. Where they saw restlessness, I felt freedom. That van became this portal, an
immediate escape into a realm where any thing, any place, any life was possible as long
as I kept driving, kept seeing new things, kept believing something better was out there because as long as I was driving there was. Seeing the world’s texture, its constant variance, the way the Utah’s landscape changes from red rock valleys to windswept plains, the way Alberta wildflowers paint the horizon yellow miles after miles for as far as the eye can see, the way Florida feels almost sub level, sinking into its own swampy terrain. These details, these places, the ability to witness it in such great color, to capture it in a photo, to paint it on a canvas, to fall in love with a place and leave it, this was my
life and if I close my eyes tight enough, it still is.
When I first came to this facility, they made me see a psychologist. She asked me how
I felt about the transition, the new home, the new limits of the body, the fading vision.
Back then I wasn’t quite sure how to say it, how to articulate what it feels like when
everything you’ve built your identity around, the artistry, the up and go free spirit, the
independence — all of it just slips between your fingers faster and faster by the week
until you’re sitting there at the edge of your sofa chair waiting for someone to put
answers in your hand instead of pills. 267
It’s been weeks since I’ve seen light. Weeks since even a shadow has emerged. These
are the days where I wonder if it’s ever coming back. If I’ll ever see color, food, faces
again. If I’ll watch Mira grow, watch crows feet stretch across the comers of her eyes. Be
sharp enough to see her first few gray hairs. See the face of the man or woman she’ll fall
in love with, do more than just touch the cheekbones of her children. If I’ll witness any of
it, or find other ways to feel, touch, hear it all through secondary measures. Sometimes,
on days like today, I think of Mira en route to somewhere beautiful in the belly of
Sunshine. I pick up the phone and ask for every detail she can give. I paint an image in my mind and pretend I’m wedged in that driver seat. And as she describes the tiers of mountains to her left and the river gushing with rafters to her right, I am right there. I am
speeding down the highway as wind whips my hair into knots. I am three days into a journey, neck so stiff from driving it can’t wait to stop. I am going somewhere, anywhere. I am no longer here. I am just an hour away from floating in the Colorado river. I am two beers away from meeting a love affair that’ll last just long enough to remind me there’s far more than just one person for all of us out there. I am setting with the sun. I am rising with the moon. I am hanging my hammock in between two sparkling
stars, counting constellations, finger finding Orion’s belt, thumb pressing big dipper,
shooting stars dashing from one edge of the sky to comer of my heart. I’m alive. So alive.
Meant to live just like this. 268
And then the call ends and I wake up.
I can hear the nurse coming. His reeboks squeak with each step.
“Gigi.” He softly nudges my shoulder. The room is still dark, hard to tell if my lids are even closed. “Gigi, are you awake? It’s time for your pills.” 269
Chapter 29
Day 13: Yellowstone National Park, Wyoming
She had never been here before, like this, at the brink. The jutting drop where the waterfall starts and the river ends. Mira can see it so clearly from here, the exact point of transformation from here, the line where the water meets the naked air. Here, on the smallest ledge with a cluster of tourists around her, the water turns to thunder in an instant. It soars into incessant static, spreading itself across every inch ears can reach.
Here there is no separation from the roaring water and the self, no choice in whether or not it pulls her in. Just like the water has no say, Mira feels herself coming in, feeling any ounce of tension in her chest soften, split like fractals of mist leaping off the cliff.
It’s her last day in Yellowstone and even though she’s seen a half dozen waterfalls in the last two weeks, she stopped here at Upper Falls not expecting much. Not expecting the river to viscerally feel the split second where the river loses its paths and avalanches down. From a distance this scene may look peaceful. May look like just another serene photograph to capture through a viewfinder, but up close, this close, it’s torrential.
Mira walks to the edge of the overlook. Her hands grip the warm rail, camera resting against her hip. Water flies out from beneath her feet, ricocheting off the boulder she 270
can’t see but knows is there as she watches the river pound, pound, pound, spraying the singular flow into a thousand pieces.
“It pulls something out of you, doesn’t it?” a woman asks from beside her. Mira looks to the left to find a short, gray-haired woman, hair shaved to the back of the neck, cut above the ears wild waves dancing in the wind. “Rips things out of you you didn’t quite knew you had left.” The woman’s voice trails off as though she was talking to herself even though her elbow is just a few inches from Mira’s, almost pressing against it. She tries to remember the last time she felt this close to a complete stranger, how the trips keeps offering sliders of connection like this, nature bridging against again. How they’re each having a moment that will imprint in the mind with the same frame just a different backstory pressed against it. She looks at the woman, thinking before this, after this, they’ll both go onto their separate lives, but long after the trip is gone will still have this moment, never knowing their sharing the memory with someone living at polar ends of the country.
The woman’s voice trails and winds back again, gaze transfixed on the fall’s rhythm.
Together, but separate their lids soften, slowly lulling with the rush.
“It’s pretty hard to look away. I’ve never seen a waterfall from this angle. It’s intoxicating, really,” Mira says softly, watching the water dive off the cliff. 271
“You know what I think is funny? The difference in perspective. How all of those folks on the other side of this canyon over there are taking photos, thinking this waterfall is so damn serene. But look at this. Look at the drop. That geyser shooting up from the bottom. It’s violent as hell.”
They stand in silence, the chatter of incoming tourists rising. Large-winged insects, cousins of dragonflies, dive in herds off the falls. Their little bodies hug the cloud of mist.
The woman looks around the crowd. Cell phones wedged between faces and the fall.
“I think we’re the only two people in this crowd without a camera to our face.”
Mira laughs. “Normally, I’d be right there with them. Capturing moments like this is kind of what I came out here to do. But I don’t know. This is something. Just needs to be experienced for awhile.”
“That’s what I love about the brink of waterfalls. People forget about this angle you know. I’ve been traveling all over the west, finding my way to places like these. Hiked up to Havasupai in Arizona, Bridal Veil in Utah. They’ve been carrying me through this trip.
And I swear every time I see a new one, I feel a new layer leave me. The water, like this.
It literally moves the insides, does something that’s hard to describe.” The woman pauses and inhales a deep breath. “Exactly what I need.” She turns to Mira.
“You got a thread to your trip? By the looks of it, you’re traveling solo too?” 272
“Yeah. My first real trip alone, really. It’s been beautiful. And I guess for me it’s photography, learning what can be captured and what can’t. Meeting new people, just making each day about the sight. I didn’t know I would love it this much.”
“Traveling alone?”
“Everything. I feel like in each place I’ve got to get to know a different side of myself. Stretch comfort zones in some way or another. Have time to just really soak up the scene fully. It made me realize how much I’ve just been rushing through my life back home. Just pushing through it rather than really living it, you know?”
“Oh I know it.” The avalanche of water explodes towards the sky after hitting the river.
“Sounds like the road has treated you well.”
“Yeah.” Mira leans further into the guard rail. The hot iron warming her skin. “What brought you out here beside waterfalls?”
“Eh, life turns. I got some not so great news from the doctor. I just needed to get away, force myself in front of beautiful things. Sometimes you need to intentionally mark new chapters in your own way after life does it for you. So, for me, these waterfalls, they’re the leap, you know? That moment, where the water leaps into a space, that for all 273
you know, could break you, maybe kill you, because let’s be honest — sometimes life doesn’t give you choices. You just have to hold onto that raft. Cling to it until it’s time to let go. That’s what I’m trying to tell myself anyway. To trust the current. Trust it has enough momentum to keep me from crashing against the back of that mountain.” She pauses, eyes drifting far beyond the scene. “I keep telling myself maybe if I leap as far from the cliff as possible. If I can resist reaching back for those rocks. If I pencil dive like those swimmers do, then maybe, I’ll only end up with a few cracked ribs. Maybe I’ll survive and get to float way down there in the canyon and just be a part of the river.” The woman wipes a thin tear from her cheek. “I’m telling you, these waterfalls, they know how to move you.”
“Well, I don’t know you, but from what I can see you’re working your way through this well.”
The woman smiles, revealing the thin gap between her two front teeth — a little split between mountain ridges, looking as though it was intentionally left out of love for character.
“Thank you. I’m feeling more optimistic about it all lately. Focusing on the beauty can do that.” The woman sips her water bottle, after swallowing the gulp she outstretches her hand. “By the way, I’m Sheri.” 274
“Mira. Good to meet you.”
“You know, Mira. Seeing you out here solo, it gives me hope for the next generation.
You gals are learning young that you can be alone and carve your own road. You know,
I wish someone would’ve told me life doesn’t need to fall into the shape we all were given. I hope you know that. When you look back, you always wish you would’ve figured it out sooner.”
“It’s funny. I’ve been starting to really realize that on this trip. Even in the little ways, that maybe I can do other things beside sit behind a computer all day. Maybe I don’t even need to live in the city. Sometimes you’ve living one way so long you don’t even question the possibility of something completely knew. I don’t know. Seeing all these places, meeting new people. It’s opened me up to all the things that are out there. There’s so many different ways to make a life feel like home.”
The woman eyes turn glossy. She looks to Mira slowly, crows feet slowly spreading, warming her cheeks to a rosy hue.
“Even when we’re leaping off waterfalls, we can carry a sense of home with us. I’ve been taking comfort in that. Whenever I’m in that bleach-smelling hospital, I close my eyes and remember one of my favorite moments. Sitting on the patio in the sun with my morning coffee. Standing at the beach and seeing a whale’s fin breech. Little moments 275
that light you up, you know? That’s the home I want to carry with me every day for the rest of my life.”
“I should really be writing this down,” Mira says with a laugh.
“Me too. I’m a poet. I guess these things should be going in the next book,” she smirks. The woman brushes her hands through her hair. “On that note, I think I’m going to go get some words on the page. It was great meeting you, though.” Sheri’s eyes hold into Mira’s. “Keep doing this. Being out here. Keep yourself open. I can see it. You’re going places even if you don’t know where yet.” Sheri rests her palm on her shoulder.
“Before you go, would you mind if I-if I took your photo? Here?”
“Of me?”
“I’ve been taking portraits of the women I meet on the road. Kind of in the same way you might take snippets of life and turn them into a poem.”
“Ah, of course. Sure thing.” She leans her arm against the rail, her hip slightly poked to the side. Chin raised. Confidence. You can see it in her. The woman’s got confidence that’s been growing and growing for decades.
Mira snaps the photo. Sheri just a touch to the left, the splitting waterfall behind her.
“You get what you need?” 276
“Beautiful, thank you.”
“Alright, Mira. You take care.”
Sheri nods and walks down the trail and within minutes she’s out of sight, beyond the herd of incoming tourists, around the bend. There’s a warmth left in her chest, expanding like morning sun breaking through clouds. She feels a shift in her body. Gravity’s pull staring in the toes, winding past the knees to the back of the navel. She thinks of Sheri’s words. The brink. The point of transformation. It’s more than being open to the start, it’s being open to the unraveling. The city couldn’t feel further and right then, she starts to wonder why she has to call a place home just because it always has been. Why couldn’t she and Gigi find their way to a new space — whole new way of life to call their own?
She looks up at the canyon’s salmon-shaded edges tapered as far as the eye can stretch.
Such a contrast from the skyscrapers, the stacked flats, the glass buildings replacing
Edwardians, million dollar condos rising higher and higher, taking over chunks of the sky. Out here with Sunshine, home is constantly changing. Home is this crashing waterfall vista. Home is the belly of a river. Home is the starry-night sky. Home is evolving, always intertwining. Expanding inside of her, bleeding out of her. Morphing it’s shape again and again as it’s meant to be. 277
She thinks of all the people she’s met on this trip. Chloe finding comfort in solitude,
Shelby owning her new chapter, Janice digging into places others forget to look, Xavier rewriting memories he thought would be another. People living life a little differently.
She finds a boulder to sit on, watching the waterfall as rounds of tourists come and go.
She feels herself holding onto Sheri’s words, tying them to a little ledge in her chest, tucking them in a place that can be felt, but not easily taken.
Women doing life differently, she thinks. These women, no matter how small of a snippet met, they’re worth admiring. The ones that didn’t necessarily check all of the boxes life always said were meant for us, but somehow haphazardly built their own.
That’s the story I want to tell, she thinks, imagining the Global Traveler Fellowship, wishing she would’ve had that angle when she submitted. She walks back to Sunshine, the mobile home she once looked down on her mother for. The thing that kept their family standing out, seemingly rootless. But now, she can see it, feels it in the aftermath of the waterfall rifling through her body — that this little van was so much more than a van. It was an act of defiance.
