want to tell new stories. My story doesn’t feel new anymore, it feels as old and tired as my body, but I go anyway.
I don’t feel well when I get off the plane at LAX. The pain got the best of me thirty-five thousand feet over Texas and it’s stuck around. I haul my big plastic suitcase behind me through the terminal and look around at all the people careening carelessly, drunk on their phones. Their busy eyes, pink and brown and black faces, old and young, all pointed down—CNN, Facebook, the time, Amazon, anything that feels good. I smile big at them but nobody smiles back. People make less and less time to see each other these days. I’m sad about it, but I’m complicit. I do it too. My phone is a new drug and it’s a powerful one. I have beauty, brightness, and “love” at my fingertips twenty-four hours a day. I can’t put it down.
“They say it might snow up there,” the white-haired lady at the Avis counter whispers at me, as though snow in the mountains is a secret just between us.
“I hope so,” I say back to her. I have to force the friendliness; my body is screaming at me. I want to be alone.
She hands me the keys to a tiny rental car and waves.
“Be safe.”
“I will,” I promise her. But nothing feels safe.
* * *
The drive takes two hours. I listen to Matt Corby the entire time, rising up from the starving, gray desert, through the mist of low-hanging clouds, to the base of the powder-capped mountains. The altitude makes my temples twitch angrily at me—another migraine.
I clutch the wheel as my little car skids and I make my way around a big mound of mossy rock. The road becomes a spiraling Slinky, taking me round and round. The pain nags at me and I want to go home. With each turn, I look to the sky and pray the same way I did back in Libby’s garden.
Make it be beautiful. Make it be beautiful. Make it be beautiful.
After the hundredth bend in the road, the sky changes. The sun has sunk somewhere below me and left a radiant spill of raspberry pink and orange and buttercup yellow. I pull onto a wide shoulder that must be especially for sky watching, and step out into the air. It’s twenty degrees cooler than I thought it would be.
“Look at that sky!”
I take a picture and look at the sunset. I focus on the beauty and wait for the relief. My muscles go slack; everything hurts a little bit less. The colors ebb and flow and then vanish completely. The beauty pauses the pain for a moment—it distracts me, but it never lasts.
* * *
I arrive at the venue by nightfall and all anyone can talk about is snow. The outdoorsy Patagonia-vest types can hardly contain their excitement as they pace through the lodge and ready their lenses for the perfect picture. My body is ready for bed but I know how it will feel when I lay it down for rest; the red ants will take over, the migraine will come back. I just can’t bear the idea of stillness right now, so I stay up, stretching my eyes and my smile wide and waiting by the windows with the others. We drink dark-colored drinks and laugh and make the beginnings of friendships. The snow never happens but nobody seems to care. At around 2 a.m., we all slip away to bed.
My talk is in room 4B the next morning. Pain rises with the sun to settle up with me, collect the cost of last night’s fun. I didn’t sleep well, but I hardly ever do. I have to lie faceup like I’m on an embalming table just to get close to comfortable. Sometimes, sleep takes hours to come. Sometimes, sleep doesn’t come at all. My neck and back scream at me when I try to rest and my mind races. I think about how badly I’m hurting, how badly I will hurt when I’m fifty, seventy, eighty years old. I don’t want to get old. I’ve accepted my pain and I wouldn’t change it. I have deep gratitude for the new eyes it’s given me to see people, the new arms to reach them, but pain also scares me. Sometimes I say yes because I want to; other times I say it because there’s an urgency, a knowing that one day, I