At first when I woke up and my face didn't quite fit, I didn't think anything of it. It is after all winter, and my habits of both hydration and moisturizing are haphazard at best. My skin often feels incorrectly attached. But now under my skin are all of these secrets, an elephant nose and a sunken treasure ship, five songs and thirteen poems. I'm not sure where they came from, but now they are mine. My skin will just have to learn to adjust.
In Utah last year we reached the salt flats and I squinted for a while at the horizon line, trying to make out its shape. I had read somewhere that it was so flat that you could see the curvature of the earth, which seems suspect to me. I like that this is a thing that we think about, though, all of the places from which you can possibly tell that we are on a planet and not just this ground in front of us. I couldn't tell if it curved anywhere, but the bright hot white stretched out in front of me and I thought about the Donner party, struggling through that land, losing the days in a slow battle that would lead to catastrophe. Even I am not dramatic enough to have seen that as a sign at the time, although I would be lying if I told you that the thought hadn't occurred to me sometimes in the very late nights since.
I've been doing a lot of research on tuberculosis lately, which obviously means I have subsequently being doing a lot of thinking about adaptability, the ways that we keep up and the ways that we are left behind. All of the ways that everything is bigger than we are, even when they're also smaller.
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