Neoteric.

I am driving down Blood Road–that is its name, but in another language, of course. And of course the locals mispronounce it, because it’s exotic, because no one around here speaks that language, not even the immigrants, who are in fact not immigrants but Americans who are not white.

In any case.

I am driving down Blood Road, and the farther I drove, the further the road exemplified its name: asphalt to gravel to red-red dirt, a dirt scarred with tire tracks from someone there long before I ever dreamt of living here.
I find a wooden bridge and I park on it. I do not care that it could cave in at any moment, allowing my car to crash into the ravine only a few feet below and get bogged down into the red mud. I do not care that a sign nearby warns of flood plains. I do not care that Blood Road will end soon. I do not.

I sit here, and I photograph, and the light is what a friend will later call “a miracle.” It is a miracle, because this light is what many days drags me out of bed, makes me bathe, makes me brush my teeth and eat breakfast and dress myself in clothing that is acceptable to the public. This light and these flood plains are what stop the aching in my body, the yearning to be elsewhere, the feeling of mistake that lodges itself next to my kidney and lies there: a dormant thorn in my side. Miraculous.

A miracle is the youth in Quinn’s eyes, and how they often flicker like a five-year-old’s when he is simply listening to nothing at all. He holds me at night until his sleep won’t let him any longer, and then he turns on his side and reaches his arm back behind him, to find my hand, to touch me somehow.

And then we fall asleep.
And we wake up again.

He kisses me as he leaves for work, and I wait no longer than a half-hour to muster up the strength I will need to face yesterday. Yesterday and today and tomorrow are identical triplets.

I manage to manage, and I manage to sometimes take my car out to the middle of nowhere and breathe clean air. There is a cemetery on this road, a small one, next to a white cottage. I watch a man mow the cemetery lawn, delicately weaving ’round detail-less headstones: Marken. Smith. Johnson. Brown. And maybe there is a first name; maybe not. I don’t notice. If only last names are prominent, I assume all the dead are men.

It is not a mistake to sit on this wooden bridge, for maybe an hour, my car blocking the road–not that it matters, because no one has driven this far down the road for maybe a year. It is not a mistake. It is not a mistake to feel vulnerable, and small, and insignificant. It is not a mistake because it reminds us that we are human.