A ROAD OF HER OWN

A s’ A Written Creative Work submitted to the faculty of 5 4 San Francisco State University 'ZOm in partial fulfillment of £ N 0*7 C V the requirements for the Degree V. (

Master of Fine Arts

In

Creative Writing

by

Kimberly Marie Gomes

San Francisco, California

January 2019 Copyright by Kimberly Marie Gomes 2019 CERTIFICATION OF APPROVAL

I certify that I have read “A Road of Her Own” by Kimberly Marie Gomes, and that in my opinion this work meets the criteria for approving a thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirement for the degree Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing at San Francisco

State University.

I l/fa/ May-lee Chai. MFA Assistant Professor, Creative Writing

Michelle Carter, MFA Professor, Creative Writing A ROAD OF HER OWN

Kimberly Marie Gomes San Francisco, California 2019

A Road of Her Own trails Mira, a twenty-nine year-old obituary writer and aspiring photographer, who is stuck in a dead-end job but afraid to move on due to fears of artistic inadequacy, crippling debt, and leaving her ill mother behind. After growing up with her mother in their Westfalia van, Sunshine, Mira is afraid to give up the little security she has managed to accrue for herself - a steady but boring job and a small basement apartment in the most expensive city in the United States. Traveling and photographing may be the dream, but her passions feel selfish until she too is confronted with her own mortality and embarks on a road trip to Banff, Canada, where adventure and inspirational women help her redefine what it means to be alive.

I certify that the Abstract is a correct representation of the content of this written creative work.

Date ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

For centuries novels have featured men embarking on adventures for the sake of adventure. Yet even in 2018, it’s rare to find a traveling female protagonist going on a journey for herself without running from or to a relationship. “A Road of Her Own” is

my attempt to write the woman-led story I wanted to read. Thank you to May-lee Chai for your steady support and thoughtful perspective and Toni Mirosevich for teaching me how to dive into the spaces that helped generate this book. TABLE OF CONTENTS

Chapter 1 ...... 1

Chapter 2 ...... 20

Chapter 3 ...... 30

Chapter 4 ...... 41

Chapter 5 ...... 48

Chapter 6 ...... 58

Chapter 7 ...... 78

Chapter 8 ...... 86

Chapter 9 ...... 96

Chapter 1 0 ...... 101

Chapter 1 1 ...... 107

Chapter 1 2 ...... 111

Chapter 1 3 ...... 123

Chapter 1 4 ...... 134

Chapter 1 5 ...... 140 TABLE OF CONTENTS

Chapter 1 6 ...... 149

Chapter 1 7 ...... 156

Chapter 1 8 ...... 169

Chapter 1 9 ...... 175

Chapter 2 0 ...... 197

Chapter 2 1 ...... 200

Chapter 2 2 ...... 211

Chapter 23 ...... 220

Chapter 2 4 ...... 225

Chapter 25 ...... 241

Chapter 2 6 ...... 246

Chapter 27 ...... 250

Chapter 2 8 ...... 260

Chapter 2 9 ...... 269

Chapter 3 0 ...... 278

Chapter 3 1 ...... 282

vi TABLE OF CONTENTS

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362

vii 1

Chapter 1

Have you looked down Montgomery Street at 8:45 in the morning and felt like the world was swallowing you whole? Mira stands there, in the thick of the human river. Horns honk. Cars clog intersections off Market Street. Muni buses rush by inches from the curb.

It’s Tuesday and San Francisco suits silently scurry to places of equal importance, rushing to sit, absorb, be absorbed by to-dos left undone from yesterday.

She can already feel the cloud of short breaths when she steps off Muni. She sees it as the stream of bodies overflow at the foot of the escalator, an expanding puddle struggling to contain itself. Person after person inches up to the stairs, taking up every inch of free space. The only place to look is down, so down she looks. She steadies the

DSLR camera in her palms. Careful not to disturb the crowd, she pulls her camera up from her neck and snaps a photo - a motion she’s practiced week after week. She snaps another of the glittering, yellow landing strip at her feet and imagines ants toting the same line as the humans around her. The cement sparkle continues out of the station and onto the sidewalk. The concrete comes alive as little specks of glass of dance in the morning glimmer. She wonders why they put sparkles in the cement - if it’s an accident or a choice to lighten the thing everyone ends up staring at. 2

As she rises from subway to street level, she notices the darkness - the Financial

District shadow. The kind that goes unnoticed once the eye adjusts to the lack of light.

Skin chills with goosebumps. Sun disappears behind blocks of glass buildings. Mira

looks up only to find the slim rectangle of sky bookended by bank towers. She looks

behind her. A man with a briefcase stumbles into her, ramming her shoulder before weaving and muttering under his breath.

Looking back up at the stream of bobbing heads, she wonders how many people have looked down the street and felt like their life had merged into someone else’s. If anyone else ever sees that one suited person weaving around crowds, bumping shoulders with an old woman, ignoring the comer musician, one, two, three too many times. If they find themselves catching their breath in the elevator, whispering, “remember when you

said this wouldn’t be you?”

It’s this kind of pondering that makes Mira intentionally slow when she realizes

she’s fallen into autopilot out of fear of being trampled. It’s moments like these when she

slips into the surrounding rhythm, that she worries one day she’ll find herself running

across the street for no reason other than she’s grown accustomed to hurrying. She’ll

keep her headphones in when the guitarist begins his curbside solo, forgetting how her

chest once lightened with each plucked string. She worries one day she’ll be too far in to

climb out. 3

As she passes Bush Street, she considers turning around and going as far as the N

line will take her. She imagines walking along Ocean Beach camera in hand, capturing

the children walking along the waves, the flying v of herons overhead only to remember

the stack of obituaries waiting for her to write.

Routine. She’s come to realize some people survive it better than others. There

are those who can wake up groggy, drink their coffee, move through the list of to-dos and

come home to watch television, drink a beer and do it all over again. There are those who

are motivated by climbing the company ladder; and then, there are others, like Mira, who try that route, cycle through the motions, but always feel this ache in their chest, the ache

of what they’d rather be doing, what there isn’t enough time for. It clogs their throat until they find thirty minutes a day for the thing they love, yet the thirty minutes just feels like

sex without an orgasm.

If she looks closely, on those tender days she can catch it in strangers’ eyes — the

way they stare up into the rectangular slit of sky between the buildings, trying to inhale

its vastness. And if she listens closely, she can even hear it — the panting — the longing,

the hope for something to cling to behind day to day minutia.

As she slows on the curb, she tries to imagine a life where she has more than

thirty minutes for her photography. Tries to envision a morning without working for 4

someone else, an evening without picking up a second shift, a life that feels lighter, more

hers than all of this. But as she walks down Montgomery Street, the student loans steep in

interest, the rent she’s barely affording climbs just a touch as a new tech company moves

in down the street and a studio artist moves out. The health care bill collector is calling,

reminding to pay for her mother’s medication her insurance didn’t cover. The world spins

and it’s not even 9 o’clock.

She looks down to her watch, finds a line in the opening of people and moves. Like

the rest, she walks swiftly running from the fear of being late. Moves with shoulders

hiked to the neck, hands clutching backpack, eyes widening as the crosswalk turns from 2 to 1. Mira feels the angst in her own stride as though her pants have caught aflame, pacing, racing, disregarding all who cross her path. She can almost taste a drip of stress turn metallic on her tongue, can almost feel her heart add an extra two to one beat. She rides the elevator up and up, past the floor of investment bankers and start-ups working in

the clouds. The golden elevator dings. The Frontier's headquarters open to a floor of gray

cubicles. Each little square hides the face sitting within it.

The newsroom. She walks past it and into the storage room, a windowless space

where she works. She plops down into her swivel chair and clicks on the computer. The

screen glows white. As it hums to life, she tries to remember how she landed here, in this

dust-ridden cubicle surrounded by half-used paper reams and door-less cabinets. She 5

thinks about how many times she said this would be temporary as she catches a glimpse of her three year workiversary card. How she told herself obituary writing was just her way in, just a way of working at a big name newspaper where she could climb her way up and build her bones as a photographer. But this storage room was hardly part of the plan. This is not where she hoped to be at nearly thirty — working in an oversized closet, fixing copy machines, working night shifts for a florist to make ends meet just to live in a sub-level apartment beneath a fish market.

After graduating college, she vowed she’d find a way to make a living outside the world of computers and cubicles. She thought if she interned for enough magazines, if she put in enough free labor, her dreams of traveling, photographing the world, learning from new cultures and people wouldn’t be too out of reach. But life moves and before she knew it she was swept up in it, not feeling far from where she started three years ago.

Mark and his crooked bow tie rush through the doorway, nearly tripping over a box of packages she has yet to unload.

“Mira, come on. Put these on the table. The last thing we need is another workers comp report,” he says, kicking the mail haul. 6

“Morning Mark,” she says, her lips stiffening. His eyes skip her face and land on the mail cubbies overflowing behind her.

“I need seven obits today. Short and sweet - we’re not looking for Pulitzers. Do

Mrs. O’Malley first. Everybody liked Mrs. O’Malley,” he says, smacking the red folder on top of the cubicle wall. “Then, call Mrs. White. Her husband, a bit of a North Beach icon just passed away yesterday - was a little too much of a life of the party if you know what I mean. We’d like him to be the memorial feature. Her family isn’t up for writing the details, so get his essentials.” He scurries away across the mildewed carpet.

“Oh, and Mira he shouts. “Do something with that mail-you know no one checks their boxes.”

It’s hard not to notice how comfortable they’ve become with death without feeling any emotion from it. The habit of offering the same vague, apologetic phrase over and over careful to ask just enough, but not too much. “We’re sorry for your loss,” she’ll say. “The Frontier sends their condolences,” she’ll say. Never I, always we - careful to create a barrier through the universal. She channels the desire to console into the 15 lines and 350 characters she’s been given - a meager attempt to tell the world how to remember an entire life. She includes the deceased’s forty years at the same company 7

despite how many bottles of beer she imagines were needed to unwind for the next day.

She notes his most recent community service project his wife mentioned and the children he left behind. She forgoes the Sunday cinema dates he enjoyed with his granddaughter, or his favorite overlook above Shelter Cove his wife went on about over the phone. She passes over his unrequited dream of running a farm out in the country, along with the six years he stopped talking to his son because while those make up his part of the essence, they hardly fit into brevity. It’s easier this way. For the widow, for Mira, for whoever’s involved in this cycle of life and death. It’s easier to shave off the edges. Move on.

Lingering in spaces of absence is not encouraged.

She wipes the dust from a stack of dated newspapers — pages yellowed and frayed much like the lives mentioned within. A blank page waits on her screen. Margaret

O ’Malley. A nice woman, a kind woman, the type who tended to her three-block radius like a garden, dropping off casseroles to porches in a rotating fashion. A widowed wife, a loving mother, a daily patron of Mitchell’s ice cream and a member of the neighborhood ukulele club. As she flips through the papers, Mira elbows a magnetic map she got two years ago. She told herself she’d mark each country she visited, yet between the growing bills and her mother’s worsening condition it still sits as empty as when she opened it.

Her fingers clatter against the keyboard. She adds Mrs. O’Malley’s hobbies to the page 8

even though Mark will likely swipe them before sending it to the family. “Too much

flowery language,” he’ll say. “Too many details. Get to the point.” The point.

The microwave door slams behind her. Just the sound of it makes her eye twitch.

It wasn’t always like this. She wasn’t always working out of a closet. She used to be respected, or at least enough to not sit less than two feet from the microwave. Then, the paper underwent a redesign, quickly clarifying where the editorial assistant sits on the hierarchical totem pole. She used to have a desk right beneath the half-broken light. It caught a sliver of sun from the distant window. It wasn’t glamorous, but there were people around. People she didn’t really talk to, but people who talked to one another.

They talked about the day’s news, what restaurant they tried over the weekend, who got a new dog, got engaged, booked their summer vacation destination. It made her feel like she was inconsequentially part of the conversation, a part of something. Sometimes just sitting near a window can trick you into the feeling warmed by the sun.

There, wedged between the producers and the photographers, she could hear them discuss angles for upcoming stories, or which photos should take the cover. She’d watch the editors ring the bell at every day at 2 p.m. and hover around the section’s printouts, where the lead would stand in front of the others, her red pencil pointed upright in the air,

scanning for errors, as the others patiently wait for the three nod approval. Just three 9

months ago that was her classroom, a newsroom she could learn from without anyone

realizing she was listening.

Now the microwave signals time instead of the bell. At nine thirty comes Karen

nuking her latte until burnt coffee emanates through the room. Noon brings Camil

zapping her curry just before Henry heats up his day-old tilapia despite everyone

knowing the unspoken rule that nuking fish is only done in the basement due to the

publisher’s very public opinions about strong smells. People come and go. Sometimes they say hello between the mound of envelopes spilling from the mail cubbies behind her.

It didn’t take long for the wood paneled design to feel like a cage. The way everyone can peer in from different angles, looking over her shoulder, casting crescent smiles of pity.

“How can you work in here?” one outspoken columnist asks.

She looks back, lips pursed. “It’s just temporary.” All the while knowing where temporary often leads. As the writer walks away, she wonders how does one get out of

something one needs? How do you figure out what you need in the first place? How do you describe what it’s like to feel like you’re suffocating while your body is still capable

of breath? How to describe this to someone who’s never felt the way the chest hardens

like it’s lining up planks of wood, slowly stiffening until that once natural bend gradually

disappears? Some days when these thoughts rain down, she lets herself escape to the roof 10

to write it out - for captions that’ll accompany a someday gallery series, knowing the photos will likely only bode over with a crowd who can’t afford them.

After 5:30 her first job ends and the second begins. Market Street bustles with bodies dashing past glass buildings. Mira catches her reflection in a bank’s window. The ravines beneath her eyes have darkened by the week. She’s stopped trying to count the hours of sleep she gets. It merely adds to the frustration. Her phone buzzes in her pocket.

It’s Claudia, her second boss at her second job on the industrial side of town, where she arranges bouquets for $20 an hour. Despite how many times Mira tells her she goes straight from one job to the other, Claudia continues to call every day she’s a minute late.

And every day Mira lets it go to voicemail, knowing the banter will be there whether

Mira’s late or not.

As the sun begins to set, a blinding orange ricochets off of the skyscrapers. She picks up her pace and weaves into the stream of tired faces fixated on phones. Their eyelids only lift to dodge the feet of a homeless man begging for change. A crane across the street lets out its final swing of the day after building a new glass tower that will soon have 40 floors of bean bags, ping pong tables, and granite clad kitchenettes full of free 11

beer and kombucha. It seems as each block of new buildings comes in, one her friends from art school moves out of the city.

“Too expensive,” they say.

“Moving back home,” they say.

“Trying out the Midwest,

“Northwest,”

“Southwest,” anywhere but here it seems. But having grown up here, Mira can’t quite get herself to leave.

She can feel people giving in though, turning a winced eye to the steep wave of gentrification. The picketers from the tech bus stops left their post months ago. Angry signs scribbled with “Get out of our city” no longer flap against light poles. She can feel everyone accepting it just as she’s started to, telling herself it’s time to be grateful for work after the recent four-year recession, where college grads were hungry for any job that made their degree feel worth the debt.

She walks towards Muni to catch the T-line. A pair of jackhammers drown out a sidewalk saxophonist. He checks his beard in a pocket mirror then presses his lips to the tip. He looks like he’s smiling in between blows, like he doesn’t realize he’s one of the 12

few left. He reminds Mira of the trumpet player who used to claim that corner - Birdman, his cardboard sign said. His melodies were worth a pause, worth more than the $5 she tossed in his case each week. He reminded her she had a choice. That some people have found other ways to live, that not everyone out there was so tethered to routine. She counted on Birdman in the mornings, pulled out her headphones and perked up as she heard his tune from a block away. But she hasn’t seen him in months. He disappeared once the construction came. Too much noise to compete with. Like Mira, he learned it’s possible to choke on sound.

The hour hand inches past six. As her body sways with the jolts of Muni, her chest tightens, readying herself for Claudia. She practices the six-count breathing her old therapist prescribed - deep sighs hardly noticed in the sidewalk bustle. She attempts to conjure a second wave of energy and wonders when all the school debt will have a big enough dent to leave the evening gig behind; how she’ll ever be able to quit her main job for more creative work when her mother counts on her health care. She wonders if all these dreams she’s keep reaching for will always just be that, dreams.

The warehouse’s overworked air conditioner roars from the curb of Third

Street. Claudia, the catering company’s floral manager, paces in and out of the warehouse 13

garage. Golden vases and flower arrangements line the truck’s bed. Mira’s stomach grumbles. The sun has set and dinner has passed, and she’s missed another meal.

Tomorrow she’ll have a nice dinner, she tells herself. Tomorrow she'll get off early enough to make fettuccini with cream sauce, maybe add a little mushroom, maybe even go to the market after visiting Mom on her lunch break and buy some fresh basil and garlic bread. Tomorrow. Tomorrow always looks far better than today.

“Mira, you’re late,” Claudia hollers. “We got one hour. You think I’m paying you to slow me down?” She disappears into a herd of white aprons. An assembly line of hands pluck and pat roses, begonias, echinops, and jasmine. Kat, the only co-worker Mira considers a somewhat friend, trims stems near her usual comer, neatly setting spiky thistle against soft roses. She blows her bangs from her oversized red glasses. Mira nestles into the end of the line, finding her place in the ceaseless flow.

“Long time no see,” Kat says with a wink.

“De-thoming roses is what I live for.” Mira smirks. Though she’s known Kat for nearly a year, she’s barely divulged much about her life. Kat knows the basics. That

Mira works two jobs, lives in Chinatown, spends a lot of time with her mother. That she usually works seven days a week and hardly ever mentions friends or dates. She doesn’t tell her that sometimes these flowers brings her to a more innocent part of the past, where 14

her and mother, affectionately known Gigi, would slip of out of the Westfalia they lived in and walk coastal trails, reciting botanical names of her favorite flowers, snapping polaroids of their newest discovery. She hasn’t told Kat that she looks forward to staring at the tightly wound curves of the peonies, the triangular comers of dahlias, the spotted spikes of agaves - angles that when stared at long enough resemble a perfectly composed photograph. She’s learned not to talk too much about things she loves, learned that expressing outward love for something makes it all the more likely to slip away.

“She’s quite the peach tonight,” Kat says. “I’ve only been here for twenty minutes and she nearly scalped me over begonias. All I’m saying is no one even likes fucking begonias.” She sheers off a clump of stems. “You come straight from work?”

“Yeah. What’s left?”

“Echinops and jasmine. She’s on a real jasmine streak this week. Grab some from the back fridge. She’s staying up front for the most part.”

Mira brushes past a cluster of jasmine petals and the scent whips her to the backyard of Lorraine’s, her mother’s best friend. Having partially grown up at Lorraine’s,

Mira and Gigi would listen to music in the greenhouse - back before Gigi’s started getting sick, body weakening, vision coming and going more unexpectedly. Before all that, Mira would water the arbor of sweet-swelling jasmines as Gigi would keep them 15

both entertained with plant puns. Mira can still see it clear as day, Gigi on the ladder,

Gigi in the dirt, Gigi in the van, Gigi always doing something, going somewhere - a

version so far from the chair-bound body she inhabits today.

Mira heads to the walk-in fridge. Chilled flowers sit in tin buckets, their blooms

droop, waiting to be touched. A copy of Global Traveler, a world renowned travel

magazine Mira and every other outdoor photographer idolizes, sits beside a box of jasmine and echinops, collecting pools of water over the emerald blue of Lake Louise.

Banff, Canada-number 7 on her list. One day I'll go, she thinks to herself. One day she’ll take her camera outside the confines of this city. One day she’ll get paid to photograph people who have stories worth telling. Then, she’ll make space for her art. Then, she’ll

live on her own time instead of constantly breathing into someone else’s. She looks at the

cover and imagines herself there, the water’s summer warmth streaming up her legs, while a toasty towel and cold beer waits at her waterfront camper. The lake’s subtle

waves slosh against her feet as clusters of freshwater fish breathe below. Their echinop-

like blue hue are the only things resembling real life. The walk-in’s heavy hum inserts

itself into the scene and the gravity of routine thicken the concrete building in her chest.

She slips the damp magazine into her apron pocket and returns to the fray of foliage.

Back on the line, Mira separates the clusters of jasmine and stakes them into a

golden vase. A breeze carries the sweet scent of roses across the room, reminding her of 16

the summer where Gigi and Lorraine showed her how to graft their favorite varieties

together, creating their own breed of beauty. She can almost see Gigi cutting their full

blooms from the shrub.

“Nothing like fresh roses,” Mira mumbles to Kat.

Claudia scurries by, arms overflowing with hydrangeas. “Fifty minutes people,

fifty minutes!” she shouts.

The comer flap of the magazine braises against Mira’s elbows, inviting her

back into the blue. She thinks of the stack of travel photos cut out from magazines piled

on her nightstand. She knows sights like these shouldn’t stay tucked away in dreams.

Before her mind can wander too far, Kat nudges her elbow for more jasmine.

She hands her a cluster and trims the stems of another. Kat’s fingers flutter

across the arrangement, sliding a manicured rose along a cluster of jasmine, adding a touch of Sea Thistle to accentuate the dyed purple hue. Her mother would have groaned

at such a sight - dyed roses - a sorry excuse for proper hybridization. Then again Gigi

would have groaned at most of Claudia’s operations, the mass production of blooms

stripped from their soil only to be tossed post-production in t-minus seven hours. Gigi

keeps telling her to get out of town more. “Live a little. Enjoy your youth while you

have it,” she says, forgetting that living and traveling in a van doesn’t pay for Gigi’s 17

medications, doesn’t come with health insurance to give her round the clock care, doesn’t

give them something to fall back on when that potential eye surgery eventually comes

around.

Tonight is a local tech company’s annual employee appreciation party. Lights

upon mics line the perimeter while gold and white tones of modem chic suffocate the

warehouse. Mira stares at a wall lined with shimmering vases and can’t help but wonder

how she’s improving society. The reality that these decorations, these lush vases of

beauty merely serve as extracts from the natural world hardly visited. While she doesn’t

know anyone from these tech companies, she’s spent many bitter hours imagining what their lives must be like - imagining that these flowers are the closest thing their driven,

overworked bodies will get to blooming freedom. Instead, she imagines them wedged

next to coworkers balancing on exercise balls, adding in extra hours for the sake of face time, hoping to get one step closer to owning that pet project, the next tower of their personal empire.

The newest contractor props a ten-foot trellis wrapped in hydrangeas and gold

wire near the stairs - an object that will be ripped apart before the neighboring bars holler

last call. She thinks of Lorraine’s old jasmine-lined fence. The way she’d brush her palm

against the white petals each time she passed, releasing the plant’s perfume. Here she

constructs opulence. She arranges excess. That’s her purpose. She looks down to a bundle 18

of discarded, wilted roses. There’s got to be more than roses out there, she thinks, a hell of a lot more than wilted roses.

The white glow of the full moon peers through warehouse window. Vases fill and empty themselves, as the prep leads to cleanup and the cleanup leads to midnight.

Scraped knuckles extend their hands for cash. Claudia hands Mira a wad of bills and waves her off.

“Any plans this weekend?” Kat says, rolling her bike.

“Probably just work and hanging with my mom. Hoping to take some photos if the timing lines up.”

“You, my friend, need to live a little. You work too damn much. Come to this warehouse party with me over in Oakland on Saturday. Music, art, kegs. It’s gonna be sweet.”

“Maybe. Been so tired lately. Just kind of need a mellow weekend.” Mira tucks the $100 into her rent envelope.

“Alright, well call me if you change your mind.” She hops on her bike and peddles away. Her invite echoes in the street’s silence. 19 20

Chapter 2

The smell of cannabis oil and moth balls hang stiff in Gigi’s room. Her open palm pats

the plastic lunch tray. Her fingers crinkle over candy wrappers and hit the tissue box

before reaching her water cup. She slides her fingers down the sides before tightening her

grasp.

“How full is it?” Gigi asks.

“About half way,” Mira replies. Her mother nods and brings the red cup to her red

lips. She has her sunglasses on again. Gigi doesn’t like people watching her when she can’t watch back.

“How are you feeling today?” Mira asks, staring at her thin, frail arms.

“Riding out an 8. Just before you came I was at a good 6. Damn migraines.”

Mira caresses the top of her palm. Gigi’s fingers flinch, then calm - still not

accustomed to feeling without seeing. It’s been about a year and a half since the waves of

blackness started staying more than going - something doctors have written off as M.S.

due to her weakening body, but even after a half dozen visits aren’t fully convinced.

Months before that she kept complaining about headaches. Still does, but just before the

headaches were hallucinations, things she had trouble describing. Sometimes it was just 21

flashes of colors, an image that sounded more like a revival of an old acid trip. Other

times it was places. The doctor said it just her mind’s way of getting confused with space

and time. Between the migraines and the visions reality became a movable space,

somewhere she had trouble finding her way in and out of. Mira’s eyes still well up when

she sees her mother like this instead of the driver’s seat of Sunshine, the orange Westfalia

they called home for more most of Mira’s life. A woman who once lived for exploring

new sights isn’t meant to stay caged in the confines of a curtained mind.

It had been nearly a year since Lorraine, Mira’s almost second mother and Gigi’s

closest friend, had said it was time to bring Gigi to an assisted living facility. The three had lived together as a makeshift family for as long as Mira could remember, Lorraine’s one-bedroom in the Panhandle served as home base for the bathroom and shower Gigi’s van didn’t have. The two had been best friends since the day they met in 1980, nearly thirty years ago, when they were both passing separately through Bend the year before

Mira was bom. Both painters, they spent countless days driving to the mountains and painting vistas while Gigi was pregnant with Mira. Lorraine had helped Gigi work through all the unknown that came with that year and Gigi never forgot it.

When they both eventually made their way to San Francisco, Gigi found herself

steadily parking near Lorraine’s apartment, making living in the van while pregnant a bit

more comfortable. Gigi had always been the more free spirited of the two, had trouble 22

pinning down a job that was more than seasonal work. Lorraine worked as a flight

attendant, giving her enough to rent in San Francisco until her father passed when Mira

was in second grade. Fie left Lorraine a sum large enough to buy a one-bedroom. The

space couldn’t have come at a better time, giving Mira a more spacious living room to

call her own as she grew.

Up until they moved Gigi into the facility, that little home had still been Gigi’s

home base. Though Lorraine tried to offer the daily care Gigi had grown to need, the last

six months had worn heavy on them both. A prideful woman, Gigi never wanted Lorraine

to turn into a caretaker and would push her body’s limits until Lorraine would find her trying to lift herself up off of the bathroom floor. Gigi’s discomfort worsened as Lorraine tried to lift her in and out of the shower tub or onto the toilet. Lorraine’s ability to keep it together dwindled as she failed to find the right words for Gigi’s outbursts as her vision

came and went. And while she didn’t want to admit it, Gigi’s needs had become far

greater than what she could give. The tension in that small one bedroom started

thickening by the week.

Mira would drop by and to find them yelling about things from opposite sides of

the house only to silence as soon as they realized she was there. Lorraine was always the

safety net, the friend Gigi knew would cover things when money or emotions grew tight, 23

but everybody has limits. So, Lorraine found a facility that took Mira’s health insurance and she covered the small portion leftover with her meager pension from the airlines.

The day they brought her to the facility, Mira linked her arm in the crook of

Gigi’s, sunglasses on from yet another excruciating migraine. That day Gigi’s left eye had lost sight for 37 going on 38 days — the longest streak so far. Her left arm and leg had been tingling for months to the point where pins and needles felt like knives. She was only 54, but her body had quickly devolved into a woman that stood at the edge of 75.

Over the last six months her health had plummeted, aches and pains turning into an inability to lift her own limb. Her hand had started to curl. The MS medication that worked for a few months now offered less relief than Advil.

That day, as they walked Gigi to her private room down the hall, the smell of sanitizer and musty fabric thickened. Lorraine stood at the end of the hallway, arms hugging herself, walking slowly several feet behind them.

“It smells like a God damn hospital in here,” Gigi griped.

“Well, on the upside that means it’s clean,” Lorraine chimed in from a few feet back.

A nurse emerged from a shadowed room. A man in a light green shirt lied in an oversized chair. The news blared in front of him. 24

“Ms. Rigormo would you like any help?” the woman asked.

Gigi turned her head towards the voice and lifted her glasses, her right eye squinting. “Don’t call me that.” She turned back to Mira.

“I don’t belong here. Look at these people.”

“She prefers to go by Gigi,” Lorraine whispered to the nurse.

Mira inhaled deep and squeezed her mom’s hand. “I know. It’ll be weird at first, but you need more help. They’re going to help you transition. They have a vision impairment specialist whose going to come every other day and the nursing staff is supposed to be the best in the City. Who knows maybe I’ll figure something else out. But right now, this is our best option. So, let’s try it out. Just for a bit, okay?”

Twelve months later, Mira felt a sinking feeling each time she saw Gigi in that oversized chair. With Lorraine’s home no longer an option and Mira hardly able to leave her 9 to 5 to care for her more full-time, this place had slowly turned temporary into permanent. 25

“You know you don’t have to spend your lunch breaks here, Mira. Give some time to yourself.” Gigi’s finger creeps beneath the black frames and scratches. “Do I have anything is my eye?”

Mira gently tilts her forehead.

“I don’t see anything. Let me get the q-tip.” Mira dips the cotton end in Vaseline and wipes along the edges of her lid. Her green irises creep through, waiting to dance in the sunlight like they used to. Mira tries not to go there - to the people, the places, the things her mother is missing out on. She comes here each day to distract Gigi from the beeping machines pulsing in the living room, from the M.A.S.H. episodes playing on repeat in the room next door, from the smell of mayonnaise and white bread that seems to perpetually waft through the kitchen well past lunch time. Even if it’s just through stories,

Mira tries to take her away from these cold white walls and remember the grand life she’s lived in hopes it’ll replay on the backs of her lids when she’s alone.

“So, where are we going today?”

“Where did we go yesterday?” Gigi asks.

“Half Dome, 1975. You were living in Yosemite Valley for the summer.” 26

“Ah, Half Dome. You know it took me nearly an hour to drum up the courage to

climb those wooden planks.” She smirks and searches the tray for her small glass bottle.

“Can you open it for me?” The twin bed squeaks as Mira twists the little vile from the

skunk-like liquid. The doctors say the cannabinoids in the water may help with the

healing, rejuvenate some kind of cells around frayed nerve endings, or if nothing else

keep her comfortable. Mira pinches a vile into her water and swirls it around before

lifting it to her mother’s lips.

“Thanks, honey.”

