Breathe
Morning comes softly to Alamogordo. The Sacramento Mountains emerge from sleep one shadow at a time, their ridges gathering light like old memories returning to the body. A thrasher splashes in the bird bath. Water lifts. Water falls. The sound is small enough to be mistaken for a prayer. The desert says nothing. Creosote. Dust. Stone. The long language of things that survive. I stand among ghosts I once called myself. The child who dreamed of elsewhere. The man who carried too much. The lives that fit for a season and then loosened, slipping away like old skin. The earth keeps them all. Every day I walk in a quiet funeral. No black clothes. No hymns. Only sunlight moving across gravel. Only wind lifting the corners of memory. Only the endless procession of what has ended making room for what has not yet begun. The mountains brighten. The thrasher climbs from the water and vanishes into the mesquite. Nothing announces itself. Still, something is happening. The wind moves through ...