She pulls out a piece of paper and writes these thoughts down — a reminder to share with her mother later. 278
Chapter 30
Day 13: Bridge Bay Campground, Wyoming
To a photographer, social media is both a blessing and a curse. A way for your work to reach people it otherwise wouldn’t touch. Yet, the very nature of it keeps it simultaneously sandwiched amidst the thousands of others posting sunsets, snapshots of favorite meals, moments one so easy to pass over. That’s how it all started, a means for
Mira to get more eyes on her work, to share snippets about her adventures on feeds and her website if for no one else to look at and relive later.
On the screen, the women’s photos take on a life of their own. Their faces, zoomed in, fine lines kissing the temple as they smile, the warmth in their eyes no where to go but into the lens. Others are just a figure without a face at all — just a silhouette, back amidst towering mountains and golden, green treetops, darkened strides contrasting against a backdrop of color. When she looks back at the photo, it’s a mere sliver of the moment she experienced, but that narrow view offers a focus to dig into, a story to write like this one: 279
Sheila.
Poetry slips o ff her fingers and falls into the river. The worries come next. Pulling threads that have been winding and winding wondering what comes after the doctor’s visit, the lab tests, the rapids you never predicted. I met Sheila at the brink o f a waterfall.
Pier eyes were writing her future across the water. She reminded me o f how little moments can change everything. The ones where the doctor’s assistant doesn’t e-mail, but calls because this is the kind o f thing that comes with questions. It’s the ‘this will be quick, nothing, let's take it in between errands ’ tilts ever so slightly. The ones where the young woman voice clings like wind chimes all the while spewing medical jargon scribed on her paper. The chimes deepen into peach pits as she lets her tongue run loose with
‘it’s not like crazy cancer or anything ’ and follows it up with a paragraph from her paper, reminding you're not alone, all very common, don’t worry. Sleep more. Stress less. Easy to say, hard to do. So, she tries not to worry back at her desk, filtering through e-mails that have morphed into sludge, because the woman said the word cancer when it’s not cancer, and that makes her think she forgot to put a ‘yet ’ in between the sentence.
So, with the 'yet ’ brings the wonder if sh e’s living her life right, if she’d still spend her days the same way. And if the 'yet' turns to 'is, ’ would she stay close to her home, or drive far, far away, left hand out the window, desert, ocean, mountain air blowing through fingertips, reminding what alive feels like when new sights smack against the 280
windshield morning after morning. So, she takes herself to the river, to the edge of one
two words, where the water loses itself to gravity, unravels into a waterfall. She forces
herself to witness the transformation again and again. To watch how even a fall that far
can turn into something magnificent. That’s Sheila. A river turned waterfall, making poetry as she free falls her way down. Even though she probably would never ask for it,
send your love and prayers. She doesn’t want them, but she might need them.
Even though it’s just a little blurb, just a blog sitting on one of the million of
webpages crawling across the internet, Mira can feel her chest loosening, lightening. The
way with each photo, each sentence shows just a bit more than necessary, it cracks the
thin layer around the heart, puts it under the flame, melts it ever so slowly. In a world
where people have a tendency to always show their best angle, it feels refreshing to put
something else out there every now and again. Snapshots of outlier beauty. Things that
aren’t necessarily neatly packaged in a square box. Women who are in progress and
despite trying circumstances still thriving in their own way.
She didn’t expect people to respond like this: little things like blog subscriptions
rising, a message here and there from an acquaintance she hasn’t seen in years saying
these little fractions of truth are helping her through a rough life transition. There’s
something about putting yourself out there. Something to injecting honest, heartfelt
vulnerability in a feed full of photos where everyone’s only showing their best life that 281
builds connection. Reminds the face on the other end of the screen that you can almost
feel a heartbeat of a stranger through this handheld device. Mira clicks the post button.
She pulls the laptop nearly to a close and halts, the screen hanging mid-air. She scrolls
her e-mail, refreshes once, twice, checks her junk mail scrolling up and down, hoping she
didn’t miss a confirmation of receipt, but still nothing from the Fellowship. Her cursor
hangs in the white space of the search bar, flashing again and again waiting for words to
come. She googles the fellowships’s acceptance rate and finds a three year-old thread of
other photographers, writers, videographers - equally hopeful souls anxiously waiting for
replies. One read, They respond far quicker than most foundations. I got my rejection in just three weeks. Another posted she got hers within two months.
Mira’s fingers fidget on the keyboard. The slimmest chord curdles in her throat. She
shuts the laptop, turns off the phone and looks up through the moon roof. Out there in the
vast darkness, the smallest speck of stars glimmer, she wants to see it. Herself out there,
funding and camera in hand, no longer bound to a city life that tightens belly-bound coils.
She wants to see herself in Sunshine, driving from Colorado to New Mexico, south of the
border, talking to women from all walks of life. As she drifts to sleep, you could almost
hear it. The whisper, a voice trying to ride the daunting swell. 282
Chapter 31
Day 15: St. Ignatius, Montana
When driving through Montana it’s easy to feel like the state is meant more for the wild than the people. Unlike California where clusters of towns can be found even on the driest parts of Highway 5, here ranch land keeps the homes sparse and separate, the grassy plains stretching and stretching, the only thing stopping the flat land is the foothills reliably waiting in distance. As Mira drives, she slows for the horses. No matter how many times she sees them, their golden coats, lean bodies, muscular thighs. She notices even though she’s seen countless horses in stables in California, compared to those roaming free in Montana, their bellies look bloated, like they’ve been waiting to run in the ways wild animals were bom to. The contrast of what’s been with what could be.
Windows down, the highway offers air conditioning Sunshine can’t create. The roar of the river stays as steady as the tunes come from her cassette player. Speckles of horses emerge every few miles. She’s searching for a ranch off mile 72, a turn off recommended by a free camping forum. The ranch owner has been known to let ovemighters stay and shower in exchange for a couple hours of farm work.
Just then she sees a lone woman on a black horse, the mane shining against golden hour rays, her white cowboy hat almost blooming like a sunflower. Through the sun still 283
hung high, six o’clock nears and Mira knows she’ll need to find a place to sleep besides the private driveways dotting the highway. She traces the mile markers, looking for number 63. She counts the days since she’s taken a real shower, three, four days maybe?
Her hair has begun to itch, layers of sweat lining on top of one another.
Sunshine cruises past mile 60. She wonders if that woman out there, the one leaning into her galloping horse, is the kind owner all the travelers have grown to love. With mile
63 comes a subtle gravel road just wide enough for one car to follow. Mira drives and drives, seeing the one-story white home near in the distance. A field of corn sprawls to her right. Endless yellow blooms stretching to the left. As she nears, two dogs scamper for the van, barking deeper and deeper as she closes in.
A young man in a plaid shirt emerges from the com fields.
“It’s okay, Kiva,” he says, walking to the driver’s side. Mira stops, a twinge in her gut.
“I didn’t mean to startle your dogs.”
The man’s boots rustle against the gravel. “Don’t mind Kiva. She’s a good guard dog despite her size.” 284
“I’m just passing through. I heard there was a farm around here that does work trades for a night’s stay.”
“You heard right,” he says with a smile. “You’re the first traveler we’ve seen in a couple weeks, so timings great. I’m Sam.”
“Nice to meet you. “I’m Mira.”
“The owner, Rayha’s out right now, but I can get you all set up. Mind if I hop in? I’ll show you where to park.”
Sunshine rattles as they bump over the dirt road, rocks scatter off the tires as Kiva runs ahead. For as far as the eye can see land stretches, and with it does the sky. Blue sky country, they call it. Unlike anything she’d grown up seeing in California. Here rolling mountains seem to bookend everything. Amidst Rayha’s hundreds of acres sits a modest house — a ranch style one-story with bright yellow shutters a porch with two wooden chairs.
“You can park right next to that stack of hay,” he says. “We’ll be moving some of that later on.”
“Sounds good.” 285
“Oh there she is,” Sam says, pointing as the Mira slams the driver’s door. “That’s
Rayha,” Out from the field came the woman on the black horse. Mira could see her smile before she could make out anything else. Then came view of her short, brown hair tucked beneath a cowboy hat, her yellow tank top accentuating her brown sugar skin. The horse trotted up to the van.
“Evening, Rayha. Got a gal here whose looking to camp out.” Mira had just crossed the border in Montana. Five hours of driving straight from Yellowstone. Having spent so many pockets overnight in places within ten days left, she wanted to make the most of each stretch, which meant passing through rural parts just outside of Glacier National
Park before the border.
She heard quite a bit about Rayha from the free camp forums - other travelers had posted about her kind tendencies, telling bits of her story making her feel like Mira already knew her before she got there. Rayha was a traveler herself. Spent a couple years vanning across the United States, woofed in Central America, worked tables in Australia before spending some years in Southeast Asia living on the cheap as long as her funds could take her. She welcomed in travelers with no cost camping, one hot shower every couple days and meals in exchange for help on the farm, picking up horse manure, turning compost piles, chopping wood — odds and ends any traveler could pick up. 286
Rayha swings off her horse and plops on the ground, little clouds of dust plume around her.
“How’s it going? I’m Rayha.” She outstretches her hand working glove still on.
“Mira.” She smiles. “I was hoping to stay for a just a day or two. Happy to help out however I can in exchange.”
“Of course, no shortage of things to help with around here. I just ask for three hours of work per day. You can parcel it how you like, but three solid hours is the deal. I recommend the morning just so you can go off and enjoy the park after carefree.”
“That’d be great, thanks.”
Even within the first few minutes of meeting her you could feel her warmth, the glow she came with. The reason so many people had recommended her ranch as a place to pick yourself up when days on the road got tough and when you needed a break from the silence that so inevitably comes with traveling solo.
Rayha signals to the left of the house, pointing to a distant grassy patch with an outhouse about five yards away. She walks her horse just a touch, not even bothering to tie to her post, just let her wander knowing even if she runs she’ll still be home. 287
“After you get settled, feel free to take a shower. Bathroom’s inside to the left.
Towels are just out front. I’m going to start up dinner. Tonight we got beef stew.”
Mira nods. “Thank you so much.”
Onions and oregano plume through the house. Three bowls of steaming stew sit on the table. Rayha and Sam are already half a glass of beer in.
“Dinner’s served, Miss Mira.” Sam says, gesturing towards the bowl.
Seasoned potatoes and caramelized onions soften against her tongue.
“So, how long you been living on the road?” Rayha asks.
“About two weeks now. Came from San Francisco, heading up to Banff next.”
“Well, you’re really covering some ground. Banff is a hell of a place. You’ll love it.
So, just on holiday then?”
“Yeah, I got a little over three weeks off — finally using all that PTO I’ve been saving.”
Rayha laughs and sips her beer. “Yeah, we all start out that way.”
Mira thinks about home, that small, sub-level apartment, stenches of fish perpetually seeping through the vents. The rushing cars and hissing buses, the endless clamor of 288
people. Just the thought of it makes her chest tighten. She thinks of her dashing black outs, the sporadic headaches, how they’ve been nearly nonexistent since she stepped out of the city and onto the road. She inhales deep, tells herself to stay here, in this moment.
The warm stew warms her throat as it slides down.
“To be honest, I can’t say I’m looking forward to going home. I didn’t really realize how tense I was until I got here. I feel so much more at ease, like a softer version of myself out here. It’s been nice change of pace.”
Rayha smirks. “Sometimes you don’t realize how much you need a place until you meet it.” She looks around the cabin. The wool tapestry adorned over the fireplace. A bull’s skull hangs beside it.
“That’s how I landed here, you know? I wasn’t much different than you. Was on the road for a fixed period — was teaching high schoolers over in Boulder. Was hitchhiking my way through the states when I stumbled upon this place. Was trying to get myself to
Canada actually, but the truck driver I was with turned pervy. He reached his hand over to the passenger side and I threw a fit. Hopped out the truck as soon as it slowed. Ten miles up was a rickety old fence with a for sale sign and few stray chickens in eyeshot. I wandered in and found this old woman living here all alone. Sandy. She was eighty-five then with horrible arthritis. The fields were totally overgrown, the land had gone 289
completely wild. She loved the space, but hated the reality that she couldn’t tend to the things like she used to. She only had one son. Guy moved to New York years ago and flew her out on holidays.” Rayha shakes her head and spoons her stew.
“I mean the local neighbors would come by every week to bring her groceries, but the woman needed company. She needed live in help. I don’t know what she would’ve done if I hadn’t stumbled upon her. So, I stayed and helped out in exchange for a free place to stay and food. Two weeks turned to two months. After that, my job back home didn’t seem like a part of my life anymore, just a chapter from the past I was willing to close.
So, I lived with Sandy for four years before passed away. Fell in love with Montana and this land. She felt like the grandmother I had and lost and found again. When she passed on, she gave the place to me and a distant comer of the property to her son — more of a symbolic gesture than anything else. He hates me for me. Tried to sue me, but there was no grounds. Just his own guilt shining through too late.”