“How about you tell me about Alberta? When you went for the Northern Lights.”

“Oh, the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen. Those greens and pinks floating through the sky like a psychedelic ocean turned on its head. You were just a little tyke.

Even though you were too young to remember, I’m telling you, you loved it. I had never

seen your eyes so wide.” She smiles.

Mira can see the life flooding back into her cheeks. They always said they’d go

back, travel up the coast, re-create memories their own way once Mira graduated college.

But as the college degree came, Gigi’s vision had become more problematic, so her

mother started putting off the longer trips for when she’d feel better, not realizing those

days wouldn’t come. 27

Mira slides the photo album out from the nightstand and slips through the same laminated pages she’s turned week after week. In this album she studies the rolling trees and the narrowed brows of the great homed owl, the glowing green lights spiraling well above the horizon. Despite her passion for seeing sights, Gigi’s never been one for organization, much less photo albums. This book was Mira’s doing - her way cataloguing her mother’s life in some kind of order that looked intentional. She sifted through boxes of family photos she kept tucked under her bed. From it she pieced together a life that somewhat resembled something like her friends - adventures had before Mira was bom, first days of schools, family trips in Sunshine.

Gigi’s frail body lightens out of the Lazy Boy as Mira scans the pages. She sits up tall and takes off her sunglasses, a sign the medicine must be kicking in. She squints, lines spreading at the corner of her lids. A grin grows across her cheeks. Mira sees how much she enjoys this escape. They’ve been doing it for months despite the psychologist’s orders. He said to keep her focused on the present - to keep her rooted in reality, to keep her fighting. Mira closes her eyes for a few seconds, trying to imagine what it’s like to live in complete darkness, tries to imagine a lightning bolt of pain splitting down her forehead, constantly on the run from light. A heart monitor beeps from the living room.

The woman inching through the hall hacks in a slow progression. Mira can see why her 28

mother daydreams so much, how easy it must be to wander off when the world becomes an orchestra of colliding sounds.

“Alberta it is,” Mira says, scribbling Northern Lights onto the bedside notepad - a catalogue of their mental adventures. The wavering, green sky piles on top of lines about Mount Fuji, Macchu Picchu and Angkor Wat. All destinations Mira tacks onto a grand tour reserved for someday. Someday when they pinpoint what surgery might fix it all, when the school loans and medical bills are paid off, when Mira lands that staffer position. Then it’ll all run smooth. Then, she’ll treat Gigi to a getaway - her first full re­ vision of the world. She’ll watch the way her mom lights up at seeing the ocean lap against the shore and the stars crawl out from their velvet blanket.

As the stories of Alberta continues, Gigi bounces from hiking trails to starlit campgrounds, telling Mira about the time she lured Lorraine into a midnight hunt and convinced her that the van-side rustling was Sasquatch. Her crow’s feet deepen as she recounts one of their many all-night adventures.

“You were such a sound sleeper. I had you swaddled to my chest the whole time we wandered under stars. Not a single peep.”

Gigi leans back into the Lazy Boy, fiddling a sugar free candy in her fingertips.

The nurse peeks in as the end of their twenty minutes near. He nods with kind eyes. 29

“Ready for your nap, Gigi?” Gigi pulls the blanket close to her chest.

“No, but that horse tranquilizer you’re about to give me will sure get me there.”

Her laugh is cold, hardened. The doctors prescribed a pain reliever and even though she hates how drowsy it makes her, she hates the throbbing temples and piercing limbs even more. As she lies there in her cotton gown, Mira imagines all the nights her mother tucked her in. The nights Gigi caressed her temple - a tactic Mira would later use to self- soothe during the lonely nights when Gigi would leave her with Lorraine for a week, when she’d stay up wondering how she could be more fun so Gigi wouldn’t want to leave when the next opportunity came around. While Lorraine was generous with her home and food, she reserved her affection for the men she dated, meaning when Gigi left, so did the nights of someone laying beside her in bed asking how her day was.

Mira wedges the scrapbook into the nightstand. She catches a glimpse of Gigi’s old paintbrushes, their tips dusty, now merely ornaments of the past.

“I’ll see you tomorrow.” Mira’s lips meet her forehead. Gigi pulses her palm. 30

Chapter 3

The white glow of the full moon peers through the scratched Muni window. Mira’s just finished another shift at Claudia’s. Her eyes weigh heavy as she hops off the bus. A streetlamp flickers over Grant Street. Rows of red, Chinese lanterns hang above the narrow strip of asphalt. She can see her apartment just a half block ahead, just beneath the fish market, where big red flags flap as the wind comes. She hears their slapping tongues as she tries to open her front gate - a stubborn, rusty thing like a child that won’t listen, push, pull, push pull - the only way it opens. Descending down the steps, the stench of cross-eyed cod slams into her face - a stench she tells herself isn’t so bad once she bums incense, bums until the smell of sage cloaks her hair, carpets and clothes. Tonight the place smells more sour than usual, a reliable indicator that the fish market upstairs is one day late on its fresh shipment.

Being just past midnight, the apartment sits silent, a city kind of silent, where sirens hail in the distance and pipes gurgle up and down the walls. It’s one of the few times of night this place feels like home. When the market isn’t full of customers bargaining in a language she wishes she could understand, when the streets rest honk- less, when this place, like her record player, has the chance to sing its own sound. 31

What her apartment lacks in smell, it makes up for in privacy. Having lived in a crammed living room or a van for nearly all of her life, this place is an upgrade. Photos that were shelved up in a box, gasping for air now hang from fishing wire comer to comer, baring faces of strangers, emotional destinations she gets to relive every time she swings open the front door. The one above the television shows a child crying over his mother’s shoulder with a half-empty ice cream cone dangling from his hand. Next to it hangs a newlywed bride wiping her tears beneath the Palace of Fine Arts. The photo closest to the kitchen frames a dog sprinting between a trio of upright logs at Fort

Funston. Brief seconds that remind her living comes in the smallest of moments.

Despite being primarily a digital photographer, she spent the first couple of months turning the bathroom into a darkroom, creating an escape from the city where she could work on the countless rolls of film she took during trips with Gigi during teenage years but never had the funds to develop all at once. Every now and then, after a few drinks she sits there in the rose-lit room staring off into the hanging photos - portals to various spots in California from the peaks of Shasta to the coast of San Diego. She closes her eyes and imagines her body just moving through miles and miles of endless terrain without any responsibility to do anything - just be, see and exist in the world, slowly soaking it all in. 32

From inside the darkroom the world takes on a calm hue. The sound of the city

falls away as the bathroom fan hums. From inside here, she slips into fractions of

moments, watches the edges of a person, a place, rise beneath the thick liquid. Dots soon

bridge into lines, turning into the crook of a person’s nose, the curve of her lips, or the

horizon line behind her.

Every now and then, when she’s feeling confident in seeing the frame without a preview screen, Mira brings her film camera out onto the streets and captures portraits of people. Regardless of the camera she uses, she’s made it a mission to find remnants of

scenes in people’s eyes - to find the ocean in the old woman’s pupils who waits at the

Muni stop on Judah, or catch the bright morning sun along the face of a man who walks

up and down Grant sweeping in exchange for quarters and cigarettes. Their essence

shines from their eyes. When the lens hovers there, refines its focus after the person got

comfortable, finished telling their story, there’s a tenderness, a softening, eye wrinkles

spreading like tom starfish. This is what she’s started capturing — not the things people

look at, but the way they look at them, the moment she sees them converge as she asks

about their day, their week, their life.

Mira presses the tongs into the chemicals. She remembers their conversations as

their faces emerge. She relives that twinge in her stomach that comes every time she

forces herself to spark up a conversation with a stranger, camera in hand, unsure how 33

they’ll react. And as the details of the face forms, she sees the little details she never saw

in person. The little scar on the woman’s face just off the edge of her mouth, possibly a

remnant from childhood that wasn’t noticeable under shadowed city light, a little detail

that’s followed her from falling off the top bunk bed, to the divot felt by the boy during

her first kiss, to the distinguishing feature she’s grown accustomed to.

Mira pulls the print of a woman from the plastic tray and clips it to the wire. Alice was her name. This particular photo was shot from the side - a portrait snapped during a pause in their conversation. Alice had started talking about her daughter.

“You remind of me of my daughter,” she said, eyes drifting out up behind the sandwiched buildings and into the hovering fog. “She has dark eyes and smooth brown hair just like yours, so soft it feels like satin. It’s one of the few soft things about her.

She’s always loved to push herself. Loves feeling the rush of adrenaline. From a young age, I had a hard time keeping from feet on the ground. She was always making ramps out of her mattress, or climbing Oak trees to the top branches, or jumping from high dives alongside kids five years older than her. She had her father’s courage. She wasn’t afraid of what could happen. Didn’t even think about it. I used to get so nervous, you know.

Was always trying to keep her safe, but at a certain age I realized she could handle herself in ways I didn’t know a kid could. I miss that. I miss seeing her live. She grew up and had no interest in paying so much just to stay close to home. Right now she’s teaching 34

English in Central America. She loves it. She says I should come visit. But I don’t know.

I’ve never been too good at flying.”

That’s the part the photo always misses. The conversation behind the moment.

The story sitting just outside of the frame. It’s why she started writing down captions

alongside each photo. Trying to expand the scene beyond what’s given. The combination

of photography and writing is her newest project, her latest way of trying to connect with

a more intimate part of the city. To find a way to escape into instead of from, mining the

humanity out of the masses, making a person more than just a face in the crowd in hopes

someday they’ll hang on a gallery wall for residents to see.

Laying in bed, she looks up to one of the photos hanging across the fishing wire

— an image Gigi took of her while napping on Sunshine’s sheepskin rug, feet dangling

out the back of the van. As Mira lays there, she can almost feel the way the rug warmed

her cheek, the perfect napping bed. She tries to force herself to sleep and catches a flash

of waking up in Sunshine. Gigi’s driving along the coast. The ocean spray salts the front

windows. Sleepy eyed, teenage Mira stretches her body across the rug, watching the blue

sky beneath the small crack of the window curtains. As Gigi pulls over to the afternoon’s 35

view point, Mira feels the cool Northern California breeze slip in from the back door - her mother’s subtle way of inviting her to see a vista worth waking for.

In the comer of the photo sits the yellow mug Mira made for Gigi in ceramics class. The one Gigi would steep hibiscus leaves in the morning, waking Mira with its sweet aroma. Whether she was six or sixteen, Mira could always count on seeing that same yellow mug on the cherry dresser. After making the mug for Gigi in elementary school, it went everywhere the van did, reminding Mira how Gigi loved things most when she could carry them with her.

Shortly after, Mira made a similar version for Lorraine — years before that

Donner day — her own way of giving her godmother a little piece of Sunshine to sip from when her she and Gigi went away. When she was young, Mira always preferred the way the mug looked in Lorraine’s house, how it was just one of many mugs in one of many cabinets. The way it rested on top of the shiny, blue countertop instead of the multi­ purpose dresser. She loved just about everything in Lorraine’s place and the groundedness that came with it. While she liked how her mother took her bouldering in

Joshua Tree or coin-diving in Tahoe, after a week or so she grew tired of feeling so crammed. As she grew, she sought space of her own, a room she could use as a shield, a door to lock herself away in. While the door never came, a sheet curtaining Lorraine’s living room became the next best thing. 36

She can still imagine the day she walked into Lorraine’s home. The sold sign was still on the overgrown lawn. Lorraine had just got the keys. It was a Sunday. Mira had just started second grade. It was her first week back in school, so she and Gigi darted away from the city for the weekend down to Big Sur, where Sunshine had climbed

Ferguson Road, one of the few free camping spots left on a coast that grew more expensive by the day.

Mira can still remember the stark difference in sound as they traveled back into the city. The way the crashing waves were replaced with hollers from the street comer as they parked in front of Lorraine’s new home. Gigi jumped out of the driver’s seat, running towards Lorraine, hands waving it the air, squealing. She hugged Lorraine tight, smacked a kiss on her cheek and yelled congratulations as if she was talking to every person on the block. Lorraine beamed, wrapping her arm around Gigi’s shoulders, the two of them looking up at her new place, backs to the van. Mira creaked open the passenger door and slid down the ripped seat, using the door handle as the step stool she never had.

She looked up at the old Victorian with its bright blue front door. Her eyes widened and chest fluttered as Lorraine swung it open, raising her arms and shaking her hips, a shadowed silhouette of happiness. As Gigi and Lorraine explored the inside, Mira stood at the front steps, jaw slack, looking up to the roof that was nearly five times the 37

height of Sunshine. She walked in slowly, past the paint chipped walls. Her feet creaked with each step. That’s when she saw that big bay window, the one that looked like the walls were outstretched for a hug - a comer so large and round that it welcomed the sun from five different angles all while offering a lush view of a purple Maple tree. In seconds she could feel her body expand, like she had grown inches just standing there.

All that space. All that space to sleep in, grow in. Her fingers trailed the walls, grazing the brick fireplace. She’d never seen a fire outside of the ones she and Gigi had made outside of Sunshine, but she’d seen them in photographs, on commercials, little snippets in supermarket aisles showing her the possibilities of the world.

“Mom, Mom!” she yelled, her voice echoing off the empty walls. “It even has a fireplace!” Gigi and Lorraine’s voice trailed off in the distance. Later, as Mira spent school nights there, she would imagine all kinds of conversations had out front of that brick fireplace, a fixture so old it must have overheard thousands of conversations. Later, she would often sit there and imagine the children cuddling up to their parents while listening to the radio. As she entered her teens, the images changed to characters she read about in books, Beatniks who’d sit on floor pillows, drink tea, and talk about life’s possibilities and limitations.

But what she really adored was the bathroom. It had a tub-a nice, big sink-in tub with a door that locked and hot water she could melt in with music in her ears while her 38

mind wandered. Sunshine’s bathroom meant pit stops at McDonalds, or worse the local

gas station. Every now and then Gigi rented a motel when they were far from home. Mira

would drop her bag on the bed and head straight for the bathroom, letting the hot water

steam the mirror, turning the 5x4 space into her own little spa. Anywhere with a tub

became her little bubble-bound sanctuary, the easiest way to sink into the solace found in water. Lorraine even had a backyard. And while she saw grass to mow and fruit trees to pick, Mira saw possibility, room to run, play with a dog, build a tree house, plant a tomatoes in the summer and be around long enough to watch them turn from green to red to salsa.

After that home had become a part of her weeknight routine, Mira just couldn't

look at Sunshine the same. And with time and age, she carved herself a curtained off space in the living room while Gigi slept in the van out front or at the beach, or wherever her heart pleased. With the comparison of spaces, came the spark of longing for Mira’s own home, her own stable space. Gigi knew these days would come.

“You come from a line of wandering women,” she would say when the pre-teen

grew tired of keeping her clothes to a minimum of ten items. “Some people aren’t meant

to be tied down. Sunshine is home. Lorraine’s is home. You’re lucky to have two lives

rolled into one. You’ll always have a place to stay here, but if you’re looking for 39

something else one day you’ll have it go after it yourself. We all have our priorities in life. You’ve got to find and build your own if you don’t like what others leave for you.”

Having seen the way other mothers endlessly gave to their children, she hoped her mother would give in and get a little one bedroom they could call home. Yet, no matter how often she nagged, Mira knew Gigi’s love for the water and roaming meant Mira would have to save for a place, save for college, a car, everything on her own.

Even when she was just ten years-old the concept of money made her chest tighten. If Lorraine would give her lunch money, she’d pocket a portion of it and buy just enough to fill her over until dinner. She always remembered what money could buy, a place of her own, more lavish food than peanut butter and jelly, the comfort to go to the doctor’s when Gigi cut her finger while fixing Sunshine instead of pressing it tight for hours, super gluing it shut muttering about the price of urgent care. She knew one day if she saved enough she could have a place where she wouldn’t have to sneak into restaurant bathrooms to brush her teeth during weekends away, or wonder if it was okay to bring friends home, not really feeling like Lorraine’s was ever truly hers.

So home became this constantly expanding idea - a distant place where feet walked on floors and naked limbs laid in bubbled tubs, and scents from freshly-made dinners ruminated through living rooms instead of open air. Something that she’d 40

constantly have to save for as the prices of her hometown rose and rose each year.

Having seen how accessible San Francisco was to the bay, the mountains, the ocean, and

how Gigi loved to call it her home base, Mira never really second-guessed it. With all of

the tourists flocking to it, the companies always coming never going, she figured this was

the place to be, that there couldn’t possibly be a better place out there to sow roots, so

home it was.

And now, though this sub-level, fish scented apartment isn’t grand, it’s grown on

her. The way it’s dug just a few feet below ground floor, making her feel like she’s tucked beneath the city’s fray, like a little part of the street is holding her tight. While she

doesn’t have the bubbled tub or the bay window, she has a spot for incense and a room

lined with photos and her own little darkroom to let her escape to. It’s hers. It’s nice enough to keep a grateful woman stay, but grow hungry for more. Because if you sense there’s more out there, there usually is. 41

Chapter 4

“I’ll update you when there’s an update,” Mark says, eyes darting away from

Mira. He sifts through a stack of papers without glancing up. Mira leans against the doorway, one foot in, one foot out, hoping if she lingers just a touch longer she’ll get something more.

“Is there anything else I can help you with, Mira?” he says perturbed, eyes raising.

“I’m happy to show them to Katie myself. I know you’re busy and

Mark rubs the crook of his nose.

“Mira, I know you’re passionate about photography. A lot of people here are. And

I’m happy to pass them along to Katie, but you have to remember this isn’t your job. And

Katie is already behind on submissions from professionals. So, we’ll update you if there’s an update.”

Mira feels her gaze harden.

Mark returns to his papers. She returns to the storage closet. 42

A folder of growing prints sits at her desk, photos she hopes one day will sit at the photography desk. She figured making physical prints would increase the likelihood of

Mark reviewing them. E-mails were too easy to delete.

Just above that folder is the red one - housing another part of the population, those waiting to come alive again on the page. She plugs in her headphones and reads the first names and descriptions.

As 5 o’clock comes, she spills out into the lines of commuters racing to their stations. Simulating the herd, she bobs and weaves until a bearded man in leather pants is lined in front of her - a rare gem in sea of monotone suits - the perfect candidate for an off-the-cuff obituary. While it’s morbid, the habit helps her wean in and out of the day.

She wonders what he does in the Financial District that pays him to be himself, even if that means leather pants on a Tuesday. She scribes him as aspiring fashion designer. A transplant from outer Los Angeles who will uproot his cat and his cacti for New York in hopes of becoming a buyer for Prada. He’ll settle for an assistant buyer at JC Penny’s before his brooding resentment fires enough motivation to embark on his own line of leather-inspired wear. It will have its season in Paris, surge in Seattle, and will accrue enough self-satisfaction to feel complete before he reaches his 57th birthday, where a clogged artery will result in a spontaneous yet painless death. His family will dress him in 43

blue at the funeral unaware it was his least favorite color. He’ll turn in his grave each

time flannel is deemed the fabric of the season.

He seems interesting, like he has stories - someone who has no trouble

convincing himself to live on his own terms. Someone who can teach her something new.

He looks like a Patrick. She could use a friend like Patrick, could use some friends

altogether. The last of the few close friends from school had left the Bay Area as the

prices kept climbing. Between her jobs and spending time with Gigi, making new ones

has been harder than she imagined.

As she turns towards Market she notices a damp magazine stuck open out at the

edge of the sidewalk. A glossy photography shows a woman pointing a camera towards a

wolf. She leans towards it and catches a whiff of the sidewalk’s stale urine in the process.

To the right of the photo sits big bold letters, Global Traveler Fellowship: Find a View

that Connects the World. Open call, deadline June 1. Winner receives $5,000 to fund a photography expedition. Amateurs encouraged to apply. Mira’s eyes widen. She kneels

down to the ground and rips out the page. The bottom fold shows last year’s winner — a

graduate student from NYU’s photography program and a student of Susan Meisela’s, a

photographer Mira’s grown to love. Her work’s been featured in The Los Angeles Times,

Wall Street Journal, the list goes on and on. Mira rolls her eyes, the sudden wind in her 44

sails almost immediately depleting. “Amateurs. Right,” she grunts, jamming the page into

her back pocket.

She turns on Market street. A flood of tourists and commuters dodge one another.

Amidst the river of people, a lanky man in a blue vest catches her attention next, banging

drumsticks against a trio of five-gallon buckets. Anxious cabs blare their horns, while a

bearded evangelist bellows with a bullhorn about Jesus. As she approaches the bus stop,

the deep hum of the 10 nears. She darts towards the bus stop, cursing her only pair of heels - the ones she should’ve thrown away with the others. A sharp pang shoots behind her eye as the stream of suits pass without pause. White blotches suddenly cover the

street. She blinks and blinks, trying to shake the gray fuzz from her view. The blurred whirl turns to black. Her hands scramble for the bus pole, a bench-some thing. The drummer’s pulse hastens. Buckets bang. Pots clang. Breaths shorten. Shoulders ram against her stiff forearm. Horns invade. The world stays black.

The city’s chaos clashes against her chest. Her heart thumps through her ears, out-

drumming the city’s sirens. She rubs her eyes, blink her eyes, but the world stays black.

“Ask him! Praise him! Repent your sins,” the bull-homed evangelist screams from one

side. Mira grasps the air, but comes up empty as though she’s wafting through a cloud.

Alone. Alone in the dark on a street full of wisps and nudges. The bus hisses during its 45

descent as her body curls into a ball, pressing her palms against the cold bricks. Once red

and textured, now just lines and rectangular shapes felt on frigid fingers.

The bucket drums halt. Gray blotches flash against the dark screen. Glowing light

returns from both sides. She sees her fingers on the bricks of Market Street. Then, comes

an oncoming wave of pant legs and polished shoes. A blue vest and a pair of tattered blue jeans squat down beside her. Chipped drumsticks fumble between their feet. She sits there staring at the drumsticks with hands and knees digging into the bricks. She presses them with desperation as though pushing hard enough will slip her into the city’s cracks, into safe arms, into a place where this moment can be explained, if not erased. A heavy

shadow feels like it’s hanging over her, beneath her, lodging itself in the seams of her

skin.

“You okay, sweetheart? You need a hand?” the sidewalk drummer says.

“I - 1 don’t know what-” Mira leans onto his forearm. He lifts her from the

concrete.

“Let’s just get you somewhere to sit.” He drags one of his makeshift drums

beneath a Sycamore. She sits there in silence, looking at the sidewalk of strangers with

equal parts fear and gratitude. She notices the little things. Like the slash in the back of

one man’s dress shoe, or the chipped nail polish of the woman on her cell phone. Little 46

things she feels so lucky to see clearly in this moment. The kind man returns to his post, drumming a slow, jazzy beat as though he’d nudging her back into the world. The 10 pulls away. She scratches her eyes, masking the welled- up tears. Her mind flashes to her mother, sunglasses on, bound to the oversized chair. She rubs her eyes harder and harder.

This can Y be happening. Not yet.

On the bus home, Mira stands in between two bodies, watching shadows stretch down the block as the light fades into the horizon. Feet shuffle towards Market Station, entering or evading the allure of the city after dark. The bus jolts to a stop and Mira feels the warm breath of a too-close commuter, riding her steps as she descends with the rest of eager bodies yearning for home. They settle into their places, each member of the herd leaving just enough space between one another to angle their phones upright. Mira tries to distract herself, reaches for her own. Her finger quivers over the white screen. Unable to scroll, she stands stiff, attempting to find meaning in the black sheet of darkness. She starts up the six-count breathing - in, in, in, out, out, out. Maybe it’s stress, she thinks. It’s got to be stress.

She feels the man’s breath chill down her back and wishes people could mine space like they do gold, wishes she scrape out sound from all the surrounds and just sink 47

into silence. Her shoulders hike to her ears. Whipping her neck around, she turns to see a stranger’s drooped face-eyes underlined by dark circles; hands tapping, tapping, tapping his screen attempting to extract a sliver of vibrancy into his day. Mira looks up at the metal ceiling. If she looks long enough the moving reflection looks like a river. She closes her eyes and pretends she’s floating far away on it, far from this bus, this moment, miles from the encroaching darkness. 48

Chapter 5

The next day Mira returns to work before most. The office still, the coffee machine not yet clinking, the morning nukers not yet heating up breakfasts. Silence reigns. After enough time in the same place you learn people’s routines. The sections of the day when coworkers cling to their desks; when they wander to vending machines just to stare at chips they vowed to avoid; when they slip to the rooftop to kiss the coworker they assume no one knows they’re sleeping with, but everyone knows their sleeping with, because gossip breeds in a bored world. Mira has studied those of The Frontier long enough to know these windows just so she can avoid them. Her own way of carving slivers of silence into days of tightly packed people. 8:40 am was one of those times. Too early for bladders to squirm and too late for the first wave of hair primpers. Every now and then Denise, the short woman from sales, would be there peppering her cheeks with blush, filling in her eyebrows, but fortunately not today.

Mira leans her stomach against the sink. Her thumb and index fingers stretch her lids apart. She stares into her eye, examining the gold spikes speckled around her brown iris. Slowly shifting from left to right. She scans for red streaks. She hovers over the pupil

- the little piece that feels the most connected to the soul. When she needs a sense of privacy, but can’t quite find any the pupil becomes a little space of refuge - something she can access wherever there’s a mirror, an ever-reliable center that when gazed at long 49

enough will make the heart beat slow, the breath deepen, the mind remember it’s something more than a circular motion trapped in skin. Going deep into its blackness softens her, expands her, makes her remember she is more than this moment, this place, this time of her life. Even if she doesn’t know exactly what this portal is, she knows how it makes her feel — wall-less, full of light. If she stares long enough without blinking that little black dot grows in depth. No longer just a hardly noticed part, it becomes the center, the intimidating essence, the only whole. It’s a gaping portal into the core emotions she’s avoiding, the pain she’s scoffed over, covered up in efforts to feel less and walk through a day a bit easier. When she stares into this little black dot, she can’t help but feel her chest rip open just a touch.

But today she’s looking for more than lightness, but red streaks, hazy spots, a milky film — anything she’s read are indicative of sight gone awry. But her eyes just stare back blank, gaping, without a hint of opacity. She pulls out her phone and searches the Internet for answers, asking the every-knowing encyclopedia if stress can cause bouts of blindness. An article from 1997 pops up. Her shoulders drop as she read the headline,

“Harvard Study Says Stress Can Lead to Temporary Blindness.” She skims the first few paragraphs that cites a doctor who found stress can surge blood pressure and leak fluid behind the retina. They reference a woman who temporarily went blind after catching her 50

husband in bed with a stranger. Yet, another example of how that things could be worse.

The bathroom door swings open.

“Well, good morning, Mira.” Mira darts up, eyes bulging. The woman giggles.

“Sorry about that. Didn’t mean to startle you.”

“It’s fine. I was just leaving anyway.” She pockets her phone and walks towards

the door.

“I heard Mark moved you into the storage room. I told Sharlene that’s just not right. Not right at all. No one deserves to work in that kind of condition here.” The woman leans her shoulder against the tiled wall. Mira stands stiffly, trying to figure out what to do with her hands.

“It is what it is, I guess.”

“There’s always something you can do.”

Her stomach whirls into a braid. It is what it is has become the lean-on phrase,

the one she says when things are too shitty to gloss over, but doesn’t necessarily require a

true reaction. Gigi used to say it anytime things went wrong. When the chicken burned on

the Webber “it is what it is,” when the park ranger kicked them off the beach parking lot

at 3am, “it is what it is,” when Gigi’s at-the-time boyfriend forgot her birthday, “it is 51

what it is.” Never a believer in staying mad for long, Gigi wrote off all minor irritations

with this phrase. Things that while frustrating are not life-changing, not catastrophic,

small in comparison to all the things that could go wrong in the world. But despite how

hard she tried, Mira couldn’t quite get herself to care as little as her mother did. To her,

the storage room was like someone patting her dreams on the head and saying, you’re not

quite good enough just yet. She despised that room, the comer, the sharp contrast from

the vibrant life held in the newsroom to the dull hum of the soda machine vibrating

behind the mail cubbies.

“W ell you’re handling it far better than 1 would,” the woman says, shifting off

the wall, dipping into a stall. “We’re lucky to have someone who has a perspective like you.”

She wants to call Gigi and tell her about the blackout on Market Street. Wants her to tell her she’ll be fine even though neither of them know it to be true. But she knows

it’ll just worry her. She imagines her sitting in that chair, minding wandering in the dark

to all the ways her daughter’s life could go wrong, how she’ll keep her job if the

blackouts continue, how they’ll afford Gigi’s medications without the insurance to lean

on. Too many questions, too little answers. Mira walks to the roof and dials the doctor. 52

The next morning a cold draft spirals around Mira as she sits he sat in front of the doctor, her hips twitching with nerves crinkling against the paper sheet. The white woman in the white coat rubs her palms together.

“Do you mind if I open your lid? It may be a little uncomfortable, but I need to get a full look.”

“That’s fine.” Mira’s hands rest in lap, still as her voice. The doctor’s chilled fingertips stretch the lids wide as if she was spreading an orange peel.

“Now rest your chin here. I’d like to get a better look.” Mira leans into the machine, her eye just centimeters from the oversized binoculars. The doctor leans into her end, shining a light up and down her eye. A thin trail of light glows behind. Mira can smell coffee on her breath.

“Don’t worry. We’re almost done,” she says in a slow, melodic rhythm, a soothing, yet serious sing-song mastered in medical school. She’s practiced it well, but Mira can see the pity, the mirrored concern drooping in her wide blue eyes, withholding the could be she doesn’t want to, but must disclose. An old friend who worked at San Francisco

General once said an ER doctor only gives fifteen minutes to each patient, just fifteen from greeting to goodbye. Mira glances to the clock, fearing her case is worth going beyond the allotted protocol. 53

She moves the flashlight again right to left, beams blaring through Mira’s skull.

“You have a few areas of abnormal tissue visible, some tear around the nerves, usually the kind we end up seeing in glaucoma patients later in life,” the white woman in the white coat says, eyes unblinking. Mira’s face droops. Her body hangs into itself, curling her shoulders towards her breast. She wants to ask a dozen questions, how bad does it look, what does bad look like, has she seen this before, has anyone, is this the kind of thing that can be caused by stressed and if so reversed by the removal of it. If she slept eight hours a night, if she only ate vegetables, if she ran, swam, exercised, moved out of the city, remembered to breath more and worry less, would it all go back to how it should be? She wants to say all this and more, but all that creaks out is,

“What do you mean?”

The doctor’s expression softens as Mira’s does, her eyes glistening with a hint of wetness.

