Backwards + Stars + Owls

All loss is connected. I know this because every time someone leaves my life I think of all the others that went missing, go backward, try to detect the moment they left. She was one. Recently someone else left my life. Something about his leaving made me think of her. Maybe because they both saw me in ways others couldn’t or haven’t. In our twenties, the crimes between us ran too deep to climb out of. I loved her more than any man. That’s how much I loved her, but we no longer speak.

When I think of her, it’s always that strange night outside the empty bar in Taos where we drank beers until closing. Inside, the dance floor strobed and throbbed with music and light, passing over nobody. We met two men who wanted to know our relationship to Taos. We said we had none. “Blanca Peak will tell you. It seals your fate,” one guy said while inhaling a cigarette. “The mountain will either accept you or reject you,” the other agreed. I still wonder what that means exactly, how one is accepted or rejected by a mountain. The men laughed at their own cryptic sayings which were all code for teasing us for being outsiders. They were working men, who worked climbing and repairing all kinds of electric and telephone wires that run through tall polls. “Height doesn’t bother us,” they offered. They invited us to their trailer, a double-wide when the bar started shutting down. “We have molly” they said. It was new then, designer. We knew only one mutual friend who had done it, she came back from Burning Man raving. I shrugged. I agreed to stay sober if she wanted to experiment. We got in my truck and followed their car down a long dirt road. The stars were guides, intensely cartoonish, in Taos we felt so close to them they seemed to bend around us the more we traveled into the dark. Before we got out of the car we asked each other if we were doing something colossally stupid. We didn’t know these men, we didn’t know what was behind the trailer door. I told her I’d be vigilant, she could trust me. Once in the trailer a girl in a black tutu with a septum piercing pushed things to the side on a coffee table and snorted powder off a DVD copy of Austin Powers. Everyone else was quietly swallowing molly except me. I was handed a Bud Light I pretended to drink and sat on the couch. Something was on the TV but I didn’t watch it. She was on the couch across from me half under a blanket with the guy she’d been flirting with. Everyone was making small talk, including the girl in the black tutu. I was glad she was there, even if her powder pushing was awkward, no one seemed to care. I kept hearing something rapping on the backdoor. No one seemed to notice that either, but the irregularity of it bothered me. I asked about the noise. Shrugs all around. I asked to check and went out the back door to investigate the noise. As soon as I opened the door blowing across the frame in the wind was a dried snake wrapped in a wedding veil hanging from the doorjamb. I almost screamed as it came pummeling towards me jumping out of the way. The tutu girl looked up from her powder. “Oh isn’t it pretty? That’s all that’s left.” I didn’t ask if she meant if that was all that was left of the snake, or the wedding, but I nodded, the snake’s body frozen in a coil, its face a placid, ancient stare. Plastic white roses weaved preciously through the veil. The shadow of the Sangre De Cristos from the door. All fourteen thousand feet of Blanca Peak. Back inside I could still hear the snake and the veil crashing against the door–some kind of dried-up reminder–a memento mori, maybe. The guy next to me put his hand on my leg. It was morning and along my knee his hands crept to the middle of me. I put my beer down and stood up. The outline of the mountains kept pressing through the window. The girl in the tutu was snorting powder out of the carpet now. She spilled and that was all that was left now. She crawled like a miner towards the dust. Her pelvis low, she giggled. I decided for us we were leaving. A moment I feared would become ominous, but no one protested. We walked out of the trailer as easily as we walked in. Outside things seemed to turn to sand, the early morning, so fragile, spilling through our fingers. Three A.M. stars burst between me and her and the car. She was high. We got in, and I turned us back down the dark road, a paper grave we climbed into together. Later, she would stop trusting me. Sometimes I see myself as the snake and her as the wedding veil, and sometimes I think it all means nothing. The men, the snake, the powder; the black tutu, the wedding veil, the empty bar; me, and her, and how we all came together in those few hours under the stars.

The last connection I had to her was the owl necklace she gifted me for my 28th birthday. I wore it every day for years. Even years after we stopped speaking. Two years ago I had a panic attack in a hotel room in Baltimore and broke out in hives. I thought maybe it was the necklace. It had started leaving green marks on my neck after years of my body oils wearing down the finish. Impulsively, I threw the necklace in the garbage, and then I dumped takeout on top of it so I wouldn’t be tempted to fish it out later. When I got into bed that night I stared at the metal of the trashcan gleaming off the street lights coming in through the window. I knew the necklace would be gone after I left the room the next morning. That was the end. I tell myself I will not be this fragile ever again. I tell myself I will not continue to open to people that close me. The way it all drains into a ditch of pain: loss, loss, loss. The way the loss of someone else somehow becomes a loss of a piece of yourself. The way you want to just crawl back into time and memory and shake your own shoulders and whisper, Don’t. This is going to hurt.