If I try to drive from here in Maine to New Mexico, it’s 2,400 miles. 

From here to Oregon, 800 miles from my current residence to my relatives in NJ, then another 3,000 miles after that. 

A brisk 8 day drive that meanders through mountains, forests, corn fields, dry, flat, empty plains, more mountains, and then a temperate rain forest in Oregon.

The land has some seriously creepy stuff, even just right outside our doors. 

There is often barking sounds on the other side of our back door. 

At 3 am. 

When no one would let their dog out. 

It’s a consensus not to even look out the fucking windows at night. 

Especially during the winter months. 

Nothing chills your heart faster than sitting in front of a window and hearing footsteps breaking through the snow behind you, only to look and not see anything. 

I live in a tiny town whose distance from larger cities ranges from 30 miles, to 70 miles. What is in between?

Giant stretches of forests, swamps, pockets of civilization, more trees, farms, wildlife, and winding roads. All of which gives the feeling of nature merely tolerating humans, and that we are one frost heave away from our houses being destroyed, one stretch of undergrowth away from our roads being pulled back into the earth.

And almost every night, we have to convince ourselves that the popping, echoing gunshot sounds are really fireworks, because we have no idea what they might be shooting at.

pretending we don’t know we’re sitting on top of limestone caverns filled with icy water

meanwhile in maryland the summer is killing-hot, the air made of wet flannel, white heat-haze glazing the horizon, and the endless cicadas shrilling in every single tree sound like a vast engine revving and falling off, revving and falling off, slow and repeated, and everything is so green, lush poison-green, and you could swear you can hear the things growing, hear the fibrous creak and swell of tendrils flexing

walt disney, that famous madman, walked into florida and built a multibillion dollar entertainment empire in a swamp in the middle of florida. the swamp did not forget. the swamp is eating the old and broken things in the heart of glittering, new disney world. the swamp is all. if you hear low, piglike snorting from the swamp, you’re told it’s gators in mating season, even if it isn’t mating season. 

(you’re better off believing it’s the gators.)

the humidity. the heat. the humidity. tourists drop by the scores, heatstroke in July and August. you wear your sweat like a second skin and every breath is wet. florida would never have been settled if not for the timely invention of the air conditioner. that is a true story. once we grew oranges, strawberries, produce. we shipped them all over the states. before the freezes of the 1980s. before the blue tabebuia inexplicably all died. (not the yellow or the pink, only the blue, the rarest and most beautiful.) now we export only tourist memories. 

the ocean is nigh unreachable in part of the state, an unfamiliar and ugly wetland where they used to launch men into the stars. take a road. drive east. go over a bridge. drive east. go over another bridge. drive east. drive into a wilderness of scrub and palmettos until you finally hear the ocean, an hour later than you thought it would take. the barrier islands go layer upon layer into the waters of the Atlantic, and you have to wonder why so many strips of land. is the land trying to prevent people on the sea from coming to the shore–or is it trying to keep the people on the shore from ever reaching the ocean? 

i hear popping shots at night, in the woods outside my home. in ten years i have never discovered what the sound is. 

Veins everywhere?

gorgeous~

Skin patches? Birthmarks?

hella rad~

Scars? Stretch marks?

beautiful~

Freckles? Moles? Acne scars?

heckie yeah~

Large? Curvy?

lovely~

Small? Thin?

charming~

Missing a few pieces?

handsome as ever~

Feel like you just look weird?