4, 10, 14, 20

4, 10, 14, 20

On my fourth birthday, I said goodbye to Saudi Arabia by rolling. I remember the blue carpet and how it overwhelmed the white-walled and now empty room, how Tommy and I floundered like beached fish against it despite both knowing how to swim. Mom made me a coconut cake and steak. We ate it outside waiting for the sky to darken. I could hear them talking in my living room, distant, and Tommy and I sat on the grass, combing our fingers through the stalks in search of smaller things. Lying back, the walls of the yard rising up, I felt his leg touching mine. He told me about America and how it was a place with strange animals called cows, which were a sort of camel but not. I listened, not frightened exactly but bewildered, trying to imagine being far away from me. Then he was done telling stories and even though it was my birthday, he sat on me and smudged a dandelion against my nose just to prove that he was still older.

We left Indiana two weeks before I turned ten. Mom cried when we drove away from the irises outside the garage, and I looked out the window as we made the familiar right-hand turn off my street. It was a funny thing to do, crying. We’d left two pennies in the cement were Dad had poured a new patio three summers ago: 1989 and 1991. I knew where the scratches were in my closet where I would go to hide and how it would feel to collect white paint under my fingernails, pinpricks of dazzling pain. When I rode in Dad’s moving truck, he let me use the walkie-talkie. Tommy and I told a winding story between the two U-Hauls until the batteries died. Callie sat between Dad and I, numbed, her ears low and back, her smile loose across her jaw. She put her long nose against my knee and I played with the soft fur around her eyes, wondering if this was how Mom felt brushing my hair on Sunday mornings. Dad asked me what it was like to be so close to double digits. I told him I wanted to be eleven because that’s the age, Tommy told me, when you start to know things. Callie sighed and I kissed the crown of her head, laying my cheek against hers for a moment, her hot breath filled with grass- and dirt-things.

Three days before I was to turn fourteen, I sprawled on the hot rocky outcrop of our last campsite and looked up at the light through the oak leaves. My hair, thick with oil and stiffly malleable, smelled faintly of smoke and sunscreen. My skin had progressed to that point where dirt had begun to build its own little worlds, towered cities around my ankles, a lighthouse against my neck. I was alright with it. It was only a week but already I felt like I was taking on something more animal. My body leaned from days of nothing more than trail mix, apples and dehydrated pasta, while my muscles strained to paddle and portage. I heard my best friend singing as she pumped water into her dented Nalgene, and closing my eyes, it felt as though the sun were melting against my face. It was a funny thing to realize then, what time was doing to us. Indigo smacked the ground beside me, pressing the cool plastic bottle to my leg: “Drink.”

I spent my twentieth birthday waiting to cry. On the phone home, Dad talked to me rationally about options. He has a way of saying things that I won't, afraid as I am of where they might lead. When he asked if I wanted to drop out of college, I paused for a long moment, my fingernails biting into the skin below my knee. There was no simple answer to that. This place dug into my bones when all I wanted was Arizona’s expanse of sky and time to watch the monsoons break from the tiered clouds and the kinetic canyons bringing to me the sense of motion in waiting. I remembered telling Travis that all you ever had to do was move fast enough over the rocks and you’d never have enough time to fall. But I had. I’d lost myself in the dust running down trails again and again, scrapping little mementos into my skin, taking a strange pride in my own blood and the grit I would wince to wash out later. Sometimes I felt like nothing more than a pair of eyes. Inside, I was hungry for more skies and mountains and dirt making powdery patterns on my hands. Away in California, Tommy told me to transfer, transfer now, like it needed to be done rapidly, like the switching at the junction of train tracks. He lured me over the phone with pictures of Claremont-McKenna’s hybrid campus and the promise of robust financial aid. I tried to tell him that moving to his coast wouldn’t solve my problems. Sitting on the grass, Dad waiting on the other end, I knew that leaving would always be easy. It was staying, it was waiting and letting all the other places fall away, that was hard. Later that night, I held my face together with my hand and Amanda said to me that birthdays got to be like this when you were away from home. I shook my head, resting my arms gingerly against my lap and told her, “No, it doesn’t even feel like my birthday.”