Badlands at Dawn

I'm usually the one who needs convincing to do anything before noon. This time I set an alarm in the dark, shook Ethan awake, and said, "trust me" — which from me is practically a speech — then drove us out onto an empty road with nothing around for miles.

After Minnesota, I needed to put us somewhere that didn't look like any place I'd ever been. The Badlands delivered. The sun came up over all those striped ridges, pink and bone and rust, going on forever, like the surface of some other, kinder planet. Ethan, bless him, was furious about being awake right up until the exact second the light hit. Then he went silent. Then he cried a little. Then he started narrating the whole sunrise like a nature documentary, which is just his way of crying without the tears.

I didn't watch the sunrise much, to be honest. I watched him watch it.

I spent two years convinced the best I could hope for was to stop feeling anything at all. Standing by the cold dirt road in South Dakota with the whole sky on fire and this loud, ridiculous, mess of a person next to me, I felt all of it — and none of it hurt.

That's new. I'm keeping it.

— J