I do not remember the person I was back then. I recall the basic outlines of my life, but the memories replay by rote as tales told me long ago by someone else about another’s life. The dates are clear enough, the places somewhat dimmed, but my thoughts at the time are as opaque to me as those of a crow.
A note came recently from one I loved back then. Back then our relationship was fraught with apprehension, and we parted. Her daughter now is older than we were back then. We were to meet on the coast, but it was over before she got there.
Cresting the Sierra Nevada I smelled the lodgepole pines, the tamarack on the air. The range rose up behind me, a barrier between me and my old life. That life began to fade, memories mixed inexorably with half-remembered dreams.
A good story rises and falls on its characters’ “desire lines,” the progress of their search for whatever it is they want. My memories of that time are bad story. I no longer remember by what desires I was driven. Companionship, certainly enough, and affection, and probably direction, and in that I would have been no different from anyone else of any age. Distraction, probably. Validation and purpose, probably. I can infer that I sensibly would have had these desires, but I no longer remember.
Desire-driven or not, I left, and traveled west until the land ran out beneath me. The Sierra rose up to obscure my past. The life I left behind desiccated in its rainshadow. Whole ancient landscapes submerged as terrain moved against terrain, pressed down into the abyss, melted in intense heat. Now and then a glob of molten granite will arise to break the surface.
If not for her I might not have ventured here, might not have crossed the arid and intimidating Nevada steppe, against which the green of the Sierra seemed luxurious. That I yearn these sleepless nights for that very steppe shows only how different the young man was. Annealed by age and fire, my eyes gone wild yellow, I watch the ranges to my north. The desert on their far slopes tantalizes me. I taste the scent of creosote and rain though there is no creosote here, and the air is parched.
