Nonfiction

Marin County California, Thursday October 30, 2025

Dear Amos,

How do I hear your familiar, faraway music even still? You have percolated through the minutiae of my everyday mind so that I turn away from the immediate…but toward what, exactly?

Leaning against a live oak here in 2025, I scan the horizon from the seaward flank of Mount Tamalpais. A gust of your old loneliness comes off the ocean and tangles my hair. I squint past the edge of a continent, as if I could calculate an azimuth between you and me. But fog hides the distant pinnacles of the Farallones, where I imagine you still pacing back and forth.

At this point, is yours a celestial body? Or will I turn away from the ocean and see you in the flesh, sitting with your back against a boulder, dropped out of time just in time to meet me here? This confounding realm of questions draws me to you as inevitably as tides to the moon, and maybe that’s it: Like gravity, your field of influence is palpable, but when I try to explain how it works, I flail, lost somewhere between my physical mass and your persistent energy. I turn landward and the hundred and thirty-two years since you died keeps collapsing. Here you are, turning and turning in my mind, even still.

Let me try to explain: Years ago, a scientist hired me to walk the shoreline of San Francisco Bay…to count oysters. See me now with my clipboard and rubber boots, in the same wide-brimmed hat I’m wearing today. See my bemused expression to find myself — a lifelong beachcomber — getting paid to survey the intertidal zone. And as I wander the salt pans and cobble I’m also gleaning stories. At Eden Landing, I spy Ohlone hunters in the long-gone wetlands as hordes of waterfowl darken the sky. In the Presidio, I join an 18^th-century crowd wagering bets in five different languages on an organized fight between a Spanish bull and a California grizzly. Essentially, I am doing what I always do: meandering, stitching stories out of the air, living in the meaning those stories create…but I didn’t expect to meet you there.

When oyster season was up, the scientist needed a research assistant, so I spent a few months in libraries reading old expedition journals and cataloging mentions of sea otters, eelgrass, oysters, and bioluminescence. One rainy day at the San Francisco Library’s main branch, in the back of a filing cabinet I found a worn manila folder full of old letters. I opened it. That’s how we met. You reached out through time and took my hand.

In 1849 you came here for the Gold Rush; I was holding your letters home to Mystic, Connecticut. Sitting on the floor under the library’s fluorescent lights, you led me down the dusty streets of Sacramento and the crooked pathway of a life. I read about your bad luck, worse decisions, and finally a journey out past the edge of the continent. I shared your longing, especially, as you remembered Mystic and asked to be remembered by it, while at the same time striding headlong into a new era that swept you inevitably forward.

That day in the library, I looked up in wonder but saw only a crowd of people wearing headphones and intent on screens. They seemed much further away than you did, Amos. I am someone also caught between worlds — between a palpable past bursting with stories and a lonelier, technological present — and your letters felt personal, riveting. You caught hold of me and I chose to live for a time in your story, and now you pull at me with an invisible force.

Sacramento City, Wednesday Aug 28, 1853

Dear Friend,

I received your letter and you do not know how glad I was. I should have answered sooner but I was up in the “diggins” and I could not write from there so you will have to excuse me and I will try and be more particular in the future. Your letter informed me that Hannah had not received but one letter from me. I have written 3 letters to her and have received 2 from her. You must tell Hannah to excuse me for not writing to her in particular this time, for I shall try to write to her next time — and let her read this letter with you and tell her I have not forgotten her by any means. Please write to me every chance you have and give me all the news there is in Mystic…for I don’t expect to see you very soon perhaps never.

I suppose you would like to know what is going on in California and I will give you what information I can. The Mystic boys are all well and some of them are doing very well indeed…working in the mines is uncertain business as some are lucky and do very well while other poor devils work just as hard and don’t make 2 dollars a day. I expect you have had first-rate times at home this summer and I should like to be there with you but I must content myself to stay here until next summer and then if nothing happens I expect to see some of my old friends again, especially the girls. I don’t take much comfort here I can tell you. There is but one young lady here that I know and I know her only by sight for I never spoke to her in my life and that is not the worst of it for I never expect to and you know very well that I do not enjoy myself very well unless I am in company with the girls. But if I should live to come home I mean to have a good time and I rather think that I shall not go to California again.

Your sincere friend                                                              

 Amos

Dear Amos,

Slow down! Men in dusty boots bump my shoulders and the racket rattles my bones. Amos, wait for me. You are so young. You’re 19, striding along chuckling to yourself, you’re harder to track than a run-on sentence. The dust-plumed distance swallows you before I can catch up.

San Francisco January 9, 1857

Dear Father,

Since my last letter to you the great contest for President has been decided the old year has passed away and 1857 has commenced his course. In the way of news I hardly know what to write as I have done but very little since I wrote you last. The schooner has been sold and consequently I am again out of employment but I am in hopes for a short time only. Lod Sawyer and myself have rented a small sleeping room until we can get into some kind of business again. I am at present trying to get the appointment of Light Keeper at Fort Point as the present Keeper talks of resigning in a few days and I am in hopes he can be induced to resign in my favor. John Wolf [light keeper at Point Bonita] has been to see him for me and Lod Sawyer is doing what he can for me in the Custom House. If instead of going to the mines last winter I had staid here I think it very probable I should now be holding a good situation at the Custom House…but I went to the mines and so of course lost all chance at that time since my gold, papers and prospects were stolen in the mines, including a letter of recommendation. If I could get a letter from some prominent man at home to recommend me, I should be all right. Father, I hope you will think this business of enough importance to assist me all you can.

As regards my capabilities, there are but very few jobs here I am capable of filling. I am not very ambitious and would be glad to get a situation as “Messenger.”

            Believe me

                Your affectionate son,

                                             Amos

Dear Amos,

See, here’s what happens when I read you: We stand together on Battery Street outside the San Francisco Custom House, people going up and coming down the steps behind us. We’re not too far from the library where I found you. And in that same library, I looked up the newspapers from the day you wrote this letter. We can do that in 2025.

Turns out a big earthquake rumbled through the city that morning — this morning — January 9, 1857. Did you feel it? You live at the chaotic edge of the world, as chaotic as your mind appears to be, influenced by forces you might imagine but can’t understand the way I do: That the Pacific tectonic plate slides under the North American continent. Deep below where we stand, rips in the earth’s fabric rub against each other, languorously making and unmaking the world.

Have the soirees and girls of Mystic faded? What schooner were you talking about? Why have four years passed since your first letter?  I try to ask my questions, but you’re already looking up at the Custom House. You may not be ambitious, as you say, but you need to hustle, so I’ll let you get to it. I step aside and you take the steps two at a time. My gaze lingers, and the truth is I am not so ambitious either.

I wanted to tell you: I don’t walk the shoreline anymore. I got serious, had a baby. I barely hear that old hum of stories above me; it seems to have drifted away. San Francisco Bay and its cities have shape-shifted, just like when you were here. New speculations roll through. Not gold this time, but ethereal industries of technology and desire, with their attendant money sweeping through neighborhoods, changing the landscape.

2025 hustles catastrophe faster than I can keep up. Often, I slide backwards and panic. Now I work as a writer for hire, spinning stories for whoever will pay, and my stories exist only in the ether, coming and going with monetary transactions. I’ve lost my place in this shifting world of binary code and planned obsolescence. Less and less is heart-felt, and I hesitate to even reminisce about that part of my life lived before it got this way. Can we find Mystic again?

I’d rather stay with you than go back to my job, so I call the historical society in Connecticut. Just think of it as a kind of Morse code telegraph, but instead of signals going through wired electricity, I talk into a device that converts my voice to electrical pulses, which are transmitted across radio waves. We have transmitters everywhere to relay the waves, including in space. What took you five weeks to tell your father takes me only a few milliseconds. It’s true, but it’s tenuous, and loud. We live in a constant electrical storm of words. When someone finally answers, I say your name.

Point Bonita, March 8 1857

My dear Brother,

In the first place I may as well explain where I am, what I am doing, &c. I am at present Light Keeper “protem” at Point Bonita (at the entrance to the harbor of San Francisco) in the place of John Wolf who is sick. I have been here since the 3^rd February, but do not expect to stop here more than perhaps a fortnight longer as Wolf will probably be able to attend to his duties by that time.  

Now for your letter and it is with both pleasure and grief that I write as you will observe in the sequel. It perhaps might be considered as somewhat remarkable (and it certainly seems so to me) that two brothers separated such a vast distance one on the broad Atlantic the other on the placid Pacific not having seen each other for seven long weary years, should be thinking of the same subject and at the same time too but I can assure you my dear brother, although I have not mentioned it in my letters that there has been one subject on my mind for the past two months which I have thought of more than anything else and that was the very subject which composed the principal portion of your letter to me: “the great West.”

I have thought much about it and have also spoke of it to several of my acquaintances and if my circumstances were satisfactory to myself I would make the West my permanent home. But as it is not my good fortune to be so circumstanced I must endeavor to console my self with the hope that by and by my situation may be more flattering.

