Twenty-Eight

I'm twenty eight, fit, happy and for the first time in my young life, somewhat calm. Santa Fe is almost everything I want it to be -- when I'm sixty -- so we're packing up and moving on. Another life we cannot name is calling us, and so we listen.

Just five miles past Pecos, driving north, ever north on I-25, my my heart aches for the desert and I want to turn back, say "never mind," and start over. I want to live in the mountains and forget about the gold, wrap the gifts up in brown paper and bury them deep in the ground, steel myself against harsh winters and learn to make something from something instead.

But I keep driving, the radio my soundtrack as I drive: Colorado, Kansas, Iowa, home.

Polly can't understand how a Minneapolis girl can't get around St. Paul, or why I don't want to learn. From his perch in Williamsburg Patrick tells me to give in and move there. "It will be like moving to a new city, like you're not really moving back." I cave and we settle in to sleepy streets and farmer's markets and miles and miles of off leash dog parks, but all I can think about is Patrick's offhanded comment when we were kids, "Sometimes I think about giving up and moving to a studio apartment in St. Paul." I can't shake the feeling that I have given up, that this is it, and if this is it, I think I'll just kick this quest to the curb and watch TV.

Reinvention is my thing, on the page, over drinks, in my bones. So I dive in, re-shelve the books and hang the pictures, decide who I'm going to be here, again. There are new promises and a clean slate and a sense of something bigger on the horizon, something so big I couldn't possibly measure it.

Like a prodigal daughter I return to playwriting, shocked to find the green and white building where I forged my hopes and dreams is full of strangers. Polly goes to college and we surprise her parents with beer and sliders and make them laugh more than they normally would on a Friday night. I find a job and vow it will be my last and I try not to get lost in this new, mediocre life. It's familiar, but we're bored, so bored, and after two glasses of wine, we admit we're a bit lost, too.

Still, each night I curl into her, or she into me, and we sleep, no space between us. I feel her arms wrap around my waist and a contented sigh slips from my mouth. If I could just live in this moment, in this room, with her, forever, I wouldn't worry about the gold. I would just carry it in my pocket and use it when I needed it, like a superhero called to duty. If I could just keep her warm breath on my neck as I walk through my day, I could do this thing. I'm sure of it.