“I don’t want to worry with you hypotheticals, because it could be a range of things and quite frankly an ophthalmologist would be better suited to confirm.”

“I mean, there has to be something you can tell me.” 54

The doctor presses her hands against her white coat. “Well, to be honest your nerves have undergone some wear. It could be an issue later, but from what I’m seeing now you shouldn’t be experiencing any immediate loss of vision.”

An issue later. Later. How much later? Mira’s throat dries, chalked. The doctor moves to her work station and flips through a notebook.

“Do you have any history of visual impairment in your family?” The chalk cakes on another layer, sealing the dam.

“My mother has been gradually losing her sight - some say it’s from severe migraines, others say it’s M.S. No one’s quite sure yet.” The woman scribbles something onto a clipboard.

“And when did she start having these issues?”

“I think in the last few years.”

“Ok.” She pauses and looks to the computer. “Would you say you’ve been experiencing stress lately?”

“Doesn’t everybody?”

“I think that answers my question.” 55

“I work a lot, and my mom hasn’t been doing well. I don’t know. 1 guess I’ve been feeling pretty overwhelmed, but just have kind of gotten used to it. ” The doctor’s lips purse as though she had said the wrong answer.

“Sometimes we find these bouts of blindness can be caused by high levels of stress.”

“And other times?”

“A myriad of things, but we don’t want to jump there. I know you’re concerned. But first things first let’s just set you up with Dr. Onslow. He has an opening in four weeks. I know it’s quite a ways away, but he’s pretty sought after. In the meantime, I’d recommend you get some rest. Take it easy. Maybe even go on a little vacation. You’d be surprise how many parts of the body can naturally reset itself.” The doctor’s fingers click against the keyboard.

A dense wave rises up Mira’s throat, climbing up her breasts through the neck until her throat sits wrapped in a ring. Attempts at deep breathes rise and fall in choppy form. She looks down at the bulky camera tucked in her purse, thinks of the sights on her list of places she may now never see.

“How’s 9am, Tuesday the 29th?” the doctor says.

“You’re sure there’s nothing sooner?” 56

“If anything comes up, we’ll be sure to call.”

Mira stares at the poster detailing the plastic eye on the counter, the top severed,

retina split in half, showing the little orange and yellow nerves winding out from the back

of the eye. The tiniest little tendrils. Vital nerves she never appreciated, or knew were

there.

She doesn’t tell the doctor she’s already ten years ahead of this moment, trying to

figure out how a photographer takes photos without seeing the frame, but instead says,

“9am is fine.”

The enlarged anatomical eye on the walls stare into her. Its bulbous shape fills the room.

Mira lifts off the doctor’s chair.

“Easy there,” she says. “Be gentle with yourself.”

“Am I okay to go now?”

“Free to go. Do you have someone to take you home?”

“No, I’ll be fine on my own.”

“I can call you a cab?” 57

“I’m fine, really.”

As she walks down Geary Street, Mira’s mind circles what if s, imagining what the next doctor will say, if she’ll have to undergo surgery, medication, change jobs. Her mind swirls. A bus hisses by. Voices clamor. She thinks about what the doctor said, a vacation. Sunshine. How nice it would be get away from the city, to just spend her days alongside a forest, in front of red rock, underneath the stars. Spend her days taking photos, walking, just being instead of constantly doing, doing, doing. 58

Chapter 6

“Mira, the copy machine is stalled again. Before you get started on these, can you make sure it’s back up?” Mark tosses the list of obituary bios on top of the stack of yellowing newspapers.

“I just fixed it yesterday. Maybe we should call the repair man.”

“That imbecile charges per visit and never actually fixes the damn thing. Wait until you can’t fix it on your own.” He turns towards the door. She looks at the manila envelope full of new prints and knew this would the only time of morning Mark wouldn’t be locked in meetings. Her throat tightens.

“Oh and Mark?”

“Yes, Mira?”

“I just wanted to check in on the photos I gave you.” She clears her throat. “What did

Katie think of them?”

“We’re going to have to pass on those, sorry Mira.”

“I have a few more - a bit different. A different subject. With these I was actually thinking it’d be nice to catch the contrasting cultures of the city- the old and new of San

Francisco so to speak. One has the new, coworking building alongside an old brick 59

Victorian, another is a group testing Google glass alongside a street side saxophonist. I’m thinking it could be a series-a subtle commentary on-”

Mark’s voice climbs over hers.

“Mira, you do a great job with the obituaries. Really, you do. But I don’t want you to lose sight that your job isn’t to take photos for The Frontier. It’s to help The Frontier flow. I’m busy. Katie’s busy. We’re all busy. So, if you want to try and earn a photo somewhere why don’t you submit your best one once a month? Refine your selection a bit.”

Mira feels her face slink, her heart widen, the cavity and shovel in further, growing heavier by the second. Water wells up in her eyes. She grimaces at herself for being so sensitive, too sensitive in a place not made for such feelings. She nods, tucks the folder under her arm walks swiftly past the newsroom, past the storage room and up the dark stairway until she reaches the roof. The city howls with sporadic horns and indistinguishable chatter. With no one around, she hangs her face into her palms, letting it all come. Just for a few moments. She knows the danger of housing rivers of pain and lakes of silence trapped in the body. She knows water wasn’t meant to lay stagnant, but flow out of one body and evaporate into the air of another. But she also knows tears weren’t meant for inside work walls, inside any walls where others could see her fall 60

apart. So, she wipes her cheeks with her sleeve, takes a deep breath and lets the gust of air bring her flushed cheeks back to white.

Looking up to the sky, she tells herself one day Mark would want a photo, one day.

She hopes Katie would find a place for her. Mira had taken her out to lunch a few times, picked her brain on how she got to where she was, what opportunities led where. She kept telling her, “Just keep paying your dues. Keep submitting. One day something will land.” But how long does she have to wait for one day? She walks back down the stairway, sinks into her chair and sums up another life in 350 characters.

Later that afternoon, the entire office gathers in a conference room for a company wide meeting. Mira finds a seat as Mark walks to the front of the gray walled room, standing in front of a blank whiteboard. Florescent lights beam overhead.

“As you know the paper is under rather significant financial strain. While we hoped some of our most recent changes would be temporary, it seems that some may lean more towards permanent.” A long pulse swallows the room.

“Which ones?” a man hollers from the crowd. 61

“We’ll be sending a full list this afternoon fleshing out how each section will be affected. But, in short, we’ll be leasing out part of the floor to a new tenant to accommodate for the lack in revenue. So, all the newsroom assistants will join Mira in the wire room. The photography department will remain as is but we will not replace the vacant positions. Since the sports section primary works off-site, they will officially work from home and when coming in can utilize the eastern conference room.”

Heat rises up Mira’s chest. She sees another year clogged in a storage closet with not one, but two other people soon to join her.

“And what about layoffs?” an older woman calls from the back. The paper has seen a flash flood of layoffs three years before. Sights of colleagues carrying out boxes full of desk decor surface without difficulty. They know what it’s like for coworkers searching for work at smaller papers or rerouting careers as journalism teachers and content marketers. Shoulders hike higher and higher as Mark goes on.

“Right now, we don’t think that will be necessary. We’re hoping this new rental agreement will fill the holes for the year.”

“Now we know this affects team morale,” Mark says, raising his voice over the crowd’s grumble. “So, we’ve brought in a HR consultant to do some group activities with you all each week,” Mark said, gesturing to the side of the room. 62

“Meet Shaundra. Shaundra, why don’t you come up and say hello?” A tall brunette

walks swiftly to the center of the room.

“It’s great to meet you all. We’re going to have such a great time together.” Her smile

looks warmer than it feels.

“Instead of our usual meeting updates, Shaundra’s going to do a little activity with us.

Take it away.”

Pressed in a bright blue blazer and pencil skirt, Shaundra paces the room back and forth, white heals clicking with each step. She pauses in front of the whiteboard and scrawls ‘happy’ in big, red letters.

“Let’s just get straight to it, shall we? I want you to tell me the story of happy,” she says. “Tell me what happiness look likes to you.” She stands against the whiteboard as though this was the kind of thing you could sum up in a word or two on a Monday morning - the kind of thing that everyone has figured out. Mira glances over to Mark in the comer, fiddling on his phone as Shaundra waits patiently for answers. Voices escape the room as a squeaking chair creaks, magnifying the group’s discomfort.

“How about we do this as a writing exercise instead? Each of you write down a story

of happy, a moment where you were truly happy. Show us in detail what that looked

like.” 63

Mira stares at the blank sheet and tries to remember when she felt full of color,

beaming with lightness. She closes her eyes and feels herself floating, feels each of her

limbs rising up to the salty surface of the ocean. She’s eighteen and has just seen Europe

for the very first time. Lorraine had found two free tickets and sent Mira and Gigi off as a

graduation gift. They’ve just flown straight into Rome and within a week found

themselves along one of the most gorgeous, cliffside coasts Mira had ever seen. One of

Gigi’s friends had opened an inn off the Capri and so there she lays body bobbing

stomach up, lifted by the salty undertow of the Mediterranean. Her lids soft, chest soft,

smile gentle, she gazes up at the rock towers bulging up from the turquoise blue. In the distance she can hear her mother laughing with the old friend. She floats like this hour after hour only swimming up to the boat for a drink when thirsty. She closes her eyes and feels the sun case her front as the sea supports her back. She’s melting in its softness,

feeling what it’s like to be at peace for the first time. She blinks her eyes slowly with pause, trying to use her lids as a photo lens to capture the rock sculpture, the never-

ending sea, the sun, this moment, ingrain it in her mind, so every time she searches for

bliss, she can pull it from the shelves as needed. A smile climbs up her cheek bones as

she writes and relives the lightness.

A soft chime rings from the front of the room, gradually extracting the group from

happiness. 64

“How was that?” Shaundra asks in a gentle tone. Her face lit with hopeful warmth.

The crowd sits silent. She waits patiently. Someone’s chair squeaks in the comer, magnifying the unanimous discomfort.

“Would someone like to share? You don’t have to read the entire thing, but maybe just give us a few words that summarizes what it is.” Silence persists. Mira looks to

Mark. He scans the room in a way where you can almost see him tapping his foot with weighted anticipation.

“I’ll start,” he says hesitantly. He coughs to clear his throat.

“When I got my first byline on the front page of the paper,” he says, nodding his head in self-approval. A few in the crowd clap. They know the feeling. They yeam for it-an industry built on egos wanting the masses to know your name, to have your words sit in front of hundreds of thousands each morning, sipping their coffee as they read your version of the world.

Shaundra squints the right side of her face.

“Well, that’s a start. It seems like many people here with you agree, but do you actually think that was happiness? Maybe a moment of feeling proud or accomplished?”

“Which would be synonymous to happiness,” Mark retorts, crossing his arms. 65

“Okay, why don’t we try another example. Anyone else? Remember this doesn’t have to be work related.”

A lanky, junior reporter raises his hand. His collar bound to his neck with a red tie, mirroring his red hair.

“Yes, what’s your name?

“Stewart.”

“Thank you, Stewart. Go ahead.”

“The moment I first held my daughter in my arms. I’ll never forget the way she looked at me. It was like no one had ever looked at me before. Like there was no one else out there yet for her. It was beautiful. I’ve never felt as happy as in that moment.” The women of the crowd coo in applause.

“Yes,” the woman says, raising her hands to the ceiling. “See, look at that. A moment in time that can’t be replaced. A simple, sacred connection. That’s happiness for

Stewart.” He squirms in his chair, his cheeks slowly flushing as though he realizes how seen he is in this moment.

“Anybody else?” the brunette asks, extending her arms to the room. 66

Mira fidgets her fingers, wanting to have this conversation, just not in a room full of fifty, watching eyes.

“Come on you, guys. I know you know what happiness feels like.” Shaundra eyes land on Mira, immediately prompting her eyes to look at the carpet.

“You. Young lady, what’s your name?” Mira slowly lifts her gaze from the floor.

“Mira.”

“Mira, can you share a moment of happiness for us?” Mira can feel the heat off the crowd’s eyes baking her from all sides. Her fingers furiously tap her thigh like a morose code gone aerie.

“I didn’t get much on the page,” she murmurs.

“Happiness requires participation,” Shaundra says with a smirk. “It doesn’t have to be an elaborate story. Just one moment that made you feel happy, alive.”

Mira nervously rubs her at cuticles.

“When I was floating in the Mediterranean ocean at off the coast of Italy.”

“Floating. That sounds nice. What made you happy about that moment?” 67

“Um, there was nothing else on my mind. I must have floated there for two hours in the sun, just soaking everything up.”

“So, you appreciated where you were. And that appreciation made you present.”

“Made me want to preserve it.”

“Appreciation,” Shaundra said, lifting her gaze from Mira to the rest of the room.

“Appreciation makes us happy. Feeling grateful for things makes us happy. Now can someone tell me what you’re grateful for here-at The Frontier?”

“That I’m not laid off yet,” an older woman croaks from the back. The rest of the room sparks off in laughter.

“Well, that wasn’t exactly what I was looking for, but yes. You have a job. You are gainfully employed. You make money to bring home to your families. To pay your bills, to put your kids through school. That’s something to appreciate.”

“My coworkers.”

“What about them?” Shaundra asks.

“They make me laugh. They make the day fly by faster.”

“Good, good. Anybody else?” 68

“That the heater worked this morning.”

“Heat is always good,” Shaundra chuckles. Mark twirls his finger, signaling Shaundra

to wrap it up.

“So, the point of all of this was to make you notice gratitude in your day. So, this week I want you to write down ten moments that make you happy while at work. And next week bring them back to our group meeting.”

Mira sits back to her desk, the thought of her body floating in the ocean still hangs

- the way the homes with brightly painted doors speckled across the cliff, how the boats floated by slowly, never racing.

She remembers the journey it took to get there: the ten hours, one layover, two planes, a bus ride through the countryside, a ferry from the mainland to the picturesque island of

Capri. All of that, just for this moment-these two hours of time stopping, floating with her, for her to carve out a space in her mind she could access nearly twelve years later when surrounded by adults all fearing the phrase that meant they lose their jobs, pensions, means of loan repayment. And amidst their tight, quick breathes she’d remember what those two hours viscerally felt like-and just the manner of replaying it over and over

would remind her all of the lakes, spaces, mountainous places she could stand, sit, float

enwrapped in something new and remember what it’s like to really feel alive again. 69

It’s just after midnight and Mira, lies on her bed after another shift at Claudia’s watching her favorite scene from her favorite movie, Before Sunset. She watches it over and over. The one where Ethan Hawke asks Julie Dempsey if she thinks she’d be happier if she didn’t desire anything, always fixed in the future hoping for something more than what is. Dempsey replies with ‘isn’t not wanting anything a symptom of depression?’ and

Hawke goes onto quote some Buddhist philosophy, that if you liberate yourself from desire you’ll find you have everything you need-or at least that’s what the Buddhists believe. That desire is the fuel to life.

She lies there wondering when reaching for could he’s becomes toxic, a means of constantly letting gratitude slip through fingertips. Behind Hawke’s voice, she hears the brisk patter of and squeak of mice scampering between the walls. She studies the little scenes framed along her fishing wire photo stream, hearing these words, wondering if it’s smart to fixate on the could he’s. If leaving so much room for such big things leaves room perpetual dissatisfaction.

She stares at the photos hanging from wall to wall and wonders what life would look like if packed it all up and traveled around with little intentions but creating. She wonders if it’d be as satisfying as she thought of if she’d somehow create a new gap, finding 70

something else lacking and therefore a new thing to want. If she’d walk through new

place after place fully living, if after a while the fresh and new inevitably becomes old.

Old like the dreams of wanted a place of her own, like a newly rented apartment, a place

that once looked full of potential now has started to show itself. The little wears, the mold

peeking through paint in blacks clusters, rodents scrambling when midnight comes, the periodic swarm of cluster flies that somehow managed to creep in through the light

fixtures, evenings that meant she’d come home to spending an hour shoeing them out, killing up to a dozen only to duct tape the ceiling a little tighter. Like walls, likes lights,

like dreams, all things gripped eventually come loose.

She walks over to her desk, pulls out a sharpie, rips a paper from her sketchpad and

scrawls, if you learn how to bend, you '11 never break. She hangs it between a photo of a homeless man begging for change and another of a child, stretching her little arms out towards the ocean during sunset.

She could feel something swell inside her just staring at that phrase, the way tidal

waves stretch, rising in slow motion from a distance. Mira walks to the kitchen and sees

the magazine cut out she’d hung there after finding it on Market Street. It had sat there on

the fridge, every morning looming. Global Traveler Fellowship laid across in big black 71

print, the application taped beneath it. The deadline was tightening — just two days

away. As the kettle boils, she counts the number of x’s alongside the deadline list

scrawled in dry erase marker — rejections that kept coming, reminders that if nothing

else she was trying. She pours herself a cup of tea and walks to the table, staring at the

ten prints she had been sending out again and again. The ones Mark, the neighborhood

magazine, the amateur contests, all fifteen had rejected in the last few months.

Pressing her fingers to the comers, she shuffles them around, pulling a new one here,

removing another there. She only needs five for the Global Traveler application. Five

photos and a 250 words on how her project could connect the world. She spent too many

evenings googling past award winners. People who came from Ivy League schools, or

studied under big names Mira couldn’t touch - Ansel Adams, Susan Meiselas, Paul

Nicklen — people who had made their mark and pressed into the museums, magazines,

newspapers again and again. They had their focus, their common thread, the thing people

knew they could go to them for. The found their angle and did it well.

Mira studies her photos, searching for hers. She has dozens of photos of people, but

all stretched across different walks of life. Homeless men leaning over crinkled cardboard

signs alongside a herd of suits and ties. A tourist with a camera over his neck looking up

at Grace Cathedral, the sun beaming against his wire framed glasses. Countless others.

Everyday people in everyday moments. 72

Then, she found one she had taken of Gigi a year ago - before she had moved into the assisted living facility. She was in the driver’s seat of Sunshine. They had been driving down the coast to Pescadero for a day trip at Pie Ranch. Golden hour had struck and the amber rays sliced through the passenger side perfectly, lighting up the side of her face, shimmering the blue pendant that swung from the rearview mirror. Her full teeth laugh stretched, chin cocked ever so slightly, the comer of her eyes crinkled like roots, arm firmly drawn stretched over the wheel. Her confidence, light, love for the moment immediately jutted through.

Mira loved that photo of her mother, had it framed and hung in Gigi’s new room. She moves it from the pile into the center of the coffee table, next to the portrait of the woman in the pant suit sitting cross-legged on a bench on her lunch break, shot from the side so you can see the smallest sliver of a smile creeping as she angled her notebook looking up at the tree she just sketched. Another was a close-up of a crying girl atop her mother’s shoulders, empty ice cream cone in hand, the falling vanilla still in the shot at just passing her mother’s shoulder, both of their mouths curling into o’s, the mother’s hand outstretched attempting to catch it. The last two were rare shots of people who had noticed Mira’s lens at the right time in early morning light.

One woman, Angelica, was seemingly homeless, a young redhead with short, slightly riled hair. Green eyes that glowed like emeralds in golden hour. Chapped lips with the 73

slightest cut on the comer. Mira had seen her several times at cheapest gym in the

Financial District, one of the few places that offered a workout, televisions and showers for just $10 per month. Angelica wore the same puffy jacket every day, layers of clothes lined beneath it. Every now and then Mira would see her leaning against the wooden lockers on a stool sleeping until one of the workers hailed her with a wind chime tone, benevolence and a touch of annoyance rolled into one. Mira took her photo as she leaned against the alley wall facing the morning sun. She showed her the shot afterwards.

“You look beautiful,” Mira said.

Angelica’s slumped posture heightened just a touch.

“You think so?”

“You come here often, right? I think I’ve seen you around. I’m Mira.” Mira outstretched her hand. Angelica hesitated, her eyes slowly curling up, chin still tucked.

“You take photos of everyone or something?”

“Not everyone. Just people I think are worth photographing.”

Her round cheeks lifted into dark cherries.

“What’s your name?” 74

“Angelica.”

“You hungry? I have a sandwich in my bag. You’re welcome to it if you want.”

Mira had packed it for lunch and knew it was the only form of currency she’d felt

comfortable with having seen so many people on the sidewalk shoot up just a few feet

from where they panhandled. Angelica didn’t seem like she had landed on the street from

drugs though. The way she tried to keep her homelessness a secret, how embarrassed she

looked when she woke after falling asleep against the lockers. You could tell she had

recently turned to hard times. Even so, in the moment food seemed less offensive than money.

Mira later learned she was from Nevada, got a one-way ticket paid for by the city.

She had heard San Francisco was a kinder place to get back on your feet, and had been here ever since. She had fled an abusive husband back in Reno. Had been with him for

nearly a decade with all of her bank accounts and credit cards inconveniently in his name.

She was staying at the nearest shelter until she heard the city was handing out

Greyhounds to San Francisco. When Mira had met her she had just got a job at

McDonalds off Battery St., but still didn’t have enough to find a place other than the

temporary hotels off Sixth Street. So, she slept at shelters, in the subway, showered at the

gym, went to work and did it all again. 75

“Soon,” she said. “Soon I’ll have enough to get steady.”

It was moments like these that made Mira want to photograph people — the way the

lens served as a bridge between what so many see and what sits underneath the surface.

The story so often left untold, the struggle, the growth, the possibility, relatably wrapped

in one.

Leaning into the couch, Mira sips her coffee and stares at the photos. Gigi and

Angelica stand out the most. Less for their photos and more for their story. They were more than portraits, but people. She looks up at the fellowship application, the loud hum of the refrigerator shakes its comers. Yanking it off the fridge, she starts drafting her 250 words.

Photos do more than preserve a moment, they offer a bridge from person to person, a portal into the eyes o f another. Pair that with a story and yon have more something to

connect to, a way to build empathy, bring the world together in a time when it feels like

it's constantly being pulled apart. So instead of telling you more about me, I'd like to tell you about the people you see who have stayed with me long after the photographable moment has come and gone... 76

Later that evening after several rounds of proofing, she hovers over the submit button and clicks send. As she does, she feels all of them standing behind her, Gigi, Angelica, the mother holding melting ice cream, the woman turning lunch breaks into art, the stranger caught head on facing morning light. They were all there, unknowingly on their way out into the world.

78

Chapter 7

It’s been a week since the doctor’s visit. Over the last few days Mira has been thinking less about others’ obituaries and more about her own. The elderly neighbor whose front door reeks of cigarettes inches across the pavement. She watches his feet drag and drag with each step as though the trash can he’s walking towards is pulling him by the waist.

She wonders what she’ll look back on when she’s his age.

As her morning coffee brews, she remembers a story she heard about Steve Jobs some months back — how he woke up every day, looked at himself in the mirror and said, “If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?” Mira mulls over the line, imagining how someone could genuinely want to wake up and walk into their day stacked of working for someone else, crafting synopses of lives lost, pulling together bouquets people would soon throw away, all while scraping fingers against the clock trying to slow its tock to have just an hour or two longer to photograph each day. She can’t help but wonder what people would say about her own life if her own last day came. Would anyone even know about all these ponderings and passions that had been shelved inside this 400 square foot apartment? She imagines lines of people processing towards a coffin, sniffling, dabbing the comer of their eyes. Ripping a page out from her notebook, she starts writing in a familiar format. 79

Mira Rigornmo

1988-2011

Mira passed away unexpectedly Friday morning. There were dropped jaws, wide eyes,

quivering hands, but few tears. Mira was a young woman, just 29-young enough to have

opportunity await, but old enough to get her life together. She took pride in providing for

herself in having a home o f her own. She was an obituary writer at The Frontier. She

offset the meager income o f a dying industry by creating bouquets by night. She was

creative thinker, a photographer, although you probably wouldn’t know that as she

hardly spoke of either and largely kept her photos tucked away in her living room, where few visited except the hive o f horse flies who somehow keep finding their way in through

ceiling lights. She was a woman with many hopes, many dreams, many places she had

hoped to see, but never quite got to during her brief bustling life. M ira’s quiet, dutiful presence will be missed by the companies she spent most of her days at. But like most

who do menial duties, she will be replaced within two weeks. She is survived by her

beloved mother.

Life summed up in less than 350 words.

The television in the background plays a TV documentary on tornadoes. She lifts

her eyes from the page and onto the cyclone, wondering if a cyclone knows it’s whirling, 80

knows if it’s zigzagging confusion eats up all it passes. If it grows tired of spinning,

spinning, spinning, enwrapped in the urge to go somewhere but lost when it comes to

finding a place to land. She stares at the screen, watching a twister devour a home as she

sits there on her Craigslist couch fleas biting her ankles.

There was Sunshine, Jobs, and a tornado; sunshine, jobs, and a tornado; sunshine,

Jobs and a tornado all swirling through her mind. Wind howls from the television. She hears the doctor’s words echo in her ears. She skims the obituary once over, seeing a job, duties, a list that tallies savings, hope for tomorrow with little else. She thinks of her mother caged to her chair after a life fully lived without apology. She pours her coffee and walks to Muni.

As she steps off onto Montgomery Street, coffee still warm in hand, she immediately notices a man slowly walking through the river of rushing bodies. She stares at him, trails him as he crosses the street. A young man, probably in his late twenties, early thirties, thick curls, slightly damp as though they’ve been recently washed, pack on his back. He stands out like a light beam in the dark. She’s not sure why she’s fixed on

him. It isn’t the fact that he was homeless. It’s how organized he is, how neat and tidy his

pack looks. It’s the two Nalgene water bottles hanging from each side, the same Osprey

pack Mira has at home that had runs up to $300 when new. It’s the lightweight sleeping

bag and pad tucked to the bottom and the umbrella perfectly wedged in the side 81

compartment with a tipping cup rubber-banded to its tip. The plastic cup and the slightly

soggy cardboard sign being the only clues that made Mira realize he isn’t a traveler, but

homeless. She studies him as she crosses the street both walking closer to the sliver of

sky bookended by skyscrapers. Staying just a few feet behind him, she looks at his sandy

curls that haven’t had enough time to dread. She notices his posture, the way he walks with purpose, like he isn’t exhaustingly drifting along a bustling street waiting for

someone to give him change, but on his way somewhere. And amidst the sidewalks full of stiff, suited strangers, she feels close to him, wants to know more of him than just the backside of his perfectly executed pack.

As they near the next stoplight, she speeds up to stand alongside him and catches a glimpse of his face. But just like a person whose grown used to creating their own way, he weaves through the turning cars effortlessly as though he’d done it a million times without a scratch. She whips out her camera from her bag and snaps a photo, hoping it’ll

come out exactly how it did in her mind. And just like that he’s gone, already passing the

15 story building she’ll soon turn into. As he walks closer to the slit of blue sky, she can’t

help but wonder if at some point he had planned for this, maybe even chose it. She can’t

quite imagine it - pulling herself from all day to day acts, the paying rent, shaving off

student loans, adding another a couple hundred dollars to that allusive house fund -

markers deemed fitting for a nearly thirty-year-old. 82

But something about this man and all the details that came with him, make her

feel like he was kin, like someone Gigi would’ve known, someone she probably

would’ve met on the road. She thinks of Sunshine, the bulky van just rotting away in

Lorraine’s garage and wonders what she would look like while walking through the

world, headed somewhere without a timestamp attached.

By the time the glowing orange hand turns to a white man, the vagabond has

completely disappeared into the sea of people. Mira enters the big brass elevators, feeling

closer to this estranged man than any other person on the street. But as she catches her

own reflection in the closed doors - black slacks beneath an ironed blouse, she realizes he

would hardly feel the same.

As the elevator doors open, the shadowed newsroom stands in front of her. But

instead of walking out, she stays, leans there against the back of the elevator, feeling her breaths chop. Her chest stiffens. She thinks about the obituary, the line Jobs said aloud

into the mirror, the wandering man on Montgomery, the rest the doctor prescribed, her

mother sunken in her chair. She thinks of her week’s schedule, how she hasn’t a day off

on in weeks and won’t again until next Sunday. She can feel it so acutely there in her

chest — what it feels like to be washed colorless, a life turned gray by routine. She had 83

become everything she thought she should be, but was standing with everything rounding

her mind, she couldn’t help but feel like she was failing. She saw how many vacation

days she hadn’t taken, how much overtime hours she opted for instead of enjoying

holidays. She felt her heart bang harder against her chest. She stood there, the elevator

doors just about to close, and suddenly the obituaries, the rent, the loans, tending to Gigi

it all seemed like a long list of overused excuses.

“I need to get out of here,” she whispers to herself. Before giving herself time to think she rushes straight to Mark’s office.

“Mark?”

“Hmmhm.” Fixed to his screen, he sips his steaming coffee, not bothering to look up.

“I need to take some time off.”

He looks up, eyes widening. He takes off his glasses.

“Time off?”

“My mom hasn’t been doing well and neither have I, frankly. I need some time

off. So, I’m going to use my PTO.”

“Oh? Are you alright? How many days?” 84

“All of it.”

“But that’s over three weeks?” His voice rises.

“I know.”

“Uh, well, when were you planning on leaving?”

“Next week.”

“Next week as in Monday? As in five days from now? Mira, come on. We need more notice than that.”

“Mark. I just need it right now. I wouldn’t ask otherwise.”

He lets out a deep sigh and sets down his coffee. Mira takes a deep gulp, dry saliva inches down her throat.

“Ok. Alright. Well, what are we going to do about your obits?”

“I’ll get ahead as much as I can. The rest you can save until I’m back. I’ll catch up quickly.”

He pauses and stares at the calendar to the left of his computer.

“Well, I guess we don’t have much of an option here. So, go ahead. Take the time off.

I hope everything gets better soon.” 85 86

Chapter 8

When she knocks on the big, red door she wasn’t thinking about what she came for, but

the dread she’d sift through before getting it. It had been nearly a year since she’d seen

Lorraine and even though there was no inherent need to visit often, the guilt came and

hung knowing that someone who had practically raised her was now becoming more and

more of a stranger. Lorraine had left two messages in the last six months, kindly calling with her periodic dose of wisdom, talking to her voicemail as though it was Mira.

“I’m sure your busy, hope you’re doing well. Just thought I’d call, say hello. Been awhile you know.. .you can always call me if you need to talk.” She pauses long enough as though she was giving Mira time to respond. “I thought of you the other day. Picked up this new book and it talks about...” and so she’d go on and on about the book and how it was improving some facet of her life and what she thought it would be do for Mira.