            I am very glad to see by your letter that your mind is turned in that direction too for it is my firm and honest belief that any sober, honest, and industrious young man…can with proper diligence and perseverance attain a competency and may be able in his old age to live comfortably and to look back with pride on the path marked out by himself in his setting out in life.

            I hope however you will think the matter over seriously and not be in too much of a hurry. (as I see by your letter you are very ardent in the cause) for you are young yet (17) and I fear rather too young to start out into the world alone with no more experience than Mystic affords. I hope you and Edmund will be content to stay at home a while longer and help Father for he is getting old and is not so strong as he once was. Do not flatter yourself with the idea of going out into the world and being your own man for depend upon it you will rue the day unless you are old enough to be well versed in the duties of life and have some fixed plan marked out for the future.

            Perhaps in a year or so I may be able to assist you…but as you are aware I got nothing for my labor last spring and summer and business was never so dull in California as at present. I hope however that my present undertaking will amount to something and I have very fair prospects thus far that it will. Mr Latham says that when the New Collector is sent out by the President he will give me a letter of recommendation and will use his influence to get me a position in the Custom House. Write on receipt of this and by every opportunity and believe me as ever

Your affectionate brother

                                                  Amos

Dear Amos,

Do you have some fixed plan marked out for your future? I wish I did, because at present I’d much rather stay with you. The historian in Mystic uses email to send me some of your family papers. (It’s like the telephone only there are calculating machines that translate her written message into electro-magnetic binary codes and communicate with other calculating machines to send the message to me.) Out of this nebula of missives and signals comes…your very own granddaughter! Bear with me, Amos. In the 1980s she wrote a family history, and you’re in it. But I’m afraid the dates don’t line up. You never got to meet her.

She says you were 18 when you left for California and in love with Hannah Morse, a Mystic girl. Your father gave you the money to go west, but you’ll have to earn your way back on your own. You started working the diggings with another man who’d been there longer, and unlike a lot of the other men, you found gold! But one morning you awoke to find your partner gone, and the gold with him. All you had left was the very first nugget you’d found, which you later had made into a ring in the shape of a snake with a tiny ruby for its eye. Ouroboros of course. Because you must reinvent yourself again and again using only the energy and audacity you can find within. The West, indeed.

San Francisco April 5 1857

Dear Brother,

            I received your letter of March 2^nd and the 29^th and you can have no idea of my surprise on learning that Father had gone to Washington and when I read the particulars to Lod you can have no idea how pleased he was for we never dreamed such a thing and for myself I can only say that I shall never forget the obligations I am under to my old teacher Mr. Potter who so flatteringly recommended me as a young man possessing “natural talent of a high order.” I owe a debt of gratitude that I shall never be able to repay and I wish you to see him as soon as convenient and say to him that from the bottom of my heart I thank him for his kind efforts on my behalf and I wish you to send the addresses of each of the other gentlemen who signed the document. I hope to be able before many months to write to you that we are occupying good positions. But time will tell and as “disappointment is the lot of man” we will not be too sanguine of success, but hope for the best.

                                             I am

                                                  Your affectionate brother

                                                                        Amos

PS (April 6^th) I write this in great haste. Everything thus far goes swimmingly. I have just come from the Custom House. I went up to see Mr Latham and he told me that I should have the first vacancy and perhaps I shall get something before long.

San Francisco April 18 1857

Dear Father,

            Your very sorrowful letter of March 18^th was received by due course of mail and I hardly know what to write or how to answer it for it was of such a nature that I am overpowered with grief and sorrow. When I received the last letter from Horace everything at home was all right but now in the short space of two weeks how changed. My poor dear sister at the early age of twenty-one left a widow with a dear child so young as to be unable to realize her loss and I have lost a dear brother.

            I do not desire nor do I feel like writing much at this time for the sorrowful tidings have so overpowered me that I am not in a condition to write or hardly think.

Give my best love to all our family and believe me as ever

                                Your sorrowful but affectionate son

                                                Amos

 PS I will write you a line about the affairs of Lodowick and myself. We are using our utmost endeavors to get all the influence possible in this country. One of Lod’s friends who has been one of the principal clerks in the Custom House for the last four years…has promised him that he will write to his cousin this mail and recommend Lod to him, so I think if all works well we may be successful in getting a place.

Amos,

There you are in a small, cold room, staring at the wall. I can feel a familiar whiplash of hope and despair swirling in the air. I don’t dare approach you; I just put a log in the stove and stir up the embers. On the table is a scribbled letter to Mystic. Will it arrive? Does Mystic even exist, or were your letters only ever destined for me? You are 144 years older than me, but I am just 16 years older than you are to me right now. We’ve collapsed time, you and me. We are two particles hurtling toward each other at the speed of loneliness and inexplicable desire.

It took me less than an hour to find out the widow is your sister Lydia, and the deceased was her husband, William Stanton Williams, of Stonington, Connecticut. He died on March 16, 1857, from inflammation of the lungs. (I also found out that your pal Lod Sawyer will one day patent a design for a new kind of curtain rod and get rich. Can you believe that?)

I live in a time when I don’t have to wait much for anything. Our technologies multiply and multiply. Built on speculation, just like your gold rush. Built on desire — for information, convenience, money. At least your gold is solid. Ours is a speculation of zeroes and ones. We devour them and build our lives around their ethereal framework. Our reward is consumption in a dizzying variety of modes. Supposedly this is a good thing, but I don’t know. It all seems to be coming to such sorrow.

San Francisco May 1 1857

My dear Brother,

I do not feel much like writing as I have got a very lame neck. Lod and I went swimming a few nights ago and I caught a severe cold and have had a stiff neck ever since but am getting better now.

                   Give my love to all the family

                        Your affectionate brother, Amos

Dear Amos,

Lod sleeps on his cot near the stove. You knead your shoulder and flex, cringing. There’s so much noise from the street: laughter, shouts, crashes cutting through the fog. From across the table, we smile at each other. I can see Mystic’s last shadow fading in your eyes, and that you know it’s a figment while also longing for more of its dream.

On the other hand, California was made for night swimming. Accompanied at the very least by friends, usually done on a whim from the warmth of a driftwood fire, out under a sky full of whirling stars, and most definitely aided by whiskey…night swimming, awash in bioluminescence, you are wide awake and at the height of your senses. I know, because I’m a night swimmer too, or at least I once was. Right now, you are hungry for the future and I can almost feel it too.

San Francisco Aug 2 1857

My dear Brother

In as few words as possible, I will try and explain matters in regard to Miss Hannah Morse. When I left home in ’49 I considered myself in every sense of the word “engaged” to her, and I know that she and her parents were of the same opinion. We corresponded with each other regularly for some years until Mr Fish made his appearance and after a while she wrote to me stating that she had dismissed him, and requested me to write to her as before. I did so and matters went on smoothly for a while but you know the old proverb, The course of true love never runs smooth and after a while Mr Fish made another “desperate effort” and offered her “his hand and heart.” Mr Morse however, mistrusting his intentions (and I shall ever esteem him highly) politely requested the young gentleman to leave his house, and never enter it again on that kind of business. The result was a row and Mr F left the premises with “a heart too full for utterance,” i.e. slightly excited, and I guess he has never visited there since that time. (I shall always believe until I have proof to the contrary that my letters to her were tampered with, at the time he was a clerk in the Post Office, and if I ever meet him, we shall probably have some words at least on the subject.)

She then wrote to me and told me everything that had transpired and we continued to write to each other until I left here in the schooner “Heloise.” (as I supposed for home) on May 1854, I went from here to Valparaiso, from there to Tahiti, where I stayed 5 or 6 months and finally got back to California again. I went back to Tahiti again and arrived here in August 1855. I received a letter from her written “May 1^st 1855” stating that she had given up seeing me again and suggesting that we should close our correspondence. I answered her letter and have never written to her since, until last mail (July 20) I have understood that she does not go much into company and that her health does not appear to be so good as formerly and I have thought that perhaps she would write to me if I would write first. Consequently I wrote to her by the last mail and a few weeks will probably tell the result. The above is in brief a correct statement, and I trust no one will know it but you and me.

            Write often as you can for you don’t know how acceptable your letters are

                                      Give my love to all the family and believe me

                                                            As ever your affectionate brother

                                                                                    Amos Clift

Dear Amos,

Mr. Fish, notorious rascal of the Mystic PO? Hannah Morse, in her eighth year of correspondence-or-not? How is she still maybe available after all these years? And the Heloise. The mysterious schooner from early in your letters, coming back around on the wheel of stories.

You were in Tahiti during the gap in letters. But how does one think one is going home to Mystic on a voyage to the South Pacific? I’m scanning back through everything I know about you. You came from a carpentering family. Your father built boats and houses in Mystic, which still stand as museums and landmarks. I am searching for the Heloise’s crew and passenger lists, but until I find them, I’ll think of you as the ship’s carpenter. Lord knows you didn’t have money to buy a fare. But not a word of the voyage itself, and not a word of what you did in Tahiti for all that time.

