Status Updates From Genesis Road

And in the telling we'd close the distance between us.

We both laughed until we could pretend our tears were from the hilarity.

"Really, if you hadn't wrecked, it wouldn't have been dramatic and romantic and lovely."

Mainly he didn't say no. Not once.

I couldn't breathe. If I breathed, I would cry. All right. I would talk to__ without breathing then. I would breathe later.

"I love you, Mama," I blurted out in the nick of time. "You know I love you, too, Sister." Her voice was uncluttered, dry and clear as the prairie sky. She didn't hesitate. Not even for a second.

"He's about a smart ass."

Everything burned as I stood alone.

I knew we could not trust Grandma Ruby.
And Daddy run off to who knows where, Mama always said. I didn’t believe for a second he was at Grandma’s house. He was avoiding work and obligation.

It was a summer of treachery.

But in a more devastating, dramatic kind of terrifying way.
We didn't figure on having to figure it all out over and over.

The me I am wasn't in her plan.

"We owe our mothers every everything. Our lives and genes. And in return they drive us insane."

The struggles of a land baroness.
You two are playing the longest long-distance game of chicken I've ever seen.
...describing endlessly all the things cattle and gold can buy.

"Ha freaking ha, with your cowboy humor."

"You hit pause for several weeks, and you hsve to dread hitting play again."

All those possibilities. Such tender things. But stubborn. Survival of the stubbornest. And I wondered then how often the tundra blooms. How brief a season. And how rare that I was there to see it. What a cruel place to survive. What a secret little space we all inhabit, so fragile, so unlikely, each of us.
I was crying before I knew I was going to.

She has never told exactly the same story twice, because that's how people where we're from tell a story.