"What is that feeling when you're driving away from people and they recede on the plain till you see their specks dispersing?-- it's the too-huge world vaulting us, and it's good-by. But we lean forward to the next crazy venture beneath the skies." -Jack Kerouac, On the Road

I swear, you can go up and down, through hell and back and think you've seen it all. When my brother was around, we saw it all together, living from one bright moon to the next. But people aren't always around. We lived our lives like sand in the wind, never staying put for too long. Doesn't matter anyway. Whether you sit or whether you roll, the great world will beat you down or rise you up depending on the whims of nothing but complete and utter chaos. It all depends on the moment.

One moment at the dawn of our second decade and the eve of our first, Phin and I encountered a moment that changed us forever. But what can a ten-year-old do when it's him against the strength of a man and he's though up until then that the world is a fairytale? I guess me and Phin both are survivors, but I survived less, and so make up for it with survivor's guilt. Phin runs off into the sunset and I stay with our mother, Early, as she winds over and over this world, tying the ribbons of the road together in bows around us, and somehow, Phin finds us again and rides high on life just to spite the darkest night of his life.

Some nights, boys can't forget. Not when they steal your dignity. Some nights, I guess, stick with you and behind your eyes they're all you can ever see. That moment becomes a border: Before and After. On both sides of that divide, we were just looking for a place to sleep and somwhere to call home. Now, though, I know that I've always been home, sitting still or running fast, watching the scenery go by in a blurr. I just took the long route around to figure that out and on the way I lost and gained more than most people see in a good, long lifetime. But that's the way it goes.

I think, often, that the idea of "ethics" becomes lost in the midst of conflict. All my life, I have considered myself an ethical person. As I have grown older, I have found myself questioning if I ever really knew what "ethical" meant, or what having morals means. When the nameless, faceless soldier on the television becomes the civilian that you love, who has done all he could for his country and himself--because there is no way out--when he hates himself for shooting a gun and feeling pleasure when the enemy dies, what definition of morality can be given? To whom can "ethical" be ascribed?

From December 12

Two years ago today, at about this time, I learned what it was like to have a life ripped out from under me, what it was to know that happiness and love are illusions and that belief in either is the most foolish thing anyone could ever hold. It took almost two years to move from pitying myself because I couldn't believe my best friends had actually left me for both of those things. Now, I am as healed as I will ever be but I am changed. The walls I had built around myself and that were destroyed, never came back. Instead, steel grew in me, infiltrated me. I am a realist but I still hope.

My life is a sea of motion and I ride it. Outside, I make my own way, I race against time because I know that "we all owe death a life", and that "to be born again, first you have to die". That's some good old Salman Rushdie. That's some good old truth. I like it, because there's hardly any of it.

One day, someone accused me of wanting to save the world. I would love to save the world but I'm not an idiot. No one can save the world. No one's "got the whole world in his hands". I know that nobody changes, no one can change anyone else, and to think otherwise is foolish. I can't save anyone, including myself. I do know, though, that I can't sit back ad do nothing while I watch the human race blow itself to hell. One at a time. I will try to instill respect, rationality, acceptance in. I am not too optimistic. But I have to try.

I will spend my life trying. I will die trying because I know that the civilian becomes the soldier and the soldier, often, cannot understand himself as a pawn and cannot live with himself. In other clothes, the soldier we view as merely collateral is the civilian we mourn. There is no difference. Both deaths, on all sides, are just as tragic. Both are human deaths no matter how "wrong" or "right", how brainwashed or aware.

Because I'm me, I look everywhere, so I have to borrow this: "there's a cross for everyone and there's a cross for me". Amazing Grace. Am I running away from my own pain by focusing on that of the world? No. I have been in pain enough and I will continue to be. So will the world. The problem is, many people are incapable of pain: killing is a hobby. Pain signifies the humane within the human. If you can't feel pain, essentially, beneath the post traumatic stress, then there's a real problem. I swear I'm not a sadist or a masochist, but my goal is to make sure that if pain is warranted, it is capable of being felt. My goal is to make the human race, in very small doses, humane. Perhaps, the virus will spread.

How many times have I been in the same place: where I don't know where I am and even less where I'm going? All I know is that everyone is slipping away, either into the grave or into time.