How much of a person remains in his written words, if that’s all that’s left of him? You are lonely, perhaps editing the truth into a version fit for your imagined Mystic. No months recounted lolling on the beach, gambling for black pearls with sunburnt sailors in a thatch saloon. Dwelling among tattooed men whose ancestors ranged the ocean in voyaging canoes, ancient journeys no Mystic sailor could envision, or could he? One of them tried to teach you wayfinding, but you were too drunk to remember what he showed you. I wish I could’ve seen you there, Amos. We’d stumble together under those incomprehensible stars.

The woman at the historical society claims she has no other letters from you in her collections. I am turning in circles, trying to navigate between so much information online and these beautiful missing pieces. You are spinning your wheels too, with your Custom House vying. Across a century and a half, more than anything I want you to land your precious position, and find my own here in 2025, where my world is listing badly in an unending storm of changing technologies, each one pushing me farther from the coast of everything I once loved. So we go on searching and scrambling. For money, success, or simply to make it home alive.

San Francisco January 4 1858

My dear Brother

It is now quite a long time since I wrote you last and the only reasons I have to offer are these: viz. I had nothing to write. I have failed at getting a position at the Custom House and am going to try another speculation.

                                                Believe me

                                                                        as ever

                                                                                    Your affectionate brother

                                                                                                  Amos

San Francisco February 19^th 1858

Brother Horace

            There have been times when I have not written for quite a lengthy period, but the reason was that I felt so low spirited and discouraged that it was impossible for me to write.

            You mentioned in one of your letters that it was reported that I was dissipated. I should like very much to know where the report came from.

I have drank some liquor in California and if I live I expect to drink some more but, that I am, or every have been, dissipated I utterly and unqualifiedly deny, and I challenge the party who makes the assertion to bring out the proofs. Ever since I left home it seems that there has been a settled plan to injure me for some purpose or other at first it was reported that I was going to marry a Spanish Maiden and as it is generally understood at home that Spanish girls are whores (I shall endeavor to use plain English) the news must have been very refreshing.

But

                                    “Who shames a scribbler

                                    “Break one cobweb through

                                    “He weaves the slight, self-pleasing task anew

                                    “Admire his wit or sophistry in vain

                                    “The creature’s at his dirty work again.”

Now they harp on dissipation. Well I cannot help it and care nothing about it so far as I myself am concerned. But the thoughts of my parents and friends at home is what gives me pain and many a bitter lonely hour have I passed in thinking of these things.                                                                           I remain as ever

                                      Your affectionate brother

                                                                        Amos

Dear Amos,

Such panic, such speed. From where I sit across from you in that cold little room, your pencil digs impressions through the paper and into the soft wood of your table. Look how Mystic raises its fair head. You are losing hope. But (mis)quoting Pope is sheer perfection. You could not have offered a better seduction. Your frustration draws me like a magnet and also your earnest, terrible loneliness. How is it that I know you as kindred spirit? Across all this time, yours are the words that enliven my flagging heart. Out of place, struggling to be understood and to thrive. We are the same, you and me. On a whim I lean forward, reach for your face and pull you toward me. Our particles collide with 167 years’ worth of the sun’s energy. The cloying taste of brandy on your lips goes to my head while behind me, liquor drips down the wall and lands in the shards of the bottle you just threw.

San Francisco July 141858

Dear Father

I received yours of June 19 this morning and I can assure you that it was perused with much pleasure. I have been in town about two weeks having come in for the purpose of handing in the Yearly & Quarterly returns of the [Farallon] Lighthouse where I now reside and work, and also to spend the Fourth.

I cannot answer your letter in full at this time for I am expecting to go back out to the Lighthouse today or tomorrow on one of the Pilot boats and I will write you from the Island and give you a full account of the Light and everything appertaining to it.

Give my love to all the family and particularly to little Lydia. O how I should like to see you all but that is impossible.

                                    In great haste

                                                Your affectionate son

                                                                        Amos

Amos!

You left me worried in that small room, and now everything has changed. After all these years you’ve gotten a position? I wanted a celebratory declaration. I wanted you to swing me around, laughing your hot breath onto my cheek. Oysters and ale and your tiny room…but that’s not how life works, is it? Careening into the next thing, the next century, the next self, forgetting the agonized tedium that came before. Running toward new agony. I do it too.

The Farallon Islands are twenty-seven miles offshore. That is very, very far away from people. I know you. You are happiest in the company of friends, where your reflection through someone else’s eyes is never far away. You are always in such a rush. Well, the islands will change that. Amos, wait! You’re getting blurry and I’ve got a bad feeling about this.

Farallones Light House Aug 15 1858

Dear Brother Horace

We have been having beautiful weather (for the Farallones) for several days past and Mr Maynard (1^st Asst) and I have been making us a little skiff to pull aboard of the fishing boats that come here to get our letters &c We are considerably bothered about getting news here as it is very difficult to land. The Island as you are perhaps aware is a high rugged and barren mass of rocks in the open ocean. There has never been any regular communication with the city except by the boat which brings out our provisions once in 3 months and the reason has been that the late keeper in the first place could hardly write an intelligible letter.

My eyes have not got well yet but they are much better and I hope they will not plague me much longer. I am inclined to believe it is caused partially if not wholly from an impure state of the blood. I am now taking some syrup for my blood (which I know is impure) and also using Thompson’s Eye Water. I expect one great reason why yours are so much inflamed is looking at the “female form divine” I presume my eyes would be worse than they are now if I could be at home this winter and go to a few parties.

But seriously, Horace, you must be careful of your eyes and not let yourself read much and none at all by candlelight for that is one of the very worst things for weak eyes.

Give my love to all the family and particularly to little Lydia and believe me as ever

                                                Your affectionate brother

                                                                        Amos

Dear Amos,

We sit on blocks in the half-finished skiff. Sap pearls from the newly hewn wood. I was right: carpentry is in your blood. You’re making this boat without even thinking about it. You talk a mile a minute about the need for a larger boat, about the lack of a safe harbor here, which you regard as not insurmountable. You fidget, tearing up wood shavings and letting the wind take the pieces, never letting your red-rimmed eyes settle for more than a few seconds. I zip up my jacket. Your wool coat’s unbuttoned. Waves roar against the slick black cliffs and gulls scream. This place is wild, Amos. Wilder than you will admit.      

You shiver and climb out of the skiff. The man I see, pausing with his lathe, looking across a terrifying stretch of sea that separates you from everyone else, is silent now and considering what, exactly, he’s conjured by accepting this position. When I went to the Farallones a few years ago, a guide on the tour boat told us this place is a refuge for great white sharks, that they come from hundreds, even thousands of miles away to circle these rock pillars far below the surface, continuing their kind’s ancient circumnavigations of the planet.

I wish I could stay with you, Amos. I wish I could bring you with me. But you’ve got to do this next part alone.

Farallones December 16 1858

Dear Brother,

I intended to have written to you by the last mail but the weather was so stormy that no boats could come out here for about ten days.

I have nothing under the sun to write you in the way of news so you must excuse a brief epistle. I expect to go to town sometime next month and shall try to send some money to Father.

Give my love to Grandmother and all the family and tell little Lydia that she is not forgotten.

                                    Your affectionate brother, Amos

December 28 1858

Horace,

It has been very bad weather for some days past and no boats have dared venture out from town. I shall finish this and send it by the very first chance and as today is very pleasant I expect some boats here tonight.

I should like to be at home this winter to enjoy some of your parties and sleighrides for I could, I think, take lots of comfort as winter is my favorite season at home but I must content myself where I am a while longer. Well Horace I hardly know what to write to fill up this sheet for if you have any idea or have ever read of a God-forsaken country this is certainly the very spot. Nothing but a barren rocky island, with the continual roar of the surf breaking on the rocks. That is the only sound to be heard. I don’t know but I should almost forget my name and genealogy and nothing but the prospect of getting home again would ever induce me to stay in such an isolated & gloomy place.

Believe me as ever

                                    Your affectionate brother

                                                            Amos

Dear Amos,

Even when you’re being swept away from everything you ever knew, you are not lost because I’ve got hold of you. I know your name and genealogy, and I will not forget them: Your brother Horace becomes a Deacon with the church. Your sister Lydia marries again, a man named Samuel J. Lee. I know your brother Edmund and your sisters Sarah and Seneca. I even know about Lemuel and Edwin, may their little bones rest in peace. And how about this to keep you going? You become a Lieutenant. Yes, you! In the 1^st Connecticut Cavalry, under General Ambrose Burnside. During the war, someone shoots you through the left arm, but you refuse to let the medics amputate it, and it turns out okay. You live through the war, and you have children, lots of them: William, Ada, Katherine, Annie, and Leonard. Does this help, Amos? That I can keep your story safe, that it is what I was born to do? That living in your story also makes me feel alive?