Even though Lorraine always offered kind words, her voice always twisted something in

Mira’s gut. The longer she’d let herself listen, the tighter her eyes would wince, the

shorter her breath would constrict, hearing one thing, but seeing another. Some things are

difficult to forget. Lorraine’s distant colors were one of them. Tomorrow, Mira would tell herself. I’ll call her tomorrow. She'd set reminders for nearly two weeks on her phone,

but each time they’d chime it always felt like a conversation set at the wrong time,

between shifts, or on a lunch breaks; or too early in the morning, or whatever excuse she 87

chalked up as the current one. And as weeks passed, she grew embarrassed at herself,

how she continued to let one day at the lake from nearly more than twelve years ago

hallow out a ravine neither of them knew how to build a bridge that these days felt more

like a rope swing. Not calling felt like the best option.

And this is how their relationship had gone ever since Gigi went in the home a year ago. Though it started ages before. The three of them tried to carry on like everything was normal. Lorraine tried to make up for the hardwood-creaking silence with an unconditional couch for Mira to stay. She knew how to the play the role of the stable home figure that make life feel a touch more normal, fronting money for dance classes and soccer uniforms when Gigi couldn’t afford it. But she hardly knew how to be there

beyond that. To Gigi, she was complicated closeness, an almost lover, second mother. To

Mira she a halfway house of gratitude and blame. So, after Mira had officially moved at

17, priding newfound independence in the Tenderloin’s cheap student housing she rarely came back to the Panhandle and rarely picked up Lorraine’s calls. Maybe it was their way

of trying forget that day at Donner that lingered through their lives, the tense tendril that kept that feeling an arm’s length away from each other even when they came in for the

rarely had hug. Or maybe it was just easier to walk through the busyness of the day without having someone genuinely ask her how she was doing and feel compelled to

truthfully answer. 88

But if there was any resentment, it was all but hidden just enough when Lorraine

opened the door that evening.

“My god, what a surprise,” she exclaims, eyes bulging as fast as her arms

outstretch. Mira could feel her love emanate through her tight grip. Her forearms and

shoulders circling her body so tight she held her breath until it was done. Mira offered

one arm around her, the other awkwardly hanging stiff.

“Come in, come in. Don’t mind the mess. I was just painting.” She unties her smock from her waist. The two step over the tubes of paint riddles across the carpet. The

sound of newspaper crinkles as they pass the easel sitting in the middle of the living room.

“Do you want water, tea, beer, anything? God it’s so good to see you. You look

beautiful. Time keeps moving,” Lorraine says.

“Sorry for just dropping by like this. It’s just —”

“Oh geeze, don’t you ever apologize for visiting. It’s been too long. This is the

highlight of my day, my week. I’ve been calling. I thought you got a new number!”

“I know,” Mira’s eyes dart from Lorraine to the floor. “I’ve been busy, sorry.” 89

“Busy for quite a few months it seems.”

Mira looks down to her lap. Lorraine sighs and smiles.

“Well, you’re here now, aren’t you?” She let the pause between them linger, as though a plume of relief had just warmed the room. “So, what’s new? A whole lot I’m sure. What about work, where are you working?”

“Still at the paper. It’s okay for now. They moved me into a storage closet, so that’s been-interesting to say the least.”

“A storage closet? What kind of animal makes a person work in a storage closet?”

“Yeah, it’s just temporary,” Mira says, feeling her eye twitch with the lie.

“What about your photography? How’s that going? You know you should bring by your photos next time. I’d love to see them.”

“I’m trying to get some shots in the paper. Mark keeps looking at them, but no luck yet.”

“Something will land. They’d be crazy not to see your talent.”

“Yeah.”

Lorraine sits, waiting for more as Mira keeps her eyes to the floor. 90

“So, what brought you over here anyway? Not that I don’t welcome surprise visits. Please surprise me. Surprise me anytime,” she says, hands rushing out in front her.

“You know some of my friends are coming back tonight for some wine. You should stay.

Relax a bit.”

“Well, I actually wanted to take a look at Sunshine.” Her neck pulls back towards a wall housing one of Mira’s first prints.

“Sunshine? Haven’t heard that name in quite some time.”

“Does she still run?”

“Good question. I honestly haven’t turned her on in months. The last time I took her around the neighborhood, she nearly plunked out on me. Haven’t had the heart to tell your mother. She’d go crazy over there knowing her baby is dying a slow death.”

“Maybe it’s just the battery. Do you mind if I check her out?”

“Of course, of course. Let me just seal up these paints.”

As they head towards the olive green stairs, Mira scans the room, remembering how Lorraine’s home was always echoing the past. Amber walls, dangling gas lamps from all comers, banners and a Tibetan peace flag treading above photos of moments 91

Lorraine had lived and kept fresh in her mind through frames. Above the garage doorway

was Lorraine and her mother, hair so long it tickled their crop topped waists. They leaned

along Sunshine with pride, Gigi’s elbow dancing over the driver side mirror, her pregnant

belly barely showing then mirror as Lorraine stood with the van door slid open, leg

propped up on the carpet they just touched down on new land, their own land of

transience.

Mira hadn’t set foot in this garage in years. What used to be more of Gig’s

workshop ridden with tools, was now more of a storage space. A half a dozen of

Lorraine’s acrylic painting leaned against the shelves, pieces that she didn’t love enough

to hang, but didn’t hate enough to throw away - middle-earth art. If you didn’t know what

Sunshine was, you wouldn’t know to look for her amidst all the clutter. Wrapped in a

gray canvas covering her bulky, square figure was almost hidden behind the colorful tapestries Lorraine had draped down the middle as extra protection.

“You mind opening the garage door?” Lorraine calls, already folding up the

tapestries. As the light fills the room, Sunshine’s orange paint beams just as bright as she

remembers it. 92

“She may be old, but man is she a beautiful as ever,” Lorraine says, shadowed by the incoming light. Mira smiles, transfixed, examining the body of the van the way you look at an old dear friend.

Lorraine slides open the side door. With the maroon upholstery comes the familiar stifled, mellowed smell of lavender and sage alongside aging, unaired cushions.

It’s like her mother was just here, left the van just as it was for her last adventure. The kitchenette still has the tea kettle on the hot plate next to the yellow mug Mira made for her in her. The incense holder still ridden with sage ashes. The white sheep skin rug still stretched across maroon flooring, soft as a cloud and dotted with a splash of hot chocolate during one of Mira more careless moments, spilling stained here and there. Mira stretches out on the sheep skin, winding her body up and down like a snow angel.

‘Til leave you be for a bit,” Lorraine says, smiling and plops the keys onto the van floor. Mira’s climbs in the back and feels her breath deepen as Lorraine closes the door. Her fidgeting fingers begin to calm, mind softens, no longer worrying about whether she’s acting warm enough. She lays back onto the rug. Curling up into that of a child, she rugs her face in the sheepskin, remembering the many naps she took and woke to see the light peering in through the floral curtains. She remembers how many time 93

she’s nestled here, finding solace in the familiarity it carried while it took Gigi to a new

place, maybe a similar-looking national park or beach that all looked seemed relatively

familiar in scope and scene, always lit up her mother’s face like it was the first time,

every time.

Keys in hand, she crawls over the console and sinks in the captain’s seat, as Gigi

always called it. What was once wide and tall enough to feel like a throne, was now just

another driver’s seat. Yet, like the feeling that comes with driving a parent’s car, it felt

taboo. She just sat there, feeling the still plush cushion, she realizes she’s never driven

Sunshine alone, around parking lots and dirt roads while Gigi sat in the front seat, but never steered her knowing someone wasn’t there to take over when its bulging presence grew too large for her to carry. She remembers the deep, gurgling home that always followed Sunshine, the way she chugged up hills and hummed with consistency, a melody that double-dutied as background music when the stereo went out. Mira turns the key, waiting for the old tune. The engine winds, revving back and forth like an aging

mix-tape warped by time before rumbling into a deep hum. 94

Lorraine swings open the door. The pleasure of seeing Mira in the driver’s seat quickly droops to a frown at the sound of the aching engine. Startled, Mira’s chest tightens.

“You thinking about taking her out for a trip or something?”

Mira pulls her finger from the ignition.

“Yeah. Taking a few weeks off. Going to head east through some national parks

I’ve been dying to see. But you know, just a trip. I don't think I’m meant for the Sunshine living kind of path.” She creaks open he driver’s door and steps out, closing the door behind hers

“Sweetheart,” Lorraine cooes, her palm gracing the side of Mira’s face. Mira flinches, cocking her neck back. “There aren’t any paths in life. Just a series of decisions.

When you look back, they may some kind of jagged line.” 95 96

Chapter 9

When Mira was six-years-old her mother handed her the map she kept on the dashboard of the driver’s seat. To a six-year-old more concerned with imaginary friends than where roads lead, this impossible to fold paper was nothing to ponder over. But to Gigi it held meaning. It came in the mail with the monthly car insurance bill - the one she later tucked in her pocket while walking out of her front door, suitcase in hand and into the van.

It was the last Saturday of 1979 and fog hung over the coast for nearly three months straight. She had recently moved in with John, her love soon-to-be husband. She convinced him to move into her cliffside cottage, a trait that kept the rent low not being a location fitting for children. The patio’s railing was the only thing separating bodies from the jagged rocks below. But she was drawn to it as an impermanent safety net, a place that could hold her now without holding her back, knowing one day it’d eventually crumble into the sea.

Most of Pacifica’s residents migrated from San Francisco as newlyweds eager for family-friendly col de sacs and coastal views. But Gigi came for the water - the single, steady thing she knew to be both tumultuous and enticing as life itself.

Flash forward two years and she had fallen in the love like the rest. That is until love turned to routine and routine turned to restlessness. 97

“How’d you know it was time to head out on the road?” Mira asks, Sunshine fully packed and parked out front of Gigi’s assisted living facility.

Gigi paused for a minute. Unlike the pauses that came from exploring past adventures, no smile stretched across her lips. A deep, long sigh released in its place.

“There’s something about living on the road that I haven’t found in anything else.

The stop anywhere, go anywhere, not tied to nobody kind of feeling. I wasn’t always like that you know? Before you came along, I tried being a housewife of sorts. I cooked dinners every night, ironed your father’s clothes on Wednesdays, the whole nine. But then, I just started slowly feeling a little half empty, you know? Like I was living this same life over and over, but it didn’t truly feel like mine. So, I started saving in a little coffee can. A little bit each week. I didn’t really know what I was saving for, just wanted something for myself. And every time I put a dollar or two in that can I felt this surge of happiness run through me, like I could almost feel the happiness I was gifting myself.

Then, things started to take a turn with your father. We slowly, quietly started to grow apart, so I got even more fixated on that jar. Started buying food at the dollar store and pocketing the change I’d save. Soon the can grew to a water jug and shortly after it was 98

full I saw that orange van parked outside the grocery store with a for sale sign in the

window. It was beautiful. I never was into cars, but that van just took my breath away.

The next week I came back and it was still for sale. Sometimes you know the end

is coming. You can hear it in the quiet moments in between the floor board creaks. I

could feel it. I had no idea where I’d go, but I knew I just needed to get away, just a break

from that life and explore a glimpse of a new life — one that looked nothing like the old.

And that’s when I decided to buy her. I called the number, took her for a test drive, hauled that coffee can turned water jug to the bank and cashed in. I brought her home the next day. It was winter then and it had rained for nearly three weeks straight. Water

drains were always clogged, sandbags were lined up on garage doors. But that day I

brought her home, the clouds all but disappeared. Blue skies and sunshine. The first clear

day in weeks. So, I named her Sunshine. Every time I stepped inside her I felt just as

calm and clear as that day.”

Mira kept the map folded in her wallet, making it bulge a half inch thicker than

necessary; but it’s mere presence was enough to keep the warm reminder alive. 99

You could say it began on 6:35 am on Tuesday as the sun had just crept in

between the city’s crammed walls. You could say it started the moment she drove along the Great Highway and onto Pacifica’s one lane road; or you say it began the moment she

set down the pen after writing her own obituary.

Sometimes things start far before you know it.

Sometimes you know it’s just time to go. Time to pack yourself into a van, cash in those 28 days of vacation time, this year’s and last year’s piling atop one another, the days you were a saving for a big trip that, up until today, would likely never have come.

Sometimes you just have to drive. Drive and drive until you see something, feel something worth stopping for, to remind yourself there’s far more down that open two- lamed road than routine lets in; that there are billions of people you haven’t met, thousands of unexpected experiences waiting to happen.

Mira sinks into the maroon arm rest, trying to find her own groove in the shape that’s

already been permanently pressed by her mother. A necklace of dark blue crystals dangle

from the rear-view mirror, clinking as Mira turns south onto Highway 1. The brown,

glistening granite descends into jutting cliffs, the whitewash crashing against the only

wall that keeps her from the thunderous ocean below. Gigi mentioned this road. A

constant work in progress, increasingly disintegrating year after year, losing chunks of 100

itself to dry summers, pouring winters, gutted by landslides. She thinks about the rushing

earth as Sunshine’s bulky body rounds each comer passing through the grove of

eucalyptus trees, out of the tunnel swallowing wide-ocean views. She’s never seen a

landslide, only the closures they cause. She wonders if like the land or the body know

when something is about to change you, if nerves are twisting and fraying. She thinks of

this as she drives, trying to decide if something so necessary as sight could ever truly slip

away from you, if you’d remember what things look like, what space feels like even when surveying it all isn’t attainable.

On the passenger seat sits the map her mother bought as she started her own journey

down the coast. Stained with a splash of coffee and feathered at the comers from countless bends, it looks like it’s been in pocket after pocket, a security blanket reminding even the most lost woman that along each road is a destination worth stopping

for. 101

Chapter 10

Day 1, Big Sur, California

Mira feels everything as she pulls off onto the dirt road. Sunshine shakes bump over bump as she drives further into the forest, no cars or street lamps to light the way.

Highway One, still close enough to hear. The sporadic rush of passing cars dart between the murmur of the waves. Gigi had showed Mira this spot many times, one of the few hidden turnouts near Big Sur. Even though she’d woken to this view of sandy cliffs with

Gigi time and time again, tonight feels gut-chumingly new.

She knew waking up here would be worth it, offer a coastal edge to climb, a stunning beach to test whether she could still surf. But as she lies there, surrounded by oaks and pines, countless little creatures crunch paths around her. Every sound explodes in the dark. As she rests her head against the pillow, the smallest crinkled leaf grows into imagined feet rushing for her door. The more frequent the sound, the closer it feels. She springs up from the bed, flinging open the curtains only to see a dark sheet surrounding her. The forest softens for a moment. Then a branch snaps from other side of Sunshine, the rustling leaves scurrying further away. She locks the doors, rests Gigi’s switchblade on the ledge beside her and wraps herself under the blanket. 102

“Take the knife and the mace,” Gigi said before Mira left.

“Mom, I’m not going to use a knife. I’ll be fine,” she said, almost forgetting to pack the two before driving out.

“Trust me. For nothing else, for peace of mind.”

Mira’s pulse quickens. Heartbeats mirror the rhythm of the forest floor. She tries to imagine how she’d even handle a knife. If she’d use it merely as a warning to whatever or whoever was out there, or would she have the guts to thrust if push came to shove.

Mind darts. A mountain lion lurking beyond the trees. A lone vagabond pounding on the window in the middle of the night. Headlights rolling up, two men jumping out from each side. She shakes her head as though shaking it hard enough will rid her from fear altogether. I'm safe. I'm fine. Everything is fine, she whispers aloud. The slightest plume of cold breath comes out. She remembers the conversation with Gigi, the insistence on the knife, knowing that even the bravest minds wander in the dark.

It’d been years since she overnighted in the van, first time alone altogether. She had forgotten the way it creaked with every toss and turn. The way its steel bones grew stiff in the cold as night thickened, how despite it being the early days of summer,

Northern California nights still dropped to the edge of forties and fifties, only a thin 103

window and sheer curtain insulating her from the outdoors. She pulls the blanket to her chin, not remembering Sunshine being this cold as a child, having always had her mother to warm her though the night. That’s what happens when you have another body to count on, she thinks. You forget how difficult it can be to carry yourself through the dark nights.

She coils into a cocoon, but her eyes stay sprung, staring up at the moon roof, catching two faint stars trying to burst their way through the fog. She thinks about San

Francisco, how Gigi will do without her usual company, if the fish smell in the apartment will fester without any windows open for three weeks, if Mark will actually hand off her photos to Katie, if she’ll come back to a better life than she left. She tosses from right to left. The bus leans with her. Even though the forest has gone to sleep, she fidgets for hours. Finally, she looks at her watch. 12:30am. So much of the night left. She remembers how every now and then Gigi would take night walks when she couldn’t sleep.

“Something about the cool air and sound of waves,” she’d say. “It’s one of the few things that mellows me out.” She remembers their mornings, walking to the cliff s edge just beyond the grove to look out at the ocean. Worth a shot, she tells herself. She tucks the knife in her sweatshirt pocket and grabs the flashlight. Bundled in a blanket, she draws the van door open and follows the dark tunnel leading out of the grove and towards 104

the waves. With each step, the ocean roars louder, hailing her towards it. As she breaches

the tree line, she sees - the dark sea with the faintest hint of thin white caps curling in the

distance. She tilts her head up towards the sky, catching a cluster of twinkling lights -

specks of beauty she hadn’t seen in months. As the trees sway slowly along the ridge, she

hears an owl hoot nearby. She closes her eyes and listens to all the sounds around her - the water’s thunder splashing below, the creaking branches caught in the wind’s flow.

The night expands by the second. Standing there, she can’t help but feel the vulnerability of being a single woman standing at a cliff at lam. But tells herself this is what she came for - these little fractions of a second where the world’s undertones collide into an orchestra that can’t be planned or replicated, where comfort zones have no other place to go but up and out. She breathes in the salty air, takes one last look at the stars and tucks herself back in her slightly warm bed. She lets go of the resistance to the sounds and welcomes it.

If she lies still, just her and the sound of the evening’s crickets, the crashing waves, the hooting howl. If she doesn’t rustle in the sleeping bag or turn on music, she can hear it, her heart beat. It’s soft here. Nearly inaudible, gently tucked within her rib cage, calmed by the long days of seeing new sights, breathing long and deep again and again, long forgotten experience, nearly unrecognizable. As her body curls snug into the

sleeping bag, she looks up at the amber string lights and remembers how different her 105

body felt just a couple days ago. The way her pulse constantly rushed even when her feet

stood still. She remembers sitting the conference room, arms crossed. Mark was going on

and on about needing stories with more relatable substance as reporters chucked their

ideas to the whiteboard. Mira sat quiet. She felt it then - the deep thump in her chest. The

way it felt like it had found its own megaphone, overpowering all other sensations in that

moment, drowning out Mark’s voice. She hadn’t raced up the stairs. She wasn’t waiting to present. She was merely anticipating the two minutes of talking aloud - replaying how

she’d say her few-sentence update, if she’d sound confident enough, whether she’d try to

find a way to weave in a mention of her photos without eyes rolling around her. She

could see her heart in the glass of water. The way the once smooth surface jolted rhythmically, rocking right, pausing, then left, pausing, over and over again. She looked

down, wondering if anyone else noticed the little aftershocks rumbling in her cup as her

body sat still. It was the first time she realized the heart has ways of revealing itself

despite her best efforts at hiding.

From bed she can see the obituary she wrote back at home. She thumbtacks the

page to the upholstery, wedges it there as a reminder of the powerful things the heart is

capable of if pushed in the right direction. She pulls out another sheet of paper and

scrawls a list of the places she hopes to go, experiences she wants to have during these

three weeks on the road. She starts with the ocean crashing nearby. Surfing scrawls the 106

page. She glances up to the stars above - skydiving. A little big thing she always wished

she could do, but never quite drummed the courage. Beneath the thrills comes the

destinations Big Sur (check), Joshua Tree, exploring the hoodoos of Bryce Canyon,

capturing the water and wind-swept caves of Antelope Canyon, river-trekking the

Narrows of Zion, Yellowstone, exploring Grizzly terrain in Glacier, and photographing

the creamy blues lakes of Banff— all places she had either heard about from Gigi’s

stories, or tore out pages from when scouring through the latest issue of Global Traveler.

She thinks about the national parks she’ll soon sleep in — the snowcapped mountains, desert valleys, red rock wonders. She wonders how her heartbeat will vary as

she stands on the edge of these moments. She presses the list alongside the obit and lets the crickets and possibilities lull her to sleep. 107

Chapter 11

Day 2, Big Sur, California

Too early, she thinks as the amber rays creep through the slits of her lids. Back aches.

Eyes heavy. The sound of waves crash below. She rubs her eyes and catches a glimpse of

the scribbled bucket list overhead. She looks to the line intentionally written for today.

Surfing, the word taunting her, waiting to be checked. It doesn’t take long until she’s at

the nearby surf shop at the comer of the cove renting a board and a wet suit.

She stands at the foot of the shore. Wind whips her face. The rising water climbs

and crashes against the jutting rocks bookending the beach. She studies the waves, remembers that one time a college friend brought her out, told her to look for the opening

- the shoulder of the wave where the curl opens to the side and, invites a body to ride its tunnel. She moves from ankle to knee-deep. The ocean begins to fight back, thrusting

itself up her legs, pushing against her hips, swinging the foam board around her waist.

She drops it the sand, grabs a firm grip, tightens her core and knee-highs over the water,

forgetting her friend’s recommendation of shuffling to avoid landing on sharp rocks.

Even at just waist high, the waves slowly tower, the smallest of the set crashing against

her chest. Once the sand beneath her is out reach, she hops on her board and paddles out

amidst the gray. Paddles until her shoulders bum in ways she forgot were possible. 108

The first wave comes. From a distance, it’s probably no more than three feet, but three feet of rising looks like a wall ready to crumble down. She knows she should keep paddling, keep moving, do something, but she freezes wide-eyed and stiff bodied. Instead of gracefully slicing beneath its arc, it smacks against her face. Its force, quick and steady punches her in a way she’s never been touched, somersaulting her backwards, body swirling sideways like a rag doll. The salt water stings her nose, scorching between her eyes. She squints and covers the top of her head, hoping she doesn’t spiral into the many things she can’t see. The wave takes her deeper and deeper until sand smacks against her cheek.

Then, the pull softens. The water recedes. She slowly comes to the surface, hands guarding her head not knowing how close or far the board is. Her tightened chest yearns for breath and just as she inhales she sees it coming, the next wave of the set. The second time under feels like a slow suffocation, like the ocean is testing, testing, testing how long to stay under and out here. Surrounded by curtains of brown, she can’t see the calm, but hears it. Hears the water sucking itself back into the horizon, retreating into the sky’s arms. Swim towards the light, she tells herself. Pressure leans into her chest, feeling less fluid and more concrete. She forces her breath one gulp deeper and pushes towards the surface. Deep exhales chop as her feet tread back and forth in the darkness. She breathes deep in and out as her legs and arms scramble to grab her board. The next wave comes. 109

This time she whips her neck back to the shore, letting the water slice through her. For a few moments, she catches her breath and paddles out beyond the shore break.

It goes on and on like this. Fifteen minutes turns to thirty, thirty to an hour. Her limbs tire, her paddling slows. She almost catches a wave before tumbling off the side of her board. Heavier than when she started, Mira's chest hardly feels as buoyant than it was an hour ago. The water feels colder now, like lightyears of space live between her skin and anything willing to comfort it. There’s a place here — in between the shore and the whipping crescents, a place to tread, tilt back, let the water teach the body how to hold itself in discomfort, how to face something again and again knowing its far more powerful than you’ll ever be, that this water, this wave, remains one of the few things that can’t be conquered.

In the distance, she can see the marker of where she started — little specks of shoes and a towel alongside the only log on the beach. She lets the waves carry her in.

When she reaches the shore, she drags the board along the sand, its weight feeling like a bag of bricks. Collapsing on her towel, she leans into her knees, her body concave, bent like driftwood, reshapen from her first attempted surf in more than ten years. First and not the last. Difficult, but not impossible. Less foreign, less frightening now. Before she remembers to worry about who’s been watching, she blinks her eyes hard, intentionally, like a lens photographing the world, cataloguing this feeling, storing it just above her 110

ribs, close to her heart, reminding herself what it’s like to be ripped open and left to discover her own strength. Her half mooned shoulders rise and fall, revealing her heaving breath. She stares at the glimmering waves, awestruck at how the most beautiful thing in the world can also be the most humbling.

Before she heads back to the van, the sun pierces through the clouds, its blinding streak kissing a chunk of rocky water. Amidst the glare, the light dances, plays tricks on the eyes. For a second, when she squints her eyes, it almost looks like something is out there, a bobbing head, boardless body in between the diving pelicans. A figment of a tired mind, she thinks. If she lets herself imagine long enough, she can almost see a woman out there, floating. Just like that. She's floating. I ll

Chapter 12

Day 3, Joshua Tree

The once clear windshield now splattered with bugs, draws news wings second after

second. They fly and slam, fly and slam, not suspecting foreign barriers. Each time a new

one hits, Mira feels a pang of guilt, remembering how Gigi said killing even the smallest

of things could mean killing an ancestor reincarnated - one of the many spiritual teachings she pulled from various religions and tossed in her bag of beliefs. As she nears the edge of Joshua Tree, white moths bloom from the chaparral, zigzagging on and off the highway. When she parks at the campsite, white splotches decorate the hood, specks of stars across orange sun.

A silver-haired, middle-aged woman in a rusty camper stands at the rear of her van,

sifting her spatula over a collapsible stove. Bumper stickers adorn her back, side windows - souvenirs of cross-country trips from Florida to Montana to Washington. It

doesn’t take long before the woman voice chimes from across the campground.

“Not everyday you see a young girl like yourself driving a relic like that,” she hollers,

lifting her sunglasses onto the top of her head.

“Yeah, a family heirloom I guess you could call it.” 112

The woman stirs her dinner, releasing fumes of onions and potatoes. The sun dims

over the mountains, deepening white boulders into reds. Every comer of the plain has it’s

own shade. Every combination of rock and earth offer a slightly different hue when

touched by the coming and going of lights’ rays. It’s beauty doesn’t hide when the sun

falls, it just changes, revealing parts of itself only meant for lingering eyes, longing for

truth found in dark times.

Mira tosses out a few chunks of wood into the fire pit, trying to remember the right

assembly to get a fire going. She hunches over the pit, propping one log against another, making the triangle shape she vaguely remembers Gigi forming over all those nights. It’s been years since she started her own fire. She scours the bushes for dry brush, then her van for spare newspaper to little avail. She can hear the woman clinking and clanking from just a few yards away.

“You need some help over there?” the woman calls. Mira presses her lips. “No shame in a little help. Took me a solid year of using starter logs before I got comfortable with

my own fire.”

“I just figured there’d be something to use for kindling out here.” Mira’s voice

drowns in the cupboard, searching. 113

“I got a stack of newspaper over here. If you got yourself a beer to loan, we’ll call it a

trade.” She walks over with a bowl of steaming potatoes in one hand, roll of newspaper

between the logs.

“Plus, I’m known to be pretty good with the fires. The name’s Shelby,” she says

extending the newspaper roll as though it’s a hand.

“Thanks. I’m Mira.”

Mira crumples the paper. “Is this your first time in Joshua Tree?” She tosses a ball of paper in the pit.

“First time alone. First time in a long while really. It’s a bit of an anniversary for

myself, a celebration of sorts. One year since my divorce.” Mira pauses, searching for the right thing to say. “I know. I know, not your typical celebration.”

“Looks like a nice way to celebrate.” She grabs a beer from the van, handing one to

Shelby. Mira lights the paper, poking the ball of fire beneath the propped wood.

“I’m sorry, do you mind if I chime in here?” Shelby wanders off, returning with a

handful of sticks.

“Let’s just put these here, like this. These like this. You’ve got to make a box, you

know. A proper box. Now pass me that paper. Roll it up here like so. Now light this 114

cardboard and paper in the center.” Mira follows suit. “Now squeeze your lips together with your fingers and blow just a touch. No, not like a fish, like a frog. There you go. A little more. Breath a little bit of yourself into her.” Smoke plumes from the bin, turning the wood from black to red to orange embers.

“Now add a touch of kindling when I tell you.” Shelby sips her beer, stance wide and confident. A few seconds of silence set in, the fire crackles. “You ever been married?”

Mira coughs on the smoke. “Uh, not even close.”

“Yeah, it’s for some. Not for others. Was for me for awhile. Then, it wasn’t. I like seeing girls out here like you though - alone with the wilderness. You got your van. You got yourself. You got courage is what you got. I wish I had that when I was your age. It took me damn near five decades to drum that up. Your generation is lucky. Our learnings gave you a head start.”

“How long were you married?”

“27 years. Can you believe that? Over a quarter of a century. He was a good man, really was. I guess you could say still is. I would’ve stayed with him and if I hadn’t started writing. Took a few writing classes over at the community college. My friend, she wanted to try something new, a new year’s resolution of sorts so I just came along. No 115

harm in trying new things I figure. But I couldn’t help writing about wives who wanted to leave their husbands. Different stories, same premise, over and over. I tried writing other things, really did, but nothing else came out. Hard not to ask questions after that. And once you start questioning, things start turning, revealing themselves. Add a bit more of the paper now.”

Mira blows on the fire and tosses a clump of paper into between the wood.

“Questions never hurt anybody,” Shelby say in between sips. “At the time it was painful though don’t get me wrong. Inconvenient to say the least, but every now and then when you’re just going through the motions, you gotta question your life - you gotta question your life to make sure it’s still your own.”

Mira sits with it, that last line rooting a touch of calm through her. “I know the feeling,” Mira says so soft only the crackling fire could hear. Flames crawl up the wood, heat surging towards her face.

“Well look at that! You got it going.” Shelby raises her beer for a cheers.

The fire dances. Shelby pulls up a chair and stays longer after the conversation topics have come and gone. 116

“Would you mind if I took your photo?” Mira asks. Shelby’s face sits tinted, the

flames dancing in front of her.

“Of me? Right now? Oh I don’t know how good it’ll come out. I’m not exactly my

freshest.”

“It’s more about just capturing the moment you know? The people I’ve met along the way. I take photos of people back home when I can’t get out into nature. Since there’s been no shortage of views, it’s been awhile since I’ve had someone in front of the camera. Plus fireside lighting makes everyone look better.” Mira gives a half smile.

Shelby’s cheeks warm.

“Alright, alright.” Shelby’s shoulders climb up her neck a bit. Her face noticeably more stiff. Mira notices it, the common way people shrivel up when a lens comes around.

So, she’s learn to keep people talking, to keep the conversation going as if the camera wasn’t there.

“Do you mind if I ask you a personal question?” Mira says, uncapping the lens.

“Shoot.”

“Who do you think you were when you were on your own, you know, before you became someone’s wife?” 117

Shelby hangs for a long pause.