She gulps the rest of beer. The glass clinks against the table.
“Anyone care for another?”
“I’ll take one,” Sam says. A thin line of yellow stew on the brim of his mustache. 290
Mira tries to imagine Rayha back then. How easily she left one part of a life to build another. How fruitful the move was then, what it’s grown into now. A life of labor, solace, and paying it forward to other folks in similar positions as she once was.
“So, what mountain you climbing?” Rayha hollers as she cracks open the beer bottle.
“In Banff?”
“No, you know what I mean. Everyone who passes through here has got one. The thing you’re climbing towards or from, is how I see it.”
“Oh urn.” She sips her beer, eyes meeting the crackling fire. “I guess I just needed to get away. Kind of felt like my body was starting to physically reject the city. I was having trouble seeing, real trouble, like my eyesight would just vanish completely. It ended up being a bit of blessing though. I don’t think I would’ve gotten out here without that nudge.”
“A guy I knew way back was dealing with something like that. Used to live in New
York City - a Wall Street kind of guy. Doctors thought he was going blind. He spent a couple months out in nature, stayed a week or so with me. Not a single issue. He chalked it up to stress. Ended up moving out to the woods I think in North Carolina. Just sent me a postcard from there a month or so ago. City life, it’s not for everyone, you know?” 291
“Yeah, I’m learning that.” Mira sighs and nods.
The three spoon their stew until silverware clanks the bottom of the bowl. Mira washes the dishes as Sam and Rayha rest on the couch.
“So, you heading to Glacier tomorrow?” Sam hollers form the sofa.”
“Was thinking about it yeah. Any recommendations?”
“You planning on hiking alone?”
Mira feels a curl in her stomach. “Yeah.”
“You got bear spray?”
“Uh, no.” The pit widens. “I don’t actually.”
“Well if you’re coming back after you can borrow mine. Plenty of Grizzlies out there.
You don’t want to catch yourself unprepared and alone. If I were you, I’d stick to the
East side. More people, less wild. The West comes with a whole lot of wildlife and as you’ll notice by the signs, folks don’t recommend hiking solo. Especially a young girl like yourself.”
“Oh Mira, don’t listen to him,” Rayha scoffs. “Plenty of people will tell you that, doesn’t mean it’s true. Just make noise on the trail. Clap steadily. Holler as you’re 292
coming around quiet bends. The bears want nothing to do with you. The only trouble happens when you startle them, so make noise and you’ll be just fine.”
“Suit yourself,” Sam says, crossing his arms. “I’ll leave my spray on the kitchen table for you tonight.”
As Mira lies in bed, her mind darts from the ways she can leave San Francisco to the bears she may face come morning. Between the two, sleep hangs in the distance. 293
Chapter 32
Day 16: Glacier National Park, Montana
There are many ways to fear something before it happens. Stories round and round the mind, inviting seven difference scenarios of how the future can go wrong — prehistoric archives all attempting to keep the body safe.
When Mira walks up to the trailhead she sees these stories zigzagging across the signpost - the one that says hiking alone is strongly discouraged, that you’re entering grizzly-frequented terrain. Her guts somersaults as she looks around at the empty parking lot. Despite the ranger having said it would be full of other hikers, the concrete lot sits quiet. Only chirping birds chime as the lake laps in the distance.
Despite having grown up in bear-less San Francisco, grizzlies would strangely find their way into adolescent conversations. While Gigi loved the outdoors, she had limits to where she’d explore. Grizzly terrain was one of them. Mira had heard the same story over and over. Kai. A woman Gigi met at one of the early Rainbow gatherings. Their incessant love for laughter kept them constantly smiling, warming each other with jokes few others cracked at. Kai had grown up in Washington and moved to Montana just south of
Glacier. She couldn’t go a day without getting outside, so before long she devoted her life to it. Became a trail guide for the park during the summer and worked as a ski instructor 294
in the winter. She’d rise as early as 4:30 to finish an eight mile hike before the rest of the town had barely opened their eyes. So, when they found her chest crushed in and face mauled at the top of the trail she had trekked at least a hundred times, every local in town second guessed picking up their hiking boots. When Gigi heard the news, she drove overnight without stopping straight to St. Mary’s, the small town where the service was held. Ever since then, Gigi never stepped foot in a far Northern forest without company and told Mira the story enough for her to never second guess doing the same.
But it was this same fear that brought her here. The same story that made Glacier feel like this mythical land where dark clouds hover over snow-capped mountain peaks, where cougars and grizzlies loomed with whispered horror stories, but left moose, the most aggressive killers of the bunch unassuming for those hadn’t done their research. It was a rather random place to fear, but it was hers and she knew she couldn’t pass through
Montana without exploring it.
As Mira walks along St. Mary’s lake, she feels Ray’s bear spray tap against her hip.
Slinging it like a gun, its a constant reminder of what’s out there. She claps her hands in a steady rhythm like Rayha said, palms stinging with the incessant repetition. She looks to the surrounding sights to calm her. St. Mary’s shimmering deep blue lake to the left, stretching around bend after bend with granite pyramids hovering above all sides. Even with its glistening beauty, Mira can’t help but think about the things she can’t hear, can’t 295
see, but see her. The animals sluggishly trailing down for a sip of water. The ones not expecting to be startled by a lone girl with a can of spray dangling at her hip. She studies the curves, the huckleberry flowers blooming every quarter mile. She claps and hollers, talking to the prospective bears, the fear, the stories she’s told herself over and over. As the lake disappears, a new trailhead emerges. A couple wanders ahead of her. Her eyes lighten at the sight of people. Hand in hand they lean into one another, smiling and kissing each other every few steps until they see Mira.
“Did you bring the bear spray?” the woman asks. Her once flirty voice now wary.
“I-I did,” he replies, his tone slumping just a touch beneath hers.
They stop holding each other’s hands and read the warning sign. Within seconds they immediately begin clapping loudly and in unison, shoulders hiked to their necks. Mira slows her pace, giving them distance. She sighs in relief, knowing anything that’s out there will definitely hear a couple before they see her. She loses sight of the pair around a bend of shadowed pine trees. The clapping stops. The lake’s wash takes its place. Mira walks faster. Still nothing. She would’ve heard something, she tells herself. Would’ve heard a cry, a roar, something.
As she turns the bend, she sees a patch of burnt trees devoured by an old fire. Then comes the couple now walking towards her. Hands no longer clapping, bodies no longer 296
side by side, but in a single file line. As they pass Mira, their necks hang heavy. She
knows not to look at their eyes. She can feel it, the embarrassment of turning back too
soon, fear swallowing them. She breathes in and adjusts her bear spray.
Hours later, Mira can hear her footsteps crunch as she walks across the forest floor,
reminding her there’s not a single other person in earshot. The silence magnifies how
alone she is. Something as serene as squeaking birds, when set against utter quiet, heightens solitude. If she lets her mind wander too long she can see a mama Grizzly
foraging along the huckleberries. She can hear the deep grunt of the Moose startled after a slow drink along the lake.
While Yellowstone had its fair share of Grizzlies, the park had a way of keeping you feeling safe with its curated boardwalks and tamed roads stacked with cars. You were amidst the wild, but constantly with hundreds of others. Surprise felt like less of an
element of concern. But here, people are speckled throughout the trail rather than
flooding it. She can walk mile after mile and not hear a single voice other than her own
clap echo against the mountain walls. She remembers what the ranger said. That moose kill far more people than grizzlies do. That while bears, lazy and wanting to stay out of
humans’ path, will stay away where possible, the moose, especially the mothers are 297
aggressive. Far larger and thicker than a horse but just as quick, they tower over and when approached will trample. The ranger offered plenty of advice on what to do if she spots a bear, but nothing for the moose.
“Just stay away from them. If you see one,” he said, pausing and widening his eyes.
“Just stay away. They’re aggressive.”
Mira tries to relax as she walks. She focuses on the golden light rocking along the rippling water. The way the deep black stone of the mountain contrasts from the pearl snow atop it. But no matter how many things she distracts herself with, she can’t help but dodge visions of Kai, now layered under flashes of a stampeding moose. She passes the river and climbs higher into the mountain. Sights of hikers are replaced with vibrant wildflowers. Orange hibiscus-like blooms sprout from overgrown bushes. She squeezes between the flowers, each prickle reminding her how few people must walk this trail.
Mira feels her pulse quicken, a confusing cross between fear and intuition. She tries to decide whether it’s best to just turn back altogether, if she’s stupid for walking out here alone with so many signs telling her otherwise.
Suddenly, there’s another noise on the trail. She slows her pace, the crunch of the leaves halting. The leaves grow louder and louder. She feels her body tighten, hands draw 298
to sides. From the deep green grove emerges a father and his daughter. A blue feather sticks out from his hat.
“That was a close call,” he says aloud to this daughter.
“Yeah, I didn’t feel comfortable with that.”
“Me either. Me either.” He nods as he passes, neither saying hello, just sending wide, knowing eyes blurred with satisfaction that the moment in question has passed. They continue talking, bringing up their cousin whose getting married in Arizona. Mira’s imagination offshoots from Kai to whatever looms ahead. What was a close call? Why didn’t they say anything? Should I turn around too? She stays still, looking out to the distant glacier jutting between peaks. Flashes of a grizzly’s wide shoulders and slinking head dart to what she’s supposed to do if she sees a moose. Her stomach sinks deeper and deeper. Not a single other solo hiker, she realizes. Her body starts to feel heavy. Feet dragging across the floor. Her body less energized than the morning. Her trudging legs make it all the more apparent that she wouldn’t be able to outrun anything even if she tried. She shuffles in slow motion, body trying to decide which direction it wants to go in.
She remembers the documentary she watched a month or so back on fear. How the old man’s deep voice kept finding different ways to explain that fear was almost always in the anticipation of the moment. That it’s woven in the stories we tell ourselves, and 299
expanded by the imagination, anxious nerves swelling wide when paired with narratives our minds writes in the absence of knowing what’s next. She repeats the man’s lines, telling herself if she walks into moments she fear, they’ll drastically dilute afterwards.
I’m safe. I’m secure, she tells herself, knowing these words could be blind optimism.
A sudden rush stumbles through a bush. Leaves collide in sharp strides. She freezes.
Head twitching like a nervous bird, she listens for the feet of people, the familiar steady crunch after crunch. Nothing. And then she sees it, the hooves emerge from the bottom of the thick brush. Flashes of the ranger round her mind, the way his face grew taught at the mere mention of a moose. She walks back slowly as the other hoof comes into view. Her hear races. She feels beads of sweat form despite the creeping wind from the nearby glacier.
And then the full body emerges, its soft tan fur, its big doe eyes —- a fawn. A teenage fawn. Mira smiles, laughs so hard she doubles over. Her chest collapses in relief.
Fear she whispers to herself, it’s contagious a thing. She smiles and keeps hiking towards the glacier, the untouched snow shimmering in the distance. 300
Chapter 33
Day 18: Rural Alberta
When Mira was twelve her mother learned how to make her own moonroof.
“Wherever I sleep, I want to give myself the chance to see the stars,” she’d say over and over as she mapped out the plan, slicing and welding Sunshine back together. Gigi was good at that - turning the standard into the elaborate, making what everyone else accepted as standard into her own piece of art. Those stars, the way she could just tilt her head back and catch a glimpse of Orion’s belt or the Little Dipper, it replaced the bedtime story other children got before being tucked in. No matter where they were, what state, beach, parking lot they found themselves in, Mira could count on the stars. She still does as she lies in the back of Sunshine, looking out of the same moonroof, noticing the comer edge that’s a bit more square cut than the others — a little detail Gigi muttered over for weeks until she adjusted to its imperfection.
Tonight she’s looking out that moonroof from the flat prairies of southern Alberta, just past Easy Street, a neighborhood where the locals come and hang by an oversized pond, dogs and beers in hand, feet cooling in waters so wide it could momentarily fool you for a small lake. Despite the air flow from that moon roof, heat hangs still. The van’s windows offer few streams of air to only select parts of the body. The top of the forehead, 301
but not the neck. The right shoulder, but not the left. It’s nine o’clock and still eighty plus degrees. When the heat gets hard to shake, she focuses on the stars. She sees one shoot across the sky and imagines it slipping onto her tongue, finding its way into her veins lightening the body with the its illuminant rush. As one star flashes, another disappears into the velvet sheet. Eyes half-hanging, she whispers the same question Gigi did every time when she was a child.
“What was your favorite part of the day?”
