We hold these truths to be self-evident...
Hell’s real, says the billboard.
Yeah. Okay, then. Maybe.
But what about the taste of dust in your mouth like deer bones, the stink of Pennsylvania—
green, acrid, tinged with roadkill. Is that real too? Can we keep— that?
They got words for everything nowadays. Ohio— not real, never existed. Florida, a fever dream,
a place that deserves to be laughed at, wet red mouths wide open, fingers pointing, mosquito-
bitten. I say ‘California’ and all they think of are movies and songs, not the dried-out throbbing
sob of a highway, not the creak of heat like leather across a land that stands as a patch of history.
I remember every gas station I’ve been through, every car I’ve thrown up in, every Christmas
where my grandmother’s hair was shorter and my parents spend their time telling my grandfather
to ‘be careful’— a mantra, repeating, becoming a plea. I can write it all down. I can turn back
time, and turn their house back into a pile of sticks. Give them another twenty years and watch
them grow our home from the ground-up all over again.
Childhood— I had that in increments. I missed places like a second skin. I left aching with
unfamiliarity and inward sighs. I learned to be afraid of bridges, afraid of second and third
chances; the girl who was cruel to me, the boy I was half in love with in the second grade.
My vocabulary grew. “Gephyrobia”. Rot in the soul. They laughed as I shrank down in my car
seat, feeling the concrete tremble with the weight of our audacity. I skipped the prom cause I’d
have to drive across the Coronado bridge and I thought the plummet was more important than a
boy with eyes like dark waters, or the classmates I never really knew.
Hell’s real. I wasn’t much for religion. I wanted to skip Sunday school, so I made myself throw
up in the bushes outside of the church. I wanted to avoid a girl who was talking about seeing her
guardian angel at the top of the stairs. My guardian angel is our elf on the shelf. Had to move
him once so my brothers would never know the secret. I felt the magic spooling out of his
threadbare red coat and away from me, puffs of dandelion seeds and frayed wishes that didn’t
come true.
I’m so American. So fifty-states. I wince in Scottish. No ten-lane highways here or gas stations
like a deadened pair of eyes. I hold the hollow remembrance of a softly-loved place deep inside
and I pray this makes me enough of a patriot. Cigarette ash tapped by a new boy, spilling onto
my tongue— grains of sand on a beach in North Carolina. I swam out so far I was neck-and-neck
with the seagulls. Gulp of black water around me. Sharks lurked somewhere, and I wanted to
jump off a bridge.
Eclectic, ambitious. I can write it, though. I can make it easier on all of us. I can give a eulogy, a
really good one. I can say that the past is a torrid thing and point out that euphemisms are usually
just a way of hiding what we truly want. I can add a postscript— escapism takes you right back
to where you started, once age settles onto the cogs of a worn-down clock and the American flag
begins to look a bit patchy, a bit more anxiety-riddled than when you were a little kid.
Fell in love with the flag. Bastard approach to love, that. Tricking you into believing that you can
love a place if you hold it in your mouth long enough, swirl it around and let the words trickle
out, slowly. Confessions in a confession booth. I can write it, though. I can make both of us
believe in it. God
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