sonora

Find someone who loves you more than you love them.

When you are rich, your past disappears. You get everything you want when you want it . . . Everyone wants to know you. Everyone wants to be your friend.

We both knew no bounds to our escapism.

I lit a cigarette. 'Go ahead, take a smoke,' my father said. 'It won't kill you. Only sadness will.

One day you look in the mirror and you see your parents' sadness in your eyes.

I have forgiven Sonora. I have forgiven New York, forsaken the recursion of history. But I do not yet know how to forgive myself.

I remember wanting to flee her, and being unable to flee her, so in need of her and half hating her for it, and I still am nauseous from it.

With this man I will never want. With this man I will never be sad again.

I understood it in my bones. Longing made the music bigger.

It was long past midnight. Laura's music played on. It was composed in the language of stars, tinkling in a crystal pool suspended from constellations. She used chimes now and then, the chimes that characterized every patio in Arizona, the piano, the trees combed by wind. A prelude to a storm. It was like discovering the secret room in a dream of your house that holds all the magic. It was music I wished I lived inside. Around us, cactus, hills filled with jumping cholla, the heat of August like another animal heaving over us.

I look out at the reservation, still and glittering with casinos, and think of all the death dried up and buried in its dirt.

I faded out. I was for a moment my father tapping on his cigarette, the way he holds it, crushing it flat. I was my mother at the sink, staring into the desert from the kitchen window, dishes in hand. I was in all the beds I'd ever slept in. Me sinking into the sheets, letting my thoughts fall down. I was running alongside the ocean, Laura splashing me with water. I was dancing to a melody I did not recognize, spinning wild and lovely into exalted leaps. I was no one again. I was someone with no name, no past. My face resumed the freshness of birth, the brightness was again in my eyes, the brightness only children own before life begins its wreckage.

There is the body of history ever atop of us, and the body of memory rustling within us. Between the two, we are crushed.

I first understood why Christians prayed for a savior in the form of a beautiful man. He had absolved me of the blue-streaked blond.

I knew beauty for me would only ever be derived from loss.

It was all so foolish then, as it is now, as it is forever. To be in love with beauty. To try to hold on to it.

With the years, we become even more ourselves and call this change.

When I returned to New York, it had already changed. I always wished things could just remain.