Back then, she’d lay there, trying to squint her eyes pretending she was more tired than she was. She’d offer a scene here and there to suffice, the art project she did in class or the song the teacher played during free write time. But the truth was the moment hadn’t happened yet. For her, the best part of day was night when everyone fell asleep, when she could drift into her dreams, find her way through a world where she could map out a new place where edges weren’t frayed and discomfort not felt. She could fashion herself a home with four walls, blue tile shining on the bathroom floor, a mother and a father who kissed each other each morning over hot scrambled eggs. A room that was all her own with a canopy bed like her friend Lucy had. A comer full of toys, a merge of both her siblings and her own. A body she felt comfortable in, one that didn’t take on so much angst at the thought of speaking up, communicating in everyday ways the world expected. 302
But these days, out here, seven days into the trip, she has all kinds of answers.
“Falling asleep in the sun on the river and waking to a stranger’s lab cuddling up beside me.” A small smile stretches across her cheeks. Out here, instead of waiting for the sun to set, she wants to hold out her hand, pull up the blinds on the horizon, lift the sun up for one hour longer just to live out the day a little longer. 303
Chapter 34
Day 19: Banff National Park, Alberta, Canada
The line to the parking lot stretches for miles. Slowly each car inches closer, riding the bumper of another. The sun has already begun to droop behind the craggy peaks. Mist wafts over windshields taunting the crowd with could-be rain, fading the afternoon’s clear skies to a hazy steel blue. Even though everyone is on the vacation, there is a hurry in the air. A quick paced race to see the thing they’ve all came for. Mira spent the day exploring every tourist-laden vista in Banff, canoeing Lake Louise, hiking above Peyto
Lake and Castle Rock. And while each place took a bit of her breath away, it was Lake
Morraine she came for. The vista that first drew her in. She’s seen the photo circulating the Internet years ago, popping up while standing crammed on Muni, when waking before the sun came up, before closing her eyes to sleep, and every time she saw it the vision of Banff would expand, the image of the town would grow wider, sprawl out a few more blocks. The mountains would leap higher, a billy goat would find its way along an edge despite Mira not knowing if those were even the kind of animals that lived there. It was the beginning of the draw really, so it seemed fitting to be the center of the end.
Deemed one of the most photographable lakes in the region, people came from all over to catch a glimpse of it. To see light hit the lake in such a way where everything 304
becomes mirrored — the mountains, trees, everyone hovering above hoping to see the clearest versions of themselves. Mira walks across the floating logs, dozens packed along side of each other, forming the only way to get from the parking lot to the tower of boulders. Just seconds before, she stood at the edge of the makeshift walkway. A tourist teetered across a log. He wobbled slowly, feet slipping down the sides, splashing into the frigid waters. He yelped as he splashed into the ice cold lake, his camera raised high in one hand. Water up to his hips, he laughed while the crowd gawked behind him. Mira felt bad for the man, not for his wet pants that would eventually dry, but all of those eyes staring. She hops from one log to the next, puts one heel in front of the other, balancing across the thickest one she can find. It teeters ever so slightly as she stands just a foot from the end. She leaps before the log flips on its belly. She sighs, no fall.
As she climbs, she catches snippets of conversations from surrounding tourists in accents from all around the world. Thin faces with long noses and French deep-throated tones. A Indian mother in a kurta and patterned leggings holding a boulder with one hand, her son’s in the other. An mixed-raced American couple with American accents much like her own take a selfie. Everyone, from different comers of the globe, wide- ranging experiences all here experiencing a variation of the same moment.
Mira lifts off one rock to another, climbing higher towards the sky. The Indian woman hails from beside her. 305
“Excuse me. Will you take our photo?” Her children stand a few feet away, already lined up behind her.
Mira presses her face close to the point and shoot before realizing there’s a screen to view through. She holds for a second there, the family smiling arms around each other’s waist. The father on the right, mother on the left, son and daughter wedged in the middle.
The crystal blue lake reflects behind them. As she snaps the photo she can almost see it in their living room, hanging above the fireplace on the mantle next to graduation photos.
She takes a few more for safe measure and places the camera back in the mother’s hand atop her gold wedding band. The smallest crescent moon of a smile slips over her as she climbs to the next level. Family. Just a family on vacation, together, father in tow. For a second she wonders what the mother and father do for a living. How long they saved to get here. If this is just another annual vacation or if this lake will stay pressed in their memories, hold them over for years in the same way summer destinations had for her own mother.
Mira snaps her own photo of the lake. As she does, she overhears a woman’s voice to her left. Two women, leaning beside one another, shoulders pressed together. You can tell they spend time together simply by the clothes they were wearing, nearly mirror images of each other. Both in thick brightly colored jackets, both wearing thick rimmed 306
glasses, the only difference being the red frames against the woman’s brown skin, and the black frames against the other’s white skin.
“I’m just tired of holding it in,” the woman in red glasses says, elbow leaning onto the other’s knee. Another woman sits beside her leaning her back against the rock. No cameras in hand, the two stare out into the water. Both of their gazes press long and far out into the lake. Mira feels a soft deepening in her sacrum as the woman says it. She recognizes the exasperation in her tone, the way those words have been waiting to climb out.
“I don’t know what it is about this trip, but so much is coming up for me. I’m just tired of carrying all of this on my own, because I’m afraid other people won’t know what to do with my feelings. Because I’m afraid of making waves. I think I just need to them to know. I need to be able to walk into their home and not feel like I’m holding this heavy brick in my chest.” Silence hangs on the other end. The woman in black glasses reaches for her hand, folds her fingers into hers, leans in and presses a long kiss against her cheek.
As she sits there just a dozen feet from the couple, she can’t help but wonder about all of the things a lake could hold. All of the moments it’s seen. The intimate conversations its heard, the first kisses its reflected, the fears of the thirty-something women readying 307
themselves to come out to their families, the prayers of the puffy-faced son who just lost his mother to cancer. The child’s angst fluttering round from chest to throat making soul’s salt plop into fresh water over a fish caught and lost. The teen who is two seconds away from chucking his phone into its middle, let it sink down and down and down the way his heart feels after sending a tender text to a love who won’t reply. He blames the reception. Damn mountains, he mutters, not yet knowing it’s these mountains, that will help him, her, every one of them repair the remnants after life’s abrupt turns.
She looks down at the frigid turquoise, closes her lids for just a second, tries to feel the words she wants to rise. Maybe it’s one of the many ways she’s afraid she'll live a half-shaped life, just a fraction of what she could’ve amounted to. That she’ll just stay living a run of the mill existence, reaching for a promotion that won’t do much but make the bills a little easier to pay, help her get that new car she isn’t sure she exactly needs, one day make that down payment for the home she’ll later want to vacation from. All the steps that say she’s climbing somewhere even though she isn’t quite sure where she’s going. Would it be the fear she’ll always keep the ripest parts of a day, of a relationship at a forearm’s distance? That she won’t have a woman like the one in red framed glasses, one to lean into, share tender truths with. Someone to help unravel the decades of translucent bricks she’s stomped with her feet, molded with her hands. 308
She thinks of Xavier and wonders why he’s the closest person she’s let in in years. If knowing she was just passing through, knowing she could leave him behind made her all the more likely to open well aware in just a day or two she could go back to living a couple inches more closed. But the collection of strangers she’s met have turned into people worth remembering, making her heart hang a softer and larger. She can feel it in there, taking up more room in her chest than it had when she started this trip. The way opening to each new scene, the vivid colors of the Grand Prismatic spring, the cloud-like formations, the fox running along the road, the sunset caught over the valley, all of it, beauty unfolding again and again. The world existing in full magnitude without even trying. That it’s the only humans who have grown attached to overthinking, to shielding after hurts keep us from moving through the world unguarded, from opening to the light we need.
Mira turns her back to the lake and scans the crowd of people. Cameras in hand, arms wrapped around one other. They gaze into the sun’s shadow as if disappearing from the sky. She sees the couples, so many couples, mostly ranging from twenties to thirties, able bodies climbing up and down the rubble, waiting for one another to reach the next safest landing. She imagines herself way up there with someone next to her. Imagines herself climbing knowing she has a job to wake to that she loves, one that fills her bones, that fuels her photography, that lets her wake and rise as she wishes to catch every golden 309
hour without restraint. Sees herself two, three, five years from now holding the hand of a person she’ll give her heart to, knowing she gave so many years to building herself.
She looks back to the mountains, the massive white tip piercing the sky. The snow has yet to be touched by feet or paws. Deep cavities sit atop centuries of limestone keeping these lakes their creamy blue hue. Her breath deepens as her mind trails the snow’s path. She imagines the melting glacial cracking open bits of mountain crevasses, pulling bits of the earth with it, merging distant entities together.
She tucks her camera under her arm and climbs past the last boulder to the top of the peak. A thin sherbet cloud stretches across the sky. She leans her hand against the granite purple stone beside her. Its warmth spreads across her palm, remnants of the day’s sun seeps through her skin. The couple near her begins their slow descent. As they disappear out of sight, a carousel of moments rifle through her - Gigi, Lorraine, red inked rejections, her windowless apartment, sepia-toned Donner, all of it forming reflections, little polaroids of the past. When she looks out at Lake Morraine, its perfect mirror image reflecting, she can almost see beyond it, remembering that a reflection is merely what surrounds something, not fills it. She realizes this lake is hardly made up of the row of pines and snow-capped granite despite how it appears for the eyes and lens. That she, like
Lake Morraine, is her own body of water, deep and full, both a part of but separate from her past. That just because she lived through something, came from something, does not 310
mean it define her. That like almost every body of water she comes across, there’s a stream offering a way out. There’s rushing river leading to a distant ocean, vast possibilities well beyond land-lock. She pulls the camera to her face and snaps the last image she’ll take of the lake — the one she’ll one day hang not for the beauty of the reflection, but the reflection she had. 311
Chapter 35
Day 19: Banff, Alberta, Canada
The howling came out of nowhere. High pitched and full of force, the shrieking tones bounce off the crystal blue lake and echo from the charcoaled granite rocks. Mira hasn’t seen a single person in over a mile. After passing the 1,000 km mark, the high altitude of
Banff harbors more marmots than people. A second howl comes on, joining the first, the pair of unseen wolves sounds closer by the second. It’s her last day in Banff, so she decided to hike the tallest peak she could realistically finish — a 12 mile trek through
Harvey Pass. She freezes alongside the lake, imagining all of the animals that flock to bodies of water as often as humans do. Her feet no longer shuffling along the rock trail, she hears something else up ahead shuffling in the same way. Sun beaming bright overhead, she shields the rays with her palm trying to see farther than her eyes can reach.
Her chest tightens. Heart quickens. She looks down behind her, the steep boulder trail striped with snow. She considers turning back, knowing she’d be cursing herself the whole time for not seeing the top on her last day here.
Just then, voices come into earshot. Laughter. Women laughing. She looks and her chest immediately softens like a tent taken down with the wind. As they come closer, she 312
hears the howling again, this time realizing it’s come from their mouths. She smiles wide and laughs deep, hands pressing to knees.
“You scared the hell out of me,” Mira says as the two women fumble down the rocky trail.
“Oh shit sorry!” one woman laughs back. She adjusts the red bandana wrapped around her forehead. “We were just messing around, didn’t realize anyone else was up here.”
The other woman playfully punches her shoulder. “She started it. All her fault.” Her wipes her forehead with the neck of her t-shirt sweaty. Her cheeks lift in laughter like glowing cherries.
“No problem. Just glad to see its was you two howling. How’s the view from the top?”
“Oh man, it’s fucking beautiful. I hike a hell of lot down in Oregon and I’m telling you, this is the best terrain I’ve trekked in months. I mean come on. Forest groves, meadows, lakes, snow, peaks all in 12 miles. Can you beat it?”
“We’re moving to Banff,” the other woman says pan-faced. Her friend laughs.
“Yeah, I wish,” she says, tightening her bandana. 313
“Yeah I know, right?” Mira looks beyond the women at the trail ahead. “Well, awesome. Glad to hear it’s worth it at the top.”
“Ah man, it’s always worth it. Always. You enjoy it.” The two woman jog down the trail, giggling to one another.
Mira continues up the trail passing gorges, ascending beyond the sun and clouds that seem permanently pressed in the sky. The air chills the skin. Up here, thin sheets of snow blanket the trail. Maybe it was being up there so high, 2,000 km away ground. Maybe it was the laughing women talking about loving this place enough to move for it. Maybe it was the seven lakes she passed on the way, the steep gravel, the fact that way up here despite July expectations you walk through two feet of snow. Maybe it was the fact that she hadn’t showered in three days so bathed in the river and actually enjoyed it. Maybe it was all of the little moments leading here that made her feel like she didn’t need to go home to the same life she left. That the past she had, however hers, did not dictate where she was heading. Options. So many options. And maybe it was those same options that made her stomach feel like there was an anchor dangling from her rib cage, swinging back and forth like a pendulum, dreading the thought of uprooting what she had spent so long thinking that’s what was fitting for her, yet no longer felt like hers. 314
Her feet dig into the shale, millions of little pieces slowly broken down from boulders above. Wedging the bottom of her stick in the thin sheet of summer snow, she climbs and climbs watching the lake she just passed grow into nothing more than an oversized drop of water. The air pierces her cheeks as she climbs. She imagines her life back home — hiking the stairs to escape her desk bound in a storage closet, fluorescents closer than the sun. When she grips the hiking stick, she imagines gripping the red folder she’d take from her screen to Mark’s desk, repeating the cycle again and again.
