As I write, coyotes are howling from just outside the trailer door. Boon is foofing his warning bark at me, and Annie is pacing the hallway. My fingers are frozen from walking the dogs just a minute ago, our paths almost crossing with their yipping cousins.
A part of me wants to stand outside on the stoop and echo their calls back to them into the night and across the flats until my voice reaches the 11,300-foot peak above me – giving my mournful and wild cry as I ready to leave this place, my tiny, lonely abode in the beautiful desert. In a few weeks, I will trade its blue vistas, orange sunsets, moonrises, friendly cottonwoods, jagged, stark outlines, and crisp, crisp light for the city – a gloried but unfamiliar place of streets and 90-degree angles and so many people.
People to kiss, though! And laugh with! And to photograph! – some like I did at Halloween and its following days of souls and saints.
There is a great dichotomy between New Mexico and the East, two places that are both so different and so loved. One is fairly empty and filled with wind, one is very full and empty of sky.
My heart is here in this enchanted desert – always – and my soul sickens if I am away from it too long. But my heart’s keepers – most of my family, most of my friends, the core loves in my life – are not here. And so I am torn. I move back and forth between them, now swinging away from the west towards a place where the lights twinkle and shine below where I’m used to them blinking – from windows and buildings reflecting under an orange, glowing expanse, not sprayed like fireflies across a high, black one after the sun goes down in its own blaze of orange.
At best, I clutch the hope that one day, I’ll live in the open again and have a career that allows me to fly away east whenever I want to smile at and kiss everyone.
I miss everything all the time. I love you.
Be well.
– SAWK