"For my people and others like me," Little Blue Hawk said, "people whose flesh comes from this land and rose out of this dust from the beginning, names have a real meaning. A name can change if a person grows out of one and into another."
"How can you grow out of your name?" I asked.
Little Blue Hawk grimaced and looked sideways at me without turning her head. "You become someone new," she said. "Twisted Spear, my mother's brother, grew out of that name one summer. He went out with his brothers and a few others. They made camp by the river. On the fourth night a storm blew in. The storm swelled the river in the dark and the water swallowed the camp before they could climb high enough. They all drowned. All except Twisted Spear who awoke on a far bank the next morning. He returned home alone and after the mourning was over, began to be called Spared by the River. You see? Twisted Spear drowned along with his brothers and Spared by the River was born."
Little Blue Hawk smiled and reached her hand over to me and pushed and clump of hair away from my face.
"You look too sad, Judah. Why?"
I shook my head and swallowed the lump in my throat.
"It's almost like one of Early's stories."
"I haven't heard them."
"If you stay with us long enough, I guarantee you, you will."
Little Blue Hawk nodded.
"What name were you born with?" I asked.
"The one you call me by. I was born into it, though. Not with it."
"How come?"
"The day I was born, a hawk from the East, where the trouble came from, flew into the reservation. It landed on my parents' roof the moment my mother felt the first pains of labor. Eventually it settled on the windowsill outside the birthing room. It stayed all day and night. At the dawn of the second day, I was born and with my first cry, the hawk cried, too. When the people looked, the first light of morning slanted down from the sky and shone upon the hawk and upon me. Over the course of the night, the hawk had changed colors, from gray to blue. When the sun was completely above the horizon, the bird flew away. I was left in its place but the Old Ones say it was a guardian and so I would hold it in me. Little Blue Hawk is my namesake. I go where my wings carry me and I watch over. I have not outgrown my name."
"You're watching over us."
"For the time I'm here."
She blew out a breath and gathered dust from the ground in her fingers, then let it fall. "There's an eastern wind blowing," she said, looking up. "But you give the White Man a better face."

"Val?"
"Judah?"
"Hi."

Valentine looked me over as if to make sure I was real as opposed to an apparition. He'd done his time searching on foot for us in the desert and a fair share of it trapped inside a mirage. "Spent my life since then wondering if it weren't a mirage that just kept on going. After all, they say the last moment of your life and every dream you ever dreamed or ever would dream flash in front of your eyes so that it's like living it all over again or for the first time," he'd told me and Phin once.
But we were in the present moment and I'd gone lone on an exit local road.

Val looked up from his newspaper from the other side of the counter and gave me his full attention.
"What are you doing here?"
I looked right back and shrugged.
"I got lost."
Valentine laughed and shook his head.
"Lost! It's impossible for you to get lost, Judah." Right. I have no base. How can I get myself lost when I've never had a place to be found? "Where's your mother? Your brother?"
"I'm alone," I said.
Valentine drew his brow into a furrow and looked me over good.
"She really did you in good, didn't she? I told her it would catch up with her one day."
I laughed.
"Well...we all grow up sometimes," I said. "Maybe Early's is still happening. Her growing up, that is. Has to have the road."
"Or maybe she's just running."
"Maybe mine is standing still. Or learning how to. But I don't feel grown up."

As we stood there talking to each other over the counter in Val's hard-earned/hard-worked convenience store, I noticed that his eyes had begun to wrinkle, little cracks, creases, around the edges that hadn't been there before. Maybe some people never grow up--like Early--and maybe others stay young on the inside but grow old on the outside. I wondered which I would do. A mix of dirt and sky and water.

"Well, come on," Val said and folded up the paper before putting it down in a shelf under the counter.
I smiled and followed him through the doorway. Half-way down the hall, Val stopped and half-turned to look at me.
"You got lost, huh?" he chuckled as if to himself. "You fell in love, didn't you? Or was it really only your mother's craziness?"
I couldn't help but let a smile crack out the corner of my mouth.
"I got lost. Lots of ways."
"Was she on the road, too?"
"Yeah. No Wheels. And not like us. But she was wandering, too."
"What's her name?"
"Little Blue Hawk."
Valentine raised an eyebrow.
I nodded.
"It's a long story," I said.
Like the road. But maybe longer, 'cause Little Blue Hawk got me to sleep atn ight and shut the nightmare out.

"Little Judah boy man, I sees me a fine lookin' hella fire of a whatso beauty up there on that horizon," Phinnaeus declared.
I barely heard him through my sleep, but I turned over and groaned. He punched me.
"Wake up, little brother."
"What is it!"
"We's got us a beauty," he said.
And I got up, right in the middle of the day no less and Phin had the wheel while Early was napping in the back with me. I looked over at my mother and climbed carefully around her and up into the front seat. Up in the middle of the bare rock mountain road with her long hair blowing around her like a protective veil and her thumb held out for a hitch was the most beautiful goodamned thing I ever seen.

Phin, my brother, slowed with his foot on the brake and I looked out the rolled-down window at her. I stared for who-knows-how-long and she smiled with a wall over her eyes like our Early. Like me.

"Gettin' in, yo?" Phin said, leaning over me.
She nodded and Phin punched me in the bicep.
"What!" I hissed and punched him back.
"Open up, little brother! Whatso man you gone stupid?"
"Shut," I said and twisted around to open the slider door.
"Watch out, miss," Phin said to her. "Our momma's dead asleep in the back you be sharin' a lift in now."
The girl nodded and in acknowledgment and climbed in with one, swift motion.

"Valentine?"
Valentine Russel looked up from newspaper he was reading from behind the counter he presided over. I swallowed in my desert-dry throat. He scrunched up his forehead and looked at me. It had been a long time.
"Judah?"
I nodded.
"Judah!" he exclaimed and stood up. "Where's your brother and Early?"
"I'm alone," I said.
"You're alone?"
How could this be. I know. Times had gotten long and short so that I measured time in the thickness of dust on the dashboard. People grew up after all, and now I was doing mine.
"I'm alone. Phin's somewhere on the road. Early is, too."
Valentine looked me over for a minute and tried to read me but I was my mother's son after all. When the door was shut, no one could open it.