I used to float away so often. Every day, floating up above somewhere but I am trying to bring myself back to earth and it hurts so much, holding myself to solid ground.

Disconnected—the fishing boats speed until they slip behind the sun beams and in the middle of the river I melt into black water. I can feel myself slipping, nineteen and already out of time—three feet deep, halfway down the sun drags the fishermen off the edge of the earth and I am left floating here, in the dark, looking up at scattered stars and passing helicopters.

Sitting cross legged in a house somewhere in between two places you do not want to be, dead plants on the windowsills, jammed shut doorways, the sirens from the cop cars paint the white walls in thin colors. We all stay silent as the boots thump down the hall. In the corner a woman looks at everybody with such intensity, a finger to her lips. An ambulance comes and two paramedics wearing rubber gloves pull a dead man out of the building from the room next door—don’t touch him, they say—and the music starts again, and I can’t help but keep staring out the window.

The fire is still burning, turning bright green to charred black as it passes by, and I don’t know how to put it out. These scars, they’re still with me from that time ago, passed down—they’ve broken into my mother’s skin too, her father’s skin too.

Those scars, they grow deeper every day. I can’t seem to shed the thoughts that they might never fade, that these marks will be mine forever.

I am not sure how or entirely why I ended up here in the first place, standing, in the middle of an empty corn field; there are roads up ahead where horse and buggies pass by and the sky is slate gray; beautiful houses on hillsides sit hollowed and dilapidated, slummed out somewhere across the river by landlords who escape to the cities; broken porch swings and thin windows, and burn marks on the front door, and doesn’t the river look beautiful from so high up?

The men yell you do not belong here, and I feel like I have to stay, only if to prove something to myself but I don’t know if I can be better. The breaks, they aren’t coming, and I am running out of time, trapping myself in Middle America, crash landed, burning. My shoes are made of lead.

My feet are melting into piles of metal. I am welded to the dirt.