Farallones June 28^th 1859

Dear Father,

I received two mails since your last letter and I was glad to get it. Letters from home are very welcome on this lone barren rock. Mr Maynard, 1^st Asst keeper leaves here tomorrow for town to go home by the next steamer (5^th July) and I feel as if I was losing a brother. There is nothing of interest here to write about.

                                                Your affectionate son

                                                                          Amos

Amos,

I stand inside the light keepers’ cabin, watching your retreating back. I want to run to you but something holds me at the window. With your collar upturned against the salt spray and the ever-present wind, you hunch along with your head down, under a thick overcast. I get the sense you’re talking to yourself. Who wouldn’t, in your position? You do not stumble on the rocks or tufts of wild grass. In a sudden move you raise a rifle – I hadn’t seen that – and shoot a seabird off the nesting cliff. You keep walking. Adrenaline shoots through my body. You don’t even see the bird fall, wings outstretched and then crumpling on the ground. You shoot another one out of the air. And then another. And another. Now thousands of birds swirl and scream above you. You shoot and shoot. Shocked, I cover my mouth with my hand. The island’s 2^nd and 3^rd assistant light keepers come out from the kitchen and stand beside me at the window, shaking their heads. Mr. Maynard is gone, and with him the last reflection of yourself as a respectable man. Your purpose, whether real or speculative, no longer matters. You are undone.

South Farallones Nov 30 1859

Dear Brother Horace,

I tell you I am getting awful tired of this loneliness. I am in hopes that Govt will make some arrangements to have a vessel visit us regularly I am trying hard for it and have written one or two “official” letters on the subject. Things at this Island have always been in an unsettled state.

Write me as often as you can for letters are all that keep me alive here and it is now more than a month since I received any.

                        Your affectionate brother

                                                            Amos 

South Farallones February 27 1860

My dear Brother

            Yesterday was a glorious day on the Farallones, and the happiest Sunday I have passed for many a day. About noon a boat came in from town and we received some two or three overdue mails and my afternoon was passed away very pleasantly reading my letters.

            I had been fretting for some time because I got no letters and had written to Lod a number of times about it, but at last they came all in a heap and consequently my fretting is over at least for the present.

            I see that Mother thinks I had better “come home and get married” does she, well I am exactly of the same opinion, but, in regard to “starting anew” we differ for I have had such bitter experience in the past that I dare not trust the future and if I were now to start anew, I fear my head would be “silvered o’er with age” (as it nearly is already) before I got fairly under weigh. If my circumstances would permit I should try to follow her advice but when I left home I made up my mind that I should never see it again unless in different circumstances I am of the same opinion today. It is not a very pleasing reflection but it has been my thought through ten long years. I have seen much sorrow during that time much more than I ever expect to get paid for and have of course got somewhat weaned from home but yet I long to see it again for there are those there who are near and dear to me but as for Mystic itself I cannot in truth say that it has any charms for me and I do not now think I could be contented there. All those I have ever seen who have been there and came back again say that, after living in California a few years Mystic is a poor place for them, and they cannot content themselves there.

            Has that feather bed which I sent ever reached home? You have never mentioned it and I don’t now as it has ever arrived. It is not of much value and I sent it merely as a specimen of “Farallones goose-feathers” which I collected myself.

            Give my love to all the family and write to me as often as you can and believe me

                                                Yours truly, Amos

Farallones June 14 1860

Dear Brother Horace,

            I am glad very glad to learn that you are going to stick to the “old familiar spot” and I certainly think Horace you have come to a wise conclusion and I believe today that I should be far better off and happier if I had never left home but this far in life my lot has been cast in slippery places and I am getting too old now to think of starting anew therefore I must abide the issue. “There is a Divinity which shapes our ends; Rough hew them as we may.”

            At present I have about made up my mind to remain in California that is if I can make satisfactory arrangements, for as I view the matter it would be perfect folly for me to go home unless I had money sufficient to enter into some business and as I have not I must try and content myself here. I have written to Hannah asking her if she will come out here if I will send for her and upon her answer my future course in great measure depends.

            But I must close as we have some visitors here stopping a few days and I must “do the amiable” as well as possible. Write as often as you can find time and believe me as ever

                        Yours truly,

                                                Amos

P.S. I hope you will excuse this short letter, Horace but the fact is I am very busy at present. I am studying to accomplish a certain end and you must know, I am very much occupied.

Dear Amos,

We sit across from each other in the skiff bobbing near the rocks. Your coat is over my shoulders, and for once it’s me that can’t stop talking. You are “studying to accomplish a certain end.” This is your last letter, so this is my last real look at you. You’ve rolled up your sleeves and your arms rest comfortably on the oars. We’re bobbing in the narrow strait between islands, and I am desperate to stay with you. But each of us studies that certain end, the only certain end for all humans. Not to get too philosophical, Amos, but isn’t that study our lives themselves?

For a long time, physicists built a unified theory of the universe, Amos, because we all want to live inside a sturdy framework of meaning. Writers like me do too. Despite our lots being cast in slippery places, we look for patterns, we work toward ideas of success, we try to create order. But all of a sudden, after scientists built the particle collider and it turned out to work, a different picture emerged. Maybe, instead of an elegant, logical system, our universe and everything we know about galaxies, stars, dark matter, and the fabric of reality where we all supposedly reside was created out of nothing more than a few coincidences. Like how I found you. Maybe all of this — I gesture to the overcast sky, the choppy sea, the islands — is the greatest meaning we can seek, and imagination creates the only coherent moment in a profoundly chaotic universe. You are part of me. Your story feels more real to me than half of what I see in 2025. What more meaning do we need? I pause for breath. You are looking at me strangely. “I think it’s time for you to go,” you say.

You hold the boat steady against the guano-spattered island, where men have carved small steps into the rock. I scramble out. We look at each other as the boat drifts away, and then, as if it’s the most natural thing in the world, you row leisurely out into open water.

Eventually, you were fired from your position at the Farallon Light House. The reason, my online research reveals, was for making a deal with the egg company that came out every summer to illegally harvest seabird eggs to sell in San Francisco, where there was a chicken egg shortage. You got a cut of the profits and then lost your job. But with the money, you returned to Mystic. And when you got there, you married Hannah Morse.

After you fought for the Union army, you lived in Washington DC as a guard of that city. Hannah and the children were there for a while, but eventually she moved back to Mystic. Why, Amos? I imagine you went back and forth for a time. But then you returned to DC for good, to work in the Pension Department. Because you were always restless for new stories, like me. That curiosity and wanderlust won’t let us rest. You lived alone in a boarding house, occupied by pursuing that certain end until you caught up with it on December 24, 1887.

No one claimed your body, and when a friend finally inquired, the hospital sent him to a potter’s field, but your remains weren’t there. Turns out you were in a dissecting room at Georgetown Medical College. Members of the army under the supervision of your friend took possession of your earthly remains and finally buried you at Arlington Cemetery. That friend, it turns out, was none other than the rascal of the Mystic PO: Mr. Fish.

I leave my desk and walk outside, back into 2025, blinking in the impassive California sun. Up the street, my neighbor’s gardening. People ride past on bicycles, and a PG&E worker removes an obsolete telephone wire from between two poles. It’s time to pick my daughter up from school.

Somewhere in your faraway music, out among the Farallones, we’re still sitting face to face in that little skiff, bobbing on dark water. But what I’ve learned from you is that all we can do is change and keep changing, reinventing ourselves through time as we pursue that certain end. Stories continue on and remain. We’re together there, pulled through time like tides to the everlasting moon. All at once, it fits again, this life. Thanks to you.

Believe me as ever,

your affectionate and eternal friend,

Stacy

*Note: Amos and I Unmake the World” is a hybrid creative nonfiction/fabulist work. For clarity, this piece includes real-life letters written by Amos Clift between 1853 and 1865, and my contemporary replies. Amos’ letters now reside in the public domain.

I think it must be 100 degrees outside. I sit on the part of the graduated sidewalk where my little feet barely brush the gravel. It’s the closest I can get to shade outside during extended recess. The shade cuts straight down the center of me from my head to my shorts. The canopy above my head doesn’t extend past the sidewalk that its under it, so everything from the cuff of my shorts to my feet is still in the sun. I feel the roughness of the concrete underneath my thighs, and I have to be careful not to reach too far with my feet, or I’ll get scratches on the backs of my legs. My hair, swept up in a ponytail, feels hot to the touch on the crown of my head. The tip of it is damp from touching the center of my back, which is wet from sweat.  I look out across the field of wilted grass at the tall, metal slide. The only kids who are crazy enough to go near that frying pan of a slide are the stupid boys who make bets with each other to see who is willing to sit on it the longest before yelping out in pain from the heat. I see wavy, squiggly lines coming off the slick surface. My little sister had broken her arm on that slide when she was in kindergarten. At the bottom of the long, skinny poles that kept it in the ground were puffy mounds of cement, like they were stuck through large piles of whipped cream that had frozen. She fell from the ladder and hit her wrist on one of those piles. It wasn’t whipped cream. All the dandelions are long gone and picked over by people making wishes. It’ll be a couple of weeks before the next round of wishes can be made. Next went the clover in the fields, and we weren’t allowed to go to the fence line by the honeysuckle since Brandon got stung by a bee while attempting to eat the nectar from the yellow flowers. Four-leaf clovers were out there, but it was way too hot to lie in an open field looking for them.

