I am driving west, away from New Mexico, where Kai and I had made our home, when the shrubs suddenly give way to rock: Cliff faces scarred with eras past. Steep buttes worn by rivers long dry. And I travel from I-40, back ten years, to my final evening at your bedside.
We were watching National Geographic, like you and Dad used to each night. A sun-weathered geologist stood atop a dusty mesa and pointed to a field of rocks below. Forest of stone, he called it, where 200 million years ago trees washed into a system of ancient streams. Then ash from distant volcanoes gradually petrified the logs, replacing their fibers with minerals.
I resisted the geologist’s descriptions. How silica from the ash collected and crystallized in the wood’s cells. How, over centuries, the earth drained and lifted, snapping the stone logs clean. Because all I pictured was how the proteins had accumulated in your brain. How your memories had fractured beyond remedy. And I resisted your smile. How you nodded along, almost pleased, to the English you had ceased to understand or speak. How in those images, severed from history or meaning, you found beauty.
But now, as I continue west, farther from Kai, from his new boyfriend, from my old life, I try to channel your smile. I nod at the cliffs’ bands of red, white, and purple. I note the buttes’ likeness to temples and altars. I try to see beyond the past’s scars and wears in hopes that, this time, my resistance will give. The road will lift. And I will feel the fracture. The snap. The beauty of your clean break.
Matthew Torralba Andrews (he/him) is a queer writer of mixed Filipino descent. His fiction has appeared in Apogee, Bellingham Review, Cincinnati Review, South Carolina Review, and elsewhere. He holds an MFA in creative writing from Eastern Washington University and lives in northern Arizona.