New Mexico
isn't that weird? shouldn't I appreciate California where I've lived over half my life? or Los Angeles for the same reason? but this afternoon I appreciate New Mexico, where I passed through important intervals of my life. I was born there. I left there for Brasil before I really experienced New Mexico. after Brasil, after my family was ripped apart and reassembled, we were planted in New Mexico again. I finished puberty there, I think. learned about girls and girlfriends. had poetry flashed in front of me and dismissed. learned there was no god for me. worked in the desert in fours, threes, twos, then alone. saw the stars in the desert as if I'd never seen them before. learned about learning in college, then again in graduate school. learned about having a wife and a child. then a smattering about children while I pursued physics and poetry. New Mexico was there for me as a desert, as the greening border of a desert, as forested mountains, as a refuge at the edge of people and of what I thought was the real world. New Mexico was there as not my home but where I lived, a strange world, not quite the real world, a part of the United States and not part of them at the same time, a place to escape into then escape from. New Mexico.
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