Curse Me
The neighbor says he used to race motorcycles. Hit his head a lot. Now he doesn’t sleep much. That’s why he’s out grilling burgers at 11:30pm on his back porch which sits, more or less, directly below my bedroom. He’s trying not to wake his family, he says. I tell him I feel like a giant asshole, but he’s now unfortunately keeping me awake. It’s a warm night. The windows are open. The air is still as an iron rod. He seems genuinely apologetic. He’s got a deep southern drawl and a black gap near his upper lip where a tooth is missing. We agree 10pm seems like a reasonable time to quiet down going forward.
Behind our connected porches, there are at least five different species of trees growing together like a tangled family. A blue spruce, a stand of what I think are young ash trees, some kind of long needled fir, a small cottonwood perhaps, and an enormous honey locust so vibrantly green against the stormy afternoon skies it almost hurts to look at.
This is what I think of as the sleep anxiety creeps back up on me. A little flare up from a few disrupted nights of sleep. If all these trees can thrive together, then all us folks with our different leaves and cones and branches can thrive together too, right? It’s been quiet since we chatted, the neighbor and I. There’s no tension between us, a delight of maturity. We’re just finding our place in the canopy. Still, I have to force my body to release the tension behind my chest, my hands clawing at the muscles of my breastbone as though I could let my heart break free. I can’t shake the fear that my battle for sleep, my battle for quiet, will last forever.
I wonder if most nights my neighbor claws at his temples in the same way, wishing for sleep. Wishing he could carve his own skull open for relief.
That’s one aspect of the new life. I am also already happily absorbed in my daily rituals. A hot beverage made by the kitchen window in the morning. Work done in my own office, filled with plants, the color yellow, and so much sunshine. Afternoon bike rides through the stratified layers of purple, green, and blue dust and the burnt sienna slabs of desert stone. Watching the storms roll over the Monument in the evenings. Regular breaks for pizza at the Hot Tomato.
I’m guarding my joy. Protecting it. The question, “How’s the move going so far?” sends my skin crawling. Right now, three weeks in, what’s there to hate? But if I say it’s amazing now and in a year it’s not, will they call me a liar? How long before the insidious nature of a place shows itself? How long to decide if it’s my particular brand of insidious?
Digging trail the other night with a local mountain bike group, I heard someone mention the Grand Valley curse. It goes something like this: After the Utes were forced off of their land in 1881, they cursed the white settlers moving to the valley to always have to return to it, whether they wanted to or not. Legend says carrying a little dirt with you from the Book Cliffs, Grand Mesa, and Colorado National Monument could break the curse, allowing you to leave. Others aren’t so sure. And it’s very likely the curse is altogether made up.
If it’s real though, I exist on the curse’s B-side. People here want to ensure they can escape should they ever want to. Meanwhile I want to ensure I always have somewhere to call home. I don’t know how long I’ll make it here, but if I scrub my boots clean, never carrying that dirt with me, perhaps every time I wander away, I’ll always find myself pulled back to Grand Valley. Pulled home.