“Maybe that came out wrong. What I mean is - ”

“No, I know what you mean. I’m just thinking.” Shelby’s eyes float up to the starry

sky, hundreds of specks of light surrounding them. The tautness in her mouth softens as

she stares into the deep velvet. Her eyes squint just a touch as though she’s watching a

distant film reel. Her mouth slips open a sliver. Mira snaps a photo.

“I was curious. Real curious. I craved new experiences. Fiend for them really. Things that lengthened me, you know? Added new inches to my life.” Shelby sips her beer slowly, ignoring the intermittent shutter. The fire crackles between the two. Mira waits for the next sentence, but Shelby just hangs there, quietly laughing to herself as her eyes shift from the sky to the fire. Mira can see it — the way her posture softens, hands coming to knees. Her eyes no longer dart to and from the lens. It’s evident Shelby’s back there, mining through memories, reliving her favorites again and again.

“I guess that was the part that interested me about marrying Bill. I looked at it as an adventure. Someone I could explore life alongside with. Someone who made me more deeply explore myself.” The smile on Shelby’s face slips into the flames. She squeezes the beer can a little tighter, a crack echoing across camp. 118

“It’s not easy being married, you know, but it’s not all hard times either. I miss some things. Like how we’d have an idea we both we’re drawn to and go after it together. On the good days, it’d work that way. Other times. Well, sometimes people want you to grow, but within limits.

Mira rests the camera in her lap, feeling a twinge of guilt at keeping the lens snapping as Shelby dives. “Would you have changed anything?”

Shelby laughs beneath her breath as though a memory has just caught up to her. “Oh, not a second of it. Just because something doesn’t end the way you hoped it would, doesn’t mean it wasn’t worth living.

When the fire and beers dwindles down the two part ways into their own campers, taking the lingering conversations with them.

With night comes the stars and with stars come silence and silence comes the chance to sit in the gaps and see how well she can fill them. Mira found it comforting having

Shelby in that way. Her presence acting as a buffer from the constant silence, encouraging her to speak, to step out of the comfort zones and walls she rarely second guesses. As the kettle warms a pot of tea, Mira pulls her shoebox of photos, a collection she brought to keep her inspired, slowly growing with new polaroids snapped here and 119

there. She hangs them along from the string lights, the amber hue making every black and

white print just a touch sepia.

She finds a photo of Gigi, an old image of her mother with a group of mustached

men. She can’t help but wonder if any of them were her father, if she’d seen his face

somewhere down the road and just never known it. She’s asked her mother every few

years about her father, what happened, where she could find him now. Gigi never gave

much, other than a fisherman from Alaska she once loved and lived with, but never saw

again. There were a few years from junior high to ninth where she felt her father’s

absence more. She’d pepper Gigi with variations of the same questions only to get the

same reciped answers. Every time Mira would ask Gigi would say, “He was traveling

fisherman. A kind man, a quiet man. But ultimately we weren’t meant to be.’’ Anytime

Mira pried, Gigi would give the same line, regurgitated over and over like she’d rehearsed it long enough to believe it. Sometimes as she tried to fall asleep she’d make up

visions in her head about the ways she took after him - how she picked at her cuticles

when she was nervous or the way her skin grew red when stressed. The things she never

noticed in Gigi she assumed were his and even in those imagined moments they made her

feel a touch closer to him. After those years, something callused over. She figured if he

wanted to be there, he would’ve have. After enough time of telling herself that story, it

firmed up as truth. 120

Mira puts the photo back in the box and hangs another of the two of them arms around each other at the beach. Their faces dangle amidst the other photos she’d brought from her apartment - little estranged faces that remind her of home. When they’re all up there, hung just so, she leans into the sheepskin rug, admiring it all. Admiring the clothes and bags tossed about the carpet, how the sound of crickets creep in — little violins singing the desert to sleep. She can already feel her mind adjust. That even when the mind only knows a scene through one gaze, with enough repetition, even if just for a matter for days, it opens the possibility of a new way of living. As she looks at the moments hung before her, the van feels a little less like a family heirloom and a little more hers.

That night before she falls asleep. She adds the photo of Shelby to her newly created blog - the one she started to catalogue her adventures on the road. She wants to remember this trip, organize these moments into snapshots she can carry with her long after they’ve come and gone.

There’s something about sharing a moment that makes it feel more alive, even if it’s not with another person. That night before she settles in the van to sleep she pulls out her remote server and waits until the faintest bit of Internet piece together amidst the desert mountains. She wanted to catalogue this trip, organize these moments into snapshots she 121

could carry with her long after they’d come and gone. Have something to look back on,

something to show for the experience each step of the way.

Mira loads the memory card into her computer, the photos from the day cascade onto

the screen. Shelby’s fire lit face stands at the center of the collage, the right side of her

face shadowed by the night. The red flames climbing into the bottom comer of the photo.

Mira clicks across each image, marking her favorites. The first few shots mostly capture

discomfort. Shelby’s mouth tightens, her lips stiffening revealing lines that weren’t as

noticeable during her belly-deep laughter. Mira thinks about the fireside shoot. The little things she could’ve done to help her relax more, asking her to close her eyes and breathe

deep until she felt comfortable enough to open. Little things she remembers her mom

doing when she posed as Mira’s subject. Then, after a dozen or so photos, there it is, the

shot she hoped to capture. Confidence.

Another photo comes on screen. Shelby’s shoulder pulls back and wide. Her eyes

lean on the edge of the lawn chair’s armrest. Her back up right instead of hunched,

highlights her thick neck and sturdy frame. She spoke in the way she sat, discussing the

things she saw and did alone, experiences that strengthened the foundation she stood

from. Mira remembers how Shelby’s eyes didn’t soften in self-pity as they talked of

divorce. She said it matter of factly with a calm air, like a cool summer breeze on a

summer day. 122

Mira uploads the photo to her website, titles the new page ‘Some women are birds’ a

nod to her favorite Terry Tempest Williams book, the story of a daughter who finds

mother journals after her death, a cultural practice among Mormon women, only to find

each and every page was empty. Mira dwells on the empty page. The thinks of how to

summarize her life and starts typing. For the first time in a long time, the photo alongside wasn’t an obituary, but a snapshot of a life lived - a view into the complexities, detours,

growth of a single woman. She stares at the screen trying to decipher how to sum up her up in a caption, what part of the conversation is worth noting, what part too personal to

share. She was so much more than a recent divorcee. She was courageous, an open book critically examining her own pages. She thought how her favorite line and typed it

beneath her photo. Sometimes you have to question to your life to make sure it's still your own. 123

Chapter 13

Gigi - February 27, 1977

I’ve never known how to tell you about the day I met your father. It was in the middle of

winter. The rain pelted the asphalt, breaking holes in blacks sheets - puddles whose depth

deceived the both of us as we ran down the streets. I pulled up my only pair of bell-

bottoms and thrashed my rain boots through the potholes. Your father’s bare feet trailed

behind, dodging my splashes before making his own. The curtain of gray swiftly

swallowed the blue sky, making it feel later than it really was. John was a crab fisherman who frequented the grocery store around the comer from my apartment - the only cliffside cottage around, a trait that left it open and empty for months as clusters of couples toured and left, shaking their heads at its location not fitting for children, feeling their stomachs rumble as the patio’s railing marked the only thing separating bodies from the jagged rocks below. For me it was a slice of paradise - secluded with unobstructed views of the consistent, setting sun.

The rest of Pacifica’s residents had migrated from San Francisco - budding

newlyweds seeking refuge from the City’s clamor. They spent weekends lining freshly

painted three-bedrooms with shag carpets, tweed couches, and wedding photos. I simply

came from the water - the single, steady in my life. While the city brimmed with 124

potential for people to paint, it lacked the mental and physical space I needed. Here space

effortlessly unfolded with miles and miles of rippling water bringing the eye to distant

lands. I spent the first month turning half of the living room into my art studio, propping

my easel just at the comer of the patio’s sliding door and hanging my favorite artists and

photos I’d taken along the walls as inspiration. I loved those days. Hours of solitude,

transforming the cottage into my own gallery of estranged places and faces - a

kaleidoscope of emotions hung against every comer of the wood, paneled walls.

Your father shared my love for water, for space, and a different kind of living. As

a fisherman he spent much of the last two years gazing into open sky and stretching seas.

A man who only owned one pair of boots - boots he rarely wore beyond the ships as his

feet preferred cold ground and fresh terrain. This explained why he settled in five beach towns over the last six months. Despite having been around for just a few weeks, John

garnered attention from the people in pressed suits and pleated dresses. His bare feet in

markets or restaurants attracted slack jaws and narrowed eyes. His habit of bartering over

paying was both admired and despised. I first met him the market near Mori Point. He

was carrying a basket full of crab traps in own hand and a cooler of fish in the other.

“I’ll trade you three sea bass and a crab trap for a loaf of bread and two pints of

milk,” he blurted over the counter. He plopped the wet cooler next to the register, lifting 125

the lid with a smile as if it glimmered with gold. The bald, pot-bellied owner scrunched

his nose and slammed the lid shut.

“What do you think this is kid? Get the hell out of my store. Make some room for

the real customers.” That hardly discouraged him. John walked barefoot to the markets

next door until he met Lawrence and Louis of Lahaina’s Grocery, a couple from

Honolulu that appreciated his less than conventional ways. They accepted his fish and

extended day in old bread and soon-to-expire milk in exchange.

This was the kind of thing that drew us together - our disinterest in following the

same pace of everyone else around us. He, a young man coming and going amidst cities of stability, and I, the only unapologetically single woman and only art teacher in town,

snapping photos of faces to later paint. I was hell bent on finding something more

exciting than a living room full of children. I just wasn’t ready for all that, wasn’t sure if I ever would be.

Your father’s looks were hardly captivating. He always wore stained t-shirts and

had a bulbous nose and a scraggly beard weathered by months of sea salt. His skin wore

more of a windbum than a tan, but his eyes - his curious, brown eyes. They’d light up

whenever he discussed something he was passionate about. I loved that - the way they

effortlessly spoke for his wild spirit, making me all the more curious each time we 126

passed. I’d see him try to trade his latest catch for a carton of cigarettes and a bottle of gin as I sifted through the magazine rack, hoping for words slightly more invigorating than a recipe or a Redbook tip for landing a husband.

I was twenty-one at the time - old enough to develop a drinking habit, but young enough to be judged for a glass of wine at family gatherings as aunts and uncles peppered questions about when I’d finally settle down with a nice man. I tried to make it home to

Oregon for Christmas every year. I knew how much it meant to my mom, but the more I visited, the harder it was to see the newly frayed edges of my parents’ relationship. They were too old to mend parts of the past that had recently started rising to the surface. So, that December I was considering staying in California for the holidays when I first met your father.

I had been out snapping photos of people I thought would make interesting paintings. I hadn’t yet figured out which was my favorite medium, so I explored both, finding it easier to navigate the world through a different lens. Back then I was taking photos of people, mostly men, mostly in bars, mostly without permission. But that particular day I found my way into Charley’s Pub. The weekday drinkers never minded my camera and got a kick out of our conversations. Back then the women of the town 127

didn't hang around alone in those kinds of places, but I found the dim, red lighting too good to pass up. It softened the men’s faces, shadowed one side, and relaxed their eyes in a way that made you wonder about their past. Some of them shared their stories. Other didn’t. Either way, I’d be snapping profile shots as they neared their third glass, where a few of the tender ones would show that brief window of vulnerability where bits of heartache spewed.

That was where I spoke with John for the first time. He was leaning over the counter, hassling Charley over why one fresh sea bass was worth a sixteen-ounce lager. I snapped my camera as he extended the slimy, oozing fish over the wooden bar, dangling above the bottles of vodka and whiskey. The lens shuttered just before Charley smacked it out of his hand and onto the bar’s floor, adding a layer of salty slime to coats of stale beer. I laughed so loud he couldn’t help but notice me.

He smirked and nodded my way.

“What’s with the camera? You doing some kind newspaper story on Pacifica drunks.”

“Hey, hey. Watch your mouth, kid,” Bob, one of the more seasoned regulars said, his back hunched in his chair. Bob didn’t drink much, just one glass every day, very slowly. He started coming in the day after his wife died and returned every day since. 128

“Oh, I can pass for a journalist, huh? I’m moving up in the world,” I winked back.

We sat there for a good hour until I wanted some fresh air.

“I’m gonna head to the beach. Wanna come? Charley, you mind if I put my

camera in your office for a bit?”

“It’s raining,” John said.

“And?”

We gulped the rest of our beers and ran across the street to the shore. As we neared the sand the rain poured on, casting the ocean into a deep roar. Men in Datsuns hurried to their homes, where scents of tuna casseroles and meatloaf seeped through the windows. John passed me the flask of gin, revealing his scabbed knuckles. The dry pungent smell scorched my nostrils as I swigged. Your father was a character alright, the way he boldly wandered through town trying to redefine currency intrigued me, far more intriguing than the others who had passed through town. He was livelier than Dan, the caravanning hippie from Vermont, and more tender than Frank, the traveling musician. In a place lined with picket fences and block homes, I drew to anyone who stood out from the flock. Each time the men got better, as did the stories, as did the photos. Your father was always my favorite. 129

“I bet you a pack of cigarettes you won’t jump in,” he said, narrowing those eyes

at the swelling waves. I looked around at the empty beach. The dirt road nearly barren.

My brown bell-bottoms soaked to black.

“Make it a carton and a bottle of wine and you got yourself a deal,” I replied,

unbuttoning my overcoat. This was kind of thing sailors, travelers, incoming men from of

the road and sea loved-a good dare. Daring a woman with coiffed hair into destination-

less day trips, awkward encounters, and unknown waters. Each month I pretended it was the first time, wagering something to help stock the fridge or a bottle of Burgundy for

quieter nights. I went for the wine, knowing it was Sunday and the lot of any newcomers

generally shipped out on Monday. We shook on it. His wild eyes widened in anticipation.

A pair of pelicans soared above the water as I sprinted for the waves. Cold drops peppered against my cheeks. Once my toes hit that frigid shore, I kicked my knees as high as they could go and leaped into the belly of a wave. The ocean’s thrust immediately whipped me into a backwards somersault, slapping a clump of sand against my face and

another into my trousers. I bobbed like a buoy, catching a glimpse of John’s bare chest

charging the water - his smile as wide as his eyes. We didn’t last for more than five

minutes before our toes went numb, but those five minutes were all I needed to last

through the week. 130

As the rain softened we wandered back to my cottage. The windows steamed as I stoked the fire. Your father trailed the wall of paintings and photos. It was nice having all my art out there like that - the children of the city crying in their mothers’ arms; the long, tired faces of men drinking at Charley’s, their ties loosened well below their top buttons, faces of men who had stood in the same place he was. I liked how I didn’t need to pretend to be a woman I wasn’t. It was all out there.

As the fire danced, I drew back the sheers, revealing the gaping view of the

Pacific - blue ripples reaching no end. The light beamed across John’s back, revealing two purple scars stretching from shoulder to shoulder.

“Where’d you get those?” I said, tracing my finger along the grooves.

“Overseas,” he replied, unclear if that meant the Vietnam War or a crab ship. I tried to imagine where he’d been before he started fishing. The things he’d seen, the women he loved, the demons he was running from. Beneath the golden light his face began to look weathered in more ways than one. The setting sun illuminated the dark circles beneath his eyes. A sadness sat there and I couldn’t help but just stare at it, waiting for a look that would offer up some truth. He put his hands in his pockets and walked onto the patio. He must have stood there for a good ten minutes not saying one 131

word. I was no stranger to that look - the one that wanted space, clarity, and comfort all

in one swoop. So, I just let him gaze out into the somethings that were bigger than both of

us. I liked him more for not turning around. I liked men with a little mystery, ones that

didn’t give it up all so quick. The ones that slowly peeled back their layers showing you

little imprints of themselves bit by bit until you reached the center - that glowing, tender

center where souls talk for hours, where people revealed more than just body parts. That

center was hard to come by. I knew your father had a story. I wanted to do more than

photograph a brief glimmer of it. I wanted to know it, sit with it.

Back then I wasn’t the kind of girl to risk it all with honest words, so I brought

him a cup of coffee. I kissed the purple scars before wrapping a half-finished afghan over his back. He curled into it like a child. Beyond the awning the rain pelted on. We stood

there, pressed into one another for what felt like hours, soaking up each second knowing transience all to well. We spent the rest of the evening talking about what it’s like to live

on the open sea, the sheer vulnerability that exists when you’re at the mercy of nature’s

untamable waves. I didn’t expect him to talk about the war, but somehow we wandered

there and his eyes watered as he told about the time he found a portrait of a woman and

two children in the wallet of a Vietnamese man he killed. He almost let a tear go, but it

shrank back as I kissed his crows feet. We stayed up talking for most of the night. I never

forgot that day. That glowing center. 132

After breakfast we walked to Sands motel, the dingy digs he called home for those weeks. I watched him drain his cooler and pack his green duffel bag for the next fishing trip. I kissed him goodbye a couple blocks from the pier - not wanting to watch him board the ship that’d take him into the sea I longed to be in. For the first time I found myself missing someone before they even left. I hadn’t met a man who wanted to talk more than anything else, who wanted to share just as much as he wanted to learn.

As we said goodbye, Mrs. Mateer, one of the church-going wives, shook her head as she swept the leaves from her porch. Her neighbor, Mr. Coughlin, squinted in a scowl, touting his briefcase down the porch stairs. I could only imagine what they were thinking.

Gigi with another man. That woman. When is she going to settle down? Used to the looks, 1 waved to them and offered a full teeth smile as though I was oblivious.

Just after that a lingering pang pulsed behind my eye - a dull pain at the time brushed off as too much gin, not enough coffee, or an abrupt preview of soon to be loneliness. A sudden, white blotch skewed my view of John’s face. His bulbous nose, his wind-burned cheeks no longer sharp and clear, but contorted into a thick haze. The lines spread into one another. I rubbed my eye irritated, aiming for one last clear look at those brown eyes before his departure. I wondered if I’d see him next week, next month. I imagined us swimming a little farther, laying in bed a little longer, having a proper dinner at that nice Italian restaurant in town, but I shook the visions from my mind, 133

remembering expectations often kill happiness. So I enjoyed what was there, or at least the murky view of it.

“I’ll write you,” he said.” The haze lingered. I kissed him on the lips, knowing damn well he wouldn’t. I blinked and blinked until his tall, wide body disappeared beyond the foggy row of track homes. It wasn’t the first time I had trouble seeing life and love clearly, and it surely wasn’t the last. 134

Chapter 14

Day 4: Mojave Desert, Nevada

“Nice van you got there,” a man with a trucker cap says as Mira pumps gas into

Sunshine. The hot air hangs stiff, reminding all who stand it in they’re inching towards the precipice of the desert. Mira glances quickly at the man, wiggling the gas nozzle,

knocking every last drip into the tank.

“Thanks.” Mira walks to the driver’s seat. The man walks closer.

“Where you headed?” His hands coax the ends of his beard.

“East,” she says, remembering Gigi’s advice to never disclose end destinations to

strangers.

“East is a mighty long way to go for a young girl like you all alone.” A corner smile

creeps up the man’s cheek. Mira slams the driver’s door and starts the engine. The starter

whines once, twice, making her chest tighten. After a third time it ruffles into its deep

chug. She drives off, seeing the man’s crooked smile in the side mirror.

“Creep,” she murmurs to herself. She wonders how her Gigi did it, went all those

places, along all those bare roads where trees were more common than cars, confident 135

that nothing would happen to her. She pulls out her phone and clicks 2 on the speed dial.

It rings and rings five, six, seven times before Vincent, one of the nurse’s answers.

“Hi Vincent. It’s Mira. Can I speak to my mom for a bit?”

“Not coming in today?”

“No, not for a few weeks. I’m actually on vacation.”

“Ohh, a vacation!” he says, his tone curling high into vines. “Good for you. You deserve a vacation. Just wait one second I’ll get her.”

The phone crackles before Gigi’s raspy voice emerges over the speaker.

“Mira?”

“Hi mom.”

“How’s your trip, sweetheart. Where are you? Tell me what you see. Tell me everything.”

“If s-it’s going good. I’m just heading through the Mojave Desert into Arizona.

Sunshine’s running well. Well enough. She takes a bit to start sometimes and there was just this creepy guy around and I haven’t been sleeping well. I don’t know, I’m still

worried I guess, but other than that everything is good. The coast was beautiful.” A long 136

pause sits on the other end as if Gigi is soaking up each part of the sentence building the film in her mind.

“Where’s the guy?” Her tone rises, more alert.

“Behind me, at the gas station. Just some creep trying to make small talk about a little girl on a big road.”

“Ok, just make sure it stays that way.” Her voice trails off. “Don’t you worry about those dirty old men. They just like to see a young woman flustered. Don’t give them the satisfaction. Just hold onto a long, unblinking glare, and you carry on with whatever you’re doing. You brought that mace with you though, right?”

“Yeah, of course.”

“And the knife?”

“Mom, I don’t know even why you gave me that thing. I’m not going to carry a knife around.”

“I’m not saying you need to, but a little something extra. Trust me. Just keep it around for me, will you?”

“Alright, alright.” 137

“You’ll be fine though, don’t worry. People surprise you out there, in good ways.

There’s a lot of good folks out there on the road. You just got to keep your whits about

you when you’re alone.”

Mira nods, like she’s right there in front of her, watching wave about as she speaks.

Her eyes can’t help but look in the rearview mirror. She sees the an old pick up turn out

of the gas station and go in the opposite direction. She sighs.

“So, tell me what you see.”

“Sandy flat and for miles. The sky is clear, blue and in the distance there’s a few

clouds.”

“Flat bottom clouds?” Mira squints, trying to look closer at the clouds. She studies their shape, their plump texture, not sprayed apart like the San Francisco clouds she’s

accustomed to.

“How do you know if they’re flat bottom clouds?”

“Well, look at the bottom. It’s flat,” she says, her quick-pitched laugh climbing

through the receiver. “They leave imprints on the land beneath it - perfect cloud shapes just plopped across the earth.Just wait. Wait until you reach to Utah. You’ll see the flat

bottoms everywhere. You’ll see the land change before your eyes, in the way reds and 138

pinks start peeking out from the center of the mountains. It’s incredible.” Mira could hear her voice lighten and liven with each sentence, as though even just recalling the beauty she’d seen was turning back to the clock one year at a time. “Don’t forget to when you get to Page.”

“Alright will do, Mom. I love you.”

“And Mira, try not to stress yourself out there. This is about calming yourself. That’s what going to help you get better.”

“I know. I’ll pull over if I feel off, too. Don’t worry.”

“Well you keep calling, okay? I want to hear from you everyday even if it’s just for me to you’re okay. I have too much time on my hands here to just sit here wondering.”

“I will.” Mira felt a tug in her belly, wanting to be there next to hear, caressing the side of her face, reassuring her she was fine, she was fine, she was fine even when in the churning in her gut signaled otherwise.

“Alright, well I’ll talk to you tomorrow. Enjoy yourself okay? Take photos of everything, write down as much as you can. Trust me, you’ll want to remember these moments when they’ve come and gone.” The lightness in her voice dims with the last sentence, reminding them both her days of wandering are a part of the past. 139 140

Chapter 15

Day 5: Antelope Canyon, Arizona

They were waiting in line, bookended by rusted rails, when the woman said it. At just 10 a.m. the desert sun creeps in boldly from both sides, eager to bake tourists hiding under the canopy. They were all waiting to have their time in Antelope Canyon, to gawk at nature’s wind and water-swept tunnels. An Asian woman, somewhere in her thirties, has a DSLR camera hanging from her neck just like Mira, seemingly just another tourist doing it for the photo. A bandana keeps her short, black hair out of her face. Small talk starts as the woman squats amidst the crowd. She reaches her hand beyond the rails, feeling the low boulders. Her hands caress them up and down, rubbing the chalking remnants between her fingertips. Then, she pulls out a knife of sorts - the kind that looks like somewhere you’d use for putting rather than cutting. She wedges the edge against the boulder and begins scraping. The rest of the crowd continue chatting, a range of languages chiming against one another.

“Uh, what are you doing?” Mira says, brows pinched.

“Oh just a little scraping. I’m a digger,” she says. “Kind of thing I do.” She springs up from the rocks and outstretches her hand. “I’m Janice.”

“Mira,” she says looking down at the tool. 141

“So, what do you mean by digger?”

“Well I like-to think of it as I dig up things people want to forget about, things

most figure disappeared under world’s calamities.”

“Uh, interesting?”

“What about you?”

“Eh, well for work I help out at a newspaper. But I’d like to consider myself a

photographer.”

“Then why don’t you?” Janice asks, her tone and face firm.

“Well, I haven’t got anything published yet or anything. I just take a lot of photos.”

“So, you think Picasso wasn’t a painter until someone hung his art somewhere?” her eyebrow cocks just a touch. Mira smiles.

“Yeah, I guess you have a point there.” The line moves a couple steps forward.

Janice puts the tool back in her satchel.

“So, I still don’t really get what you do. You an archeologist?”

“No. A digger.” 142

“What’s the difference?”

“My mother was an archeologist. She was the first female archeologist of China actually. She went on formal expeditions, got funding, went to school for decades. Me? I learned the grassroots way, just by watching her and kind of averted form the formal path

I guess you could say. I studied history and anthropology. I started focusing on the most destructive times a country experiences over the last fifty years. I focus on the parts we’d like to forget about. How the earth and infrastructure of Laos and Cambodia were decimated from the war. The way Fukushima’s coastline has changed post-spill, the color of sub-level water of Flint, Michigan. Physical digging alongside historical digging.

Either way I find things worth bringing to the surface.”

The crowd shuffles forward. Janice and Mira reach the top of the first of five staircases, descending into the dusty pink canyon. The light fades away as they walk deeper into the slats.

“So, what brings you here? I’ve heard this is more of a visual wonder than anything else.”

“Mh. It’s a bit more than that.” 143

As the group funnels into a line, the Navajo guide hollers over the chatter.

“Welcome, to Lower Antelope. These canyons were formed by flash floods centuries ago. Years and years of the water gushing from the sky and through the earth.

With the water came wind and the combination of the two over time formed what you’ll be seeing today. The smooth, fine waves is what happens when the elements work together. This is what nature’s force gave us.”

The sun disappears as they wind further underground. Mira feels the temperature drop five, ten degrees. Shadows swallow any glimmer of light. She looks up. From here, the sky is nothing more than a slim, jagged river creeping at the edges, disappearing completely as she walks further in.

“This became a space of refuge for the Navajo,” the guide says. “When the colonizers came, the Navajo hid beneath here until they passed. From up above this place merely looks like slits in the earth. But beneath, as you can see, lies so much depth.

Between Upper and Lower, there were space for many. Temporary shelter when the water wasn’t rushing through it.”

Janice wanders up ahead, her hands graze everything she passes. Mira snaps a photo of her staring up the salmon walls before she disappears around a rock.

Withdrawing from the group, she lets herself seep into her surroundings, studying the 144

walls, the way they nearly converge at the center, their edges looking as if the fingers had combed through a pond and frozen its ripples in mid-air. She studies the light through the lens - how the color captured drastically changes depending on the light, fading from red to deep belly purple depending on the angle. She stares into the frame and hangs there in that moment. Feeling the aperture wheel turn on her finger. She finds her setting, softens her breath into the shot, and clicks.

As she walks through the canyons, she feels the wall’s texture - smooth pink stone with only the slightest ridge symmetrically trailing across the wall. The surface changes ever so slightly, dried tear drops, mineral deposits, speckled along the silky walls. She closes her eyes, lets the dark take hold, lets the darkness cloak her. Her hands follow the bends of the walls, the little valleys, and stiff cliffs. It makes her wonder what it’s like for her mother to just have this, darkness without light. What’d it be to have everything you know stripped away, to find a way to feel the world instead of see it. She feels a space open up deep her belly, just above her pelvis. Feels the deep cavity of what lies beneath. She thinks about how maybe a person, much like a place, can house rivers within them, waters that navigate through tunnels, serve as a space to hide out, find security in when the rest of the world feels muddied and thrashed. It’s this reason she finds herself alone so often, comfortable in the silence of her own company, allowing her to descend further into her own canyons. 145

She opens her eyes, lets the spectrum of red rock sweep over her. She thinks about Gigi, wonders if maybe it wasn’t the sights that drew her, but rather the feeling mined from within those spaces. How sometimes seeing something new, studying it with such careful presence makes you feel something inside you forgot existed. Helps you tap into something you didn’t know you were trying to find.

The chilling temperature, the shadowed walls remind her of the first time Gigi brought her to her first cave in Oregon. Gigi tried to coax her in, tugging her hand, telling her she didn’t have to be afraid of the dark. It was an adventure, she said. That these walls would be unlike anything the young ten year-old had ever seen. Mira’s body tugged towards the door as they entered, resisting the enveloping darkness. She remembers the dripping structure that came with the cave. How the ceiling looked like giant rain drops swelled and froze into rounded icicles mid-air. Once they got inside, Gigi’s hand slipped away, her fingers felt the grooves of the walls. Gigi sat down there for nearly an hour, finding comers that grew darker and darker with each subtle descent. She looked back at

Mira, her little heart pounding with each deepening shadow wondering if this turn would be the place the cluster of bats would dart out from. Mira kept her hands to her arms, holding herself while her mother’s hand endlessly trailed the edges.

They walked for an hour until they two were deep inside the belly of the cave.

Goosebumps grew from Mira’s arms. She remembers that feeling - wanting to be held, 146

comforted, to not ask for comfort when you didn’t yet know how to communicate such a

thing. She trailed her mother’s steps closely until she suddenly stopped, Gigi’s arms

swing out like wings, causing Mira to bump into her. On the other end of her mother was

a caution sign. Beyond that was pitch black. They’d reached the end. Gigi stood there,

staring. Mira could hear her breath grow short and heavy. She sniffled, wiping her face.

Mira grabbed Gigi’s hand as it drooped down. Her mother’s palm was damp with tears.

Mira always wondered what she was crying about in that moment. What about the caves, the darkness made tears river down. Gigi could do that. Be just inches away from

Mira, but alone at the same time. She could have these moments of drilling into herself, sitting in caverns she never let anyone else feel. It was after these times she’d stay quiet for hours as they returned to the van, finding the nearest body of water where Mira would pretend to color in her journal, watching her mother stare out into a vista, soft tears

landing onto the earth beneath her. It was why they had made it a habit of always

watching the sunset.

No matter where they were, be on the coast of San Francisco or a red rock cliff in

Southern Utah, Gigi would look to the sky when the sun hung a few thumbs up from the

horizon. She’d look to Mira with a little smile. “Ready to find a spot to end the day?”

