quotidian

What I miss most about New Mexico is singing. Late at night, walking a stretch of the old Santa Fe Trail, hands full of apricots no larger than a skipping stone, I sang and sang to myself and there was nothing to stop me. I had a head full of traditionals then, murder ballads, old love songs, things I've forgotten.

I picked tons of apricots that summer. Cherries, too. When people utter that cliche, "Living off the land," I think they rarely suspect how sweet the land can be.

Here, there are radios everywhere. Try walking two blocks without the song in your head being retuned by someone's woofers. And I'm bad song compulsive - I pass a car or a gas station or a bodega , take in a whiff of Roxette or Rick Astley, and I'm fucked.

It's a sad thing to realize that, after about the second moment of your life, most of you exists in the past. I sometimes feel like Billy Pilgrim, one foot in the tenuous present and another in some foggy rendition of myself at seventeen, or twenty, or twenty-five. What I am now is the tip of some enormous iceberg. Or, no. The edge of some enormous wing.