angela|21|she/her

Laguna, New Mexico – 3:35 PM

We stopped outside a closed Native craft store just as Kii began to slip. It overlooked a nameless town crowned with a great ivory church of adobe. Behind it, red hills fell into a lapis hue that wrapped them up like smoke. Now beyond rage and into some wordless pain, Kii transformed into a great gnarled knot that burned as he screamed in the sage fields. A dog barked with him from a nearby yard, and a woman watched from her window—the unfolding of complete loss spilling from the dark-haired boy.

I grew up under the same roof as an angry man, and some part of me still collapses in their presence. I said nothing to him; I just stood looking at the church, flinching with each cry and pushing back old memories as best I could. Screams get swallowed up out here in the flats. I’m not sure where they go, but I like to believe the desert takes care to see they get passed along to whomever it is that guides us on our long roads.

Owl and I have both, in our own ways, felt the crumbling of a belief around a person—have watched a life planned go up like dry kindling set to flame in a windstorm. There was nothing we could say.

With time, he stepped from the framing that held the landscape, the church, the mountains, and the sage. His hands were cracked and gray from the wind. His eyes were stiff and teary, but the cold kept them from running down his face. We got back on the road and drove in silence. All around us, the day began to close up shop, and in its absence, the last remaining light drew our heads to the sky—a wonderful spilled paint of a sky. Lapis and maroons ran into each other in great streaks that cut for miles as I strained over my shoulder to see them slip behind endless mountains, the color of a satin sea. Invisible threads pulled them swiftly to their source. Brighter and brighter they glowed in passage, back to that golden bed of coals just out of sight.

lost in the waves