How Long it Takes to Disappear: Part 1

A story of losing (and finding) myself

Hi, friends!

I couldn’t think of a better way to kick off Sunday Drive than with a story about getting lost.

Since this is a newsletter exploring journeys, both physical and metaphorical, and since getting lost always teaches us a lesson, it seemed to fit.

This is the first of three installments I’ll share over the following weeks. If you’re new around here, this is where to start!

Enjoy xx

P.S. This story is intended for mature audiences and entails subject matter that may be triggering or upsetting. Reader discretion is advised.

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When I go to Canyonlands National Park for the first time, I worry about the crowds.

I’m not traveling alone, but fewer people will make it easier to do what I came here to do. The main reason I enter the wilderness is to lose myself, or rather, lose that which haunts me. I walk until it disappears, or until I find a new way to endure it — whichever comes first. This ritual requires a degree of detachment, both from the people I love and from humanity itself.

We arrive at the campsite as the sun dips downward, igniting the landscape around us, and I see that my concern was unfounded. Here, where hundreds of sandstone needles and spires slice the air like knives, and the horizon stretches flat for thousands of miles between swaths of land and sky, solitude is inevitable.

I choose to escape on a hike in which everyone is distracted. My sister and a friend kneel to pick up glittering rocks, examining each one with care, and her boyfriend searches for scenes to capture on the vintage camera dangling from his neck.

My thirst to be alone is always temporary; a cool pool in which to be refreshed before returning to what I know.

I walk quickly ahead on the only path I see — a mound clotted with sagebrush. I look back. The hill obstructs my view of the people I know, but I believe they are there. 

Ahead is a panoramic view of the canyon. I lean into it — the curl of the Green river, the cake-like layers of rock, the towering ochre monoliths. 

The urge to be alone is easier to neglect if I’m in the city, living in a neat square of existence, but now that I’m standing on the edge of a cliff with no trace of humanity in sight, I feel it: an invitation to slip unseen into the distant purple. 

It isn’t suicidal — I don’t want to leave my whole self behind. Rather, it’s closer to what the French call L’appel du Vide, the call of the void. It’s when the urge to know what lies beyond feels bigger than the consequence of that knowing. 

I lie down on my back and wait. Five minutes go by. Then ten. Then twenty.

They should’ve arrived by now. I stand up and call out for my sister.

The breeze settles on my shoulders and bugs buzz in circles around me.

A hawk shrieks in the canyon. 

I am alone.

***

I am no stranger to getting lost. 

In fact, I’ve honed my expertise in this art over the last decade.

By the year I turn eighteen, my father cannot stop drinking, and the last time I live in a house with him he hurls a pair of steel toe boots at my sister and me, closing his bedroom door before seeing where they land. 

My mom, separated from him, moves into the cottage she grew up in — the one overlooking the salty river where palms lean haphazardly like crooked teeth.

There’s no home I can go to where I feel safe.

It’s easy to ignore that I don’t have a house the first year it becomes real because I’m in college and I live on campus. But then comes Christmas and instead of going home to a house where my family lives, like all my classmates do, I go elsewhere. 

I see my sister in Rhode Island and we drink entire bottles of wine and set tables for two, then stumble to the bar on the corner that feels more like a living room, packed with people who, like us, have nowhere else to be. These are the nights when my sister and I realize how much we need each other, how we are all we have anymore. 

I usher whiskey down my throat until two men appear beside us. We talk about the seven fishes feast, a tradition we are not celebrating with our Sicilian cousins this year because we are instead practicing the art of ignoring, each laugh like a brushstroke, every sip like an eraser, undoing our family portrait.

It becomes our tradition. Years later we are sloshed again, boots slipping through snow on the sidewalk that leads home from the tavern, a different one this time, and what I understand about the strangers I meet at bars is that when their fingertips yearn for the shell of my body they are seeking an escape of their own, but it is one I cannot grant them because I must be the one who leaves.

This is a test, an act of resistance, that I will soon learn to use in a bigger way. I will learn to leave friendships, relationships, jobs, and places I live; places I love. What I don’t know when I am twenty is that I want to be gone because it means no one can let me down.

I believe that being left by someone you want, or who you think wants you, is so much worse than being alone by choice. 

There is power in being the one who goes, even when you want to stay. It also means you never stick around long enough to let anybody love you.

Some people say I’m running. 

I think I’m saving myself.

***

…to be continued.

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Thank you for supporting my creative work. I’ll see you next Sunday!

-Michelle