Watch for Ice

The country is burning and I am still on the carousel of this life I have set up. 

I babysit a child that won’t speak to me unless her parents are in the room and I scroll through videos of protests four states away while she eats applesauce. 

I don’t have my own child yet and sometimes I wonder if I will, if I can bring someone into this world, if I can carry the responsibility of letting a daughter exist in this life. 

I drive across the country, towards the West Coast, and I listen to a podcast about Hurricane Katrina, 20 years later 

and it is all the same and it is all worse. 

I am stuck on America. Here is my family and my lover and I endlessly trace back the decades of history that my genealogy has been here. 

Everyone is miserable, always. I wonder if we have all become too landlocked, in our 

mind, body, country. 

I come over a hill on the highway and see a sign reminding me to “WATCH FOR ICE” and when I open my phone, I scroll through videos and posts reminding me of the same thing. 

I spend hours ruminating on a diamond earring I lost somewhere in the eight hour stretch between Rabbit Valley and Lake Powell but when I come up for air, I’m left wondering if it is the grief and the regret of the loss or if it is just a placeholder for the grief for the country I’m living in now. 

Driving over Vail Pass, I think about my whiteness and everything it has afforded me and then I think about my great great great grandparents landing in Canada, cold and damp and 2000 miles across an ocean from home. A journey taken countless times and now, in my lifetime, I watch videos of other immigrants trekking across deserts to come here and other immigrants navigating across seas and I don’t know what my immigrant ancestors were migrating for: 

freedom, food, safety, peace. 

It is all bravery and then it is all hope, unruly and unbelievable. 

In the Virgin River Gorge, I think about when I was eight years old and my family became immigrants in a foreign country and how protected the color of our skin made us because I know now we were never there fully legally and I know now that if I looked different, the story might’ve been different. 

In Blue River, I recite bible verses and stories I memorized when I was six years old. I wonder how even years later, I can pull from the far corners of my mind stories of immigrants in this ancient text, Noah sailing the world for a safe place to land, Mary and Joseph walking for days to find shelter, Ruth and Naomi being welcomed into a new community, Moses leading his family into a foreign country, even Jesus. 

When I was ten years old, I had nightmares about walking through my house and being shot in the back. I don’t know where these fears came from but I can still feel the pinch in my back where I imagine the bullet to be. In college, I tried to camp solo and I always told my mother it was safer in the backcountry than any city and I know now it is only more true. 

On Monday I will return to an office where we pretend that the daily carousel matters and that an email matters and that the next meeting matters and that the fiscal budget of Q1 matters and all too quickly, I fall under the heavy blanket of complacency. 

I come up for air at the end of the day and all the nihilism falls off like droplets of water beading down my skin. I laugh at my own tendency to spin about my emotions in 24 hours. I laugh that I could consider it all meaningless. 

I laugh because joy is the resource I have in surplus.