Today, I focus on the gravel. I practice writing my name in the loose pea gravel with a lot of concentration. If I look up, I will see the snow cone truck parked about 30 feet away. I will see Marcie, Jay, and Mark waiting in line for their second snow cones. Even Sandra, who had peed her pants on the playground in first grade, got to go back for seconds. The grasshoppers that made all the racket when they flew made a big deal out of the heat. I wasn’t going to, though. Once or twice, I feel the sweeping breeze of air conditioning when a teacher or student comes out of the double doors close by. It feels amazing on my back and the back of my arms. Nikki offered me her wilting paper funnel of ice when she drank all of the flavor juice that was in it before it had a chance to melt. I was grateful for it and had eaten the ice as slowly as I could without letting it get reduced to just water. I took the little cup inside three times and filled it with water from the water fountain. Each time, the strawberry flavor was less and less noticeable. Mostly, I just wanted people to see that I had one. They didn’t care. There wasn’t much shade on the playground, and all the trees are taken up by the big kids. A few kids kicked their feet to get higher on the swing, trying to make a breeze, but they soon gave up, not willing to give the effort it takes to keep moving. Besides, the air feels like hot, dog breath.  A lot of people don’t know how heavy the heat is. When you carry it around a lot, it kinda slides down your face and makes you frown. It bows your back, and you take it with you everywhere. Makes your socks droop, your hands sticky, and your eyes tired. It’ll make you drink from the water fountain until your belly is swollen. That kind of heat that seems to single you out makes you feel like it was especially made for you. Pee-pants Sandra knows that kind of heat, I think. Sometimes I see it on her face too. And when I look out over the crowd of faces, paper funnels, and classmates with cherry and orange smiles, I can’t help but wonder if there is something different about me; Something that draws the heat to me and away from everyone else. I wonder if any of them really ever noticed it. Because when you’re in a life of comfort, why would you give the heat a second thought?

When Sophie sits on her sofa on March 6, 2017, she considers ending her life.

It’s not yet spring in New York City—no flowers or leaves on the trees—but it feels as if everything is ready to bloom after long months of winter stillness. Spring is her favorite season, and she doesn’t remember yet that she always feels like a different person when the pink petals start to fly in the sky and land on the sidewalk, a magical wonder that only lasts until the busy New Yorkers walk on them and strollers squash them, petals sticking to their wheels for blocks.

            That morning, she woke up exhausted alone in her bed in her dream home in Brooklyn at the border of Clinton Hill and Bed-Stuy. Her place has two floors, two bedrooms, an office, and a rooftop. She filled the space with West Elm furniture she loves: plush carpets that she likes to step on barefoot, designer white chairs, and a mid-century modern dining table she bought with plans to host dinners. These objects make her feel like she succeeded in life.

            Her husband, Guy, had just left to drop off their two-year-old, Capucine, at daycare before heading to his accounting job in Manhattan. Still in her pajamas, Sophie shuffles down the stairs to the living room, grimacing at the feeling of the heavy, wet pad sticking to her crotch. She feels dirty. She walks faster past a mirror, avoiding her reflection, and settles into her usual spot on the beige-gray IKEA sectional sofa.

            This is where she is when she realizes she cannot continue with her life.

            She has had some glimpses of him in the past. A year before, she looked more closely at her face in the bathroom mirror in their smaller railroad apartment in East Williamsburg, but did not recognize herself. She felt disgust, thinking she looked like the man with a rat-tail haircut in The Walking Dead, which she religiously watched every week.

            Before that, while visiting family in Melbourne, Australia, she had walked around the hot, buzzing city, wearing a red summer dress and a huge polka-dot hat, pushing her baby in a blue Yoyo stroller. It was so damn hot, and her thick hair made her even hotter. Trump had just been elected for the first time, and her anger bubbled up like lava. So, she turned into a nearby salon, sat down in the 1950s red-leather hairstylist’s chair, and found the strength to ask for what she had always wanted but had never allowed herself: a short haircut.

            Under the big black cape covering her body, her thighs were sweating in the chair. The hairstylist cut her hair shorter and shorter. Sophie sat motionless the whole time.

            She stared at the mirror.

            In the mirror.

            Typically, she avoided mirrors and only glanced at them briefly. Yet, in this moment, she looked into her own eyes. She stared deeply. They were like black holes swallowing stars.

Suddenly, she saw a glimpse of him again. What was this? Who was this? Who was Sophie, really? She didn’t know it yet, but that day, she would sit down in the hairdresser’s chair as Sophie and stand up as Max.

            Here she stays, two months later, on her beige-gray sofa for hours. Stuck. Frozen. Staring into the void.

            She can’t take it anymore.

            Last night she got her period again. It had returned a year before, after she stopped breastfeeding her baby. That’s how it works. Before that, she didn’t have periods for years while taking birth control. But here it is, in her belly, outside her body, dark red on her fingers when she goes to the bathroom. She feels nauseated and sad, as if her body is not a safe place. Each time her period reappears, she disconnects from herself as she waits for it to pass, already anxious about the following month when it would return. She believes she hates her periods because she is weak and lazy.

            On March 6, 2017, she can no longer stand it. The only way to end it is to stop living in this body. To stop living.

            She knows she will do it if she leaves the sofa, so she calls her husband at work and whispers, “Please come home. I am about to do something stupid.”

            She is still within this crystallized moment, while he makes the forty-five minute train trip from the Lower East Side. It must feel like hours to him. While she waits, she is barely breathing, not looking at anything, hanging by a thread, desperate for help.

            Guy was supportive the previous fall when Sophie needed to stop working for three months due to severe burnout, which put her in the hospital for a week. He cared for Capucine so that Sophie could rest. Her brain felt foggy every day, and she struggled to focus. Even browsing the internet felt almost impossible. She realized that, after a month, when she returned to work for her design client, she couldn’t understand what was on her screen, a project she had been working on for a year. Terrified, she had to accept that she needed more time, her brain still healing from overexertion: twelve-hour workdays, caring for Capucine at night, managing the home, and attending to Guy’s needs, even making doctors’ appointments for him. She had too much on her plate. Would she ever be able to go back to work? Her entire career was built on multitasking and working hard. She was scared to admit that something had to change. But what?

            Sophie grabs her favorite blanket and covers herself, still not leaving the sofa. Since the burnout, the spot became her place to try to relax. On that sofa, she learned how to breathe fully, to take her time even though it felt challenging to do nothing, not to be productive. Her whole identity was rooted in achievements and meeting the high standards of the family member for whom she worked. She had to look inward and learn to listen to her deeper needs, something she had not learned to do in the first three decades of her life. Most days, she binge-watched TV shows, numbing her anxiety and her sense of inadequacy. She feared that she would never find a job again. She was afraid she was broken. Eventually, she decided to watch The L Word, a show about lesbian women and their dating lives. She had avoided watching it until now, succumbing to her discomfort and apprehension, despite her friends constantly talking about it. She now understood why. Through each episode, something in her grew warmer until she felt the urge to look for lesbian porn. This was new for her. She never watched porn before, even straight porn. The shame she felt for seeking such movies dissipated as she discovered her body, giving herself pleasure. This was new for her too. But then the shame would return and she would keep her new pastime a secret, even as she eagerly awaited the next time.

            Watching Game of Thrones, she felt aroused at nude scenes, especially when women had sex. She was only looking at the women. She felt herself getting wetter the longer the scene went on. She wanted to have sex after almost every episode. Guy noticed and often joked, hopeful, “Is it a Game of Thrones night?”

            Sophie is silent now, waiting for her husband. She is frozen, with no energy to even get up and get a glass of water. How long will it take for Guy to arrive?

A couple of months ago, she finally understood why she was so drawn to roller derby, a predominantly lesbian sport: she was attracted to women. Up until that point, she never questioned her sexuality, but she couldn’t hide it anymore. She had to tell Guy. They had spent eleven years together and were honest with one another.

            “I think I am into women. I feel horny around women, and you know how I feel when there are naked women in Game of Thrones…” Sophie said.

            Guy looked at her and smiled.

            “That’s fine with me if you want to explore with women!” he said, which surprised Sophie, since they were monogamous and had never discussed opening their relationship.

            “Are you sure?” She said, anxious about hurting his feelings and about meeting someone new, particularly a woman.

