Most times, I guess.

I spend most days at some point along a circle: 4:30 a.m., wake up, take medicine, doze on the couch, eyes open at about ten after five, breakfast, shower, hair, dress, kiss Quinn goodbye, go to work, work, lunch, home, dinner, read, sleep, 4:30 a.m.

Wake up.

Quinn and I went to my old home–my parents’ home–for Thanksgiving. It involved a drowsy early-morning journey to the Oklahoma City airport, a flight to St. Louis, another flight to Cleveland, and three days of familial joy. I kept myself from weeping on the way back to Oklahoma by focusing on our puddle-jumping plane and the mycobacterial-sounding whoop of a man several rows behind us.

Oklahoma has been hammered with icicles, ice in elaborate patterns on the asphalt, ice followed by snow. The snow is thin enough to allow the grass to pop up through, visible from our front window, and paltry enough to prohibit any snowman-making or sled-riding. Several hundred thousands–maybe a million?–people were without electricity, and in a land where most people have their own well water directed into their homes with powered pumps, the blackout dragged along a drought, too.

A nineteen-year-old pregnant woman died of carbon monoxide exposure by placing a generator too close to her drafty windows.

I have sat in my office chair, every Monday through Friday, wrapped in a cardigan, watching the lights sometimes flicker. I am warm. I may be uninspired and homesick, but I am with power, with water, and warm.

When things fall into place:

I am working, full-time, for slightly more money than I made as a graduate student, but much more money than I made as an unemployed post-graduate. I can sustain a decent lifestyle in Middle America on this paycheck, and really, what’s most important is that the work is relatively interesting and I respect my boss. She’s an attorney who dabbles in pilates and guitar lessons, understands my desire to buy some decent produce in this part of the country, and commiserates with me regarding the sometimes-here, sometimes-not feeling of despair I’m slowly learning to live with–grow into–while I nestle into the cold metal of America’s Bible Belt buckle.”You should take up a new hobby,” my boss tells me, right after I ask her for more work (I apparently catch on to the legal-ese of estate planning quite quickly). “Maybe horseback riding?”

I cringe. Visibly. The thought pains me.

“Okay,” she backtracks, “I mean, maybe, um, what about glass blowing? They offer classes at the Art Center.”

“Now that would be cool,” I murmur, somewhat interested, but not really.

“Or maybe,” she continues, “you need to volunteer. Maybe you need to feel like you’re doing something meaningful.”

I shrug. “I guess so.”

She sighs. “Okay, my dear,” she finally offers, “let me give you a real Halloween scare. When my husband carted me out here 14 years ago? He said we’d be here for no longer than 5 years.”

Three children and a law firm later, they are still here. My boss likes it now, though she often jokes about Okie names, Okie speech, Okie reasoning, and Okies, period.

And these are things that do exist: Okie-ness is a fact. And Oklahomans perhaps are plagued with the deepest inferiority complex of all the states’ citizens, being known for earth that swirls ’round the sky and births John Steinbeck novels. I, however, fall into a fascination with that dry earth, and how hypocritically it floods over, red blood mud, when it rains.

Well, it doesn’t rain here. It always storms.

I also enjoy the bandit history of the state, how at a youthful 100 years old, Oklahoma is just starting to shed its “Bandits, Cowboys and Indians” image. A man I met recently worded it this way: “The Indians who survived the Trail got some shit land that no one wanted. Then people realized that there was something to be had in Oklahoma, and whites came out and stole the Indians’ land again. People came out for free land and freedom from the rule of the law. Sometimes they bothered with due process.” It’s not surprising that Jesse James has a history in Oklahoma, and yet they always film those Wild West movies in places like New Mexico. I want to be a little sharp shooter with a revolver in my garter, except I’m about 120 years too late. I suppose all fashion comes back around.

In the meantime, I work and wonder what I’ll be when I grow up. Jesse James, a bartop dancer, a land irrigator, or anything that doesn’t require me to wake up at 5:00 AM.

When I walk past the den, Quinn is lipsynching to a song, closing his eyes and acting like a rock star.  The female singer’s intensity puts Quinn’s living room rocker act to shame.  When he notices that I am watching him, he suddenly gets tired.  He stops, sighs, and says, “Ah, my daydream wife.”

The real singer, he means.  I’d only heard a few seconds of the song.  “Who’re you listening to, again?” I ask.

“Bikini Kill.”