“Can’t we just stay out here?” she whispers.
At the top Mira sees the smallest speck of a couple laying down in front of a patch of birch trees, the sloping snow-capped mountain in front of them. His hands fold behind his head. She leans into his belly. Mira stands a half mile away, leaning against a flattened boulder the same way. From up here, where no sound is heard beyond the soft wisp of mountain wind, it’s easy to feel separate from it all. Almost like she’s underwater, enclosed in a bubble of solace, nature not separate from but connected to the seams of her skin. Breathes fall deep. Thoughts wander far. Could be’s roam meadows for miles.
Home. How the association with the phrase has changed. Home, just two weeks ago felt so akin to San Francisco. Yet, now, looking around, she wonders how much she’s forced 315
herself to carve home simply because she was bom there, because of Gigi, of expectations of making it in a city pricing out nearly everyone she’s known. Somewhere along the way she felt that staying there, surviving the rise in rent meant she was somehow more alive, worth more in a conversation, amounted to what other parents in parking lots hoped she would amount to back in high school.
She thinks of the small cabins just at the foot of the mountain, the towns she passed through surrounded by wild flowers, the riverside warmth of Missoula, the mountain-studded charm of St. Ignatius, the wide tree sprawl of Calgary, all new scenes she could land in and find a way to make her own. She closes her eyes and tries to imagine her bags packed in Sunshine heading to warmer grounds. Tries to envision the phone calls with Gigi being enough, the hunt for new work being nothing more than a couple interviews to land her behind the camera she’s longed for. Tries to see herself in a spacious, window-lit apartment, a partner to spend her Saturday afternoons with, a pool of local clients all seeking her eye to capture slices of family moments, portraits that’d otherwise get lost to time’s quick swallow. The mere thought feels like more than a left turn, but a grand detour that may or may not reroute to the right destination. Then, she thinks of Rayha. Her white cowboy hat, shiny black horse roaming in from the distance.
How she looked like the land was made for her, her life meant for her. And maybe that’s 316
all it is, she thinks. Just need to take the one petrifying leap to become the person we’re meant to be. 317
Chapter 36
Day 20: Jasper, Alberta, Canada
Sometimes you don’t know why you’re drawn to someone. You just know you need to get closer, the tug in your belly winding tighter with each step.
The woman stands in the front of the white-walled room, framed canvasses surrounding her. Her gray, almost blue curly hair shines off the track lights above her.
Mira could she her hands waving before she saw her face — vibrant energy casting across the room. Draped in a loose sack of a red dress, it was hard to not to notice her in the comer of the Jasper community library.
Mira shook the rain off her jacket and hung it on the coat hanger. Men, women, and students formed a semi-circle around the woman. So, even though it was 10 a.m. on a random Tuesday, the rain had come and hung heavy over the small town, giving tourists little to do beyond eat pastries from the one and only bakery or spend an afternoon in the library.
“I started this project because I wanted to explore the many ways a single element can intersect with the most real moments of our lives. Something so easily ignored.
Something I can’t quite get enough of. Water. So, today I’m going to share with you some of those pieces.” 318
Mira sits just a touch behind the circle, a young couple beside her.
“You wanna stay for this?” The girl asks.
“I mean,” he pauses, looking into her glazed over eyes. “It’s okay. We can go.”
Mira studies the couple for a moment longer, wondering how many more times he’ll do that for her — leave things he wants more for the one who has his heart.
“So, I’m a communicative kind of person. I want this to be interactive as much as possible. Because we all have these stories. I’m just the one with the mic today.”
The crowd offers a light laugh.
“If you’d just indulge me for a moment, tell me one moment of your life that stands out in your mind. One where you found yourself alongside or in the company of water.”
The room falls silent. Heads turn from one direction to the next, waiting for someone to be the first. An image immediately comes to Mira. Without hesitating, she raises her hand.
“Yes, thank you. You there, what’s your name?”
“Mira.” 319
“Mira, lovely. Okay tell us your moment.”
“Well, recently I was at a waterfall in Yellowstone.” Her gaze drifts off imagining herself back at the brink alongside Sheri. The gushing waterfall thrusting past them, hammering against the river beneath them.
“Yellowstone, love Yellowstone. Go on.”
“I’ve never seen a waterfall from that angle before. It was overwhelming really. How much force and power was just a foot or so away from. And the drop. It dropped straight down from right where we stood and I just felt something pull out me, you know? Like the gravity of the water was picking up things with it and part me started going with it.”
“Oh, I love it.” The woman walks closer to Mira. Her red dress now just inches away from the person in the front row. “See. Right there. A catalyzing moment that possible couldn’t have happened without that waterfall. There’s something about water that opens up the body, softens the soul. Whether we’re drinking it, swimming in it, or just watching it from afar, it has this undeniably psychological effect. And I think, partly because of that, we can have these moments that we walk away changed from.”
Mira feels her heart pumping faster. A few eyes still lingering on her. Her cheeks flush, feeling more seen in a group than she has in awhile. But there’s something else to 320
it, a little rush. She smiles and leans in towards the woman, proud of herself for speaking up.
“Anyone else?”
A white man raises his hand. Salt sprinkled across his dark hair, he raises his hand with ease like he’s done this time and time before.
“Yes, yes. Tell us your name, sir.”
“Greg.”
“So great to have you, Greg. Tell us what’s your water story?”
“Well, when I came out to my parents I took them to the ocean. I grew up in Southern
California, sunny beach town and we’d spend most of our weekends there growing up. I took them to our usual beach, walked them along the pier I learned to fish on and told them I was gay. I think having the ocean there helped. It soaked up some of that initial silence for us. Helped us work through whatever was rushing through our minds. Or at least that’s what it did for me.”
“Ah, the ocean. Yes. Yes!” she exclaims, raising her hands in the air. “Beautiful, so beautiful. Thank you for sharing.” She presses her hands over his palms. “Look at this, strangers swapping stories all because we have one common denominator to connect us. 321
That’s why I love water. It can be used as this unifying force. This element that no matter where you stand on this planet you have some access to it in some degree, and if you don’t the absence of it makes it all the more present. It’s a powerful thing.” Her eyes wander, seemingly lost in her own mind. “Anyways, let’s get to the art, shall we?”
“Maestro please!” The woman hollers to a worker in the back. The lights drop and the projector slowly fades on, waves crashing against the white wall. “So, this first piece is a short film, where we hired different people from all walks of life to read different vignettes. Most are their experiences, but a few are actually my own.”
Flashes of oceans, rivers, rain against windows all cycle through as the actors go into intimate moments. But instead of looking at the film, Mira looks at the woman. A little smile spoons across her face. She doesn’t seem to have a single ounce of doubt about her work. Confidence beams through her. Mira sits there, staring at the wall-bound waves, wondering if she could ever be up there like this, feeling proud to show off what she created, standing tall, feeling she deserves to be up there just as anyone else.
When the lights come on, a line forms to speak with the artist. The woman’s enthusiasm hardly fades, her hands waving as quickly as the conversations. Mira lines the room, staring at the rest of the woman’s photos, studying her use of shadows, the angle of the light against the person’s face, the way they’re both the focus on the photo and a part 322
of the backdrop all in the same swoop. As the last person shakes the woman’s hand, Mira feels her breath quicken, a dozen questions cycling through her head. She freezes for a moment, debating whether to walk out the door or towards the woman. Before she can decide, their eyes meet. The woman smiles, slowly packing up her things.
“I really enjoyed your work,” Mira says, moving closer.
“Oh, thank you. Thanks for coming. It was quite a great crowd.” She slides her notes into her leather bag. “Are you from around here or passing through?”
“Just passing through, nearing the end of a road trip.”
“Ah nothing better than capturing moments on the road. That’s where the vast majority of work started from. Little snippets. Different places, until I could figure out a way to gamer that same inspiration at home.”
“I hear that,” Mira says, looking down at her feet.
“Are you an artist as well?”
Mira pauses, pondering the question. She wobbles her head back and forth, wincing.
“Uh, yeah. Yeah I guess so. Well, trying to be anyway. I mean, I just take photos.
They haven’t been published anywhere or anything.” 323
“Yet,” the woman says with a wink.
“Yeah hopefully.”
“Let me ask you something. Why do you like photography?” the woman asks.
“Hmm. Because I get to capture a moment that could easily be forgotten. Preserve a piece of time in a way, my own take on it.”
“And why do you that?”
“I don’t know, because I like it. I feel good when 1 do it. I don’t think of anything else when I’m behind the camera. I’m just there, in the moment with that frame. I don’t get that with many things.”
“So, you do it for yourself. Because in one way or another it makes you feel better.
So, whether you or not your photos land anywhere, no one can take that away. You know that right? That’s yours to keep. Always. Don’t forget that.” The woman presses her hand on Mira’s shoulder.
The sight of narrow canyons bookending Zion’s river. The thin arches hanging under cloudy skies. The vibrant colors surrounding the steaming lagoon. Sunsetting over the horizon. Little moments she’s captured with her eyes and lens all carousal by. 324
“Thank you. Thank you for that. I guess sometimes it’s just hard to believe in your art when the rejections are the only thing coming in.”
“Of course. Completely understandable. But honey that’s part of the game.
Resilience. Testing faith in yourself. Realizing you have something to say, to show, to create that’s needed, if for no one else but you. And if you’re always creating for you, I promise one day, someone else will connect with it to. It may not be here, like this, with a crowd. Sometimes it’s just small moments. But keep sharing your work. It’s good for you and it’s for the art. Just follow it. Follow whatever pulls you. Whatever makes you want to take more photos, feel more alive, go there. Your art, hell your heart, they’ll both be better for it. But shoot, it doesn’t seem like I need to even tell you that. You’re out here aren’t you? On the road taking photos? That’s big. Sometimes we’re already bigger than we realize.”
Mira sighs, eyes lightening into warmth. “Thank you. I can’t tell you how nice it is to just talk with openly with someone all this. The doubt, you know? It’s hard sometimes.”
“Oh, honey. That doesn’t go away. The doubt will be there. You just learn how to counter it. The more you show up day after day amidst the doubt, the quieter it gets. So, just keep doing what you’re doing. That pull. I’m telling you, just follow it.” 325
“Would you mind if I got your card? I know you’re probably super busy, but it would just be nice to keep in touch maybe?”
“Sure thing. And despite being at the front of the room, I’m not all the busy. This is actually my first public showing.” She laughs. “I’ve been in your shoes for longer than you realize. Still there most days, so if you want to send over some photos after your trip,
I’d love to see them. Who knows, water and landscapes, I can see them sharing space.
Can’t you?” She says with a wink.
Mira tries to hide the smile swiftly widening to no avail. “Of course. That would be amazing.”
“Anyway, it was great meeting you, Mira. Keep that camera close, and that confidence closer,” she says squeezing her palm.
The woman shoulders the leather bag and waves as she heads out of the room.
Fluttering beams bounce across Mira’s chest. She tucks the card in her wallet carefully and clasps it tight. So, this is it, she thinks to herself. Being at the right place at the right time. 326
Chapter 37
Day 21: Blue River, British Columbia
Mira had woke up early to a field of yellow wildflowers, stretching as far as the eye could
see. It was her last day before the return drive home through the States. She had little
plans other than to capture as many moments as possible, following the sun in all its
shades, soaking up the miles of, knowing after today she’d be have to put in eight hour
driving days to make it back in time for work on Monday. Dark still cloaks the sky as she
waits for Sunshine to warm before hitting the road to find the day’s trailhead. Fingers of
habit, she pulls out her phone and scrolls through the morning’s email. Spam devours
most subjects lines all except, “Re: Global Traveler Fellowship application.”
Eyes widen, heart hastens, Mira stares at the subject line, her thumb hovering. Mark’s
face flashes before her face, conjuring that sinking feeling once more. In a split second there’s enough time for doubt to creep, enough time to imagine all of the ways this email
could crush her last day. One more no. One more thing that’d make it harder to trust in
her take on the world. Another time, she thinks to herself. I’ll open it later. After the last
day. We don’t need that bringing us down. She tucks the phone in her pack and puts
Sunshine in drive, letting the cove of mountains embrace her. 327
As she drives, she thinks of the artist from yesterday. How she carried herself with such confidence, spoke of her work with such ease. Follow the pull, Mira whispers to herself. Follow the pull. She inhales in and out. Her fingers tap the steering wheel as she drives. She feels the nerves rising and rising, eyes darting towards the phone resting on the passenger seat. The river rushes on beside her, a wide turn out beside it. Without warning, she swerves so fast she surprises herself, neck whipping as she brakes to a halt.