            “Yes, go ahead. It’s better if you explore this than repress it.”

            Wow, that went surprisingly well. Maybe too well. A heavy weight was lifted off her chest, but a new anxiety surfaced: she had to find a woman to go on a date. It happened via Tinder. It took Sophie a good hour to set up a profile, writing and editing. This was the most vulnerable she had ever felt, even a little embarrassed. “Pansexual, Queer, Questioning, Woman, Open relationship, Non-monogamous, 5′ 5”, “A little extra” build. In a great, long, loving relationship with my man, while open to finally exploring another part of me, who apparently loves women! Everything is clear and honest between us. I am here to have fun on my own, with new queer friends.” She picked two photos that represented her: one with a polka-dot dress and another, more recent, with her short purple hair. Desperate, she liked almost all the women she saw in the app who said they were lesbians. Very few of them replied, but a petite woman with short black hair from Park Slope agreed to go on a date a few days later. Guy happily agreed to care for Capucine while Sophie was on the date.

            It took Sophie a long time to find a proper outfit. She landed on a black t-shirt, black jeans, and a pair of suspenders with hot pink skulls. They met at the cozy Russian bar, Masha and the Bear, in East Williamsburg. Sophie asked surface-level questions. The woman politely answered. The date felt more like a job interview and after thirty minutes, they stood up. Sophie was so nervous and too uncomfortable for anything intimate to happen, even a kiss. She wanted to forget about the whole thing, feeling embarrassed and inadequate.

            When Guy finally arrives, she can’t hear most of what he says, but he sits beside her, and that is enough—enough to remove the insistent call to end her life. They sit for an hour on the sofa, and when Sophie finally comes out of her freeze, she finds the courage to seek a therapist. Why now? Does she feel something terrible will happen if she doesn’t talk to one? Perhaps the thought of ending her misery is too comforting. Or maybe she doesn’t want to give up. She keeps gasping for air like she did when she almost drowned at six years old. She can still see her mom running to her from the beach.

            She needs to talk about her unexplored sexual orientation at thirty-five. After swiping through multiple therapists on ZocDoc, she finds one who works with LGBTQIA+ patients. She makes an appointment for the next morning, wanting him to see her at her worst. She wants him to see how raw and disgusting she is, her wounds in the open like red and pink meat hanging in the window at the butcher shop. She wants him to see how broken and flawed she is. If she waits longer, her facade will quickly rise again as she pretends to be this happy-go-lucky roller derby cool mom. Growing up in a family that did not value therapy, she has no idea that it will save her more than once in the following seven years. Deep scars that seem healed on the surface will be poked at, squeezed, and cut with a surgeon’s knife, releasing old pus contaminating her mind and body.

            That night, alone in the bed she bought when she moved for work with her husband from France to New York City five years before, she feels annoyed that Guy is, again, unable to go to sleep until early morning. She wonders what she has done or not done to make him avoid going to bed with her. She can’t pinpoint when it started, but they also stopped kissing goodbye before he left for work, as they had done when they met eleven years ago.

            Lying on her back, she is nervous about seeing this new therapist in the morning. She only met one many years ago for a couple of sessions, which made her feel ashamed because her parents did not believe in therapy. She is glad this one is available on such short notice. What time is her appointment again? 10 am. All right. Capucine would be at the daycare by then, so she could go easily. Where is his office?

            Rolling to her left side, she grabs her phone from the bedside shelf and pulls up therapist L’s info on ZocDoc. In his profile picture, he looks kind and happy. She swipes and lands on another selfie, except this one shows him looking like a woman. Weird. How is this possible? She remembers watching the show The Fosters, in which trans actor Elliot Fletcher plays a trans boy. Until that point, she had no clue trans men existed, as she only heard disturbing stories about trans women. Her only awareness is from movies like La Cage aux Folles, a “folle” being a derogatory French word for an effeminate gay man, or the homophobic culture in France that men perpetuate, her dad included, referring to “manly” activities like driving a powerful car as not being “for the fags.” It hasn’t clicked for her yet, even though her entire Instagram feed is now filled with trans men’s accounts, where they show their new chests without breasts. Why this obsession? While watching The L Word, she also encountered a trans character named Max. She remembered thinking, “Wow, this is so empowering for the character! I want to feel this too.” Without her realizing it, the glimmers inside her started to vibrate, ready to shed light when the right time came.

            Alone in her bed that night, she feels an electric shock. Why did she pick a trans person as a therapist? In these few seconds of realization, she is at the edge of a crevasse, the wind pushing her back while she looks down into the void. Every sign is pointing in the same direction. If she weren’t in shock, she would laugh at the situation. How could she have missed something this obvious?

            Alone in her bed that last night, just a few hours after she was ready to end her life, Sophie closes her eyes for the last time, her breath slowing, her blood so cold that she feels her body sinking into the mattress, unable to see the light again.

***

            “Fuck, I’m trans,” I say out loud.

            My blood warms, my veins revive like tree roots bringing water and sap to the dried branches after winter. I open my eyes and take the first breath of my new life.

There are no instructions for the slow, seismic shift of growing up between languages, only the gradual ache of realizing you are a creature of halves, a face that answers to two names while the mirror offers back a sentence forever cut short.

You moult and shift, a flicker passing through the cracks of translation, yet people rarely see the leaving; they mistake your silence for forgetting and your flutter for indecision, never realizing you are already inhabitng the “in-between.”

Most chances arrive in two tongues, usually a beat too late to choose, leaving you to rehearse a private freedom in Spanglish—an elective exile that feels simultaneously like an escape and a return. You begin to gather the symptoms of this displacement like uncollated notes: memory becomes a border crossing and belonging feels like a passport that was never stamped, and looking back, you realize that your stillness was merely survival, though it doesn’t quiet the panic that rises when both flags finally hang still in the wind.

The answer, if it exists, refuses to speak; instead, it burns with a quiet, hungry heat that flickers beneath thick accents and those phrases that refuse to be carried across the line.

It is a soft light surviving its own contradictions, the rhythm of something alive in two directions at once; a constant, rhythmic ping-pong of sí and yes, of ni modo and maybe, the echo of a word chasing its own shadow. To speak is to never quite know which tongue holds the absolute truth, to write dusk and then crepúsculo and realize they describe two entirely different heavens.

Some days are measured only by the wait between customs lines, like a farmer gauging the soil between his strawberries and the distant fence, realizing that the moon above him is already bilingual and that there is a profound, silent peace in finally refusing to choose; in letting the land translate itself.

They climb the ridge together, careful not to disturb the desert hush, understanding now that curiosity is a path with two names and that the valleys behind them are destined to blur.

At the summit, they find no finality, only a mesquite tree spreading wide, its leaves speaking the shared vernacular of sky and soil.

The children followed those leaves once, each step a word in a language they hadn’t yet mastered, every path a return to a place they had never actually left, their history threading their tongues like a long, shared breath. This was the secret they stumbled upon: that awe, when properly placed, makes the body invisible to sorrow.

I watch them now through the slant of memory, letting their eyes become mine until I hear the mountains speaking in a multi-hearted code, a miracle repeated so often it begins to sound like a lullaby. Nature is borderless, yes, but it is also painstakingly specific, and we find we can belong in more than one place at once. There are other names for this—dichos, refranes, prayers whispered into the wind; but sometimes it is enough simply to walk and listen to the oldest trees murmuring between breaths.

The rain knows where to fall, favoring the late afternoons and perfuming the mesquite before the sky clears, and when the sun rises sharp and blue, you see how tender the city has become. It is not broken, merely translated, as if the sky left its mouthprint across the rooftops and the mind, astonished, keeps layering more, realizing that knowing in two languages makes the imagination thicker, wilder, and infinitely more resilient.

Which leaves us with the only question that remains: Is it a kind of blessing, this constant knowing without ever needing to know that we know?

              “Can we just stop at the store?  Please?”

My client, Tina, said this while we idled at a stoplight.  She had just opened her purse and discovered an empty, crumpled cigarette pack.  She held it out to me.  The summer sun bore down hot and blinding through the windshield of my old Chevy pickup.  My air conditioning had crapped out weeks ago.  I needed the light to change so we could get going, so I could make it to my next appointment, so we could get some wind through the open window.

“I don’t know,” I said.  We had just spent two hours at Tina’s doctor’s appointment.  I had to drop her off and jet off to the other side of town if I had any hope of making it to my next client on time. I felt the first stirrings of hunger.  I had the jitters from a supersized coffee.  I forced a smile — ceaselessly polite, even with my anxiety hassling me beneath the surface, pushing me from the inside out.  “I’m going to be late.”