I am living with a man who harbors fantasies about riot grrrls.  It could not get any better unless I became a lesbian. * image from http://zinewiki.com/index.php?title=Image:Khanna.jpg

My mother is the youngest of seven children.  Two of her siblings have no children.  The other four have eight children among them.  Of those eight children, only one does not have kids.  Another has only one child, but will eventually have more.  The remaining six have at least two children each.  Two of those children have children of their own.  This means that I have cousins, first cousins once removed, and first cousins twice removed on my mother’s side.  It also means that some of my first cousins’ children have second cousins.  It means that within my lifetime, my first cousins once and twice removed will have second, third, and maybe fourth cousins, if I am blessed with old age.

My mother became an aunt at the age of four.  It would all be impossible otherwise.

My maternal grandmother had no siblings.  Well, she grew up thinking her mother and her aunt were her siblings.  My great-grandmother was only a child when my grandmother was born in 1920, and at that time, a teenage pregnancy was an embarassment.  My grandmother learned the truth of her lineage when she was fifteen, became pregnant, got married, and became her own adult.

My maternal grandfather had at least one sibling.  I know little about him and nothing about his family.  I vaguely remember meeting his sister when I was maybe three, maybe four.

My father is the oldest of three children.  On his side, I have seven cousins and one first cousin once removed.  My paternal grandfather was one of maybe seven, maybe eight children; I can’t keep track of all my great uncles and aunts.  All of his siblings have several children and grandchildren, and some have great-grandchildren.  My paternal grandmother is one of five children.  One of her brothers died young; the others all have had children and grandchildren.  I have cousins, second cousins, first cousins twice removed, great aunts and uncles that I could not identify in a crowd.  Amazingly, they know all about my life.

When I lived in Pennsylvania, I lived in the house in which I was conceived.  I tried not to dwell upon it.  Twenty-five years before I moved in, my parents rented the downstairs apartment.  My mother became pregnant; my parents got married.  At some point during my mother’s pregnancy, she watched my father build the wall in the backyard.  It began raining, and my 22-year-old father pushed boulders uphill on his own.  My mother cried for him to stop.  He didn’t.  The wall is still there.  It’s held up well.  My father was strong then, and younger than me.  My father, back then, was younger than my little brother is now.

When I lived in Pennsylvania, I went to the local grocery store to buy some things.  I was dressed haphazardly, makeup-less, disheveled a bit, and so I was surprised when I was embraced and kissed upon my exit.  My Great Aunt Maggie, standing outside and talking with her neighbor, had seen me exiting before I even knew I was leaving the building.

“How are you, my darling?” she asked, and I returned her embrace.  I was no longer shaken.

I was at home.

I wonder how many people with my same surname will one day show no recognition of my existence.  I want them to feel at home somewhere, too.

There are nights like this one when I drink too much wine and I wonder what I will end up doing with my life.

There are options that are obvious to other people, options that are not so obvious to me.

An old internet buddy who goes by the name of Redsaid wrote that if she were me–and she is not me–she would be making billions of dollars off of her prose. I find this very flattering and very unrealistic. She is living in South Africa, a white, red-haired girl who speaks several languages and does not see race, and I think, “If I were you, I would really be living.”

It would make sense to make my living from writing, if only I knew how.

I would be a decent academic if I threw myself into it, much like I would be a decent podiatrist, physicist, or agricultural economist if I threw myself into those fields. I am a smart woman, a very smart woman, and I can write, and write well. The thought of living somewhere I hate in order to get a job, and the thought of being detached from my work (and working just to continue working) makes academia feel like a mountain of bile in my throat.

I am twenty-seven and I am directionless, and it’s always after midnight when I think about that. Tonight, I will have trouble sleeping yet again.

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.

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.

Lock, stock, and smoking drill bit.

There are so many stories to be told: stories of how Quinn, upon waking up, pulls me toward him and curls me into him, and there we lie, parts of each other and only partly awake; stories of how the red dirt here gets into your bones, and suddenly it doesn’t seem so hot anymore; stories of how driving over 1,000 miles makes you feel like you can do anything, without sleep, with little food, but with loud music and open windows.

I will write these stories. I will write them the moment I finish hanging curtains and unpacking boxes.

I will write a proper blog entry when life itself becomes proper again. That’s a joke–proper? Life? Ha! I will write a proper blog entry when life becomes a little less hectic, and when I no longer live in a corrugated cardboard Hooverville.