Iam shaking off the rust flakes from my skin. My head is full of nails but I’m nothing like him with his face of caves. The man who brought me here. Nothing like my dead aunt in the trailer riddled with chemical tumors and death. She’s been gone for many hours. A day. I stand in a muddy field. I touch her dead corpse. This is not her, but she was not her long before she died. She was plungers and needles. She was load after load.

I am trying to remember a time in California when the sun was shining. I was young, wearing a blue t-shirt. Dry west coast heat. Slow bake at 108 degrees. The kind of heat: you could roast in and say thank you. I select a sheaf of papers rubber banded together. I snap it. Life.

I do not think about her again until many months later. Mostly there is no reason. She was a bridge from one bank to the other, and many people used her to cross shallow waters. She was tired, but I knew nothing of that then or before. Mostly she was a syncope-like vessel for death. Blood doesn’t make you care, just makes you show up.

I sketch notes on a makeshift palimpsest. Yes to sketching them because I trace and retrace my letters until they look worse. Like problems. I repeat and repeat until…

Exhausted. I have driven here before. Many places I have picked up speeding tickets. New York, Virginia, Georgia, Nevada, California, we blur together. These are mistakes I pack together in a picnic basket. Wrap a bonnet around my head, no one will ever know I’m not Red Riding Hood, the wolf will feast when the wolf will feast.

I did not go to her funeral. This doesn’t occur to me until just now. The devil in me — truant, thoughtless — patient with mourning like I will have all my life to do it.

I am scattered across the country like wheat and chaff. Here but also everywhere else. That’s what it’s like when you’ve been too many places. I am still where I was born, where Rob exploded to death, where I was married, divorced, where my aunt died in a field of mud. I am still the young boy in the blue t-shirt in the dry California sun.

On that trip to Escondido I met my grandfather for the first time. He was 94 years-old. He died at the age of 103. My grandfather was born in 1898. A Duran. In…