I used my old piece-of-shit pickup for my job as a community mental health worker.  My job title was “Service Coordinator,” though for years we were called “case managers” until someone realized it was unkind to refer human beings as a “case.”  Most of my clients called me a ‘worker’, though, which sounded a little too close to prostitute.  The same upper echelon that devised the term ‘service coordinator’ instructed us workers to call our clients “members,” which itself had an unwholesome connotation.  Members — like they belonged to an exclusive country club with tennis courts and hot tubs, as if they didn’t need the services of a mental health agency.  I carried through the days, months, years of this work calling my clients “clients.”  Even the clients called themselves clients. 

“Oh my God, you’ve got to understand,” Tina said.  “I really need this.” She put her hands together as if in prayer.

        I made shit money.  I drove my clients to medical and therapy appointments, grocery stores, AA groups, to court, to detox, anywhere and everywhere in a ceaseless effort to help them gain a toehold in the mythic land of mental stability.  I put some serious miles on my junked-up little truck – industrial green, dented and pocked, rusted in some spots and, on the truck bed’s door, an old peeling I Hate Mean People bumper sticker – it had appeared one day, applied, I think, by a stranger in a Wal-Mart parking lot.  I never bothered to take my truck to the carwash or remove the detritus I let pile up in the space behind the front seat, the Dunkin’ Donuts cups, junk mail, yesterday’s dirty gym clothes. 

          My clients had the usual diagnoses – schizophrenia, depression, anxiety, substance abuse, bipolar disorder, post-traumatic stress disorder.  I imagined Tina saw between us a great gulf of experience and privilege, me a worker — self-actualized, employed, calm, centered, sage, content and healthy; she, a client – beaten down by circumstance and bum-luck neurochemistry.  The gulf she saw wasn’t a gulf, but a tenuous line drawn on quicksand.  I suffered my own biochemical and existential failings.  I took Prozac and anti-anxiety medication, which left me with a fine, chronic tremor that made my head and hands bounce about.  People often assumed I was either cold or nervous. It was me, this hot mess of a well-intentioned person who was supposed to teach my clients those good, God almighty “life skills.” Who cared enough to at least try.  I often felt the weight of a chronic exhaustion; I was single and lived alone, fifteen hundred miles from my family.  I longed for someone to take care of me for a change. 

The cars around us idled, engines thrumming.  Tina gawped at me and chewed on her fingernail, waiting for me to relent.

“Seriously, Tina.  I can’t.  I really can’t.”

She slunk deep into her seat.  “I’m desperate, don’t you get that?”

She waved her hand in front of her face and said, ”It’s so damn hot in here.” She started digging through her purse again as if God himself might have heard her pleas, might have stashed a whole, pristine pack in an unexplored corner of her enormous, cluttered purse. 

“Oh, God, God, God.  Please?”  She said.

Tina’s brown eyes, usually hard and suspicious, had gone soft.  She was always scamming, needling, wanting.  And I was always saying yes when I wanted to say no.  There was no end to my desire to please, to fit together all the dangling participles of everyone else’s needs. 

The light turned green and I stepped on the accelerator.  The rushing wind cooled the back of my sweaty neck.  Tina closed her eyes and stuck her arm out the window, opened her palm into moving air.  

“Just this one time?”  Tina asked.  

We workers were taught not to disclose our emotions, reveal to our clients our vulnerabilities, to always put them first, their needs.

The sweat began to evaporate off my skin, and I felt my relief like a glittery tingle. It brought out in me a surge of abandon, a generosity of the sort that would prove untenable later when my next client carped at my tardiness.

“Okay, yes, okay.  We’ll stop.  But you have to be quick.”  

“Oh, God, thank you,” Tina said, clasping her hands together and raised her double fist to the sky.

In truth, I liked Tina, a self-described former junkie, a woman with the kind of trauma history that could render Jerry Springer speechless.  She was sweet, smart, crafty, her talents and kindness wasted on devising ways to make her pittance from Social Security last an entire month.  She conned anyone in her orbit into her giving her stray cigarettes and loose change.  I learned early on not to leave coins in my cup holders.  Tina lived in a shithole apartment with a tiny Yorkie named Luna.  She subsisted on methadone maintenance and credited it for keeping her clean, off heroin.  “Gotta dress right and fly straight,” she liked to say.  She was around my age but looked years older – deep lines set her eyes and mouth in parentheses.  She had unchecked diabetes, COPD and walked with an arthritic limp.

I watched Tina now, her eyes still closed, her chest rising and falling with her labored breath, her arm still hanging out the window.  No one ever aspires to grow up into an addict with a felony record and hair turned brittle and brassy from years of drugstore dye jobs.  She had long ago lost all her teeth.  But she had a certain panache, an ease with which she exercised her survival skills.  We might have been friends growing up.  I imagined her convincing me to duck out of third period, the two of us sneaking behind an old, abandoned strip mall where she’d pull a fat joint out of her backpack.

Tina lived one turn off a complicated intersection with multiple one-way streets radiating from one traffic light like the arms of an asphalt octopus.  When we drew closer to her neighborhood, after we traversed ice-heave potholes left unfixed from the winter, when the rows of shabby multi-family houses came into focus, she said, “You’re the best.”  She directed me to a convenience store on a side street extending off the octopus. Tina opened her door before I came to a full stop.

“Just don’t fart around in there,” I told her, smiling.  She laughed, giddy, I imagined, at the prospect of fresh nicotine. 

As she hustled her limp across the street, I noticed a group of ragged men next to the store, clustered tall and close like a clutch of dehydrated reeds.  They conferred amongst themselves, tight and almost conspiratorial, didn’t so much as turn their heads as Tina pushed through the door.  A Connecticut Lottery sign hung in the store’s window and, beneath, another sign — $10,000 Winner Sold Here!  I thought about the rush of such a win, the realization that your luck has turned, the hope that it marks the start of a new beginning in life.  I wondered if Tina bought scratch-offs, figured maybe I should, too.  Weeds short and tall poked up through cracks in the sidewalk.  The apartments had sagging decks, dirty siding, chain-link fences.

I lived on the outskirts of this rot in a tiny cottage house on a dirt-road right-of-way.  After harsh winters, the snow melt turned into a soup of mud and garbage that always seemed to overflow from my neighbor’s trashcans and land in my yard.  My bulkhead door was rusted shut and mice sometimes crawled into my house through a hole in my floor under the stove.  Tina lived in the margin, and I rattled my cold bones in a neighboring but no less fraught margin.

When Tina returned, she yanked open my door and fell into her seat.  I looked at my clock — I was well past late.  A choice lay before me: take a series of turns up and down the one-way streets to land in front of Tina’s apartment or pull a U-ey.  I scanned front and back, side to side, weighed the pros and cons.

“No one’s here,” Tina said while she slapped her cigarette pack into her palm and pulled off the cellophane.  “You can do it.  People do it all the time here.”  

I made the U-turn and sailed through the intersection, made a hard left.  Tina removed a cigarette, turned it over and put it back in the pack facing up for luck.  As I eased off the gas and slid to a stop in front of Tina’s building, a razz and a whoop sounded behind my truck.  Tina – again – opened the door before I stopped the truck.  Another razz and whoop.  I saw swirling red and blue lights in my rearview mirror.  Tina left her door cracked open and settled back into her seat.  She kept one foot propped on the door.  “Shit,” she said.

“Fuck,” I said.  “The U-turn.”  

Tina, who had never heard me curse, cracked a quick grin that faded when the cop’s form appeared at my window.  He held his hand over his holstered gun.  I rolled down my window and looked up at him, his young face edged with baby fat, his sandy hair stiff with gel, carefully arranged, neat.  His partner stood with a wide stance behind him and trained his unblinking eyes on me.  He, too, hovered his hand over his gun.

“Know why I pulled you over?”  

I shook my head.

Tina tossed her cigarette pack onto the dash, melted back into her seat and closed her eyes.  Cars slowed as they passed us. The heat shimmered off the pavement in rainbow waves.

To me, the cop said, “License and registration.”

I pulled my license out of my wallet, fumbled through my glove box for the registration.  Jacked up by adrenaline, anxiety, hunger, dismay, caffeine, my usual trembles escalated into a full-on quake.  My hand bobbled as I handed my documents to the cop.

“Know why I pulled you over?”  The cop asked me again.

“No.”

“You didn’t use your turn signal at the intersection,” he said.  “You know that?  That’s why I stopped you.”  His hand still floated over his gun.  “Why are you shaking? Nervous?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Why you nervous?”  

So it wasn’t the U-turn?  I shrugged at him, wondering what this guy’s game was, what he was playing at, what answer he had expected.  

He pointed at Tina.  “ID.”  

Tina opened her eyes. “I don’t have one,” she said.  It was true.  She had lost her ID, left it on the city bus weeks ago and tried to finagle money from my work’s petty cash to get another.  My boss had told her no.  All she had was her food stamp card, which she fished out of her purse – it was free-floating in a stew of crumpled dollar bills and empty cigarette packs.  She reached over me toward the window and handed the card to him.

“I said ID,” the cop said.  

Tina, calm and steady, said, “That’s all I got.”  She didn’t look at the cop, but past him.  She folded her steady hands on her lap.

