A Few Days Later in the Wake of Something American
Fireworks explode over Tucson while the sun sinks into the west hills. I sit and watch a friend crush rocks that she’ll later turn to paint, paint that she’ll pour her world into just like she does with everything. Behind me, another friend lays on the ground spooning my dog. I hear them both breathing and my heart quiets itself as they speed up and slow down to match one another. They dance with it for a moment before settling into a shared pace.
A rhythm met, two bodies one breath.
The three of us are wet because we’ve been sweating for hours… days… months… We’re fine with it though, we’ve got plenty to purge. We stink of satisfaction, of the simple and the salty. Tonight we celebrate dirt and nothing else.
The crickets start to sing and I think of all the plastic-wrapped bundles of gas-station firewood that are burning at this moment in developed campgrounds around the country. I think of all the crushed cans, the burger meat, and the millions of my countrymen that are celebrating with American flag paraphernalia that’s made its way onto their bodies thanks to a cargo ship from across the world. I dig my toes into this sweet Sonoran sand and close my eyes as the distant explosions rattle my bones loose.
Every year I find myself reflecting on my love for American dirt and the countless souls that were ruthlessly ravaged in order for me to be able to call it that. Every year I sit and think myself into a hole about what it means to love this place that’s built on the broken hopes of nations and cultures that belong here in a way that I never will despite the privilege with which I travel through it. Every year I go to sleep in that hole and hold onto it for days as I try to name the murkiness that I find myself swimming in.
“Happy Birthday America!” they scream amidst smoke.
A birth is a thing worth celebrating.
It’s an act of creation…
An act of gravity…
Of unity…
It’s painfully primeval and is an experience we’ve all shared, even if we don’t remember it. Of all the magic that is to be sampled during our brief stints of sentience, it is perhaps the most sweet and spectacular.
The creation of a life…
a soul…
an experienced perspective…
This country wasn’t born, it was culled — it was selectively excavated, dredged from the broken husk of its former self. We talk of the taming that it took to spread ourselves through the land between our coasts but we didn’t tame a thing, we subjugated it. Our flavor of expansion was not romantic or poetic, we simply gauged a hole in the wilderness, pulled ourselves through it, and propped it open so that the wound could never heal.
We did this at the expense of countless lives, both human and nonhuman.
We did this at the expense of those that had stewarded this place for centuries.
We did this at the expense of our humanity.
We might be states but we are not united. We live at odds with one another, with the land beneath our feet, and with the memories that it holds within it.
Today, in the wake of our alleged independence, I ask you to pay attention to who and what you celebrate not because our home is not worth celebrating but because, more often than not, we lose ourselves in ceremony. I ask you to think of what this home means to you and what you’re doing in service of it. I ask you to learn about what it took to ensure your “freedom” and why so many of your kin are so fucking far from being free.
Mostly, I ask you to walk gently, feel fully, and live playfully.
Onward.