She picks up the phone, tapping, tapping, tapping until she finds her way to the email, not giving herself an extra second to overthink.
For a split second she closes her eyes as the email loads slowing, the little wheel turns and turns, waiting to reveal the rest. On the back of her lids flashes the phrase so commonly heard in rejection letters, “Thank you, but.” Her eyes winced as the words comes on the screen. And then — “Congratulations.” Jaw dropping, the phone slips right out of her hands, the phrase rounding and rounding in a flurry before she can even read the rest. She screams into the van, trilling voice bouncing off the walls of Sunshine.
Scrambling for the phone, she rereads the email.
Congratulations, Mira. You Ye been advanced to the final round o f candidates for the
Global Traveler Fellowship. O f the hundreds o f applications we received, you were one o f the five chosen. As part o f the next round, we ’11 be setting up a phone interview to learn more about you, your forthcoming project, and how it can better connect the world. 328
Please choose from the below time slots for next week. Again, congratulations. We look forward to connecting soon.
“Holy shit, holy shit,” Mira exclaims body squirming. “This is incredible! Oh god,
it’s next week. Oh my god what am I going to say? Do I have anything to say? Oh god. I
can’t blow this.” She immediately dials Gigi.
The phone rings and rings before the nurse picks up.
“Vince? Vince, this is Mira. Can I speak to my mom?”
“Oh, she’s still sleeping, dear. I can have her call you back.”
“It’s important though. Ah, can you just wake her up? I don’t think she’ll mind.”
“Oh, she will definitely mind. Do you know your mother?” he says with a deep
chuckle. “But okay, give me a sec.”
She can hear Vince squeak open the door, his deep voice as soft as he can go. The
phone rustles as Gigi’s groan gets closer to the phone.
“Mira? Are you okay? What time is it?
“I know. So sorry, Mom. It’s super early, but I got good news. Great news!”
“Oh?” 329
“I applied to this fellowship - Global Traveler - they have this grant for traveling artists and I got advanced to the final round! I have an interview next week!”
“What? Oh, Mira, that’s incredible! Oh my gosh congratulations,” Gigi says, voice climbing. “When’s the interview?”
“We have to schedule still, so I don’t know but soon. So soon. Sometime next week! I have to figure out what I’m going to say.”
“You really have to come with it for this one.” A pause lingers on the line. “This is big. Write it out. Your answers, I mean. It’ll help. Draft what you think you’ll say and practice it out loud over and over.
“Good idea,” Mira scrambles through the glove box searching for a notepad.
“I’d start today if I were you.”
“I will.”
“Really figure out your story and own it. Figure out what your project is, what it means to you, all of that.”
“Of course.”
“I’m so happy for you, Mira. This is great.” 330
“I know, right? God I’m so nervous though.”
“Just prepare. That’s all you can do. Either way it’ll be a good experience.”
“Yeah, you’re right. Okay, Jesus I’m so excited.”
“Ok, ok, how about you call me later, you know maybe when the sun’s up.” Mira can almost see the smile creeping on her face through the phone, her big curly hair frazzled from the night. “After you’ve ran through some thoughts, call me. We can practice.”
“Thanks, Mom. I’ll let you back to bed now.”
“Alright, enjoy your day. Talk soon.” 331
Chapter 38
Day 21: Blue River, British Columbia
Mira sits down out in front of the river, notebook in hand she tries to think of the things the grant committee would want to hear — the awards she didn’t have, the photographs that hadn’t been published, the esteemed professionals she couldn’t name drop, the Ivy
League school she didn’t go to. And as she stares out at the river, the water rushes down camp. Mosquitos buzz beneath the trees. Morning light shining, she sits cross-legged atop
Sunshine, thinking about all of the things she did have behind her, or rather who.
She had Shelby who had left a well-groomed life, a stable joint retirement because she knew she was in a marriage with only one foot in.
She had Janice who had carved a career out of reminding people of things they’d rather forget, helping the world find its way forward without repeating the way it came.
She had Xavier who peeled back that thick layer she hadn’t even realized was there until she felt how wildly and tenderly she could laugh and let love in when her guard was down. 332
She had the woman by the mirrored lake who may not have been at her finest hour,
but her most honest. Someone who was maybe a step closer to owning her story instead
of running from it.
She had Rayha who reminded her that sometimes detours aren’t detours at all and
Sheri who could pine poetry from the hardest of moments.
She had all of these people behind her, in front of her, captured in tender moments,
not curated for a shoot, but experienced in a passing moment of life. And even if it was just two weeks. Even if she’d return back to her normal life on Monday, these fourteen
days, these unforgettable people were part of moments that could never be stolen,
fragments of time she had frozen with a click of a shutter, women who veered and turned
out more than okay. And maybe that’s why she had fallen in their wake. Different shades
of the same courage over and over again. Life is full of reminders on how to keep
moving.
She pulls out her pen and looked at the list of questions she had written, imagining all
the questions that might arise come Monday. She starts scribbling.
I think this project is worth pursuing, because people need to know there are
different roads and they need to meet the everyday women who walk them. Women who in
one way or another faced different things, veered towards the ill-advised and turned out 333
more than okay, because isn '1 that what we ’re all looking for? Someone to show us no
matter what we ’re facing, it’s possible. And that whether we want to, we ’re completely
capable o f doing it alone?
I grew up with a mother who was constantly fleeing all things stable. And I never
once saw or a read a story with a woman that resembled her life without ending up as a
disheveled mess to be learned from. I ’m not saying she was perfect, far from it. I ’m not
saying I'm the perfect daughter. But, I think there’s a danger in only showing one side of
a story, of giving women a single-track option, and while I don’t think these intimate photos and honest write-ups will change the world, I do think they can start a
conversation. Something for the twenty-something growing up in suburbia can look at
and soften just a touch knowing it’s okay to do more than grow up, get married, and have
the five grandkids her parents have been waiting for.
We don’t just need more women’s stories. We need new stories. Stories o f everyday
women the world casts off as deviants from the path, the outliers who landed on the river
bend, the ones who have a tendency to wander close to the edge. And I think, after this
trip, with this your support I can go beyond just California to Canada. I could cross
borders to other countries, drive into Central America and connect with women from
different cultures who have found different ways to stand up for their version o f an honest
life. Because this world is full o f incredible heroes we will otherwise never know, who 334
will never make their way to a magazine cover. They 11 be in the backyard digging up a
new garden wondering if they ’re enough, or making sandwiches for their children just
after they got off the night shift, or putting themselves through school at fifty when
everyone told hem it’s too late to start over. They 11 be doing everything opposite o f the
clean married, kids, retirement life that’s expected o f them and they 11 be more than okay.
And seeing that, reminding ourselves of that gives the women who follow a little more
breathing room — inspiration to bet on the women they ’re meant to be.
I don 7 think any o f us have it all figured out, especially me. But I think when we lean
into that uncertainty, when we hold spaces for conversations around it. When we
highlight the unknown instead o f run from it, we can become more intrinsically connected
through tendrils o f vulnerability. That’s why I think this project is worth pursuing. Not just because I know I need to grow as a woman and an artist, but because I think a good
chunk o f the world needs it too — even if they don 7 know it yet.
A sliver of sun creeps through the trees, warming her cheek. She closes her eyes and
feels herself soften. She breathes in A smile inches its way up her face. She puts down
the notebook and readies herself for another day. 335
Chapter 39
Gigi, Summerset Assisted Living
Sometimes life hands you cards, and you’re not ready for them. Hell, you try to return
them. You jam that back in that slot again and again but they just keep bending the way
crumbled dollars bill do, and no matter how long you try you know it’s just not going to
happen. Because some moves in life can’t be undone even if we were the ones to make
them.
I’m not going to say I like being here. I’m not going to say it’s gotten more
comfortable or appealing. But I will say it offered something I needed when I needed it.
For the first time in a while it allowed me to ask for help in ways that weren’t monetary.
But I’m learning life keeps moving. It stretches on just as the road does. And you can’t just stall out and hope time takes you back to where you came from. There is only
forward in this world. Only a rising sun to drive towards.
So, I guess this is me saying I’m ready for the next turn. Ready to find ways to live
more fully in this next phase. Because my body may not be what it used to, but I’m still
here, feeling, smelling, hearing the world when I let myself pay attention to all that’s out
there. And there’s beauty. Beauty everywhere. Mira, the way she way she’s out there
seeing all those parks, describing the way the colors paint across the mountain, hearing 336
the rush of the river in the background. It’s reminded me of that, reminded me I can’t just cling to what’s lost, but deepen what’s left.
I was mulling through all of this, Joni Mitchell playing in the background, when I heard her voice, a voice I hadn’t heard since I landed here. Even still, I could’ve recognized the whisper even when half-asleep.
“Gigi, you have some company,” Vince said from across the door. A pair of feet squeaked across the hardwood.
“Hey Gigi.”
I paused long and hard, feeling my ribs contract just an inch tighter.
“It’s Lorraine.”
“I know. I’m going blind, not deaf.”
“Well it’s good to see you’re still yourself.”
“I’ll let you two catch up,” Vince says, backing out of the room.
“You find yourself a boyfriend or something?”
“What?” 337
“I just figured not seeing you for a year. You must of found yourself another boyfriend.”
Lorraine scoffed. “Okay come on, Gigi. Give me a break.”
“Something tells me you didn’t come here for a break.”
“I saw Mira.”
“I figured. She has Sunshine, doesn’t she?”
“At least we know this place isn’t making you any kinder.”
“Lorraine, I swear to God —”
“Sorry. I’ll stop. I just came to see how you were. How Mira is. She hasn’t returned my calls. I know it’s been awhile but —“
“Are you surprised? Kids grow up, but they don’t forget.”
“Gigi, it was a long time ago. Can we just move on already?”
“Not mine to move on from.”
“I’m just sorry, okay? How many times do I have to say it? I’m sorry.”
“Mmhmm.” 338
“We should’ve stuck together.”
“Yeah, well there’s no taking back the past.”
Her cold hand suddenly touched mine. I tried to soften the flinch, but it was already
out there, reverberating through my body. “I’d prefer it if you let me know you’re going
to touch me.”
“G igi...”
“Lorraine, we don’t need to do this.”
“Gigi, I love you. You know that.”
I can feel a sigh trying to find its way out. I don’t want to go there, deciphering what kind of love she’s referencing. I hate going there. She always did this. Gave me a little rope to cling to just to dangle me out again.
“I’m going to touch your hand again, okay?” Lorraine said, softer this time. I could
feel it — the warmth finding its way from my hand through the rest of me. “I’m sorry I
didn’t say it back that day.”
“It was a long time ago. It was emotional that day. It was just the wine anyway.
Didn’t mean anything.” 339
I could see the image playing back like an old grainy film. It was the day before we went up to Donner that day. Lorraine and I had shared our usual bottle of red, but she had just shampooed the couches, so we were laying side by side on the carpet, looking up at her Turkish lamps like kids in a fort. I don't remember what she said, but I reached her hand and held it, the smallest hand I’d ever clasped. She didn’t pull away. I could feel her heart racing as our wrists pressed together. I had felt this coming for months. Things evolving, the way we looked at each other long nights up staying up laughing. Everyone says you’ll know love when you see it — like it a sudden flash gifted at first sight. But for me, it was slow, a building, something far more complicated than a seamless knowing. It was the slightest tweak, but you could feel it. A little something neither of us were quite ready for. But that night, I don’t know. I just didn’t care to hold back anymore. So, I pressed her jaw towards mine and kissed her. I had never kissed a woman before and was surprised. How it felt so natural, like there was no other way to feel this right. I felt her press back into me, and I could feel it right there. Us sharing so much more than a kiss, but all the stories of what we thought we ought to be uncoiling into one another, my body unloading decades of weight as each second passed. Our eyes were still closed when I said ‘I love you.’ I didn’t think before I spoke and that was the problem.
She just stared at me like a deer in headlights. It was mortifying. Not a single word back.
I didn’t know tightness could return just as quickly as it fled. I learned that then, and even though we never talked it about it after that night, how she casually just stood up and said 340
she was going to bed, I started to see how separate she kept herself from the world in little ways like that. And after that next day with Jim. After all of it. I just could never look at her the same again.
“I want to be around more. For you, for Mira. I’ve been doing a lot of thinking since I saw her. You know not everyone’s as brave as you Gigi. Not everyone can throw themselves into the world not worried about how they land. I’ve always admired you for that.”
“You’ll have to talk to Mira. It’s her decision really.”
“Gigi, you know it’s more than that.”
