She left as soon as the sky turned pink the evening of her eighteenth birthday. She didn’t pack a thing, just grabbed a notebook, a pen, and the cash she’d saved up from teaching local kids piano — a wad of twenty dollar bills that totaled $1600 — and walked out the door in her best hiking boots. After walking five miles she decided it was safe enough to see if anyone could pick her up and drive her west. In big block letters she wrote “NEED A RIDE WEST. WILL PAY!” It took less than 15 minutes before the truck pulled over and her mom hopped out screaming, feet stomping up a storm of dust around her.
A sunny noonish stroll after a brunch where you ate too much. Too happy and full and warm and lazy to stop and pose for a photograph, but someone takes one anyway. You only have the energy to turn and squint because all you really want to do is get home, change your pants, and get in bed for a nap with your person. It’s really not long before you both stumble into a sodium-induced slumber. Inside the house, everything is quiet and even in your dreams, your body is heavy and slow. But the world outside your house carries on, and when you wake up the sky is dark orange and sleepy too. A few weeks later, your mom will see the photograph of you from that day and tell you that you both look ugly.
Her hologram felt more real this morning than ever before. Maybe it was because I’d barely slept last night, having gotten back from the bar at 4 AM. I could still taste the whiskey in the back of my mouth when I turned on the hologram machine, like I do every day before eating breakfast. She appeared and smiled at me as usual, said good morning to me as usual. But when she moved toward me and touched my arm, it felt more human than laser and light.
When I was eight years old, I heard the story about my great grandfather and his love of trees. My mother told me the story while we were taking a walk in what I called “the fake woods”—the small grove of trees that surrounded the park across the street from our house. She told me that when he was young, about the same age as me, he would climb every tree in his village, and even wander out into the woods to climb those trees, to his parent’s distress. He’d sit in the branches for hours, watching the squirrels circling up the tree’s trunk and befriending the birds that took perch next to him. It was in the branches that he met the crow that would not give up. Treating the bird like any other, my great grandfather held out a hand with a few sesame seeds he had stolen from his mother’s pantry. From the moment the crow ate those seeds from his hands, she refused to let him out of her sight, until the day she died.
This is the dinosaur living beneath the house. The dinosaur has a long neck, four legs, and four feet. He uses his feet to walk, run, and sometimes dance. His dancing feet can be heard in the night, they tap like the sound of rain. When the dinosaur is happy, rays of electricity shoot from his body and fuel the lights and all the other electronics in the house. The dinosaur likes music, jazz and top 20 hits in particular. Whenever it hears Party Rock Anthem by LMFAO or a good Louis Armstrong song, the dinosaur dances. The dinosaur, however, dislikes rock and country. If the dinosaur hears too much of this music, none of the lights or electronics will work in the house.
Do you remember the days when we went to the beach, just because it was warm and we had nothing else to do? It was before we started working, before we started thinking in terms of hours and dollars. You would watch the way the wind moved the sand, and count the birds that flitted by looking for their lunch. It didn’t matter how much time passed. Our minds were empty enough so that we found mysteries in the lines of our own hands. Those were the days when we stared into the ocean, thinking that the world was endless and impossible and free.
