Day 257

Salton Sea, 2009 | shot on Canon

Day 257

In the summer of 2009 after nearly nine months on the road, I parked myself at my eventually-to-be in-laws’ kitchen table twenty minutes outside of Washington, DC. For two weeks I sat there, banging away at my laptop. Aside from evening waitress shifts, all I did for two weeks straight in the northern Virginia almost-summer heat…was write. Every hour of each day bore witness to temperatures edging closer to the upper 80s; meanwhile my eventually-to-be-in-laws edged nowhere closer to turning on the air conditioning. (Some things never change.)

And so I wrote in the gradually increasing heat, no matter. Between waitress shifts. Between dog walks. Just like that. And I got everything down pretty good. And I’m so glad I did—you know, how you want to get everything down while it’s still fresh in your mind.

Dark brown pointy-toed cowgirl boots with turquoise silver-studded lightning bolts down the sides were fresh in my mind.

Bucking horses were fresh in my mind.

Dogs sneaking off behind barns with horse hoof clippings on the day of the farrier’s visit were fresh in my mind.

The smell of sage and creosote in American deserts was fresh in my mind.

Digging the pickup truck out from under ocean waves in the moonlight in El Golfo de Santa Clara was fresh in my mind.

Rolling across the border from Vermont into Canada and feeling the truck break down just 800 feet later where no one spoke English was fresh in my mind.

The taste of sky, and the smell of sunshine was fresh in my mind.

If I could go back and say to 2009-Marisa, the chronicler of all things, thank you, I would be eternally grateful for her effort to get it all down. To preserve the memories of 256 days under big skies, and a red-roofed Chevy pickup truck—and preserve it she did.

2009-Marisa printed it all out (with 3-hole-punch!), threaded the pages into a white, now beginning-to-rust 3-ring binder. Said rusting binder chronicling a particular chunk of 256 days of one woman’s life-lived-awake sits six feet away from my present day desk. Pages full of adventure, yearnings, wandering, and wonder, sit watching me as I take Zoom meetings and file my taxes.

Aside from Shane and his mother, I never shared it with anyone else.

I never shared the 3-hole-punched pages in the binder, complete with color photos throughout, because it wasn’t the right version of the story. Factually, yes. But in that binder is a version of the story that didn’t mean anything to the girl who raced to the kitchen table every morning in the rising Virginia sun to get it all down, lest she forget. The version of the story in that binder was just that. A chronicle. A way of not forgetting. A collection of unusual people and far-flung places. As far as pages, it was lengthy. But on what it all meant to her, it was light.

Today, my story has meaning, thanks to the exacting passage of time. The hand of time takes your days, and gifts some meaning in its place...a brutally lopsided, yet at the same time, delicately precise, trade. Sixteen years of living transforms a journal chronicle into a parable in its own right.

Bear with me as I try again, to get it all down. Unlike 2009-Marisa, 2025-Marisa seems to have a problem sitting down for more than 20 minutes at a time. Instagram and pulling weeds in the front yard interrupt my efforts to write, along with the internalization of the middle-aged non-heretofore self-censoring narrative of this is stupid, no one will read this, who cares, it’s just. actually. not. good.

And why now?

Because the story, that for so long merely leered at me next to my desk…began to bare its teeth and then morphed into the monster under my bed…its accomplice the silvery finger of moonlight across my bedspread, the unrelenting glimmer that snakes its way under my eyelids and into my consciousness, and keeps me up at night.

In the darkness of night, my story climbs up out of my heartspace, and stands on my chest—

How dare you not share?

How dare you not tell the tale of the 256 days?

The days you were awake?

The days you lived?

The days you breathed?

The days you tried,

The days you failed,

The days you bathed sun on your skin and combed rain through your hair?

The story looks menacing, then frustrated, and then a little bit sad, climbs back into its hole in my chest, and lets itself drop, heavy, back down into my heartcave.

I fear it will continue to shake me awake until I decide the girl inside can come out—

The girl who woke up mornings, starry-eyed on a partially-deflated air mattress in the back of her boyfriend’s pickup truck, or in her sleeping bag in a tent, or in a double-wide trailer on a twin-sized bed overlooking the horses’ pasture.

The girl who woke up with no appointments and no plans, she’s still somewhere deep inside.

The 22-year-old girl who reached her hand across the sleeping bag to hold her love against her chest…in the sleeping bag, in the trailer, in the tent under a big, big sky.

Some nights, I reach with my 39-year-old hand across the bedspread to whom I imagine, during nighttime’s fractured interpretation of time’s passage, is my un-changed, un-aged 22-year-old-recent-college-graduate lover. That is, until I see my beginning-to-crepe hand in the moonlit-dark reaching towards his hip, and the skin on the back of my hand signals the years gone by, the work of a blazing, bright sun on ungloved hands riding horseback across canyons.

It’s time to tell you my story, because 14,235 days of life half-lived and counting…begin to contrast more starkly with just 256 days lived fully awake. The math, never my friend, gives me the shivers, and the silver moonlight snakes its way under my eyelids again.

Do you wake up in the moonlit half-dark, counting your days?

Does the moonlight play tricks in your bedroom, too? On your hand, on your lover, on your skin, and in your bed? Does it shed light on the number of your days fully lived, fully awake?

So we find ourselves today, on my 14,236th day, embarking on another telling of this story where the words very well may not come out just right. But I’m getting enough days behind me by now to know how fast they—both the words, and the days, suddenly go.

Come ride through 256 days of a chapter of life-lived-awake. I feel the meaning of those 256 days as they recede farther into the rearview of my life—proof of life. Proof of love.

Proof that I was everywhere and nowhere, all at once.

Circle up around my campfire.

The story that follows is called—Americana.