Nevada, 2018–2026
Today I crossed from Arizona into Nevada. The last time I stood on Nevada sand was when I was fifteen and had run away from home. It was an important escape at the time. It was the first time I'd really run from what was haunting me. I’d left home before, but this was the first time I left California and the fantasy of the journey with it.
After one final fight with a man much older than myself, I found myself on my own somewhere near Reno, with no money, no friends, no family, no working phone, and the physically repulsive realization that I had succeeded in my naïve little quest.
I was alone. Truly alone.
At the time, I had wanted both disappearance and freedom, or what I mistook for freedom, which was really just exhilaration, danger, a change of clothes, a different guy, a different city, a fake name, a bus ticket, somebody's car, somebody's bed, just anywhere, anywhere else.
I don't remember exactly how things escalated to the place they did. The details have blurred but the image has remained.
Nevada.
July.
The side of a road.
All alone.
Drunk.
High.
Exhausted.
A bruised body.
A bloodied face.
No water.
No food.
No plan.
The costume had finally fallen off.
I sat on the curb and cried.
I felt physically ill, like I was rotting inside.
It was the first time since early childhood that I could admit to myself that I was afraid.
That I was only a child.
That I was hungry and tired.
And painfully alone.
It was the first time that I looked down at my body and saw a little girl, a pitiful, frightened, beat up little girl playing dress-up in the sweltering heat of the desert sun.
When I think back to that afternoon, I can still see her now, a child disguised in ideas she was too young to understand.
Freedom.
Adventure.
Independence.
All those big words children borrow from adults without knowing what they cost.
The world is not especially kind to children like that. People look and see trouble.
Someone must be coming after her, or no one knows she's gone.
Both equally dangerous.
What they don’t always see is fear.
I see it now.
The way she kept looking up the road.
The way she kept looking behind her.
As though someone might be coming.
As though someone might not.
Both equally frightening.
What shocked me the most in the moment was what I was yearning for.
I found myself wanting comfort.
Kindness.
For as long as I could remember, I had met those desires with suspicion and disgust.
But at that moment I wanted another human being.
Not someone I knew.
Not a real person, exactly.
Just the warmth of a hand without an arm.
The hand of someone who knew.
Who knew the sickness in my stomach, the heaviness in my chest, and the voice in my head screaming:
Look what you've done,
stupid little girl.
You get what you deserve.
Someone who was feeling it somewhere at that exact moment, or someone who had known it before.
I didn't want advice or reassurance.
I wanted someone who would stand beside me without saying a word.
Just stand there for a moment and offer the warmth that lives inside the palm of a human hand.
Then disappear again.
Like a vision.
Around that time I started listening to a song called Lonesome Picker by Jim Sullivan.
I listened to it so obsessively that eventually it stopped feeling like a song and started feeling like a friend, or perhaps a prayer.
Every time I listened I could almost see him there.
Just standing in the corner of my life with a soft crooked smile and kind, knowing eyes. Eyes that recognized something in me that he already knew.
The sort of look that says:
I know this road.
I know this feeling.
I know what is chasing you.
And I know you're going to make it anyway.
The sort of eyes that made me feel, as though someone had looked at all the fear and loneliness and foolishness inside me and saw something that deserved another day.
Nodding at me along the way.
Around the same time, I had also begun picking things up.
Stones.
Stickers.
Buttons.
Feathers.
Bent nails.
Cards.
Old candy.
Cheap treasures.
Broken things.
Things other people had lost, dropped, or finished with.
At first I wanted to keep them all.
I loved them fiercely.
I carried them in my pockets like small friends that kept me company. They were objects from places that felt special to me. Places that had held me softly, or harshly, but held me nonetheless.
Objects that seemed to carry a little piece of the people who had touched them before.
But after a while I understood that keeping everything made the objects heavy.
They stopped being alive and became stuff.
A pile.
Junk.
So I began carrying each thing only for a little while.
Whenever I took something from a place, I would leave something from the last place behind.
Trying to keep it from dying in my pocket.
To let it live, let it go.
A traveler might smile.
A child might keep it.
An elderly man might laugh.
A waitress might throw it away.
That was alright too.
The point was simply to say:
I saw this.
I loved it.
It held me and still has a piece of me.
Now it is yours for a while.
I would also always find a scrap of paper.
A napkin.
The back of a receipt.
The corner of a flyer.
Whatever I had.
I would write down the lyrics of Lonesome Picker.
As well as a note of my own.
And the object.
Then I'd put it all in an envelope and write “For anyone. For someone. From Me. To you.” on the outside.
I wanted to give them that friend.
That hope.
That soft knowing smile.
That little nod from the dark.
The note said:
“For a friend I do not know,
Just in case you forgot today, I wanted to tell you that there are lonely people everywhere. It’s not just you. If you are trying to fall asleep somewhere scary tonight, know that I am too and so in a way, you and I are together.
If you liked this gift, find something near you that feels friendly, take it and hold it tight in your hand, close your eyes and feel its memories. Put it in your pocket and keep it warm so it can be your friend for a little while. Then, when the time comes to say goodbye, hold it one last time and say thank you. I love you too. And when you are truly ready, let it go. Then walk away. It belongs to someone else now.