“Lorraine, let’s not complicate things more than they already are.”
“I added on to the backyard. I have an extra room now. Turned it into a more formal studio for the meantime.”
“Can you get Vince back in here?”
“You don’t belong here. You know you don’t.”
“Well you didn’t stop me when I moved in.”
“I was just scared. You know I’ve never been that great with change.” 341
“And what’s making you start now?”
“Sometimes it takes people awhile to have the courage to lean into what they love.” I didn’t mean to do it, not consciously, but I squeezed her hand back right then and felt softness I hadn’t felt in years. She squeezed right back.
“I’d really love it if you’d come back.”
I didn’t know what to say, so I just sat there silent, holding her hand. Thinking about the years we went on with regular life, trying to forget each other. How she just watched me pack up my stuff, leave and looked at me with those deep doe eyes from the door frame, but didn’t say a peep.
Vince knocked softly on the doorframe.
“I’m sorry to interrupt ladies, but Gigi, it’s time for your pills.”
I slipped my hand back into my lap. “It was good seeing you, Lorraine.” I could feel her hovering over me still. Vince squeaked closer.
“Ok. Well, give Mira my love will you? Maybe when Mira gets back we can all have lunch.”
“I’ll leave that to her.” 342
“Of course. Well, I’ll call you in a week after she settles. See what you think.” She squeezed my hand once more. “Bye, Gigi.”
I could hear her walk out of the room, and as she did, I could see it. The three of us back in the van, Mira leading the way, each of us leaning into a different phase of life while still having one another. But I could still feel the dull ache, that little crescent moon pulsing from the bottom of the heart, like something had poked holes in the parts the light could be, even after all these years I can still feel the tender parts seep out.
Nowhere but forward, I told myself. But all the while I wondered, could you take a piece of the past and let it find its place in the present? Could you heal the edges you thought were easier to ignore? Could we all accept we weren’t perfect, merely trying our best, and forgive each other with the compassion we have left?
Vince shook the cup of pills in front of me.
“Can I skip them today? Please?”
“But the migraines?”
“I’m okay. I want to be fully here today.” 343
I think one thing people never talk about enough is how to gracefully let go—to know when it’s time to close a chapter, to trust the river you’re on leads to the ocean, to trust life will take your body where it needs to go. It’s so easy to fear the unknown. It’s easy for me to feel my way from one end of the table to the tissue box and not fall into a mind swirl of all the reasons this new life will never again be enough. It’s easy to hold onto color — the way the world was once so illuminant with varying shades I took for granted.
How I could look out the window on a foggy day, cursing the weather not even realizing
I was graced with seven shades of green all in one view. Views of the day always glow a bit more once they’re gone.
Here, there’s a lot of time to think. Think about how letting go usually looked more like running from — an attempt to escape the part of life I wasn’t ready for, couldn’t commit to, feared its mere presence would strangle me slowly with the facade of comfort. But maybe it’s time to lean into this next phase. Maybe Mira’s right. Maybe I still find ways to feel the thrill of adventure with everything else I still have in me.
You know, I had a daydream yesterday? I was out of this place. I was walking down Haight Street toward the park. The smell of incense plumed out of shops. Voices laughed around smells of marinara and melting cheese. Cars hummed and a street musician serenaded all of us with hands to drums. I couldn’t see a thing, but I felt so damn alive. I could walk around this city and my limbs didn’t ache. I could hear the 344
sound of the crosswalk, or the hum of the cars and use it as signals to keep going rather
than reasons to tighten up. I could let the world fill me with the many parts of itself. I saw
it. Right there. Clear as day. In the way I walked so upright and confident, how no one
stood by my side, there was even a little smile creeping across my face. I was happy. And
it got me thinking, why have I let myself settle into this place? Why have I let everyone
else ease the pain of my life instead of pushing through it? Why am I rotting when I still have so much opportunity to live?
I’m not saying I love the idea of living with Lorraine. I'm not saying I’m even
considering it. but I don’t know. That dream, Mira’s trip, that visit from her, it just all got me thinking maybe it’s just time to let go of our past. All of it. Take the parts we want to
move with and keep moving. Maybe this time more thoughtfully, intentionally. With
more care and less haste. Because sure, it’s difficult as hell to let go of a life you love.
And every day I sit here sinking into this damn chair, I feel myself tearing at the edges of
it, trying to hold onto a cliff with no grips. And I know it, I’m slipping down. But that
doesn’t mean it’s all just rocky earth and stone ground below. Maybe it’s a river waiting
to catch the fall and carry me further than I ever would’ve thought to take myself.
So, I guess this is me lifting my fingers off the ledge and trusting that even though
I’m older and my body doesn’t work the way it once did, I’m still the same woman I’ve
always loved inside. The same ones whose crossed 40 states and 15 countries. The 345
woman who figured out how to raise a child when everyone around me said I wasn’t fit.
The woman who despite not necessarily ‘making if, somehow made a little mark. And even if no one else sees it, I’m a little proud of a good chunk of it. And I’m ready to lean back into the better parts of the woman I was and get her to rise into the woman I know I can still be. 346
Chapter 40
Day 22: Vancouver, British Columbia
There are things you can want to say to someone. Things you can you feel welling up and out of fear or growing accustomed to biting your tongue. These kinds of things can well in a person. Expand the way roots swell in a pot that’s grown too small. A point you reach at a particular place where you realize that something can’t help in the ways it always has.
Maybe it was the fact that the trip was just three days shy of ending. Maybe it was knowing the way back would be pretty much a straight shot to San Francisco, rather than the meandering journey Mira had thus far. Maybe it was the fear that the closer to got to the life she had, the less likely she’d be to tell her mother all the things that were welling up, or have the courage to act on the life ponderings.
She looks down at the forest floor. A cluster of tightly wound ferns still curled. She wonders what happens to a person that stays stay quiet, keeps it all tucked down there like a swelling root, winding and winding around itself. Her boots press into soil. She closes her eyes and imagines everything beneath her that was living just the opposite. The subterranean tendrils that found the space they needed, sprawling out again and again. 347
She considers dialing Gigi’s number. Dialing it the same way she had countless times before, but this time somehow felt different.
As the phone rings, she expects Vince’s humble tone, but instead hears a woman.
“Oh, Gigi is out right now with Vince.”
“Out? What do you mean out?” She tries to remember the last time her mother felt the sun.
“She wanted to go to the park.”
Mira’s eyes widens. She hangs there on the phone silent.
“Oh. Oh wait. Just a second. Here she is. They’re just walking in now.
She can hear her mother’s laugh railing from across the room — the same way it used when they’d be at a party, the supermarket, creasing crows feet of even the most serious bystanders.
“Gigi, your daughter’s on the phone. You want to call her back?”
“I’ll take it in my room, just give me one sec. Just gotta get myself over there.” Mira tries to imagine her mother there, kissed by the sun again. Her mind bounces from 348
possibilities, wondering whether she’s in a wheelchair, or simply leaning on a cane, either completely viable depending on how steep her symptoms are today.
“My little traveler,” Gigi says. “How’s it going, sweetheart?”
Mira pauses, eyes squinting, confused at the lightness rising in her voice.
“Where were you?”
“What do you mean?”
“The nurse said you were out.”
“Oh, yeah. Went to the park. Pretty nice day out there.”
“Uh, when did you start going to the park?”
“Well, today. I decided I should get out more. Use these legs while I still have em.”
She chuckles. “It’s beautiful out there. We walked to the water. I could hear the waves.
Oh, the sun felt so good on my skin.”
“Did you walk or
“For a good while, I did. My leg started aching a bit too much, so Vince pushed me on the way back. But I think if I just get out there enough I’ll get my strength back. Vince 349
even said he can start doing little exercises with me in my room. Get my legs strong again.”
“That’s - that’s incredible.”
“What’s up with you?”
“Just surprised is all.”
“Yeah, me too I guess. But sometimes life brings you things you don’t want but need.
Lorraine came by the other day. Just got me thinking about things.”
“Oh?”
“Yeah. We talked about, well - a lot.”
Mira flicks her fingers then darts up from the log.
“Started thinking I guess. The things I’ve been carrying. We’ve been carrying. It’s just starting to feel like maybe it’s time we start fresh, you know? Dig into this next chapter instead of keep running from it. I feel like I’ve been running from this reality so long, just running to stand still. It’s tiring, constantly trying to escape my mind, the aches, all of it.” 350
Mira sits silent. The sound of a distant man coughing in the background fills the phone where her voice would’ve been.
“Mira?”
“Yeah.”
“What’s wrong?”
Mira can feel something rising like a root swelling in her chest, expanding across her throat, drying up all of the saliva that was once there just moments ago. Her face flushes to warm, heart rushing from to a thump.
“It’s just that a lot of shit has been coming up for me around Lorraine.”
Gigi sits silent.
“I, I, I just don’t trust her and realized I never really have. And to be honest there are things I haven’t even shared fully with you that I feel like wouldn’t have happened if it wasn’t for her. And I keep pretending it’s fine. Stuffing it down and to be honest I’m just tired of pretending it’s fine. That I’m okay with it. That she could blindly let some fucking creep violate me and we’d just later ignore it for decades. She just stayed. She didn’t try and speak up for me. I mean. I don’t know. I know it was like ages ago. I don’t know why it’s been coming up so much lately, but it has and I hate it. I don’t know.” 351
“Oh, honey.” Her voice trailed trying to find the right place to go. “We all should’ve done better by you then.”
The roots split, cracking open veins to water meant to hold through winter, but now rush out like rivers to waterfall. Mira tries to muffle the sniffles, but Gigi hears it.
“I should’ve been there for you. I shouldn’t have left you on your own that much.
You were such an independent kid and I mean I never thought for a second anything would happen to you. If I had, I wouldn’t have left you there. I’m just sorry. I just want you know I’m sorry.”
Mira closes her eyes, tears streaming down, falling into the soft, mossy earth.
“I guess I just never understood why I wasn’t enough for you to stay. I mean, I get it more now. Being out here. The lightness that comes with it all. How good I feel I can only imagine was doubled for you. But I was your kid. And I never felt like that was enough to keep you around.”
“Mira, I know I didn’t show my love in ways like others mothers did. I know that.
But I’ve always loved you deeply. And even though it seemed like I was always gone, I really tried to stay put for a good while for you. And it may not been long enough, but you got to understand I’ve never been good at building roots in one place. I never wanted to. And a part of me wanted to show you that we could do things different. You could 352
choose a life that didn’t look like everyone else’s and maybe it wouldn’t be all shit.” She tries to muster a half-chuckle, but it comes up short. “Hopefully, you enjoyed some chunks of it. I just wanted to show you that we didn’t need to fall into a stale life that didn’t feel like ours. Now, I can only hope you walked away with a sliver of that.”
A flash flood of images crosses her mind. Thaf weekend during winter break where her mom surprised her with a trip to Shasta where they spent all day saucering down a nook of the mountain no one had touched. She remembers the time she helped Mira make a science project with a real life scavenger hunt, replicating the coastal ecosystem by scouring beaches up to two hours south of San Francisco. The list could keep going. The many ways Gigi was there in her own way. She showed up as a mother while still showing up as herself. Her chest softens. She wipes the wet sheen from her cheeks.
“Thanks for saying that. 1 do love you, you know.”
“I know. I love you too, sweetheart.”
“And Lorraine — ”
“We don’t have to — ”
“It’s fine. I’m fine with seeing her. I’m just not ready be a family, or whatever, again.
I just want us to move on on our own.” 353
“Okay,” Gigi pauses. “No problem, we can talk more when you’re here.”
Mira feels something stirring as soon as she hangs up the phone — the anticipation of confronting Lorraine — the hot pot boiling in her belly, dormant slivers swelling in size, popping up against her ribs. She walks to the back of the van, folds clothes discarded in a comer. Before her hands can finish she moves to the tea kettle, flicks a match to boil water. She flinches as it bums the edge of her finger. A pang hits behind her eye. Not now, she tells herself. Not now. But the boiling steams up her body, making its way from belly to trachea to tongue. She slinks against the bed of the van. Thoughts splash against the foggy wall. She tells herself if she breathes deep enough it’ll soften. If she drives a bit further, it’ll trail behind. If she forgets she’s returning, she can forget what’s coming.
How do you know when it’s time to let go of a story that wasn’t mean to stay inside you? How do you tell the heart, the little tender part of you tucked far down that we aren’t where we’ve been, but we are where we’re going? How do you know it’s time, make it time to be where you need to be? Mira looks up from Sunshine and out across
Vancouver’s skyline. She can feel the end nearing, reality pressing from behind.
