I forgot to mention: Kansas, the fields and fields of sunflowers, their black heads turned to the ground. If I had come earlier, they might have been facing up.
Kansas is a fever dream. Kansas is yellow and endless and I loved it, in its way. It is the Wizard of Oz. It makes me miss my friend from Kansas City, Lindsay in her Homecoming dress. It makes me miss my friend from Okalahoma, Duncan, a poet, who moved to DC and rode the metro for hours, and is the real thing, and I’m gone from both their lives, and it’s my own fault. I don’t write back.
Kansas makes me want to write back.
Kansas reminds me of being sick, what I used to think in my bed: how I would get out of this place, once I could get up. How I would write myself out into a new world.
A new world: Colorado.
First, cows.
Colorado is cities rising out of dust, rising out of nowhere. They frighten me with their suddenness, their haze and traffic. Just as quickly, Denver, Fort Collins, are gone, are back to the ground.
Colorado is a list of mostly animals: big-horned sheep in the grass next to motorcycles, goats on the rocks, elk in the fields and in the purple meadows, so close, even the horned ones, antelope everywhere, like white sprigs. There are people lining the roads in Rocky Mountain park, looking for the elk with binoculars and blankets. They have been there all day. I tell them where to go. I tell them I have seen three bulls.
You must be a good luck charm, I am told.
I forgot to mention: Missouri, the monarch butterflies cutting across my path. Tell them to fly higher. Tell them to go faster.
You can’t avoid a butterfly, I am told, but I try.