Mira would hop in the front seat and they’d drive to the nearest West-facing overlook.

Gigi would hoist Mira up the side ladder and toss her a few pillows to find comfort atop 147

the wooden roof rack. She’d follow already enwrapped her a her wool poncho, carrying the blanket Mira usually said she didn’t need but always ended curling into. They’d lay up there, watching the sky transform and disappear before their eyes. During that hour,

Gigi would hardly say a word, just stare into the distance as they she was having a silent conversation with someone she had known for decades. Mira always wondered what made her that way, why she held things she didn’t seem to know how to release. As she grew into her late teenage years, she saw Gigi as more than a mother, but a woman dealing with her own demons. Because of this, she learned to be patient with her. Learned to be there, to give her a break more often than not, because on those nights when they’d drive out to the beach for sunset, she could still see that same look her in eyes. The way her brow softened, revealing that same longing Mira had seen that day after the caves.

The caves, the underground canyons, the places formed by dripping water, rushing rivers, sudden rains - all examples of what sub-surface transformations. The way earth, like a woman, can look strong and seamless on the surface, but have these shadows, these underground canyons, places carved out by the past, swept by life’s rushing waters, hardened by swift winds. Places that serve as refuge, places to come back to again and again, trying to understand the darkness seen both in and outside of ourselves. She always knew her mother held places just like that cave, just like this canyon. Places no one would ever seen. Places that kept her on the move. Kept her 148

almost incapable of letting someone stay for too long, knowing she’d have to let them into a place she wasn’t never quite ready to reveal.

Mira rounds the bend, her hand trailing the red rock just as she’d seen her mother do before. She comes to a section whose shape resembles an eagle’s head, the sharp, protruding edge mirroring its closed beak. As though the rest of orange walls were its wings spreading farther than the eye could see. A paradox of a thing, something fixed in form, but looked like freedom.

She takes a photo of the stone bird - one with camera and another with eyes. She stands there still, freezing time, trying to imagine a place that sits the center. Wonders if there’s a happy medium between adventure and stability. Wonders if you can find satisfaction without having to repel from routine, wonders if you can inherit restlessness the way you inherit green eyes and brown hair. Wonders what kind of hidden wonders you could find in yourself, what kind of shapes emerge from stone ways. 149

Chapter 16

March, 1998, Oregon

I always felt guilty about the distance. How she could be so close, in my arms, less than a

foot away and her hands still couldn’t grab me in the way she wanted to. Everybody has

their thing they run from. Sometimes you see that thing in a person, a place.

Sometimes there are moments where you see yourself so clearly, the image, the

shadows, the parts once tucked, now seen, make you look away. Sometimes you’re

taking a road trip up the coast of Oregon, your ten-year-old daughter trailing behind you,

and you come to a cave. A cave all of your traveler friends have talked about, a scene with clay daggers and pleats folding into themselves over and over. A sight you’ve been

itching to see. And then suddenly as you’re gazing up and all around this shadowed

space, admiring all of the crevices, fingers tracing a texture hardly found elsewhere. You

feel yourself drawing towards the darkness. Deeper and deeper, the light from the entry retreats and you’re pulled into the vortex, immersed in the curiosity of what could be

seen, felt, heard if you just keep going a bit farther beyond the place most are willing to

go. The light, so distant, eyes try to dilate as your feet ram into mounds and rocks. Again,

you’ve gone past the paved tourist trail. Again, you’ve gotten drunk of curiosity. Again, you’re heading straight into somewhere forgetting whose behind you. 150

You trip, nearly fall into the wooden sign stationed in front of the black pit, so dark you can’t see if there’s ground beneath it. And that’s when you feel it - her little hand tugging your forearm, her little whimper from behind, whispering, Mommy, it’s really dark. Can we go? You turn around and her hand has darted back to her little body.

She’s holding herself, her little arms tightly wrapped around her chest. She’s holding herself the way she wants you to hold her, holding herself the way any frightened child would. Behind her sits a blanket of black, drops of cave water plop from the ceiling to the ground. And maybe it was the combination of seeing a body too small to pretend to be brave in a swallowing cave, or maybe it was that you nearly tripped with a black pit on one end, and your daughter on the other. Maybe it was the fact that for those few brief moments, as you let yourself wander into the belly of the darkness, feeling it tug your chest, feeling it string from her heart to its center, you forgot she was there. You forgot to think about whether she’d be scared. You forgot that just because you’re drawn to something, doesn’t mean those around you aren’t left feeling the repercussions.

I don’t find myself crying often. It’s not something I’m proud of or resistant to, it’s just a fact. 1 rarely cry. But that day in that cave, it streamed down my face so fast I had no time to hide it from her. I just let it wash over me, this cavernous realizations of inadequacy, this mirroring where there was nothing to avert my attention to. No city sidewalk to firm up in front of dozens of passing people, no food to dig into, no 151

newspaper to flip through it was just me, feeling as though I’d gutted myself open. Just staring at the pockets of the person I’d grown into, but never liked to look at. The selfish tendencies I tuck in comers, writing it off as a free spirit’s ways without bothering to look at the aftermath, the person on the other end of the equation, the one whose always feeling the rocking waves I’ve left behind when jetting out to the next impemianent somewhere. I saw it all in that cave. How Mira had grown so used to getting jostled by my wake. I’d been so interested in raising her to adapt, to be strong on her own, to not need people as much as she’d later need herself, I often forgot beneath all of her too-early wisdom and maturity was a child. A child who was still shaping her perception of the world, a child who needed more than I often realized.

So, when I felt her little hand reach for my wet palm I also felt this welling sensation beneath my breasts, this heavy expansion slowly tearing open, the way a seam ripper releases the body the dressmaker forgot was inside.

I wanted to grab her and tell her all of this. I want to press her to my stomach and say sorry over and over. I’m sorry you for landed in the womb of a woman who had so much confusion about what it meant to be a wife and mother while still finding a way to be herself. I wanted to explain how she got here, how we got here, how this all came to be. That I’d gotten so used to resisting everything I didn’t want to be that I didn’t realize who’d I’d gradually become. That I’d grown so accustomed to questioning my life - the 152

parts I didn’t want to keep, the jobs, the apartments, the boyfriends, I rarely stopped and

questioned myself. I rarely looked at my behavior, the patterns I’d locked in as who I

was, all the while forgetting with every decision came a choice. I wanted to dig into all of

this with her palm in mine. Instead. I just squeezed her hand, and we slowly walked out

of that cave and back to the van. Instead of letting her in on everything on my mind, we

drove through the winding pines until we found Crater Lake. Instead of handing over

apologies, I handed her a coloring book and crayons.

I don’t know how long we sat there - me perched atop a rock, her belly-down on the sheepskin rug, feet kicked up, head facing out the sliding door. Maybe it as one hour, maybe two. As I looked out into those rippling waters, I thought about what I could say that would explain the parts I didn’t want to talk about. How I felt like I was seeing myself for the time in a long time and was ashamed at the swept over parts. That just as I

averted from my own mother’s apron-wearing, kitchen-crying, husband-pleasing ways,

Mira would likely look at my frayed, not quite put together parts, my always wandering

tendencies and avoid doing just the same. She’d go on running from becoming her

mother just as I had. Right then a mother duck and her ducklings swam in front of us. I

wondered if there was any woman out there who hadn’t walked this same road, wondered

why we’re all so hell bent on not repeating the life we grew up from. 153

But it's hard - finding a way to bring up the things you never quite knew how to

unearth, nonetheless change. The patterns you’ve lived with so long you’ve come to

believe they aren’t behaviors, but part of who you are - parts you may not be able to

extract. That maybe you can’t just sliver off those parts. And if you can’t dig them up, if

you don’t know how to tame the parts that want to scream every time you’re squeezing

into a life that suffocates, then how do you tell your ten-year-old daughter you’ll do better

when you’re not really sure what better what better looks like? How do you say you’ll

never be able to give her that house in a suburbia with the big backyard and picket fence because you’d know you’d feel something chewing from the inside the whole time. You know you couldn’t settle there alongside the talkative moms with their gossip shows and

strollers and try to make small talk about a life you never wanted to live. I know there are things I’m unwilling to do, things a mother should be willing to sacrifice. Things your

daughter would probably enjoy, things she deserves. How do you give someone else what they need, without stripping the essence of yourself? How do you be a good mother, when you knew damn well as she grew in your belly you hadn’t mended all the parts

she’d need to feel whole? How do you step up to lead another’s life, when you’re still

trying to figure out how to lead your own?

After that trip, I bought her a camera from a thrift story outside of Ashland. We

stopped along the road and I taught her how to bring in more light when the frame grew 154

dark, how to shadow out the bleached out parts. She snapped that shutter over and over.

And when we got back to San Francisco, I parked the van. Not for long, but long enough

to help her get settled for the school year. Enough to make her feel like Lorraine’s living

room was her own home again. Enough to make us feel like when the three of us were

together, under this little roof, we could be a normal family just like anyone else. We

went to the fabric store and let her pick out the colors we’d later make a curtain out of.

She pressed little glow in the dark stars to them, little decorations that made the

removable space feel more permanent. When she started school, I got a job teaching art

classes over at Synergy Elementary in the Haight. I stayed there for just over a year even though those 365 days felt like half a decade. Mira started to thrive that year. She started

carrying that camera everywhere, coming home and taking photos as Lorraine stirred

soup over the stove, or while I trimmed roses in the greenhouse. She was happy. The

happiest I’d seen her in years. But even though I loved seeing her like that, I could feel

that familiar tug in my gut, getting restless, nerves tightening. Felt myself snapping at her

and Lorraine a little faster than I used to. After awhile the tension starts to build in you,

finds ways to turn the chest in a maze of trapped doors where coiled wants wind

themselves until they slink into other places, turning the chest into a space so tight it

needs to crack just to remember how to breathe. 155

When summer came and school ended, Mira got her first job at the rec center

assisting the photography teacher with his community class. Lorraine would look at me

over dinner with these knowing eyes, always a keen observer. One morning when we

were all out in the greenhouse transplanting succulents, Mira went out in the garden.

Lorraine gently fingered the roots of the plant, unwinding the root tendrils that had

wound themselves over and over, outgrowing its pot. As the strings came loose, she

looked at me said, you know, if you need to get away fo r a bit, we ’re okay here. I'll take

care o f her. Her eyes hung with the tenderness I loved her for, why no matter how many

times I felt lost I knew Lorraine would always be there. Sometimes I think I took

advantage of that. When I came back from my two months on the road that summer, Mira had started to grow into a young woman. Not in body, but in mind. She liked having a job

to go to, having money of her own, having a passion she could cultivate. She held that

camera like a child, carefully swaddling it with a silk cloth before wedding it to its case.

It was then I started to see her grow into the careful, methodical, hardworking child she’d

come to be. 156

Chapter 17

Day 6: Zion National Park, Utah

Zion has a way of swallowing you the moment you enter it. Its slick rock walls dwarf all that stands beneath it. Even the caves carved out in the sides of cliffs are grand enough to imagine pterodactyls living within them. Mira’s jaw stays slack as she drives through the valley, neck craning against the window trying to size up a scale she’s never quite seen before. Cliffs so high she can’t quite imagine anyone climbing them and then she sees that one lone rock climber nearly invisible alongside the darkening slabs of granite and limestone. Driving past the entry gate, she can already tell it’s one of those places she could spend day after day awing up at its size and never quite grow tired of it.

Stone walls climb so tall they triple the size of any San Francisco skyscraper. You can see history stacked atop each other from any angle you look. The green shrubs dotted across the valley floor, pink earth blanketing their roots, sediment that’s been here for centuries. As the eye climbs, the color fades, a gradient grows from a rich brown to gray to white, bleached by the sun at the tip. But while Mira tends to gaze up towards the peaks, the source sits at the center - the year-round Virgin river. This long strip of life marks the reason she came, to walk the Narrows - a six-mile round trip experience deemed a must among outdoor photographers. Smooth, iridescent water channels 157

between salmon-hued walls as though the river was the tongue leading hikers further and further into its belly.

Later that day, Mira walks along the river trail and reads the signs along the trail, lines reminding that the Virgin has been here more than 250 million years. As she walks down the dirt trail she watches the children splash at its edges, thinking about the hundreds of thousands of feet who’ve walked through their waters, bare toes grazing slick rock far before boots covered them. The Native Americans who first dwelled in this land, the Mormons who later came looking for a home from religious persecution, the millions of tourists who have found their way here since.

She sees a man take off his boots and walk into the river. His shoulders hike to his neck, mouth forming circles, immediately regretting his decision as ragged rocks poke and prod his tender skin. Mira sticks one pole in the river, the other follows. Her shins push through the current, feeling the resistance pull her back ever so slightly.

“This time of year the river is low enough to walk through, but high enough to give you trouble. Some parts get waist deep, so pay attention,” a silver-haired woman in a canvas hat hollers to a group of tourists behind her. She goes on about how these slots were bom - how centuries of crashing flash floods careened through the canyon’s center, pushing all that wasn’t strong enough to hold into its gushing current. The woman 158

cautions a teenager who splashes through the water, counseling him on how to properly cross the river, how to keep from drifting away. She talks about the consequences of the flash floods, how the Virgin gradually split open Zion’s belly, winding her way through, becoming the heart for all who’ve called it home. She moves onto the Mormons who fled their surrounding lands and gave the country the English name it’s known as today.

Looking up, Mira can see the reason they were drawn to Zion’s gaping mouth, offering safe harbor while reminding them of their minuscule size in the grand scheme of things.

Mira drags her feet along the bottom of the river, feeling each pole ground her to its movable center. She drags to avoid falling into unexpected ditches, something she overheard the park ranger say while checking to see if the forecast showed any signs of flash floods. Walking upstream, she can feel the knee-twisting current jut from each side, its steady push stirring up the unsettled. The river, accustomed to sweeping up loose rubble and unstable roots, accentuates a person’s weak spots, sweeps up the parts that have yet to be grounded. She thinks about this as she walks along the river, moving from ankle to shin-deep waters.

Shelby’s words drip back down into her mind, you've got to question your life to make sure it’s still your own. A daffodil-like wildflower springs from the canyon wall.

She touches its soft edges and thinks about how the travelers who found themselves here, the people who come to see, feel, unearth something inside themselves. There’s a thread 159

between them all, between this part of the country really. The way sparse rivers lead the

way like a tendril drawing the body towards something you can’t yet see, but know is out

there.

Rounding the bend of the river, the view becomes more photogenic, stretching the

eye down snake-like curves, expanding the route’s possibilities. Along the river comes

side channels, thin, shadowed slits where shallow streams converge. Lush ferns spring

from the shadowed stone cracks. She looks down one as she stays shin-deep pushing through the steady stream. Mira pulls her camera to cheek and snaps a shot of the canyon walls bookending the pearl-blue river, strips of black and orange streaking up and down the canyon’s sides. After the camera clicks, she holds her gaze there, shuttering her eyes

slowly, methodically, ingraining this image her mind. Closing her eyes for just a second,

she imagines this canyon from a bird’s eye view, the way the river has forged a trail for others to pass through. She tries to imagine the road map for her own life, where her own river would start and end. She wonders what part she’s walking on now and what’s

coming up around the bend. Wonders if you have to know where you’re going, what you

want to make if come to fruition, or if following things that make you feel alive, like

Shelby or Janice had, is enough to get you from the right point A to point B. She looks

out down the channels longingly as though the darkness between slots hold the answers. 160

As she continues down the river, she mulls this over. She imagines the

possibilities. The Katie’s who’ve landed stables photography jobs, the Gigi’s who wander

incessantly with a rarely read road map, the Lorraine’s who stumbled upon descent’s

luck, affording the balance of between the two. There’s the college friends who have

opened studios in middle America, or ones seen on Facebook, getting married, pregnant

bellies turning into families of one, two, three. She wonders if each of them wanted it or

fell into it, wonders what she’s willingly steering versus falling into herself.

After a mile in, she can already feel muscles form around her kneecap, her body

growing accustomed to the cold. It makes her think of the first time she walked a river

with her mother up in near Yuba City. Mira was nearly 18. They were up in Yuba River,

flying fishing, talking through what route Mira could take post-high school.

“Well, imagine yourself in one year form now. Where are you? What do you want to be doing?” Mira remembers how simple the question sounded, but how the thick the

fog was that followed. All she knew was she had a camera in her hand, was out

somewhere she’d never seen before, capturing a view of new spaces. But soon after that

flash of an image came, the rest of the life’s logic soon followed, the degree, the a place

of her own, the job needed to pay for the two. 161

She imagines herself one year out, just past 30, far from the windowless storage closet, from the steady job she can’t quite imagine going back to. She thinks about the

Global Traveler grant, imagines all of the places she could travel to with the money under her belt, taking her much farther than wheel-bound stateside, but other continents, places where she doesn’t know the language, but finds new ways to build connections with kind eyes and warm smiles.

Mira’s feet suddenly drop a foot, the water instantly rising from knee to waist, chilling her spine. Jutting her poles into the water she finds rocks to ground herself on and hoist herself back to higher ground. She looks at her damp waist and realizes here lies the trouble with always looking ahead, the trouble with always being two feet in front of where you’re at. Life slips out from under you, the only moment had gone.

She focuses back on the river. Two miles of moments happen.

“Up past this bend is the first spot where you’ll see the gorge split into those picaresque channels you’ve probably seen in Global Traveler. You’ll definitely want to get your camera out for this one.”

Mira trails the group, sliding one foot after the other. As the turns veers right, she feels a pang glow from the side of her temple. Its throb swiftly turns from dull to drilling. 162

Eyes squinting tight, belly double-over, she remembers the hands on bricks of Market

Street, remembers her mother with shaded glasses, remembers the doctor’s office the yellow nerve rooting into the brain.

“Not now,” she whispers to herself. “Damn it, not here.” White splotches zoom in and out of her view. She trudges to the side of the canyon and presses her hand against the smooth, grip-less wall. The cold river rushes along her ankles. She tries to rewind her route, remembering the first gorge was about three miles in, meaning turning back now means a three mile return. It’d take her two hours at least. Her heart hastens. Her arms prickle with goose bumps, feeling the river’s chill take over.

The white splotches slow and stretch, expanding as they zoom towards her like strobe lights pulsing against the pink rock wall. She breathes in and out, trying to calm the pulse that feels like its drumming outside of her chest. She closes her eyes, partially hoping if they rest, she can control this moment, her body.

With eyes closed, the river doesn’t sounds like it looks, it’s not smooth and calming, but aggravating, like roaring static sifting through a miner’s pan, plops caught on rocks. She presses her feet into the bank’s sand, reminding herself she is here, she is grounded, she is safe. But the river turned static keeps growing as does her imagination, wondering if the ranger was wrong about the weather forecast, if she’ll get caught in the 163

channels three miles in as a sudden flash flood swells the Virgin, sweeping up every human in it. Her heart hammers against the inside of her skin. She hears feet plunk one after the other to her right, heavy legs sloshing through the current.

She opens her eyes. Her brows wrinkle, half-expecting a sheet of darkness, but instead it’s just the white splotches slowing their rhythm, growing fainter with each second.

“Hey there- you okay?”

“I, uh, yeah. I just need a minute.” Mira avoids the woman’s eyes, cheeks flushed.

“You get a cramp?”

“No, it’s not that.” Mira moves her hand from the wall, shifting her pole back into her palm. She looks up to the woman, surprised to see she’s not much older than herself.

Her thick black curls bloom from beneath her baseball cap.

“Can you walk? You want to try going up ahead a bit. I see a log you can rest on.”

Mira looks up, the strobe lights slowing, descending into comers, retracting like curtains.

“Yeah, okay.” 164

They move slowly, the current feeling stronger here, water slowly rising from knee to thigh level.

“You okay to lead the way? I’m right behind you, just in case you-” her voice stops there. Mira finishes the sentence in her mind, imagining her hunched body rocking down in the water, being pulled downstream.

Mira collapses onto the log. The white streaks nearly gone. She looks up to the towering cliffs, breathing deep, softening into the clear sight of it all. The woman rustles through her backpack and pulls out a granola bar.

“You should eat this. My cousin had low blood sugar. She gets a little woozy when she doesn’t eat enough.”

“Thanks.” Mira’s eyes meet hers and smiles.

“I'm Chloe by the way.” She pulls out another bar for herself and takes a bite.

“Thanks for stopping, Chloe.” She rubs her forehead. “I’m Mira.”

“So, what’s going on? You diabetic or something?” Her word garbles against granola.

“No, nothing like that. Not really sure actually. Just been having these weird moments lately. Headaches, trouble seeing clearly. It’s hard to explain. I don’t really 165

know what’s going on. I thought it was happening again. That’s why I stopped over there.”

“Again? How often does this happen?”

“It’s happened twice before.”

“And you’re out here alone because?”

“The same reason you probably are I guess. Needed to see things, didn’t have anyone I wanted to travel with.”

“I hear that.” Chloe takes a swig of water. The river slicks by, rippling against smooth rocks around them.

Mira plops the last bite of the bar in her mouth. Its dry, chocolaty texture fumbles down her throat.

“What brought you out here? Besides the obvious.” Mira nods up to the mammoth canyon.

“Well, in a bit of life transition I guess. To be honest, I was feeling like I needed to prove to myself I could do something like this alone. You know, a big trip, extended time alone. And not fuck up or bow out along the way.” Chloe pulls off her cap and strings her fingers through her curls. “I’m a pretty social person, you know. I’ve always 166

liked being around people. Always lived with someone. And up until recently have pretty much always had a boyfriend or girlfriend in one way or another. Never have taken a vacation alone, and until last week I hadn’t even gone to dinner alone. I mean really sit there, you know, at a table with a waiter, not staring at my phone waiting for my take out to come, but actually sit through the whole process the ordering, the waiting, the eating, seeing other people having a good time around me and still just sit there with myself.

When I broke up with my boyfriend a couple months back I realized that. And I guess I just wanted to know I could do it. You know, be alone for a good chunk of time, surrounded by beauty and not feel like I need to fill myself with anyone else.” She takes another sip of her water. “Let me tell you it hasn’t been easy. But it feels necessary, I guess.” Chloe leans her elbows over her knees, swinging the water bottle back and forth.

“What about you? Why Zion?”

Mira looks down the river. “Well, I’m doing a bit of a Southwest tour up to the

North. Photos of the red rock drew me here. The Southwest’s landscape is unlike anything I’ve ever seen before. And Zion, it’s just so colossal. So other-worldly. You can just get lost in it. I wanted to try to photograph that. Find a place so grand you know no image will do it justice.” 167

“I like it. You’ve got your work cut out for you here.” They both look up at the

grand canyon above them.

The two went on like this for nearly hour, talking about the moments they’d had

on the road so far, their favorite places seen, Antelope Canyon for Mira, Yosemite and

White Sands for Chloe. Before long they talk about the uncomfortable instances had as a

solo woman on the road, surprisingly less frequent than they both imagined. Amidst that

Mira noticed she had stopped talking about where she’d been and more about where she’s

at, where she’s at in life. The more they talked, the more Mira felt herself relax. The

strobe lights now completely gone, a softness spreads throughout her body.

They finish the hike together, walking through the channels of the river, capturing photos of one another here and there. They talk about the many rivers life can flow to and

from, how it’s pointless to resist the current you’re drawn to. In between the chatter,

Chloe lightens the mood, her laugh bounces off the canyon’s walls. Mira can feel her

buoyancy, that lightness that makes it so easy for others to be around her, a feeling that

makes you want to stay. Later that evening, they stop by a bar to share a drink, their

thighs stiff and heavy, calves hardened like rocks. As they near the last quarter of their

glasses, a silence hangs between the two. Chloe taps and scrolls on her phone. A slow

grin creeps soon creeps across her face. 168

“Hey, what are you doing tomorrow?” Chloe’s eyes grow wide.

“Nothing planned really. Why?”

“I just had one hell of an idea.” 169

Chapter 18

Day 7: Orderville, Utah

The women in Mira’s family have a thing for the sky. As Mira looks up to the spotty clusters of white clouds, she can’t remember how many times she found her mother looking up the same way — in the backyard, on the roof the van, the foot of the ocean looking up, entranced in the up there, out there, as though she wanted to lie amidst the blue mass light years away from the confines of the life that surrounded her. That’s the lovable and hate-able thing about Gigi. She could be sitting beside you and flying far above you all in the same moment. She was always like that, reaching. Her imagination, possibilities seven steps beyond the moment. And that kind of stretch can be both contagious and repellant, depending on where you’re at in life.

Back then, Mira loved how big her mother felt, how Gigi could see the grandest visions in the smallest moments. Gigi would be looking out at a backyard that hadn’t been tended to in years. Overgrown fox ears growing every which way. Dried up, nearly dead clumps of shriveled grass and she’d catch a glimpse of the blooming blackberry bramble the rest had overlooked. She’d see the finch perched atop the leaning fence post most wouldn’t have noticed. She’d always find some beautiful in nature’s scenes, always managed to spot something with wings. 170

You could see her flying, her mind, imagination fluttering with the butterflies

drifting through the garden, trailing the pelicans that soared in v’s over the ocean. She’d

always point out the lone ones, the ones who could see the flock, but intentionally

wandered away from it. The ones who somehow learned not to mind braving the wind

head on, no one else to soften its blow. The lone bird constantly made its way into the

comers of her paintings. A subtle, not so subtle motif of her life.

That’s where Mira’s fascination with the sky started, when she realized she could carry it with you, just look up and find it wherever she is, in the smallest alley or the widest mountain range and it’d be there, steady, full of breath and possibility.

Mira had thought about skydiving a few times. She’d seen friends post photos leaping out of planes, smiles flapped open by fierce winds, but wasn’t sure. Her mind always darted to the off chance that she’d be the one in the newspaper headlines, the one whose parachute snagged a powerline, or the 1 out of 1000 tandems whose instructor packed the chute just a touch too tight. Sometimes we make excuses to stay small, to feel protected.

So, when Chloe called, her stomach both fluttered and wanted leap out of itself at the

same time. 171

“I’m not ready,” Mira yells, the wind whipping her face, thrusting her neck back.

She can feel her back push into his chest. The smell of his dried sweat rubbing against

her.

“Can’t hear you,” the man yells back. He swipes his long hair from his face. He

checks the gauge on his wrist and inches his feet forward. She feels her stomach dropping

out of her, everything just spilling out from the edge of the plane, splattering over her

shoes gripping the doorway frame, splitting apart like atoms scattering as they plummet

30,000 feet from sky to ground.

“I’m NOT ready!” The wind sweeps her voice into the clouds. The man inches both of them forward towards the edge of the plane, the gaping horizon nearing.

“No turning back now, Mira!” Chloe yells from the back of the plane, face lit.

Mira looks down desert blanketed beneath her. The ragged mountain and canyons look

like nothing more than thumb prints in the earth from way up here. Mira leans forward

feeling her fingers tightly gripping the plane’s cool metal, legs shaking uncontrollably.

She pushes back into the mans chest, stepping further inside the plane.

They say the longer you think about something, the less likely you are to do. The

longer the mind has to circle the possibilities of things can go wrong, the less it’s likely to 172

find the small, very possible window of what can go right. In the split second a thousand things can cross through the mind. From up here, everything spins, flashes so fast the mind gets caught in the body’s tremble, knowing it’s time to jump but imagining everything that could fail from here - the parachute that doesn’t deploy, the vomit mid­ air, the probability of being the fatality in the local newspaper.

“Mira, don’t think. Just jump! It’s all about trust,” Chloe hollers over the plane’s rumble. Mira can feel her body stiffen, the awkwardness of being sandwiched alongside a stranger. She tries to imagine what it’d be like to stay up here, just ride down after watching Chloe leap into the air.

“Come on now,” the instructor says to her ear. “You came all this way. Trust me, it’s worth it.”

Mira inhales sharply and nods over and over unable to let words out.

“That a girl!” Chloe yells from behind.

Their bodies hang over the edge of the plane’s open door - the mere force of the wind feels like it’s sucking her core straight out of her.

“Arms up!” the man yells. “We jump on three. One, two-“ 173

Their bodies jut out into the open space, piercing through the sky, gutting any ounce of tension from her chest. The wind flaps her cheeks. Cold air chills the comers of her head. Everything strips out of her. Every thought, every fear, everything completely vanished as she free falls towards the earth. Her cheeks spread into a smile so wide she can feel the wind flapping them back and forth. Her eyes squint behind the plastic goggles. Weightless, she laughs and laughs deep and wide, the sound of her voice almost inaudible to herself. The man spins their bodies to the right and together they whirl through the sky. Mira’s stomach flips back and forth caught in the rush. As they steady out, she sees his wrist emerge in her peripherals. He points the gauge on her wrist. She remembers going over this during the five minute pre-jump lesson, remembers this is supposed to mean something, but now it’s just a small detail lost in the rushing fall.

“Pull!” he yells. She hears the words but hardly registers them, overwhelmed by the wind pummeling from all ends.

Within seconds, their bodies whip back, the harness tightens around her groin.

They catapult into the sky. The desert zooms out from beneath, the view slowing. Her laughs rises into an uncontrollable thunder, her belly convulsing over and over as the utter awe of the scene enwraps her inch by inch. 174

Mira grabs the parachute’s handles. They steer smoothly to the right, opening a view of a Zion’s mouth, dark and deep with miles and miles of red rock mounds stretching from all sides.

“I’m flying,” she says to herself. “I’m really flying,” murmuring over and over, forgetting about the man strapped to her back. They wind slowly right to left over the earth, drifting slowly down the flat strip of land, colored flags looking like mere ants smashed to sand. She feels it right then, that new level of lightness, that realization that nothing really matters outside of the ones, and things we love. That in any instance it could all rush out from under us and all we’re left with is how viscerally, how deeply we felt, how fearlessly we jumped, how fully we lived. 175

Chapter 19

Day 8: Bryce Canyon, Utah

At high noon, every tourist was hiking up as she was going down. Choppy breathes heave against her ribs, trying to scoop extra inhales. She knew the sun would set well past eight and she had enough water and food to last in the desert for the day. Descending into

Bryce Canyon, Mira winds down its snake-like trail cooled by the red rock shadows.

Gazing into its beauty, she realizes why Gigi always wanted to head back to Southwest year after year. To California eyes, the scene of inverted clay icicles jolts you, humbles you, reminds you how small you stand amidst jurassic boulders who’ve been carved into subtle figureheads by centuries of sweeping wind and cracking ice turned water.

