She said to me how far would you go and I answered as far as I need to and that's how things began to buckle after everything she said and I said and we both said.
Dreams and the gentle mendacity of hearts, distant police sirens and the furious murmur of crowds.
Back then, landscapes were our thing. Clouds and fields. Painting them and loving them and dealing in them. As bored as I am now, it's hard to summon that enthusiasm again, even to describe how we lived back when, but I know it felt like something. Some thing. Driving. Like a sudden dip in the long afternoon highway, as a big rig drops a gear or three, falling into the cooling abalone shadows of evening, a snug, complacent slit between dry hillsides, diverted by thirst into the rest stop before the bridge and beside the river bank, all quick-hissing air brakes while the last golden scales of the sunset shimmer on the northern Mississippi-Missouri, squirm-scattering like a slick-released fish haul.
Yeah, it's trickery. A blue gimmick. But keep watching. Everything might change, and soon.
"So. How far would you go?"
"As far as I need to."
"How far is that?"
"I don't know. I'm still waiting to find out."
"See those prefab fences out aways?"
"Uh-huh."
"Would you run for those, scale them, make yourself a fugitive defying their limits?"
"Oh, sure."
"Do you hate them?"
"No, I love them. They define my own limits, give me targets. The dull knife edge of suburbia."
"Uh. Okay. Right. Anything else?"
"Yeah. Yes. They are swimming with twilight fire beyond switchblade echoes."
"Seriously, huh?"
"Totally. Love. Need ... I don't even know. I've probably said way too much."
"Yeah, probably."
"It's never easy. None of it. None of it is."
The loneliness of the bush called us. The choking infinite greenery.
Nothing will change the unblinking reality that every bear we met was crawling with life, each predator quivering with the hot awful stink of need, every last belch of love trembling with moist, nacreous grace and urgency, all the lovers and haters arrayed and awaiting their moment to stamp each reality with its own singular conviction.
The planet turns so agonizingly slow, charcoal borders smudging brief blurred moments across a rolling plain, sparking off bright mountains and subdued by the widest waters, this invasion of the Salton Sea, of Puget Sound, of the Wash, of the vast and dazzling Sargasso.
Like a thirty-dollar motel in the Idaho panhandle, a dirty unpolished gem set in deep green folds, its thin brown floors gluey, its thumbnail TV swinging on loose brackets, its fake wood panels tacky, its water pressure weak as spit, its nestled ghostlight both lurid and brimming with refugee sorrow.
All of this. Over and over. Greeting and decamping. Receiving and rejecting.
While gangsters broil under the annihilating heat of their own machismo. While wronged women shuck their brittle outer shells and drift into daylight, squinting and keening, their wild, exuberant hips buoyant and simmering.
While a grey church mouse on some scored Cornish bluff lifts its tiny trembling snout and samples the bright morning, gifting its sweet-tempered trust to a brand new shining Atlantic day, and helplessly, without agency, almost by accident, a pristine story emerges.