Neoteric.

At exactly 11:22 AM, I drove away. I started to drive away before that, but my dashboard gently reminded me that a door–one of the five on my car–was open. At 11:22, though, everything was packed up tight, the doors were closed, the gas tank was full, and I was driving toward the freeway.

My brother had turned my car into a life-sized jigsaw puzzle. A disassembled chair filled the holes between boxes, and my tool bag was wedged between a nightstand and a mannequin. My passenger was a vacuum cleaner-and-suitcase chimera, and my purse sat all prim and proper and Southern-belle-like on the edge of my gear shift. I had enough room for a drink and several granola bars and me. We were legos with kinetic energy.

West Virginia and Pennsylvania are siamese twins. The same, joined at Appalachia. And really, the only thing different about Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois is how you feel driving through them. Throughout Ohio you are tentative, a stranger to your car, cautious and easily offput. The surroundings are familiar, though: each state route is carved in your bones like an artery. Ohio is a blind date at home. Ohio is inviting a stranger into your living room.

Indiana is more comfortable: RV billboards, desloation, and corn. The car handles better out here, after four hours of practice, after spewing out cleaner air and afternoon light. Indianapolis grows suddenly–an illusion, a child in fast-forward–and disappears just as quickly. And Illinois is the empty nest: quiet, grown into itself, dignified, aching for a tantrum or a riot. Illinois paints you shades of yellow and green.

All of this is true if you equals me.

Missouri cradles the face of the Ozarks like a spiteful lover. The Mississippi River is a foul-smelling moment that the rest of the state nonchalantly overlooks, pretends not to notice, and then it’s gone. The rest of the time, the state civilly recognizes the mountains underneath its skirt; it nods, offers a quick cheek-kiss, and then carries on its farming and greenness. The southwestern corner of Missouri, however, turns flat, and the trees become midgets, and Oklahoma looms on the horizon like a folktale at a bonfire. Joplin’s radio stations fade, and I-44 becomes the Will Rogers Turnpike, and the trees are even smaller now. The land flattens onto itself, sucks itself inward, turns orange. The air smells sweet.

An Indian man in a pick-up truck passes me, country music blasting over wind, grey hair flying like ribbons and leaves and wheat. His license plate is from the Muskogee Nation. I am an intruder.

Our new town lies tens of dozens of miles west of Tulsa. Tulsa is a suburb, a sprawling suburb without the sub-, and all the buildings are fat and close to the ground. Tulsa spreads until the highway changes, and then there is nothing. Trash litters the sides of the Cimarron Turnpike, and there is nothing beyond that. The land is green, and sometimes slopes, but otherwise holds the sun at a perfect 90 degree angle.

I slowly become concrete and red dirt.

The red dirt in Oklahoma becomes a part of you without your even knowing it. You don’t let it; it simply is. You find it on your car, in your clothes, in your nostrils when you try to breathe the dry air. You are part Texas, part Kansas, part Colorado, part New Mexico, and not fully any of them. You are Oklahoma, whether you want to be or not. People here drive different, talk different, smile differently, and it is warm and not inviting. The weather is 110 degrees and still people walk, tight jeans and friendliness and a chip on their shoulder, all adding to the weight they lug around.

The dust. It’s everywhere.

Outside the front door of our apartment live two toads, and we have named them. We look for them nightly–Xerxes and Xerxas, we call them–until one night, they don’t appear. A large frog, triple the size of Xerxes, stares at our front door and tries to eat the random wad of paper that has fallen onto our doorstep from the sky. He is the size of my hand and it takes two days for me to feel truly comfortable around him.

I cannot find work in this town; it’s as if the frog has eaten it, along with everything else I leave outside of myself. I am over-educated and under-qualified to be a factory laborer, CDL driver, tractor parts salesgirl. I am over-educated and over-qualified to be a receptionist, a secretary, a food service aide, a customer service rep. If given a moment’s meeting with a boss or two or five, I would explain that I am desperate to leave my apartment, desperate to make any money at all, and I promise that if I am hired, I will be the best damn receptionist this state has seen. You can say things like that around here–”damn.” People are religious here but they’re not pious.

Piety is how my boyfriend cups my head when I cry, and tells me that I cannot let this place defeat me. A more beautiful defeater you couldn’t find, though, and if I must give into any place, I suppose this one is the best. “You will find work,” he says, and he kisses me, and he dabs his eyes and I am heartbroken on the bathroom floor. I weep at his feet and I miss home, as if he is not my home. He drives me to Oklahoma City, a place where you can buy vegan food at a reasonable price, and he runs to a discount store to purchase me a cooler. He fills it with ice so that I can fill my grocery cart with veggie dogs and soy milk and dairy-free pudding and cheeseless pizza and tofu and seitan. I tear up, nearly hug the cashier, and I go home and kiss Quinn like there is nothing else to do, no boxes to unpack, no curtains to hang.

This happened after my near panic attack in the local grocery store, where I could not find gnocchi, or bread without milk in it, or vegetarian meat, or anything worth eating at all. Even the scallions were bruised.

I stop into a local business and I give them my resume. I receive a call back later in the evening, and a request for an interview the following day. I nearly stammer in my excitement, and then I moan to Quinn that I am so silly, so silly to have stumbled over the words that were dying to escape from my lips. I miss talking to other people. I love him, but I miss talking to people who are not me and who are not him and who are not us. A job interview and a friend are one and the same nowadays. He tells me that I am excited, and it’s a phone call, and not to worry. I drink alcohol and eat egg rolls purchased in Oklahoma City, and I feel that I can make it a year here. I can surely make it a year here.

My spirit is okay.

I feel at home on the red dirt roads now. I feel comfortable going 70, 80 miles per hour in my car on roads that don’t have names. They don’t have names for anyone, not just me. This is God’s country, and not just because it lies in the clasp of the Bible Belt. This is where people go to start a new life and end an old one. This is what I tell myself each morning: I am in the throes of an ecstatic place, a place of rapture and rebirth. I tell myself that I can love this place, if only I can feel a part and not apart of it.

All of this is true when I equals me.