Embarking on the first mile of seven, she walks alone. Feet one in front of the other teeter on a skinny ledge, crumbling rock dusting down the side. For as far as eyes can stretch no one’s around. Her legs quiver, uprooting any balance found in her fearful stems. She tries not to think about it-the possibility of inopportune timing, the reality that while pangs from temple preceded darkness, there was always room for outliers. Arms outstretched like birds, she toes forward, balancing on the slivered path like a tightrope.

When she reaches the end, the tightness in her chest exhales through a smile. A smile that inconsequentially meets him. Him standing there, hair twists creeping out through a faded 176

baseball cap, headphones in, back leaning on the other side of a red rock tunnel she’d just

ducked herself under and through.

Smile still smacked across her face, her cheeks redden realizing someone is

witnessing a glimpse of her unguarded bliss. She nods and passes, skirting around the

man’s brown boots that are just a touch darker than his arms resting atop his knees. His

eyes widen, glowing up like full moons. She feels it immediately - a gaze that can so easily enwrap a person, hold you still for a second, leave you feeling so spot-lit, so seen, you feel like your hands touched before he even says hello. His lips creak open to crescent smile.

“Not much of a trail there, huh?” He says, voice deep and smooth like slick rock. His feet slide just a touch, slipping a rock down the ledge. It rattles down the sandy cliff ramming up against a patch of fire red wildflowers. Both their eyes trail its fall, sweeping out to the rising canyon in the distance.

“Didn’t realize anyone else was out here. Looks like that ledge does a pretty good job at scaring people off,” Mira says. She feels her stomach twinge, winged nerves like glass-bound butterflies with nowhere to go. Mira leans closer to the hardened sandstone behind her, palming a groove. Her eyes dart from him to the rising rock walls above her,

countless fallen rocks dotting the terrain. 177

“Not you though,” His brows rise slightly. The little wings settle in her stomach. She

bares a tight-lipped grin, eyes revealing more warmth than her words. She tries to

remember the last time she kissed a man as she glanced as his full lips, last time she let

herself unfold long enough to be touched without worrying what or where it’d go. Never

one for relationships, her too busy self was always too fixed on filling glimmers of free time with her love of photography versus cultivating love few else. Men drifted in, like

leaves blowing down in fall’s wind, but there’s something to be said for the body’s

openness, the way it walks through the world, energy unguarded. People respond to it,

see the glance that locks just a touch longer than normal, which wasn’t the kind Mira usually gave. Her eyes were always fixed to sky or glued to the trees. And while an impromptu meet cue would happen on one of the rare nights Kat dragged her to a bar, it was never enough to hold. Not that she truly wanted it to, knowing full well committing to something inevitably requires time and attention she was never quite ready to give. But

something happens when you travel - a reclaimed openness to sights and unforeseen

slices of life. And while she wasn’t looking for anything, she found herself studying people a little longer, observing the European tourists tongues slapping in Slavic tones as they pointed their long camera lens towards the sunsetting canyon. She watched little

kids’ feet drag as they complained to parents, snapping a photo of a toddler tugging her

mother’s arm with the white-tipped hoodoos hung ahead. She woke up early just to walk

along the campsites in the morning light when families had not yet risen from their RVs 178

and tents, when sounds were limited to birds chirping and a sleeping bag unzipping only to realize it was still too cold to rise and zipped back up again. She’d make her way to the days’ trail, capturing the amber glow over a section of the canyon she’d already visited, but felt fresh under different light. So, when she found herself in Bryce for few days, she had already felt her chest slowly peel open, curious and almost eager to talk with a friendly face. So, here feet tight-roping across the spine of red rock, she saw something in him.

Pulling her camera from her hip, she snapped a few photos of the jutting boulder that almost looked like a fist. Like a self-soothing reflex, the camera gave her something to do, something to lean on in moments when she wasn’t sure what to do with herself. The man leans against the red rock, arms over on knees, feet a safe, seven-feet away from the edge. A pocket-sized notebook sits in one hand, a pen in the other. Out of the comer of her eye, she notices he stopped writing as her lens shuttered.

“How long you been in Bryce?” she asks, still looking out in the distance.

“Just got in yesterday. Came over from Moab. Hell of a beauty that place, isn’t it?”

His eyes drifts away from the scene, honing onto her. “What about you?” 179

“I got in on Tuesday-thinking about heading out tomorrow. Surprising how when you spend enough time admiring this place, it feels like you’ve seen it all in just a few days.

I’m actually headed to Moab next. Any recommendations?”

“Well, the arches of course. Oh, and there’s some pretty cool dinosaur tracks off the mile 17 marker. Oh, and Canyonlands. Definitely check that out. You traveling with anyone?”

“Just me. Needed some time to myself.”

“Solo supertramp, huh? I like it.”

Mira looks away, cheeks glowing into rosebuds.

“This is actually my first solo adventure myself,” he said. “Been planning it for years.

I’m traveling the through America’s least wondered wonders. Just saw the world's biggest frying pan, the castle of junk, sipped America’s best split pea soup. Guarantee I wouldn’t find anyone as interested in spending time doing that if I wasn’t alone.” He laughs to himself, his throat swallowing his chuckle.

She wants to ask questions, wants to know what drew him to oversized frying pans or travels through places no one cares about. She wants to sit down right beside him and feel 180

what it was like to really look into someone you’ve never met and see if all the romantic comedies she watched had it right, or just a distant version of reality she hopes to find one day. The kind of connection that would make the world feel a little less lonely, a little less fragmented. But all that slipped out was,

“World’s biggest frying pan?”

“Yeah. People always react that way. It’s a writing project, really. Been writing about this girl recently. In my mind we’d go to those places, spend our honeymoon eating funnel cakes and exploring roadside destinations. Things didn’t work out though.” He fidgets with the notebook as he spoke, curling its edges. She can almost feel something churn in him, like a gauze slipping, revealing a still fresh wound.

“She had a man she wasn’t ready to leave and timings never really been on my side.

So, I decided to go ahead with the trip. Remake the memories, but remove her for the picture. Show myself moving on wouldn’t be that bad if I had new sights smacking against the windshield every day. So far, so good. Two weeks in today.”

A softened smile creases on her face, admiring the way he could come undone to a stranger so quickly, how he could trail a road map intended for two and fill in the gaps with himself. 181

“Seems like a good time to start writing something new.” Her eyes linger over the notebook. “Well, I’ll let you get back to your writing. Thanks for the tips. Enjoy your trip.” Her voice trails off as she puts the cap on her lens, feet scuffing through the sand.

She walks on, hand nervously pinching the side of her thigh, telling herself she’d have to get better at this, sooner or later. She’d have to let her guard down long enough to sit in the discomfort of meeting a new man for more than a moment.

“Hey, I didn’t catch your name,” he hollers from behind.

“Mira,” she yells back, her eyes crinkling at the comers.

He smiles and nods. “Xavier.” He hoists his pack on his back and walks closer. “You know they say it’s not healthy to eat alone. If you’re looking for some company for dinner, you should stop by camp. I’ll be grilling around sunset. I’m the white and blue

Econoline on loop A .” His eyes look kind, the kind that have this gentle glisten in them.

Her chest warms. “No pressure though.”

“I just might take you up on that.”

Before turning the bend, she glances back. His gaze doesn’t trace her as she walks away like men do in the movies, merely returns to the pen and paper hanging from his hands. She likes that. The way he has something to return to. That she could be a fleeting moment, her own whole instead of someone else’s half. 182

Sweat rivers down her cheek bones as the desert sun glares, no wind to cool as she climbs the last leg of the trail. Her shirt now soaked, her weight leaning into the hiking stick she picked up half way. She’s be hiking and sweating so long, she feels something emptying out inside her, little fears of would be dripping out from her skin. She thinks of how nice it felt to talk to someone she was attracted to. She takes a swig of her water and pours a splash on the underside of her cap, cooling her forehead. A calming wave descends through her chest, rooting her back in the moment.

Back at camp, she plops a few quarters in the shower, letting the water pound into her chest, streams of salt splash over her lips. On her way to camp, the sign for Loop A emerges to the left, her van up right. The sun nearly setting, she heads left and within a five minute walk finds the blue and white Econoline, back doors swung open. Xavier sits on the van’s carpet, book in hand as the coals warm atop his pint-size weber. A pair of children zoom pass on the bikes. Parents in puffy vests chat over beers, company bookending his quiet.

“Dinner still on the table?” she asks. His eyes dart up from the book, his twisted locks peaking out from his beanie. His wide smile immediately answers the question.

“As long as you’re not a vegetarian, it is.” 183

The sun falls, the moon climbs and they talk and talk about he being the first person

in his family to travel alone. About old girlfriends that didn’t work out. About the

magazines she hoped to land her photography in, the old cabin in a field of com he hoped

to write his poems in. About how she was missing the ocean and how he hated the way

salt water felt along his skin. They swapped truths back and forth, the depth of which

increased by the second.

“I want to move back to the South, recluse in a cabin far from the nearest town and only re-emerge to give the world some writing to gnaw on for awhile. Other than that it’s me, my family, and my acres of com out in the sticks.”

“I want space. I want more nature. Every morning, every night. 1 want to wake up to it, I want to run along it. I want the day free to photograph. I want to have my mornings to myself and the afternoons for doing something that feels worthwhile. I want to find a life that mellows this pull I’m constantly feeling in my gut. 1 want to feel like less of a fragmented person trying to make enough to pay off loans or make rent, or live a life that only half-heartedly feels like mine. I want to look back at my life and have no questions that it was my own. Sometimes I just want to drive far, far away from everything I know.

Wipe my memory clean, so I could start fresh without any guilt of what I’m leaving behind. Just park myself in a new country, a new language, a different life where there’s nothing and no one to worry about but myself.” 184

Their conversation pauses there. His eyes hang close to her as Mira’s drifts far out the side window up into the open sky. She tries to root herself back in the moment.

“I hate flying. To me, it epitomizes everything that’s wrong with society - everybody rushing, long lines, crammed spaces next to strangers. I hate touching strangers,” he says.

“I love flying. It’s the only time you get that far up in the clouds and have a whole, new world to look at. I also kind of like not having control for a finite period of time.

Long enough to let you unwind, but short enough to take back your day.”

“This is the first year I’ve been without a woman in life in more than six years,” he says.

“I’ve never been with someone for more than six months.”

Their confessions go on like this, back and forth, back and forth, expanding intimacy well beyond skin to skin. She thinks about the series of men she’s lay beside in the last few years, men that usually wouldn’t last more than a few weeks, let alone a month.

Letting a man come close was one thing, letting a man stay and dig in was another. She had liked plenty of guys, but none enough to let fully in, having grown used to seeing people she love come and go at their own leisure both physically and emotionally. Her 185

mother never understood why she never had a boyfriend, why no one stayed long enough to meet her. Whenever Gigi would have one too many glasses of wine, she'd gush on and on how any man would be lucky to have Mira. And as much as Mira tried to change the subject, they’d circle back again and again, her chest tightening while trying to find a way to avoid saying she didn’t trust anyone enough to believe they’d stay past the honeymoon stage. That sometimes, out of nowhere, a man’s musty smell would bring her back to that day at Donner Lake, a memory she had tried to tuck down again and again, tried to forget the way Jim, one of Lorraine’s boyfriends, had brought them to his cabin, the way he motioned her twelve-year-old self toward him when Lorraine was down at the dock, waiting for the sodas Mira had run up to get. If she let herself go there, she could still see their fishing lines cock and fly into the lake, plunking as he grabbed her little wrist and asked again if she loved him. She’d see the face of a little girl still fixed in the relentless habit of not wanting to disappoint. She’d see her younger self nod to the question even though she knew she didn’t love him, barely knew him beyond the handful of weekends she spent there. But soon after he wrapped his grown palm around her tiny skull and forced his lips on hers, digging his slimy tongue in her mouth, keeping her there for what felt like hours as his hands gripped her body.

She never told Gigi, and could hardly imagine telling the man in front of her, how it wasn’t until college she learned this was wrong. As she sat in a classroom discussing 186

sexual assault, the teacher listed the many ways someone can be violated. And as her classmates bravely spoke up admitting to instances of rape, she simultaneously realized

Jim had assaulted her, yet amidst hearing how bad it could’ve been, it felt like she should be viewing it as nothing more than a mere slap on the wrist. That the women around her had experienced far worse. That in comparison she should be able to move on if others around her had. It was the comparison that contorted her. The ‘it could’ve been worse, why aren’t you over it’ self-beratings. But despite her best attempts to forget it, the memory began throwing itself into her mind’s projector during college, replaying the moth ball-cabin smell, the sharp niches of his overgrown stubble. The scene stayed there pressing palms between her body and the man who laid next to her, making it nearly impossible to make out with a man, let alone have sex without catching a whiff of the same sweaty musk Lorraine’s old boyfriend bared. The kind ones who truly liked her wanted more than sex. They wanted to know her, hear about her past, why she didn’t like to spend the night, unearth the dark parts that kept her at an alluring distance. The mere thought of disclosing her skeletons made her want to throw up in her mouth. So, she let men drift away and stay away. It was easier that way. Easier than trying to explain things she didn’t quite understand herself. But here, knowing Xavier was temporary, a loving flashing dash, she let herself sink into him, knowing he wouldn’t be around long enough to peel back layers of her past. 187

So, as she lay there, staring into his eyes, Mira felt a lightness shine through her chest

- one she had never felt, one she simply didn’t know was possible. For the first time she was there, truly there - without interjection.

Their bellies full, they lie on the floor of his van, the desert heat descending into a steep chill. Xavier closes the rear doors and their talks continues on beneath a string of lights illuminating the little trinkets he’d adorned the walls with - clusters of polaroids he’s taken of the giant frying pan, an oversized horse statue, an ice-skate the size of a house, a green T-Rex roaring alongside a gas station, a giant pistachio split open its green insides the length ten times the length of his body standing beside it.

“When this trip stops, when I’ve seen all the places I’ve written about, then the conversation is over. It’s back to real life.” He holds his breath a bit. “What if I still miss her?”

“What if visiting all these places is just forcing you to miss her?”

“Have you ever been in love?” he asks.

She thinks about all the men who longed to know her more, the ones she never let herself get too close to. “I think there’s many versions of love out there, but I’ve never felt one that didn’t splintered off sooner than later. I think if she’s the one meant for you she would’ve stayed, and if she still is maybe she’ll circle back.” 188

He hangs silent.

“What’s got you afraid?” he asks. His cheek turns against the carpet, facing her. She can feel his gaze grow heavy.

“Time. How it feels like it’s crunching down. That life may have things in store that changes my perception of it. That I’ve wasted a good chunk of my life thinking I was living, when it never really felt like much of a life, just checking off to-dos from an indistinct life. I’m worried I won’t see things, feel things I want to feel. Worried I won’t put myself in the position to feel them, that is.” He grabs her hand and squeezes. The little pulse sends lightening rods up her limbs.

Her stomach twists, mind still deciding what she wants to do with that this intimacy, how much she is willing to give to man she knows will drift down the opposite end of the highway. So, she just lets his hand press hers and they continues on, talking about the places he came from, the same ones she was going, swapping stories well aware their vans would depart sooner than later.

After a few beers, he touches her once pale now flushed cheeks. He pulls a wool blanket over her feet, leaving just several inches between their bodies. She studies his face, the way beauty marks and a few stray curled hairs dot his brown skin. She studies his eyes, the way his dark moons hold valley-wide depth, the way they don’t hesitate in 189

expanding as he looks into her, cradling her with his gaze. She feels a subtle pulse

between her thighs, the kind she’d grown accustomed to stifling when a man’s look

didn’t align with the words that came from his mouth. But she can tell Xavier’s different.

Different for the reasons he traveled, merely by the fact that he’d stretched himself across

America not to see all the sights flocked to by tourists, but the lesser noticed and for most rarely remembered beyond still in car passing photo. Different in the way he talked, how he could quote lines from Yates and Hughes, but never make you feel small when you didn’t catch a reference, how he’d throw in quick wit jokes before silence could settle in.

How as the hours passed and the pauses came and stayed, she felt warm within them, felt

like they were saying so much, shoulder nearly touching, but hovering that intentional inch gap, waiting for the other to cross over.

As she cracks open the third can, he changes the song on his stereo. The slow pulse of the acoustic guitar creeps through the speakers - “Downtown” by Magical Clouds,” a

song she’s listened to over and over when she let herself sink into the worry of eyes

going dark, of life slipping, slipping, slipping until she remembers she has a choice in her

life, a choice in how it all pans out. She’s listened to it every morning for a month straight

before leaving San Francisco, and even so it’s still on her driving playlist.

“I love this song,” she says so soft it could’ve been mistaken for a murmur. 190

“Just stumbled upon it today.” They both smile as though a single song could be the

only confirmation needed to ease into the night’s unknown. She leans in and felt their

elbows graze. It was slightest touch, the skin where just the tip of the fabric presses

against the other, but enough to let the warmth of the body pass across boundary lines.

She thinks about where she was in this moment, his a van with starlights and polaroids,

alongside a traveling poet, in a place so naturally carved and beautiful she knew she’d

never be able to replace its beauty in her mind. She wonders about all the places this trip

will take her, how it could open her to new experiences bit by bit, a slow filleting opening to new elements.

Sinking into the carpet, she reaches her hand across the three foot safety space and touched his cheek. His slightly groomed facial hair feels softer than it looks. His eyes

both loosen and widen simultaneously, the way amber light shine from the sky during

golden hour, beaming across, but soothing all it touches. Their lips press, his lower lip

encasing hers. His hand graces the small of her back, her hips soon alongside his. As he

works his way from lips to her neck, she feels a lightness grab hold of her body. A

lightness she remembers like an old song, she hasn’t heard in years. The way life could

tingle through you, crack you open, remind you of its tender, bold vibrations in just a

sweeping second. Their bodies swap stories for nearly an hour, filling each other’s cold

pockets with unsure nerves and exhaled warmth. 191

She shivers when his finger traces the belly of her jacket.

“It’s been awhile,” she says. “I need it slow.” He sighs heavy, gripping her ribs as she kisses his neck.

Their unsure and split-secondly awkward exchanges spark nervous giggles here and there, reminding them to soften into the frayed humans they are. He slips his hand against her side, his cold hand touching her bare skin. She unzips her jacket, feeling the desert air creep in.

It’d been over two years since any man had been inside her, and she wasn’t sure if she wanted to invite all that splitting pain back in again. The actual act of sex had hardly been something she yearned for. Her tightness always taking so long to loosen, day after day until she actually could enjoy it. She didn’t want to waste tonight on pain, so they let their bodies entwine in other ways.

At the end of it all, he falls asleep holding her back to his chest, their bodies still cloaked but the wool blanket. Mira’s eyes closed, but awake, lock the memory in her mind, of what it’s like to feel the pressing warmth of another, to feel held and needed at the same time, to acknowledge the fleeting nature of the moment, knowing they came in two separate vans and in separate vans they’d leave. Though she always liked romance movies, she always thought they left an unreasonable impression on the world, teaching 192

girls to believe in fairytales when life is really much more scuffed along the seams. But this, this beautiful night had a glimpse of that, and though she knows it wouldn’t have the fairytale ending, somehow that made her hold his arms that much more.

In the morning, when the sun creeps through the sheer curtains, the day’s plans change. While she had previously jotted today as a travel day, now it stands open. They trace the Rim Trail just past sunrise, him seeing it for the first time in morning light. Even though she already photographed the scene, she still brought her camera, capturing his wandering gaze in an unexpected photo here and there, something to remember him by when his Econoline was gone. After parting from the usual tourist spot, they found a gnarled tree to sit beneath, overlooking the steep ravine.

“Can I ask you something?” he asks.

“Of course.”

“Do you get lonely out here? Driving out there all on your own?”

“Some days. Not as much I thought though. It’s kind of nice to be alone right now. I let the camera fill the gaps my mind can’t.” As the sun rises over the canyon, they settle onto a stone bench. He propped upright, she hanging her head on his lap, both necks tilting up towards the sky. 193

“What about you?”

“I don’t know. Just thinking. Maybe it wouldn’t be so bad to converge for awhile.

There’s a house-size shoe in Utah I’d love to show you.” Their bodies rumble as they laugh. She pauses for a good awhile, not wanting to say anything too soon and later regret it. She thought of how the nights would be that much warmer, much longer. The days filled with the security that comes with another, the safety of company.

“We could do our own thing when we needed space. I know you’re out here for your own reasons.”

She wanted to say yes. She wanted to say, let’s go see the giant shoe, but she felt her center tighten from her belly up and through her chest, reminding her she didn’t come out here to get lost with a man, didn’t come out here to be his landmarks. She came here to see her own before it was too late, and figured before this could sour into something more than painful than it already would be, she’d chalk it up as a couple great days, a memory of a lifetime, and carry on. She knew with him, things would be more fun, safe, alive, but also somehow less her own.

“As great as that sounds, and as much as I’ve enjoyed your company I think I just need to do this one on my own. There’s a whole lot I want to see, and for some reason it 194

just feels right doing it alone.” She tilts her head away from his stomach and towards the gaping canyon. His sigh stretches around them.

She wonders how you know you’ve made the right decision as you’re making it, and how much time needs to go by before you figure it out. It would’ve been so easy to say yes. To let them caravan together, letting each other’s silences fill any lonely gaps. But as soon as he asked a gnawing dug into the gut, the body speaking when the mind didn’t have the right words just yet. She tries to remember the last time before this trip she heard of woman, other than her mother, heading off on a solo trip just for the sake of the adventure. Be it a character in a story, a woman in a novel - somehow they also seemed to veer towards love and the story would end there. Complete, resolved, two merging into one, but never just a single woman out to some place she’s never seen with little motivation other than having the privilege of seeing it. Just wandering down roads she wants to know.

“Fair enough.” They stare up at the blue sky in silence until he breaks the pause and kisses her forehead.

“Do you ever wonder about the lives we map out for ourselves?”

“All the time,” he says. 195

“It’s all sized scale of what we’ve grown accustomed to seeing, you know? We shape

what we are based on what we know.”

“Well, of course.”

“But what if there was no scale? Think of all the shapes your life could take on, all

the possibilities you could be.”

“What’s stopping you?” he asks.

“From what?”

“The becoming.” His eyes stare into hers unblinking.

“I don’t know. I guess when you’re in the motion of your every day life there doesn’t

really feel like an option just to up and leave it all. You get used to the rhythm. For me, just heading out here alone was a leap. I can’t really imagine anything more drastic than

that right now.”

“You reach places when you’re meant to.”

“Yeah,” she says, curling into his shoulders. “Yeah, I guess you’re right.”

“I don’t know about you, but from where I’m at life’s shaping up to be pretty good.

This right here, right now. It’s good.” 196

The following morning came on soft and slow, its warm glow rising along the driver’s side through the pines. Xavier decided to head out, as well.

“This place wouldn’t be the same without you,” he said. Mira watched his van grow smaller and smaller in the rear view mirror. A weight tugged through her gut. It took no more than five minutes for his Econoline to roll out of sight. Having the comparison of company always makes absence weigh more.

She pulls out the cassette Gigi had told her about, ‘for the lonely days, ’ she called it.

As Sunshine rolls through red rock tower and limestone cliffs, she drives and lets herself miss him, knowing that meant she gave herself something potent enough to feel; that she was no longer drifting through the world, but digging in. And if nothing else, that’s what this little big journey came down to - feeling, experiencing, reminding herself what’s it like to be painfully here, wholly present, seeing it all, alive. 197

Chapter 20

Day 9: Utah

One day doubles out here. So much time to see stretch, making Xavier feel far further than yesterday. Driving up and down Utah, you can see it all. Every changing landscape the state has to offer. Driving through it is like driving through its own country. The way it changes from flat dirt plains as far as the eye can see to Mars-like craters dipping just to rise into craggy, crooked clusters of red rock. Mira pulls over wherever she pleases, exploring places blanketed in silence only revealed by a single sign that could easily go unnoticed by those speeding down the highway.

She pulls over to one these stops scribed as the Toadstools. Before getting out, she catches a glimpse of her box of photos. A new polaroid of a Xavier sits on top of the lid.

His face sits there, thick trailing hair along his soft face. She considers hanging it, considers letting him stay a little while longer, but feels a little twinge in her gut each time as she sinks into his eyes, remembering what it was like to feel them encase her.

There are certain times for wide hearts open to entwined lines, and then there’s the times you know keeping someone dangling from the windshield will only keep them in the periphery. Like a black dot you think you see, but can’t ever quite catch straight on. She 198

puts him in the box and instead hangs of a photo of Queen’s Garden, a view from the trail they met, keeping a sliver of him tucked behind the frame instead of centered around it.

Out among the Toadstools, dried river lines lead to clay pedestals topped with boulders as though God was sitting there on her ceramic wheel, flipping the earth upside down turning flash flood mud into a ceramics class, hands pulling the land into thin strips.

She walks into the dried stream bound by white-tipped clay waves, completely surrounded by silence. Not a single soul walking about, just her in the serenity of the desert, not a building seen for miles. From up here there’s no hum from passing cars, no soaring planes, just the crunch of her feet against the land.

She continues these little detours, pausing and exploring as she pleases, no one around to tell her what to do, where to go, who to be. Out here it’s her, the earth and her camera. She presses it to her cheek, zooms the lens on an angle, catching a line of white- tipped river hoodoos, each housing little cavities for creatures and thoughts to dip into.

After just nine days, she’s grown to love the silence, the days splashed with a stranger’s presence. Without so the city’s hundreds of estranged faces, comes a new understanding of space. There’s something to a vast sky dotted with millions of stars half seen. Something to an open land speckled with cars that gives the one passing through a 199

breath that keeps coming and coming. Mira imagines her mom out here, doing just the same. Finding her way from one road to the other, feeling the breeze cool her cheeks the car rolling past views of lush green trees to crashing waves to dry earth to red rock wonderland.

Turning back onto the road, she sees the mile marker 17 and veers off curious of the distant canyon ahead, no paved road making the it easy to get there. She drives on remembering the dinosaur tracks Xavier mentioned. Even when she doesn’t know where she’s heading, she drives on sure it’ll be worth it. 200

Chapter 21

Day 10: Moab, Utah

She wasn’t really sure how they got here - not necessarily Landscape Arch, one of the dozen red wonders of Moab, Utah, but here alongside this weeping woman. The two sat beneath the potato chip-thin arch, Mira rubbing her back as though she had known her far longer than just a few minutes. Her shoulder blades fill and empty like a sail as she struggles to find her breath.

Mira reached The Arches that morning. Came straight from Southern Utah, through the white-tipped hoodoos of Bryce Canyon, brushing past miles of flatland.

She’d seen photographs of this trail before - deemed an absolute must-see by travel guides even if just for a day. She anticipated herds of tourists from all across the world, but didn’t expect this woman. This puffy-eyed, middle-aged redhead tears streaming down her face, face in palms, leaning into sandstone boulders that had fallen decades ago.

The rest of the line of tourists look away, necks turning back as they walk another few steps, trudging through the thick sand. No one else stops. Mira pauses in front of the arch, trying to ignore the crying woman while snapping a few photos of the landscape she came for. Then, she widens her lens and sees the woman in the frame. Her arched body a

small shadow amidst the natural light. She snaps the photo and feels a dig in her stomach 201

as the camera clicks - capturing a sliver of another’s vulnerability for herself. She stares

at the woman and feels this vague sense of familiarity hang over her, as though she’d

seen her, this moment before. She walks back to the main trail towards the small wooden

arrow sign pointing to Najavo Arch, but the preview window hangs in her mind,

expanding the pinhole in her chest, pulling her closer and closer to the comer.

She walks towards to the weeping woman, her sobbing quieting into wet muffles.

“Ma’am,” she says, grazing the woman’s shoulder with her index finger. The

woman stays hunched. “Ma’am is everything okay?”

Her eyes lift from the ground and meet Mira’s, dark pupils undammed, streams pouring out from behind them.

“I’m sorry. I didn’t realize — ”

“I can leave you be, I don’t mean to intrude, I just — ”

“Everything’s fucked.” The woman’s words dart out short and gravely, like she’s

raking them off her tongue. Mira flinches.

The woman’s palms flatten her frizzed red hair, pressing the waves away from her

face. Her shoulders soften. Mira sits beside her. 202

“I just cheated on my husband,” she says. This time flat and sharp like ripping off a band aid. She presses her palms to her temples, leaning into herself.

“Oh — ” Mira’s voices halts, as though it just rammed into sharp corner.

“Just let me explain.”

“You don’t need to. I just wanted to make sure everything was — ”

“It wasn’t that I didn’t know what I was doing. You know, following this man off the tourist trails into the canyon. It’s not that I wasn’t aware this was hardly a circumstance I should put myself in. I could feel it at first. You know, that anvil hanging from a chain, slowly lowering into your stomach? I knew following this trail with him meant we’d be alone. And I knew he was good-looking. I knew I was attracted to him. I mean I knew I shouldn’t be doing it as I followed him over that damn wooden plank to the place where no other tourists were. I knew it was getting quiet. I knew we’d be alone.

I knew it the whole time. But is it horrible to say that I wanted to see what it’d be like to experience something exciting, something new again? That for just one day, I didn’t want to care about someone else? That in my mind I was already out the door. I had already left my husband, I just hadn’t told him yet. Is that horrible? God, it is,” The woman sobs into her palms, back rising and falling like quaking earth, throat choking on itself. Mira 203

sits quiet, waiting for the woman to regain her breath. Her palm hovers over her back unsure whether or not to comfort her.

“Oh god, you poor thing,” the woman says through sniffles. She blows her nose.

“I’m sure you weren’t expecting this.”

Mira shrugs and offers a meager smile. The woman wipes her face, brushing her hair behind her ears.

“I’m sorry I just don’t know what I’m doing right now. I’m just - confused I guess. You don’t need to stay here. I appreciate you asking though.”

Mira recognizes that look on her face -the hanging guilt, aftermath of a choice gone wrong. She’d seen it on her mother’s face time and time again. The time when she was ten and Gigi strolled into Lorraine’s living room reeking of marijuana, forgetting

Mira was having her first (and last) sleepover with her classmates; or the time she spent nearly an hour lecturing Mira’s 7th grade teacher on the ridiculous nature of standardized testing, reciting reason after reason as to why Mira shouldn’t have to be a puppet for the school’s ranking system even though Mira had only made the slightest mention of not looking forward to it; or the way she sat silently as Karen Chester’s mom reamed into her for painting a portrait of her half-naked husband without thinking of talking to his wife first. She’d seen intentions gone wrong, swift left turns. 204

“No, it’s okay really. I don’t mind. It seems like you could use an ear,” she says, leaning in.

“I guess I feel like if I tell someone I actually know, then it becomes real, you know? Like I can’t turn back. Then, it happened and in one reality or another I’ll have to face that every time I see that person - knowing that I haven’t told him. Because I can’t tell him. I mean Jesus it’d be over faster than it started. He’d never stay.”