From,
Me”
This was how I built my own little family before I knew how to belong to one.
The things I found carried pieces of people I would never meet, and the things I left carried pieces of me toward people who would never know my name.
Somewhere in that exchange, I began to feel the world softening.
Not becoming safe, exactly. It was never safe. But becoming human.
There was an old saxophone man I used to sit with on the curb on some mornings.
Sometimes we shared lemon pound cake and coffee if one of us had some money.
We didn’t always speak.
Mostly we watched the roads wake up.
He never slept either, just like me, so we were both always up to see the first sliver of sun.
On better mornings he would play and I would dance in the empty street, rich for a few minutes in the quietness of the blue-grey morning light.
Elsewhere, there was a woman who gave me hot chocolate in the evenings.
Sometimes I helped her clean after closing and we listened to music and danced.
There were Lunchables, Smarties, Pixy Stix hanging out of my pocket, coffee, cigarettes, and whatever they were calling cocaine that week.
A balanced American diet, apparently, before my brain discovered that nuts might have been the wiser choice.
In some sense I was terrified of loneliness, but I had also been engineering it with obsessional care.
I wanted to vanish and be found at the same time.
I accomplished the goal.
I was lonely, very lonely and that realization freed me. It allowed me to give myself to the world enough to listen to the towhee, the mockingbird, and the chickadee in the morning time with such familial admiration.
After about a month, I fell completely in love with the world.
With nights and mornings.
With the blue-grey hours before the sun arrives.
With the sounds of people shuffling into their days.
Construction workers.
Sleepy diner women.
Truck drivers.
Street sleepers.
The first coffee cups.
The first birds.
The first doors unlocking.
The graveyard shifters.
And the early risers.
And the journey on and on.
“The broken heel of the boot, means a job well done.” said an old friend when it happened to me.
One morning I sat alone in a diner drinking coffee when I am the Highway by Chris Cornell started to play (the live version at Queen Elizabeth's Theatre).
The song became my new "Lonesome Picker."
I listened to it obsessively.
At the time, I think it represented something I couldn't yet explain. I had run away from a home that didn't feel like home, but I had done it by finding someone else and hoping they would take me somewhere better.
Escape.
But still dependence.
But now I had begun creating a little life of my own.
Through mornings.
Through Nevada’s dusty roads.
Through shitty coffee and cheap motel rooms and the strange tenderness of people whose names I never learned.
And of course, the many objects left behind.
Years later, when I became ill and laid in bed staring at the ceiling I listened to I am the Highway once again.
It absolutely destroyed me.
As I lay there so numb I couldn't cry, I watched myself hover above remembering the little girl who had wandered through Nevada with holes in her shoes and a broken heart.
Convinced I had been built to move and was now being asked to rot, I silently screamed as my world grew smaller and smaller until I could see no further than the end of the bed.
I wanted to jump up and run.
I wanted out of the room, out of the window, out into the night.
I wanted the desolate place where I had once cried into the dust because at least there I had been alive enough to fall apart.
And now here I am once again.
Nevada sand.
The wind borrowed, never owned.
You appear again like a temporary childhood bedroom I had long forgotten.
A dark room with nothing in it but a bed and walls covered in stories written in invisible ink.
Mine and no one's.
Unwritten, but full.
A room made of all the children I had been without knowing which one survived.
Now I stand here.
Seeing her.
The child running wild and free through empty desert roads until the early hours of the morning simply because she learned that she could.
The bruised child crying beside the highway in a ripped up black dress.
And my feet beneath me now.
Older.
A bit tired.
Slightly arthritic
But moving again.
And when I crossed the state line, I felt as if I had returned home.
Home in the sense of origin.
The frightening place where one of my lives began.
The place where the glitter fell off.
Where freedom first revealed its teeth.
I had not understood that choice had a cost.
Sitting there at fifteen, bruised and hungry and ashamed, I felt something settle beside me.
It cackled as it scolded me:
Congratulations darling girl.
You got what you wanted.
You're free.
And now you want to be small?
Well it’s a bit late for that now, isn’t it?
Have you no one left to fool?
Or are you simply too tired to keep up?
It’s a cruel thing to say to a child, even when she has been cruel to herself.
Still, something opened after that.
Once I was no longer too cool to collapse, I found, underneath the fear, the world.
The actual world.
Birds.
Pavement.
Sky.
Morning light.
Old men with saxophones.
Many a dingy motel room.
And the clerks too.
The heart of a city beating somewhere beneath the trash and traffic.
I found this on my own.
I did not need to follow someone to it.
I found silence, then movement, then a lonely kind of happiness.
For years I heard I Am the Highway as a song about leaving.
My father used to play it long before I heard it in the diner.
But eventually I began to hear it as a song about being.
Not a means to stay or go.
But as the landscape itself.
The road.
The distance.
The present.
So off I go to the next motel somewhere ahead with its neon light, its dusty old curtains, its kind and temporary eyes and weary smile.
Today I reached into my pocket and took out a stone I had carried from Arizona.
I held it for a moment.
Privately.
Foolishly.
Sincerely.
Then I put it in an envelope with a note and hand written Lonesome Picker lyrics and left it nailed to a telephone pole somewhere near the border.
“For anyone.
For someone.
For you.
From me.”