She looks at her phone and sees the lingering missed call from Lorraine. Tries to imagine what she’d say. How she could transport all of this into thoughts another could hold. She wonders how to send a past self through a single photo, and if she called, could 354
she somehow relay the feeling of hot water swelling from chest to throat. Could she find a backdrop to frame the face of a child, feet dangling at the edge of a lake, looking for answers it can’t give? She tries to think up what the portrait of a teenager would look like who always wondered why tongues felt so intrusive in her mouth, how bodies almost felt like pins, how the musk of cabins makes her stomach chum. How can you make someone understand that even when you close your eyes tight, so tight, flashes can still slip through them? It’s the little things she’s tried to hide that have become the heaviest to let go-
She hears the voice of her old therapist. How she once said to write a letter to the people you have the hardest things to say.
“Just the act of letting it out is something,” she said. “The decision to give it comes later.”
She pulls out a piece of paper and starts writing, hand swiftly moving across the page.
Lorraine,
There are things yon know once you say them everything will change. After the truth comes out, something will rupture, rip wider than imagined, and as a result it can't go back to old restraints. This is one o f those times, one o f those letters. This is both a I- have-love-for-you and Tm-trying-to-forgive-you letter. This is me saying you could've 355
done better. That a child doesn 7 deserve to feel that way fo r so long, so buttoned up,
glossed over, never heard, when they tried to whisper what never wanted to come out.
That I can 7 go on pretending this never happened. Pretending that you choose to look
Jim past sexually abusing me because it was too uncomfortable, unfathomable to be real.
That even though you never wanted to be, I looked at you like a mother, a could-be
mother, second mother. And when I needed you to be there, you slipped into the dark and
let me carry the weight, showed me what it’s like to learn how heavy shadows can be
when they wedge themselves into sleeves o f the skin. When they become a part o f you in
so many places that you have to go digging time and time again to excavate all the places
they've landed and tried to conquer.
I need to tell you these things to let you carry part o f this weight. To remind myself it
wasn 7 my fault, that I didn 7 need to do more. I needed you to do more. Needed him to do
less. Needed the world to be a safer place than it was. And though maybe it's no one’s fault, it doesn 7 seem fair for me to the be the only one to have my hands holding rocks
that keep making it so much harder to swim. So, as much as I love you in some ways, I
hate you in others and I need you to just hear this. Let it be a part o f you just fo r a
moment the way it’s been a part o f me. I need you to own this part of the past the way I
have had to. And maybe that’s enough. Maybe it’s not. All I know is, it’s where we have
to start. 356
-Mira.
She takes off her shoes and walks into the lake. She keeps walking, leggings still on.
Keeps walking until the frigid cold freezes everything up and down her spine. Until she lifts herself up from the water, feels the warmth of the air against her frigid skin, and thinks to herself, this is how we learn to fully feel again. 357
Chapter 41
Day 25: San Francisco, California
Everything has to end. You can stretch moments for as long as you'd like. Pull them thin until they’re just two frayed threads trying to find their core. You could close your eyes and imagine that times haven’t changed, that you’re still there in that van under the mountains nowhere to be but here, that your mother’s fine and so are your finances. That life is smooth as the lake you were once overlooking. But we all know that’s isn’t quite true. We all feel the way time pulls us forward whether we’re ready or not.
Driving back into the city, crossing that Golden Gate bridge, fog creeping over the top quarters feels like walking into a familiar embrace. The kind of hug where the arms know where to press tight, have grown to know your body, remembering where to push palms to back of ribs. Because this city, while holding so much for so many, still knows her. Knows the sounds that make her chest singe, knows how to stretch her open on a
Indian summer day under Golden Gate oaks, knows how she likes her drink from the bar she frequented back in college, remembers the homeless faces she’s learned the names of, the strangers turned acquaintances who have found their way into her camera’s view.
Driving back into San Francisco is a mixture of driving into home and realizing she’s at the edge of it, outgrowing the parts she once stayed for. Before going further into the 358
city back to her apartment, Mira stops at Fort Point, a narrow, under-bridge overlook most would never know how to find. Ocean stretches to her right. Bay closes in to her left. Two weeks. Irrevocable moments imprinted into the back of her mind. Possibilities cracked open. The people, the towns, golden opportunities all just seemingly a short drive, walk, moment away.
The water inches its way up and down Mira’s toes, feet dangling as she sits atop a rock. If she closes her eyes can she can still see them. Little parts of the people who came and went. The way the morning light hit Xavier’s face in the morning, the way nerves flicked themselves into the flames as Shelby got comfortable with the camera’s gaze.
How Sheri’s eyes looked as though she had already fallen off the waterfall, softened into the process of disintegration, unraveling again and again. It’s a strange thing, she wonders, how when you’re out there on the road, you widen with the world. You see people as potential friends, inch closer towards random conversations instead of tuck earbuds to veer away from them. But here, in a city full of millions of people, you can feel so alone. Like you couldn’t be further from the person your pressing shoulders with
— both about to get off at the same bus stop, unlock iron gates just two doors down from one another. She wonders if it’s the constant closeness that makes everyone feel like the need to separate. Knowing if they opened to every person who looked interesting they’d be constantly tender, neverendingly exposed in a place with seven directions of energy 359
firing in the same second. What we run from and what we open to — the smallest veer that makes all the difference.
The sound of feet slowly near. Shoes meet rubble again and again. She looks up to a man not much older than herself. He’s staring out into the vista, eyes combing up and down the Marin Headlands, hands in pockets. She thinks of the countless people just like him wandering about this city at this very moment. Trying to make a place for themselves in a sea of someones, both eager and resistant to making this place a part of them. She thinks of how many Xavier’s there could be in this city, the handful of Shelby’s, how many incredible souls are out there worth meeting on any given day. She offers up a smile a little half-moon to the nearing man, the tiniest gesture that whispers hello. His eyes dart in saccadic leaps. A nervous tight-lipped grin forms and tries to stay as he attempts to hold his gaze before it falters.
He keeps walking, and as he does she thinks of the many times she could have passed opportunities on the road — small smiles that slipped into conversations. It’s a choice to walk into a space and be ready for what it has in store for you. It’s part of the reason she loves the road. Loves it because it forces her to love deeply but leave quickly. It’s the nature of passing through forces her to study the scene with every sense. Trace every inch of color climbing up that distant canyon, take in what or who she’s standing beside, almost taste the earthy fragrance of the pines, opening widely and letting the world in. 360
Every person she’s met, every scene viscerally felt has shown her how to fall in love with a place she passes through, because she knows in a day, a week, a month this will just be another park passed through, another body of water that kissed her skin and kept going.
So, she’s learned to inhale it all. Sew a comer to her chest and with every exhale leave a piece of herself there. It happened over and over again like that. Leaving pieces of the heart behind — on a lakeshore in Vancouver, beneath a hoodoo in Utah, at the foot of the brink of a waterfall in Wyoming. When on the road, you give yourself to the space knowing you can’t take any of it with you. A lesson that not everything loved needs to be possessed. That sometimes you’re just meant to experience its impermanence. Just meant to love it while it’s there. And when it’s gone, it may not be visible from the windshield, but it’s still sewn to that heartstring as a place that changed you while changing nothing about itself. And that’s why she’s grown to love the road. Because you get to fall in love with a place knowing you’ll have to leave it. And there’s a practice of vulnerability in that — in loving and letting go over and over again.
And if she just keeps leaning into those crevasse moments, offering bits of herself to a city that’s so easy to shield from, then maybe, just maybe, all of that beauty she finds in a single frame will extend well beyond it. Will bleed off the borders and color the blocks she walks on, fill the quiet moments full of people with eye to eye, heart to heart, human connection. That the things that stress many out about this city, the ways we’re all 361
fighting to afford it, telling ourselves it’s time to leave, while still feeling it pump life through their veins. All of that can be a means to connect just as much as it is to separate.
And if we lean in just a moment longer than what’s comfortable, she wonders. Then, the least expected has that extra second of a chance to show itself. 362
Chapter 42
Day 26, Pacifica
It was the kind of day that made time feel limitless, that whatever had happened over the
week and whatever would come couldn’t be further. Because she found the only spotlight
of sun in a twenty mile radius — the back of Pacifica, the deep valley you can see from
Highway 1 where rolling green hills open to the sun. The thick marine layer hovers along the coast just five minutes away. Mira drives towards the foothills, searching for rays to warm her skin. She carved out this morning for herself, a final Sunday to let the trip’s happenings marinate before visiting Gigi and readying for work tomorrow.
Despite being back home, she wasn’t quite ready to head back into her apartment, four walls that felt so foreign. So, she slept on Esplanade Drive, a street at the edge of
Pacifica where rusted camper vans line the sandy cliff. She slept here countless nights with Gigi, one of the few steady spots she and her mother could always count on when
Gigi wanted to wake to the both the ocean and the familiar.
Last night, she called her mom from the beachside street, her head resting against the
pillow the same way it had for the last three weeks. Her mother told her all about the
sounds and smells of her day’s outting. She had been out walking with Vince every day
since Mira started her return home. 363
“Yesterday I made the whole trip there back, no wheelchair. Fuck that damn chair, that’s how I’ve been feeling. Thing’s a death sentence. I told Vince I’m walking everywhere now. I’ll bring the cane for now, but it’s not staying. Not anymore.” Her voice bounced more and more each day, her old self coming back to color. Today Mira planned to take her beyond the park, out of the city, and to the beach - a surprise she knew she was ready for. But for now, the morning was hers.
The fog hangs low, a dense layer blanketing the entire coast for as far as the eye could see. It’s July, but if time wasn’t calendared you’d think it was December — gray looming everywhere except the back of the valley. You could see the sun glowing in the distance, the smallest pocket of blue sky amidst a tunnel of gray. Walking up into the forest, a mountain lion warning sign stand to her left. A woman with a stroller nears. She’s talking to her toddler whose looking up and out at the trees. The woman smiles at Mira, but instead of saying hello she continues talking to her child.
“That girl is hiking all alone,” she cooes, looking up at the creaking trees as though they’re taunting her. “Mommy wishes she could do that.” She turns the stroller along the paved cement, heading towards the half-mile valley loop. The child says nothing. The eucalyptus trees creak. “Maybe one day we will.” 364
Mira blushes as the woman continues on. She watches her disappear around the bend and in that split second of a moment, sees a reflection in the woman, a fusion of both herself and her mother. Someone who grew up seeing solitude as an opportunity rather than a limitation. She’d grown from that kid in the stroller to the one roaming up and down the country, letting the world in again and again. She pauses mid-step and stand there in the middle of the trail, sun kissing her shoulder, fog well behind her. Closing her eyes, she inhales softly and feels budding satisfaction bloom in her belly, the fraction of a moment where you realize you’re slowly becoming the person you’ve always wanted to be. As she rounds the first switchback, her tight-lipped grin stretches to full teeth.
Lightness treads through her, reverberations of all of the beauty she’s felt in the last three weeks. These passing moments now part of her, sewn to the seams of her heart, tucked in places no one could strip away. They’ve found the smallest cell to bloom into, turning shadowed comers of self into pulsing meadows of light.
As the eucalyptus creaks above her, she thinks about her first night out on the road alone. The way the smallest sound magnified with fear. She more then managed through the three weeks, but saw a new shade of herself emerge with each challenge. She opened to more people and moments than she ever thought possible. She thinks of the travel grant interview, now just a day away. She’s written down, recited, recorded and played back all the thoughts she could imagine she’d want to say. She looks up to the clear blue 365
sky, ready as she’ll ever be. Just imagining the interview makes her chest dance, but in a far lighter way than it used to a month ago. Now, instead of tight ropes twisting, its ladybug wings pattering. Now it’s electric fluttering around the edges of the heart. Now it’s believing in what she’s capable of.
Climbing up the mountain, she starts to think about the other side - if she doesn’t get it, if the odds don’t work in her favor. Despite the inkling of fear, lightness still breathes through her chest. She thinks of the lush groves of Oregon, the heart red earth of Utah, the countless places to live, to seek out photography jobs in at smaller papers, outdoor magazines, or coastal companies and build her own skills without waiting on The
Frontier's historic name to build it for her. Imagining all of cities dotted up and down the
Pacific coast, all the countries sweeping around the world, the countless jobs available, the billions of people waiting to be met, she can’t help but see the incredibly full life in front of her.
As she nears the top of the peak, the ocean suddenly emerges in the distance, blanketing the world beneath tree line. Up ahead there’s three different peaks she can choose from, each carved by a different trail. Two heavily trotted, the other full of more coyote bush than footprints. She remembers her mother taking her up here on frigid winter day. Back then, at the top stood more than a view of the ocean, but snow - the 366
smallest little snowman. Snow just twenty minutes from San Francisco, improbable but not impossible.
She pulls out her camera from her backpack and snaps a photo of the fork in the path
- one with the lens and another with her mind. Because right here, in this moment, there’s simply no wrong turn.