“You don’t know that.”

“I most definitely know that. You haven’t met my husband. He’s been waiting for this moment. It’s the reason he hates when I take these work trips alone. He doesn’t trust me. And you know, I’ve resented him for it. I can feel that rope tightening as each year passes. It drives me insane. But now look. He was right. He was right all along.”

Mira clears her throat. “So, why’d you do it, then? I mean if you don’t mind me asking.”

The woman looks up at the arch, the same one everyone thought to be solid, but partially crumbled down on a group of tourists in the early nineties, leaving just a sliver of itself behind. 205

“This is going to sound sick. You’re going to think I’m a sick person, but part of me wanted to know whether I’d regret it. I’ve never done anything like this, to this degree anyway.” She bites her nails as she pauses. “I’ve been feeling so half in and out for so long, I wanted to see if I loved him enough to stop. If I’d let myself follow the fantasy or not.”

“Well, I guess you got your answer then?”

“I mean I didn’t stop, but I regretted it. I regretted it while it was already in motion. I regretted it while I was on top of him. My mind regretted it, but the rest of me

— the rest of me didn’t regret it enough to stop I guess. God, that sounds so pitiful. Like I can’t control my own body or something.” She stabs a stick into the sand. The hot desert sun cools for a moment as a flat bottom cloud shadows over. Mira watches the stick scrape the earth, her hand, palm reddening.

She thinks about the first time she was cheated on back 9th grade. She felt that same anvil sink into her own gut. Felt it widen up and out, exploding in her chest. She could imagine how the redhead’s husband would feel to a certain degree - even if her only reference was when she was fifteen and naive enough to believe that guys had attractive, female best friends and it could stay that way. She thought about how it hung over her for years, how it never really left, just compounded through high school and 206

college as she dated time and time again only to be disappointed by how people always seemed to get worse over time, more comfortable, unraveling, rather than better. She couldn’t help but notice how most people were always looking for their turn in the conversation, how every man she undressed for had never asked how she liked it, rather just moved her body in a such a way that made her feel like an accessory to sex, rather than a central part of it. How when things went wrong they’d offer half-formed apologies, meager attempts that felt like a way to silence her complaints rather than heal them.

Mira had learned from an early age that people, no matter how close, will always look out for themselves when tested. Human nature. Wants, fears, needs are the only thing that yank in moments of indecision. She could feel it crawling across her skin. The thought of Lorraine hiding out in the living room at Donner Lake as they drove away.

The way she never apologized for how she acted that day. She cringed as she thought of

Jim, the pervert who touched in her ways she tried to forget only to resurface when a boyfriend pulled her in a way that made her feel separate from her body than in it.

She hadn’t felt the hardening happen, just noticed it when she went on dates — how she felt like a thick membrane between her chest and whoever was pressed up against it. A membrane that when tested would trail up her throat, mirroring slow suffocation, especially with the man one who stuck around for nearly a year, who wanted to know more about her past, what her childhood was like, why she always declined his 207

free cabin getaways to his lakefront summer home. All of it felt like stacking reasons to end things before they started. Before the person had found a way to creep past that membrane, to hold the tender side she barely let herself see. There were others, like the guy who brought her flowers for no particular reason, brushed her hair with his hands as they lay in bed, but then asked why she always flinched when he kissed her unannounced, or what is what like to have a hippie mother having seen a photo of

Sunshine. She feared if she told the surface details the dark depths would leak through and before she knew it, she’d be unraveled there, in front of someone who despite having known for months still had only seen one side of her - the good side, the side everyone preferred. She knew if she let herself unwind then all of those protective layers that made it easier to work all day and night would crack open, making her feel more than she was ready for.

So, over time, she learned what people wanted and gave them enough to hold them over without siphoning too much from herself. She learned men wanted some degree of intimacy, some stories from her past, so she talked about the lighter days in

Sunshine - the weekends in Yosemite, the trip up to Mendocino, waking up the curtains flapping to the ocean’s breeze. When it came to Gigi, she learned the less she complained during adventures, the more time she got with her. Above it all, she learned people, even 208

those as woven into her life as Lorraine, despite how much you trust them, have two sides they’re capable of and you’re never really sure how much of the whole you’re getting.

It wasn’t a matter of not knowing she walked through the world this way, but knowing how to change it. So accustomed to counting on herself, she had created a life that depended on her independence. The mere thought of leaning into another for too long, of letting some in knowing they could just get up, walk away at a moment’s notice, that you could rip yourself open, show your darkest cavities and even then you wouldn’t be enough. That someone could leave you like this — raw, exposed with holes to seal back up, tunnels far deeper than what you started with. To Mira, the risk never seemed worth the reward. So, marriage was a concept she never really took to. Never really thought was realistic given all she’d seen in Gigi.

“Well, at least now you know,” Mira replies.

The woman tosses the stick into the water, her wrist goes limp as though she had gave up half way through the motion.

“I mean I know what I did. I just don’t know what to do next.” She picks up another stick and scrapes a comer off the boulder beneath her crimson red emerges beneath the sandstone, a slow bleed. “The shitty part is, he always thought this was going to happen. He never like the fact that I traveled so much for work. That I liked being 209

alone. And I kept telling him he was ridiculous for worrying, but now — fuck, you know

I just wish I could’ve kept it together.”

“Maybe, somewhere down the road, you’ll see it was meant to come a part like this. For one reason or another.”

“I don’t know. That’s a pretty optimistic way of looking at it.” The woman’s cell phone rings. “Shit. That’s my husband. I should probably be going.” The woman squeezes Mira’s shoulder. “But thank you. Thank you for not walking by when you so easily could have. I know you didn’t need to step into all of this, but you did and I really appreciate it.”

“Good luck with everything.”

As the woman walks away, Mira feels the woman’s sadness hang over the rock she sat on, stretching her mind further and further from the arch before her. Even as she brushes herself off and passes the alien-like rock formations, she can’t help but think the idea of marriage. Her own parents hadn’t even made it there. She doubted if she, herself ever would. It didn’t seem like someone who questioned things over and over, someone who cringed at monotony, would ever truly be happy in the routine of living decade after decade with the same person. 210

As she walks the trail, she saw Xavier’s face and the fragments of other men who pooled around different moments of her life rather than fill them. As she walks towards the slick rock tower ahead, she sees a young man and wife climbing down. He holds her hand as she balances between two boulders. She stares at their clasped hands, wondering if the woman feels fantasies of other men bank along her ankle bones, caressing tender parts of her skin. As she watches the couple walk further away, she wonders if maybe we’re all just a few wrong turns from being the redhead on the rock. 211

Chapter 22

Gigi, June 2011, Summerset Assisted Living

If you pay attention, you can feel the splitting. I could feel our chests split a part like guitar strings, plucking from the slowly fraying center. I could feel it happening as I lay beside John in bed. Happening slowly at first, tenderly one string one night after one too many weeks of drifting through the day, making breakfast, packing lunch, eating dinner, talking about his day on the docks, washing dishes, hanging laundry just to fall asleep side by side sometimes love, sometimes not. Then, do it all over again. One night we turned to each other, our noses just a couple inches from one another and I could feel he and I unraveling even though nothing in particular had happened. But I think that was it really. The moment you realize you love someone, comfortable with someone in a life where nothing is actually happening. I felt it so acutely that night and fell asleep with tears softly rolling down my cheeks, seeping out through a crack in a vessel I hoped could hold. I remember what it felt like to feel two hearts slowly unstring from one another, remember how it started before I even had thoughts to articulate it, just a sensation - that as much as I knew this should be my life, that it was comfortable, good enough, I couldn’t stay here and find happiness in forever. Sometimes the body feels milestones far before the mind finds words. 212

John and I had been together for well over two years at that point. The days of racing another into ocean’s waves, nights of making love under a wine-filtered haze had softened into routine as most things do. We started noticing our neighbors more than we used to. Talking about the Joneses who moved to the back of the valley to buy a home instead of rent. Started talking about our future more, the kids we knew should be coming, the house we’d need to house them, the money to start it all. As the first wave of

Pacifica’s newlyweds settled, pregnant women and toddlers began to fill the sidewalk and line the beach. Families were forming all around us. We’d look at each other over dinner, toeing around the idea of our own.

“1 want more for us,” he said, as I plated the cream of mushroom casserole and served it to him. “I’ve been thinking. Maybe I should shift away from the docks. Find something that can bring home a bit more for us. Benefits would help when we start having kids.

You know Joey? He joined the union as a butcher over in the city. Says there’s an opening at a shop on Mission. It’s good money. Those unions, they take care of families.”

I remember feeling a twinge in my stomach then. Just a little something coiling in my gut.

“But you love the water,” I said. “I can’t imagine you stuck inside all day.” 213

“Yeah,” he said, poking his casserole. “But I can’t keep going up to Alaska for

months at a time when we start a family. I’d miss you all too much. I want to be around.”

In his mind it was though the children had already been bom. The dog already

running in the grass in a backyard larger than we had. To him, we had already walked

down the aisle and as I saw him up on the hill, overlooking our future, I wondered if he

ever thought to ask if I wanted any of it. I could feel the guilt cut little niches in my gut when we talked about a family, kids and a larger home for me to stay home in. But I couldn’t get myself to let it out of my throat, would just hold it there knowing if I said something I could undo all of this without having fully thought it through. Sometimes it’s not enough to know what you don’t want. So, you pray you figure out what you do.

And he had a good heart, really he did. He wanted to be a good husband, a good father, but neither of us stopped to ask was whether we were walking into a life that felt like our own, or were we just following the footsteps the neighborhood subconsciously created for us. After enough time, I just told myself to push it down. Ignore it. It’s just a phase. It’ll pass. Told myself it was a good life, a loving life. I should be happy here.

Admitting anything else felt selfish, felt like I was disappointing the only man I’d ever truly loved. I wanted it to fit, really I did. I wanted us to go on and feel like we we’re flowing, not gradually forking like a tree bound to fall. So, I kept quiet. I kept trying day 214

after day, hoping one night when our lives grew quiet he, we, our life would feel like enough.

Like everyone else I knew, I’d grown up watching my mother tend to all things inside the home, her entire day focusing around the wants and needs of my father and three siblings. I watched her bread the chicken piccata, stir the macaroni, bake the lasagna, wash the dishes, folding mountains of clothes when the day was done. I spent Monday afternoons after school with her, listening to the radio, watching her iron my fathers button downs and pressing the pillow cases flat. My father worked in a bank downtown and left before I woke. So, everyday when he came home in a suit and tie I’d rush into his arms, linger around him for as long as I could. And every night I notice how my mother didn’t look as happy to see him as I was. How she’d offer him a cold cheek to kiss as she stirred the tomato sauce over the stove. She loved us kids, you could see it in the way she lay beside us each night, asking how our days were, never moving until we spared a detail that felt like we were strengthening the bridge from us to her. But after a couple glasses of wine on Saturday night you could see she didn’t truly love this life. The way her eyes would gloss over and drift away with heaviness, wandering far beyond the walls of our three bedroom home. As I went on dating through life, I remembered that cold cheek, those wandering eyes. As I got older and watched friends sparkle engagement rings and walk under rice-tossed church aisles, I always felt this touch of sadness for the 215

newlyweds, hoping they’d be happy, but fearing they were walking into disappointment they weren’t yet aware of.

My brothers and sisters all got married by 18, had their first kid by 20. But I just couldn’t get myself to settle, not until I met John and even then I felt something pulling me towards the door every day time we started talking about firming up the roots beneath our two-bedroom that looked identical to everyone else’s. I never knew why I kept dreaming of places I’ve never been, driving on open roads alone, living in a country where I’d have to learn to know the language. But after that talk that one night, those dreams kept taunting me every time darkness fell.

Back then, I had time for a kid. I usually spent my mornings painting and the afternoons working part-time a few days a week teaching art classes at the senior center.

It wasn’t the time, but the feeling. That tightening inside me that left me feeling a bit strangled at the thought of sitting in a life I helped build without questioning how sturdy the bricks looked along the way. I thought John and I could be different than the other couples, could keep our sense of adventure as we aged. But the following month he left the sea for the city. He left for work when he sun rose and returned at six like clockwork too tired from standing on his feet all day to walk along the coast, or climb the trails like we did when we met. We were saving heaps, but after awhile I wasn’t really sure who we 216

were saving for. Then, I started keeping my share in a coffee can under our bed. I knew right then, it was the beginning of our end.

The morning I left the fog loomed over the ocean, hugging the shoreline. John had left for work. The night before we had got into a fight. Something came up like vomit.

“I’m not ready to get married,” I told him, face flushing, as we sat on the couch one night, a couple glasses of beer deep between us both. His face softened and paused, then flushed to red.

“You tell me this now? It’s been two years, Gigi. Two years. What do you mean you’re not ready?” I didn’t have any answers. I just felt like I had to tell him before he got down on a knee we both wouldn’t be able to get up from. I just had to get away for awhile. Get my thoughts together. I didn’t expect to stay away so long. I had taken the coffee can and bought Sunshine with it. The mere look of her thrilled me - felt like the start of something I could control, a life of my own to navigate. A few weeks later I mailed John a letter, telling him 1 loved him, but couldn’t go back to living our life anymore. There were many days that weighed heavy, but on the days when the ache of his absence dissipated, I’d feel a little lighter, like I finally had a chance to start fresh and get to know what I wanted out of this life. 217

I tried on all kinds of lives after buying Sunshine. Worked on ranches where I learned how to milk goats. When I passed through towns that had more people than farm land, I’d work a few weeks as a waitress until I got tired of, smelling the same food day in and day out. When I got further to Washington, I started working on the hiking trails for the local parks, getting free meals for upkeeping the trails, lugging rocks and split logs from the river to bookend a path. When my back couldn’t take that any longer, I went back down to Oregon where I met a farmer in the hills who had a few dozen marijuana plants that needed trimming. But after a few months the roaming started to feel like running. The spark of experiencing all things new would still give me a lift upon entry, but regardless of where you end up you’re still left with the same self on those quiet nights. The moonless evenings where Sunshine creaks in the cold, where there’s no one but you and the stars, where the mind can easily start to spiral in doubt, asking yourself why couldn’t you have just stayed put, enjoyed the good-enough life with a good man. Why are you out here, endlessly chasing sights without the slightest clue of what you’re looking for? I never liked those rabbit holes. Always had trouble deciphering which were actually my own thoughts and which were the mantras I’d soaked up truth countless years before.

After leaving the farm in Oregon, about four months in at that point, and I started to feel the ache more acutely. I remember being parked along a busy road in a rural town an hour east of Bend. I had heard from a guy at a gas station that there were waterfalls with 218

not a single person touching the trails, and a gas station restaurant that apparently had the

best peach margaritas and tamales around. Given what was around that was saying a

whole lot, but I was curious and headed that way anyway. That night as my stomach

churned from the tamales, no bathroom for miles, the rumble of the pick up trucks and big rigs started to make my chest singe. I couldn’t see the stars beneath the thick redwood canopies, couldn’t hear the sea of crickets or hooting owls over the rushing wheels. I turned onto my side, trying to find a comfortable position and as I curled into myself, I remembered the way John would hold me every night until I fell asleep, even though he got notoriously hot in the night and couldn’t sleep until our bodies were separate. I missed him. Not just in my mind, but in my body. It felt like someone had wedged a wrench between the sleeves of my heart and wound it open until the gap was so wide, gusts of wind rushed into the cavities so deep I didn’t even know they were there. I cried for the first time since I left him that night. Cried so hard, I nearly choked on my breath.

That week I drove into Bend - just needed to be around people even if I wasn’t talking to them. It had been four days and my stomach still ached in ways that poisoning had never conjured. I bought a pregnancy test and found a little blue and white diner at the edge of town. I found out I was pregnant with Mira in there, sitting in a metal stall with a bin of kitchen grease outside the bathroom door. I had ordered a slice of cherry pie 219

that I never ended up finishing. I knew it was John’s as soon as I saw those two lines bolden to blue. The timing couldn’t have been worse.

The very next day I drove straight from Bend to San Francisco, only stopping for gas.

I peeled into the parking lot at John’s work and rushed inside knowing it was Wednesday and he often got shipped out for multi-night fishing runs mid-week. The receptionist just stared at me with wide pity eyes behind her thick purple glasses. Told me he’d quit a month before, left on a crabbing ship that had headed north for the season. Said he didn’t plan on coming back. We didn’t have any way of contacting each other then, so I stayed in Pacifica until Mira was bom, hoping he’d find his way back. I can’t tell you how many times I stood at the foot of the dock, belly growing, waiting for a crab ship to roll in.

Plenty did, none with him. 220

Chapter 23

Day 11: The Arches, Utah

It’s not recommended, hiking alone in the desert. It’s not recommended under a looming

storm, when footprints are scarce, when thunder clouds encroach, when charcoal haze

creeps from east to west. Mira can see it in the distance, the sky deepening its color,

clouds grumbling. In the Southwest weather moves with haste. Here flat bottom clouds

easily disappear when the gray emerges. Sometimes you can see it. Other times you hear

it, but once the two merge, it’s coming and it’s coming quick. Mira heard about this in the travel guides - the swift weather, crashing flash floods, ambitious hikers getting stranded

among rising waters, swiftly climbing from ankle to knee to thigh, lizards and birds reaching higher grounds far faster than humans could.

When she first hears the faint boom her hands and feet are pressed to the slick red

rock, straddling the narrow incline. She looks back as the thunder trails into murmurs.

She can’t see it fully yet. Just its edge - that slight change in the sky, the subtle gray

coming into view. She looks up to the incline ahead of her. No trail paved out, just

stacked slick rock with no apparent end. The smooth tower before her looks like someone

swept over its muddy soil with a brush, covering any nook hands could grasp. The thin

ridge drops steeply on both sides. No sign. No paved trail, it’s easy to feel both lost and 221

inadequate in the same moment. Pulse quickens, throat tightens. She debates whether to finish the climb to Devil’s Arch or turn back. The silence of the desert feels deafening.

No one to turn to for guidance, nerves spike. Accustomed to the constant faces of the city, it’s one of the first times on the trip she feels completely alone. Not a single hiker or animal in sight. No one to tell her if she’s on the right trail. No one whose mere presence whispers she’ll be okay if she slips down the side of that long ledge into that thin slot canyon where ankles and elbows can so easily wedge between rocks that refuse to move.

She can almost see herself down there in the darkness, stone pressed against her back and chest, hollering for help that won’t come until the skies have opened and the canyons fill with water, reminding people the desert was never meant for them. Here, in this moment, in front of the slick rock, the thunder looming, she has to rely on herself, her map and the sinking feeling in her gut to decide whether it’s to keep going, turn right, turn left, turn back.

Mira swivels her body around, figuring turning back now wouldn’t be so bad. No one will know, she tells herself. No one will see her climb down cowering to doubt. She looks over to Landscape Arch in the distance, the one she met the weeping woman at just a few hours ago. And sure, she wouldn’t make it to Navajo or the views of Partition Arch, but how different could one arch be from the other? You won 7 miss much, she whispers.

But as she climbs down she feels that familiar sinking drill in her gut, the one she feels 222

each time she rides the elevator up to work, that feeling of settling. The feeling of knowing you could’ve done more but settled for less than your best during a window that will likely never reemerge in that exact way every again. It’s a little moment — one of so many. But after long enough, those collections of slivered time add to up flip books, years when life washed past without you knowing what truly happened. Too many of those, she thinks. Too many of those to add another.

Mira purses her lips and swivels back around towards the top of the rock tower that seamlessly bridges to the sky. A surge of adrenaline pumps through her chest. Afraid she’ll change her mind, she moves quickly up the slick rock. Balancing in smallest crevasses of boulders. She pushes with one leg, lands with the other. She keeps climbing, forcing herself not to look to either side, knowing the dark depths jutting below will quake her already trembling knees. She keeps scaling until the top is know no longer the gray sky, but a flat ledge with another sign pointing to the arch she came for. She walks there, deep sighs expanding in her chest, pulse softening. When she reaches the next arch, not a single person is around, just a wide, rounded stone window to look over the rest of the desert. The pink sandstone stands as high as a rooftop, wide enough to view the whole valley through. If you were to take a photo there, right at the edge, it’d look like you were standing at the brink of a fall, when in actuality just a few feet down, the rock slopes into a hidden ledge, creating a privacy curtain with stone slabs. Mira smiles at the mirage of a 223

cliff. Sometimes it looks like you’re about to step straight off the plank when it’s really just the beginning of something that’s been carved just for you. She nestles her back into the red rock, the stone cooling her spine. In the distance, the angry sky fades to blue, illuminating half of the valley. A deep breath fills her, making her lighten as she soaks up the moment. Her body remains still, calm, no wrinkle churning about. This peace. This adventure all my own, that’s what I came for, she thinks, lids softening into the sweeping sky.

She thinks of her mother. The way she always seemed to uproot herself from places, chapters as though staying just a touch longer would risk her falling into a routine she couldn’t bare, or a romantic life that was too stable to be exciting. Restless, Mira thinks, that’s what she used to call Gigi. But now, here, after the climb, the fear, the adventures she’s lived, she feels it. The visceral surge of feeling alive on your own terms.

Going just for the sake of going. Following the gnawing pull that takes you to gorgeous places time and time again. And since it’s never failed you, you continue following it, even when the rest of the neighborhood, your family, look with those pitying eyes. The eyes she saw so many cast over Gigi, those oh honey one day you’ll have to settle down eyes. But maybe not everyone does. Maybe some aren’t meant to.

A warmth expands in her chest, spreading from one arm to the other. She pulls out her phone and scrolls to Gigi’s name. How can you stay mad at a woman like that? 224

How can you not forgive someone who, maybe wasn’t always the best mom, but had the

courage to be herself in a world constantly pressing her to be otherwise? How can you

say that in a strange way, that made her a role model, if nothing else a reminder that there

is more to life than dully passing through it. That there is a whole world out there dying

to be experienced. That there are Shelby’s who learned how to gracelessly let go and

Chloe’s who leap knowing there’s so much more still to come. Their stories longing to be

heard. Mira stares out into the pink desert, imagining the three of them out there, roaming

different comers of the same world. Maybe despite all the world telling women, this place is too dangerous for you, maybe it’s not, she thinks. Maybe it just takes woman after woman stretching out on her own, with the courage and switchblade she needs to get

from one highway marker to the next. Maybe then, it won’t be such a rare sight to see

women scaring slick rock guided by nothing but their intuition. Maybe then they’ll be

safety in numbers. Maybe then so many women won’t wake up wondering, what

would’ve been if they just lived the deepest version of their lives? 225

Chapter 24

Gigi, Summerset Assisted Living

It’s not that I never thought about settling down. I guess after awhile I just started wondering why my dreams were any less valid than the woman next door? I dreamed about never-seen vistas the way many yeam for children. There’s a deep love in the vision, an expanding capacity to it. All of the things you imagine yourself growing into.

For many that was a husband and a child. A cozy house, a big backyard with a chocolate lab. Summer vacations to the lake, a reach trip to Hawaii. It was a good life, but every time I tried to imagine myself there, it never felt like my own.

I’d see pictures of places and become vexed by them. Certain ones would speak to me, immediately jolting the heart, pulling me towards that far off place at first glance.

And then gradually I’d start seeing it everywhere, the tips of the Rocky Mountains, the craggy cliffs of the Almafi coast. Whatever it was, it’d plant seeds in front me for years even until I found my way to it. I didn’t have any plans when I’d set out for these places.

I just fell in love with the process of it all. Everything from the moment you left home to where you’d end up when sunset was entirely new, never experienced. I loved that feeling, chased it whenever I could. 226

I found it hard to describe it to people though. The reason I loved wandering alone so much. People don’t look kindly on women who are both mothers and wanderers.

Selfish. Reckless. Adjectives I both heard in parking lot whispers, or may have just projected upon myself. But there’s something in the pauses. The moments where you no longer find the urge to fill the gaps, the silences, the nights with someone else. When it’s just you out there. When that natural inclination fades, you’re left with your whole self, however you came in that moment. You sitting on the bed of a motel staring at thrift store oil paintings of Paris even though you’re in Eastern Oregon. You falling into the shimmer of stars feeling yourself lighten and lengthen while remembering that first time you saw the Milky Way at the other end of your father’s outstretched arm. You folding clothes with a new piece of art drying on the roof of the van, paint brushes still damp, your own voice whispering with a smile, I’m proud of you.

If s just you. And in those moments you’re enough, just like that. No need for company. I guess that’s why I do it, how I justified leaving Mira with Lorraine on so many weekends. Because it’s so easy to get lost in the world as the bus rushes by, as the kids scramble across the classroom, as I try to tell myself I’ll make more time for my art, for Mira, for friends next week all the while just wanting more moments for myself.

But when I set out there with the intention of a destination, whether it’s three hours or 300 miles, I know I’m in it for the journey with myself, by myself, that there’s 227

no escaping my mind or emotions from point A to point B. I know even if I don’t love myself when I start that drive, I will by the time I finish it. So, that’s why I do it, why I need, why I hope Mira will someday understand. And that’s why as much as I know Mira longs for a mother who wakes up every morning early enough to make scrambled eggs and toast, a mother whose always there to walk her home from school, a mother who doesn’t leave notes on Saturday mornings telling her she’s gone for the weekend. As much as that’s what she deserves, I was afraid what would happen if that’s who I forced myself to be. I’m afraid I’d disintegrate into all of the things I never imagined myself becoming. That I wouldn’t have those days, drives, those long stretches of reminding myself why I love being in this skin day after day. And I know most mothers scoff at my ways, call me unfit. But if there’s one thing I’d want to pass onto my daughter, that’s it.

The hope that despite all of what she feels is expected, despite the jobs and the lovers and the degrees and the gossiping neighbors on every street - that she finds her own road to loving herself. And when she finds it, she holds it close as though her life depends on it - because that’s the thing no one ever tells you. It does.

I guess that’s what I’d like to tell her if I could just find the right words. So maybe that’s what this is. A different kind of love song, the story I could never find in a children’s book, the only thing I hope my daughter discovers and holds dear. The reminder that just because you do things different, doesn’t mean it’s wrong. And just 228

because you’re alone, doesn’t mean you’re lonely. And even though the world tells you you need another half, trust me, you’re always whole. I wanted her to find space in places instead of people. I wanted her to look at the sky, the ocean, the whistling grass and let it consume her. That’s why I took her along on so many journeys. I hoped they’d widen her in the same ways they widened me.

But as she inched into those preteens years, more and more she wanted to sleep on the couch at Lorraine’s instead of in the van. I realized then a kid needs comfort, stability.

She needed routine the way I needed the open road. And that juxtaposition was always the troubling part. How every time I convinced myself we were doing something grand together, having an adventure, there’d be this little tug in my gut wondering if she really wanted to be here, if she was getting anything out of it other than wanting to please me.

She was always such amicable kid and I was grateful for that. But at the same time I knew there were rivers of silence inside of her. So many things she’d never say. The way she always said she was fine even when she had just knocked her knee on the comer, a ding that would later bruise green and yellow. Even when she had tears welling in her eyes, she’d always say she was fine. That worried me. So, I’d lie next to her every night I was home, asking how her day was. She’d bring the blanket close her neck, nearly covering her mouth and close her eyes while answering instead of looking into mine. I could feel the distance forming. 229

But there’d be moments. The ones that really hurt would come cracking open

from the periphery. The ones that stay with you, the times that made me question why I

did the things I did. Like how she responded after that last trip to Donner Lake.

Mira wasn’t a crier. She was a strong kid, but when it came to Donner, that one

time, she cried half the ride up, begging not to go.

“Please, Mom. Please just let me stay home,” she pleaded over and over. Lorraine

and I sat in the front seat, brows scrunched, at the time figuring she was just going

through some kind of emotional bout. Preteens, you know. There’s a lot of emotion there.

But there was a lot of emotion in the van that day anyway. Lorraine and I had our own

things we weren’t talking about.

“What’s the big deal, Mira? It’ll be nice. The lake’s almost warm this of year.

You can take all the photos you want without anyone bothering you. It’s only for a

week.”

“I hate that place.”

“How can you hate Donner Lake? How can anyone hate any lake?” Lorraine jumped in. Lorraine loved that place. Her boyfriend had built the cabin himself and she’d 230

been going up there every other month for nearly a year. She had brought Mira one time

when I had gone further north. I dropped them off and took Sunshine into wild mustang

country, where I spent days talking to the local rancher, painting portraits of her

alongside her favorite stud. Mira didn’t want to come. She was about ten then and always

loved the water, so a lake seemed like far better an option, I guess. But when I picked them up and asked her how was the trip, she just said fine and looked out the window. I

couldn’t get anything else out of her. I didn’t press on it though. Thought maybe she just

wanted to be home, missed her mom. Missed her makeshift room, I don’t know. But when that pleading in the car the second time. Something just didn’t feel right. But I couldn’t turn around. Lorraine had been talking about this trip for weeks. She couldn’t wait to see Jim and even though that bothered me, I didn’t make it obvious. Plus, her

Pinto had broken down and she needed us to get there. A naive piece of me hoped it was more though, more than just a ride, but a time for us to connect. There were always stray parts with Lorraine and I and I hoped that maybe this week, some time away together

would help us connect the threads we didn’t know how to look at. But looking back, I

think she just wanted to see Jim and I was a way to get there. Mira and I always were

kind of indebted to her, our makeshift family, while mostly warm had gotten complicated

and undoubtedly had its tense tendrils. 231

The first afternoon we were there, Mira sat out of the docks all day. She wandered

along the road and find the places where no cars were parked and if the blinds were

closed and boats covered, she knew they were back at their real homes. She'd sit out on

their dock, writing in her journal, taking photos of passing ducks or the lake’s edge. Two

days passed and she barely spoke. She picked at her hot dog over dinner, pushed her fries

from one part of the plate to the other.

“Mira, aren’t you hungry? You barely ate your sandwich earlier?”

“I’m not feeling well,” she said eyes staring out past the kitchen table,

overlooking the lake’s rocking current. The skies had started to darken — one of the

Sierra’s fast-moving storms was creeping and you could hear the floating dock bang and bang against the wooden one.

“Can I be excused?” she said after a long pause. Lorraine and I both looked at

each other, eyes squinting.

“Are you okay?” Lorraine asked.

“It’s not polite to let food go to waste, Mira,” Jim said sharply. It was the first

time I had actually met Jim and right then, right there, I didn’t like that. How comfortable

he felt scolding my daughter. I shot him a glare, and reached for Mira’s hand. She

immediately pulled it away when our fingers touched.