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Emily Lawson
Gas Station Bathroom, UT
- Maybe the true self emerges, lives and works outdoors. Forgets it can be seen—no mirrors, no service, no battery life, no photos. The true self wakes from dreams as dense and real as life—more dense, more real, more fraught. Life is overheating and cooling, hungering and eating. Shadows close and open the canyons. Feet are cracked—the cracks packed with salve, the salve stuck with dirt, then a pair of unwashed socks for sleeping. Swollen fingers, puffy eyelids, matted hair. There is bad coffee. Brushing teeth without water and spitting into the sand. No deep talk. Some confessions under the stars, yes, but no articulate wisdom rushing forth to meet the pain. Chain-sawed invasive trees drop berries by the thousands that float in floes down the river. There are thoughts, many of them, petty and ruminative. Wide ranging, caged pacing. But one lives, as they say, here and now. Maybe that is why illness and wilderness go together. Waiting, idleness, dreamtime. Nothing lasts. Regular life awaits your return or it doesn’t. Come back to town and the soul’s own eyes burn out of the filthy blemished sunburned face. Strange dirty clothes. Stagger into the hospital bathroom and the soul’s own eyes burn out of the gaunt and sallow face. Damp greasy hair, cotton gown. Where have you been? It’s ecstatic, frightening—just a glimpse of itself. The thing, soul, that makes its appearance in the absence of comfort and purpose. Is it resting or working? Being forged or being whittled away? Meanwhile—pill organizers, CT scans, directives. Outdoors the body can work. Pull oars. But something watches very closely as uneventful days pass one after the next. Meeting each need as it arises. Sleeping hard. All the time, the real life waits.