"perception alters not only the past, but landscape itself, and landscape in turn, shapes consciousness"
--Jacquetta Hawkes, A Land
A long road reaches its wispy arm through a desert, extending into the distant mountains.
Clouds gather but dissipate. The wind whips flecks of trash into barbed wire and tosses tumbleweeds across the road.
Here bits of me are scattered: a bone there, an old Toyota pickup burned out in a fire rusting in a dune of sand, a dead dog. Lizards scutter across a dress I once wore to a wedding (not mine), and a snake coils beneath the shade of a pile of lumber--what's left of a home I tried to build with my own hands.
Do we collect or leave ourselves forgotten in the dust?
I keep walking toward the western mountains, objects dropping off into the dirt in my wake. At the end of this road, when everything has fallen away, I will step out of my skin as if stepping out of a nightgown. I will be nothing but air. I will rise on a thermal, I will circle the sky, higher and higher, and then, I will be stars.