“Why are you shaking?” the cop said to me.  “You got something to be nervous about?”  He bent at the waist, peered into my window.  “What am I going to find in here?”

He scanned the filthy interior.  He struck me as ultra-neat, his tidy hair untouched by the humidity, the fresh powder smell of his aftershave, his skin unblemished.  He seemed like the kind of guy who ironed his jeans and made his bed every morning, the kind who saw pathology in clutter, who considered disorganization an unforgiveable character flaw.  He narrowed his eyes as if he could see past my truck and into my house – had a direct line of sight to the dirty dishes piled in my kitchen sink, the mildew in my bathtub, the tumbleweeds of dust drifting across my hardwood floor when the air conditioner kicked on.  Maybe he could glimpse my thoughts, my memories bare and exposed, my history, my mistakes, the tangled trajectories of all my bad choices.

Tina began humming a quiet, generic tune.  I imagined she was, by now, well-versed in this kind of intrusion, her mind, home and history subject to the kind of search and seizure wrought upon her by people like me.  Hospitalizations, arrests, substance use, children taken by the state, all of it exposed like an opened cadaver.  Maybe she could see inside me, too, right into the white space of my depression. She understood, I realized, how it felt to dwell there.  

The cop repeated himself.  “What am I going to find in here?”

“I don’t know, junk, crap, trash.”  I felt the hot acid of my anger slip through my clenched teeth.  Tina placed her hand on my knee.  She pushed her cool, thin fingers into my skin.  She looked at me through the side of her eye, shook her head ‘no,’ mouthed the word ‘don’t.’

Another cop car, its sirens wailing, pulled up behind the first car.  Two more cops got out.  The baby-faced cop turned, lifted his chin in greeting, turned to say something to them.

“Jesus Christ,” Tina muttered, rolling her eyes.  “Don’t worry,” she said to me, like she knew this would all end, like we had just gotten caught in a passing cloudburst.  She leaned back.  “Stay cool.  This’ll be over soon,” she said, her hand still resting on my leg. 

It felt odd, her touch, the unholy comfort of it – we “workers” had been taught not to develop personal relationships with clients, to maintain a physical and psychic distance from them, to keep physical touch limited to a handshake or a brief hug.  I had, in fact, shied away from most forms of touch in my regular life as well, cringed when someone patted my shoulder or brushed by me in a crowd.   Tina’s hand sat both light and heavy on my leg, easy and strong, almost electric.

The cop turned to face us again.  “What’s back there?”  He moved closer, stopped just short of poking his entire head through my window.  “Why you nervous?  What’s in here?”  The three cops stood behind him like a bored firing squad.

“What am I gonna find on your record?”  He asked.

“A ticket.  From twenty years ago.”  It was true.  I lived a desperately quiet life.

“No, really.  I’m gonna find something.  What am I gonna find?”

“One ticket.”  

“You got drugs in here?”  The cop said.  I didn’t drink alcohol – any little drop of it went straight to my head, made me sick.  One glass of wine will send me bowing to the porcelain god. Weed did nothing but make me sleepy. The Percocet I had gotten from a long-ago surgery made me stupid. I had bottle of Prozac in my center console, legitimate, with a prescription.  I pictured myself getting dragged out of the truck, getting thrown against the side, handcuffed, trying to explain it. 

“I was parked by that store.”  The cop said to me now, turning and gesturing at the intersection.  “I saw those men standing in front of that store.  I saw you talking to them.”  I remembered that group of men I had seen earlier, those rangy men standing tight in their own private conference, the ones minding their own business, the ones who didn’t look up when I parked near the store, the men who didn’t flinch when Tina opened the store’s door right next to them.  They’d had no interest in us.  

“I didn’t talk to them,” I said.  

“I saw you.  You said something to them.”

“I didn’t.”  

“They’re known drug offenders, those men.  You know that?  Yeah, you know that.  What did they say to you? You got drugs in here?” 

         I felt so tired and hot sitting with Tina in front of that cop.  I sat stiff, said nothing, leaned my head back and shut my eyes like Tina.  This cop, he wanted me to relent, to confess, admit to some phantom pharmaceutical transgression.

          I’d had enough.  You want to search my truck, tear it inside out?  Maybe you’ll find a stray Prozac in that space between my seat and the center console, the area I called the black hole because I was always dropping crap down there and couldn’t fit my hand in to retrieve it.  Go ahead, officer, impale me with the ice pick of your judgement. But Tina’s hand, still on my leg – I felt the weight of it, the covalent-bond electricity of it.  I realized that I owed him nothing, and so I gave him nothing.  I said nothing.

The cop turned his gaze from me to Tina.  “You got a record?”

“I’ve been clean ten years,” she said, shrugging.  I’m clean, straight.”  It was true.  The methadone clinic tested her daily, would have called me bitching if she came up dirty.  I saw, for the first time, this side of Tina, this ability to shrug off shit luck and bad circumstances, just keep going, keep moving, carry on with the business of survival.  I pictured her hauling herself across town to the methadone clinic every day, sometimes hitching a ride, sometimes walking, no matter the weather.

The cop let out a snigger.  “Yeah, we’ll see about that,” he said.  He went back to his car, leaving his cohorts on the street outside my truck.  They relaxed their hands from their guns, huddled together into a chit-chatty clique.

Tina exhaled.  “What a dick.”

“Seriously,” I said.  “A little-dick dick.  It’s probably a useless nub.”

Tina snickered.  “Nub,” she said.  “I like that.  Nub.”

That word, nub, it filled me with this lightness, the funny sound of it, like when you say a word over and over until it doesn’t even sound familiar anymore.  I let out this carbonated laugh, felt myself get lighter, felt like I was almost floating above my seat, like only the truck’s ceiling stood between me and a lilting drift into the stratosphere.  Tina took her hand off my knee.  She looked impassive, her face relaxed. Her hand, which she had removed from my knee, rested lax on her lap.  She looked ready to abide whatever the cop wrought upon us.

The cop strode back, his mouth a thin slash of a line.  He handed us our documents.  And then, improbably, this: He let us go.  He waved us off, no explanation, just an admonition about using my signal – still nothing about the U-turn.  I imagined his disappointment, finding our records and seeing nothing but wide swaths of blank space.  Maybe he called his sergeant hoping to find some angle, some way to worm his way into my truck and dig for the buried treasure, those golden, mythical narcotics. I pictured that conversation, his pleas a series of “buts” ending with one resolute “no” from his boss.  Tina patted my knee and stuffed her food stamp card back in her purse.  The cops returned to their cars, turned off their lights and pulled away. 

“See?” she said.  “It’s fine, we’re okay.” She opened her door, unfolded herself from the car, clambered up the uneven, broken brick walkway and inside her apartment building, back to her dog Luna, back to life, because her work here was done.

My first memory is of my death. I was three, in the grassy area between brown brick garden apartments, where the kids collected. My mother was absent, perpetually absent, and my sister was coming out of one of those apartments after stealing a five-foot-long stuffed animal, a green snake with a forked tongue, like her. Who was I? I had to be terrible, too, but I wasn’t. My grandmother reassured me. She held me while I slept and called me an angel. If I was an angel, I was in the wrong place.

But there I was, looking for four leaf clovers when one of the boys got this look on his face (arched eyebrows, wicked grin). He came at me with a squirt gun, barrel loaded, aimed it up my nostril and shot it. My eyes rolled back in my head, and I fell backward, flat on the grass.

I didn’t know that I had died until I saw a glowing orb in an old man’s hands. I saw an old man’s face. He said to me, “The next sound you will hear will be your own voice.” He placed the orb inside my head gently.

I opened my eyes and said, “What happened?” My grandmother was running smelling salts from nostril to nostril and crying, her talc smelling stronger than what she ran under my nose. My sister stood over me looking like the guy who shot me. That kid had gone.

So sudden. So safe one second and then not. Just a stupid kid. That’s what I tell myself 60 years later. I’ve learned to laugh at myself about the so-called memories that I remember. That involve my sister. That involve mean people wanting me dead. Oh, so funny. The point is I want to tell my sister, is not whether it happened or not, but whether it could. I say, You know what I mean? But she and her snake have wandered off the beaten path of family ties, the ties that choke and gag as my mother used to say, and left me to perpetually ask what happened to no one until I get an answer. And so now, as I see it, God is real. The snake was real, the boy, the out of body. I give myself permission. I make myself promise, Don’t let go yet. I make myself promise, Trust me again. I won’t, I will. Someone has to steer this ship that’s sailed too close to the edge and could go over, again, any time. Any Time! And why do I remember God looking like the Grateful Dead figure? I never did acid.

Most people have nothing to help them exit, stage left. Maybe I imagined him, I guess, and I should give up this fish tail. Ha ha ha. But secretly I remember, “The next sound you hear will be your own voice.” It follows me to bed. I could sleep standing up. But there’s no need.