Consider this a moving towards

A refusal to forget. A willingness to remember.

I’m imaging some time in the near future where I will write about the bounty and beauty of our first season tending the ancient apple orchard. All that we learned. The way it reconnected me to the land of the living after an unexpected death of others and myself. I imagine sitting down over my holiday break, the first one in two years, and remembering high summer. But something else wants to come through first. I am still haunted and words still need to be found.

Recently I archived a lot of writing here— anything that mentioned the violence my girlfriend and I experienced the summer of 2024. I’m just going to say it: It was in response to getting subpoenaed to give statements in the trial for the murders we witnessed. I am tired of the words getting stuck in my throat, undigested in my belly. This is what’s happening, this is where we are in the story. This is how the year is closing. The subpoena hit the fear place in me, the worry that I am not equipped to show up to this moment. I am so tired. And heartbroken. I am also not naive— I know there is no justice to be had in the injustice system. Everyone loses. And we have no choice. And no control.

I took those posts down and decided I just wouldn’t write about “it” until we were on the other side but the timing of “the other side” keeps moving, extending. Taking those posts down sent my writing into a deeper hole of shame and for my own sanity, I need to pull them back out (soon).

It’s been so hard to access writing this year after we escaped a place that was home, after we escaped a neighbor and his guns, after we escaped a landlord and his violent neglect that almost killed us. I am tired in a kind of wordless way— there has been no break, no respite, no relief, no “vacation” since before the summer of 2024. Even the holidays last year breezed past in a frantic worry of trying to not die in a house fire due to wildly dangerous electrical wiring and lies of our landlord, of boxes that needed to be filled with our belongings. I was afraid to carry these boxes from the office to the car— worried someone would see us leaving. I was afraid every moment of everyday.

But today I joined my dear friend Seema’s virtual writing workshop and I did in fact write something and I do want and need to share it. I’ve long relied on writing to help expunge my body of the remnants of memory, of violence, to help make sense of the echos, the chaos, to witness and be witnessed. So taking a risk today and sharing new, baby writing. My girlfriend and I will need to give testimony at the trial, sometime next year. There is no avoiding the truth of what happened and the way it still radiates through the bodies of those of us who saw, who heard, who know.

It’s not very “happy holiday season” but well, welcome to me. And thank you for being here, for receiving these words, most especially when I struggle to be here myself.

+++

When a man bent down on one knee, rifle cocked and pointed at a Prairie Dog, I was shocked, screamed from the hill “PUT THAT GUN DOWN. GET THE FUCK OUT OF HERE.” with my margarita in hand. A keystone species, how dare he! A friend was in town and we were trying to relax. This was before I mostly had to stop drinking because of the way long covid has rooted in my body, making alcohol even more clearly the poison that it in fact is. It was the first time I saw someone lift a gun in front of me. And it was not the last.

A couple years later there was again a gun lifted by a man, this time pointed at a girl, a child. She drops. Then pointed at his brother, an elder. He drops too but I only see the girl because by the time he is shot, I am crawling on my hands and knees with my girlfriend to the sunroom door. The sun is setting but the light is still on the hill beyond the field.

Sound ricochets between gun and mountain and body. The shriek from a child’s throat. The 6 bullets piercing air and two bodies. The silence that came after.

There is no life left; the man jumps in his red truck and drives to the market in town to turn himself in because he does not have a landline or internet. In he did go, for two weeks, and then after we lived next to him for 6 months while he chopped and organized wood for the winter’s stove. While having to pass him on the single lane dirt road to and from the post office, my face wet with tears after each passing.

I had memorized the way the conifers lined the side of the hill just beyond the field where the cows would run before they started dying from neglect. I could sit and stare forever, I did sit and stare forever, day after day after year. I would know that field and that hill anywhere.

In New Mexico you can carry your gun on your hip for all to see. Or in your car under the passenger seat just in case. You can keep them stored in cement pipes strewn about the yard or buried deep in earth or under the mattress or somewhere close to the front door. “No permit needed for unloaded firearms or in vehicles” and even if a judge releases you after shooting two people and says no drugs no guns, you can still keep one hidden. Somewhere. Just in case.

On warm summer days Rose and I would take the meandering desert path from behind the rental house through the junipers and then the sagebrush and down into the ravine, ponderosas towering on either side, butterscotch and vanilla wafting through the air. On our way down the Prairie Dogs would pop up out of their holes, sound the alarm, a warning for every other tiny body moving both underground and above.

Warning warning warning they seemed to shriek.

Threat threat threat they seemed to worry.

I liked their shrieks, felt seen and known.

Were they trying to warn us? Demand we listen? Break us out of our pastoral fantasy of calm and peace and safety? I had never known safety at home before. I was desperate for it. I kept the fantasy in my grip, knuckles turning red with white at the center. I could not hear the warnings. I refused them. I insisted on staying, not moving, as the landlord raised the rent and demands year after year, as the house continued to collapse around us, as the the landlord got more abusive and threatening by the day. I couldn’t listen until I did. We couldn’t leave until we could.

Beyond the badlands, where my view now is, are the mountains familiar, peaks currently covered in fresh snow as we walk the dogs, sand beneath our feet. I am looking for familiarity in landscape, for the ways I’m able to exhale more deeply when I can see what I remember, what I know.

The familiar mountain peaks are now a distant memory, most days. No more can I walk outside, turn my gaze to the left, and see the Jicarita. There is heartache in this new normal, a loss I’m still trying to write and name.

After staring at the mountain I would then let my gaze settle on the field in front of me. Eaten and stomped down by neglected cattle, desert weeds had sprung up with a fierce claiming. A shock of purple thistle was visible from afar. A field of ox-eye daisy smiling back. “Mine” they seemed to say. And yet it was mine too, something I had settled into a kind of knowing with— that view, that field, that sunset.

Consider this a moving towards. A refusal to forget. A willingness to remember.

Is everything and every one in the desert—the thorns on Prickly Pear, the murderous, rushing stream in the arroyo after a storm, the lightening that hits earth, starts fires, a gunshot blowing through a body—a warning? Demanding us to keep our eyes and ears open, go slow? Pay attention? Be careful? Be warned.

The first time I saw a man with a gun, pointed, I became the Prairie Dog protector. If I could save just one life, well, then that would be one life saved. One more hole that could be burrowed aerating the packed earth, one more shadow to notice as the sun slowly sets over the sparse landscape, one way to remember when spring returns because the talking returns, determined claws reaching. But really, I can’t say I was able to save anyone. I was barely able to save myself.

The shriek, the bullets, the silence, after.

The Black Cohosh that, after growing and dying back for a few years, bloomed for the first time in summer 2024.