Attracted to Light

Doug and Mike Starn, Attracted to Light D

They told me I should make sure I wake up early and see the dawn before I leave. And so, this morning I did. It was all rosy glow and bambis in the alfalfa fields and big pink sun peeking through the low morning fog bank. It was crisp, clean air, the kind that makes my lips cracked and my nostrils dry enough to bleed. Sunrise is always less dramatic than sunset, but just knowing that you're one of the few witnessing it makes it pretty damn, um, well, special.

Walking around at midday, I realized I just never get sick of looking at the plains no matter how dried up and scourged it seems. All that yellow and brown, and then the place where those two colors meet. The smell of sage each time the wind stirs which, on a day like today, ain't that often. All that scrub and barbed wire and rocks so sun-baked you keep thinking you see bone. All that agony and expanse and then, like fireworks, the bluest sky above it all. I could never get sick of looking at all that distance. The worst that could happen is that I would fall in.

That is to say, it's been good for my heart. Poor scarred and mended heart! I have taken it out often, bloody and pulsing, to examine. I have compared it to other hearts, some with less scar tissue and others lumpy with disease. I have hurtled it onto the highway at night, wishing for it to be driven into the ground. I have shoved it under my pillow hoping that that might help me sleep. I have swallowed it, pummeled it, hidden it and retrieved it. I have foisted it onto others who have seemed sympathetic. The kind ones simply hand it back; the cruel ones, well, we know what they do with hearts. But still. It flutters. Like the moth toward the light.