There's nothing like sunset from the air. I saw it two weeks ago and have been dreaming of it ever since. Now, I'm looking at it from the ground. Just as miraculous. Just as worth it to be alive, for those five minutes in the day when the sky turns golden and pink and purple. Here, I've spent the day failing to dance with my feet, but it felt good anyway. My reward? I get to dance with my eyes. Never turn a good sunset (or sunrise, for that matter) down.

I guess I'm in a very good mood today. I've been thinking about miracles. The little ones and the big ones. I talked to the Tin Soldier yesterday. For the first time in months he was happy. I guess that's what happens when you let it all go for a dance in the rain. The good news is a possibility. Perhaps he won't be tin for much longer. But the past never leaves you. Hopefully, I'll be there soon, too. I can fill the tin with something other than emptiness like he filled me with disbelief and no way to left to doubt. It's hard to be a skeptic when miracles happen and people come back from the dead, right? This is one ghost I will not dance for. I'll dance with him. And even though I can't dance well, it'll feel just as satisfactory. That's always how it is when you're lead by someone who was born to be a dancer.

The sunset's over and life calls. At the moment, at least, I can say that there's always tomorrow.

Little Blue Hawk

When I was seventeen, I left the Rosebud Reservation of my birth and had nothing left to lose but my life. Like most Lakota in the twentieth century, I'd lost my father to shame and the drink that made him forget it. When I was you,g I often wondered if he was still alive. Now that I am wiser, I understand that he had been born robbed of life. But life will come again, beyond these imaginary gates. So says the Father. A'te he'ye lo.

If I had not been born an Indian, perhaps, I would know how to dream. Perhaps I would dream of owning the White Man's holy collection of refrigerators and barbed wire fences, and flushing toilets so that I would qualify to keep my children and so that the Great Father's Social Services do not deem me the dog they've made of me. But I would rather spit into the wind and give my shit to a hold in the earth, as it should be, than dream the White Man's dream. Ya'nipikta' e'ya u'-we lo. "You shall live," he says as he comes. Ya'nipikta. A'te-ye he'ye lo. The father says so.

When I took my first step onto the soil of the United States of America, in the state of South Dakota, I sought to save myself from the spiral of disgrace that the White Man's wheel had wrought upon us. I sought to shed my name in this White Man's world that had laid waste to the holy Badlands and Black Hills by covering them over with ribbons of cement, immigrants' toil, and Indian blood. So many trails of tears flow freely here, those trails have turned to rivers. I spoke the White Man's tongue and knew his god better than I knew my own. But like I cannot shed my red skin or my slanted eyes, I cannot remove the Indian from myself. To become the redemption for my own people, I set out upon the father's road, to learn the White Man so well that I should become him, in order to defeat him. Give me my arrows so that I may carve a grave out of my heart. Wanhi'nkpe mi'chuye.

I see a child walking towards me. It is my child. YOu will live, he says as he comes. E'ya ye'ye. Michi'nkshi mita'waye. Ya'nipi-kta e'ya u'-we lo.

In the plains country, where the buffalo roamed free so thick you couldn't see the ground for miles, I met my destiny. Sometimes, the father makes the wind blow in strange directions. I stood upon the White Man's highway, sticking out my thumb. Crazy for an Indian girl from Sioux country to trust in the good faith of the White Man of the United States. But not all preconceptions ring true across a population. Tell my grandfather that some White men have Indian souls and he would ring a string of turtles for protection around my neck to ward off evil spirits. I would set the turtles free. My heart was sent into the Badlands, running after my feet, and the Silvers stopped their bus for me and I denied them my voice for one whole moon before I finally gave it.

Since as long as I can remember, I've never been able to sleep at night. So I lay myself down when the sun comes up and sleep through most of the day. Phin says it's because I have a little bit of memory like he does. I say it's because I have a problem with nightmares and figuring things out for myself. The whole world's mostly asleep when the dark is out and that's the best time for me to sit and think through everything. I still don't understand why, when Phinnaeus goes, I stay. I've never been able to leave Early. She's too much a mystery and if I leave for even a moment, she'll reveal the answer, and I will have missed it. She was always something more than human for me and at the same time, something less.

I remember watching her once, when I was younger. She was standing in the middle of a rainstorm, thinking we were too young to remember.

"Stay her, boys," she said to us, leaving us behind in the Wheels, while she ran out into a summer downpour that ended up carrying half the state away. "If I don't come back, you won't remember anyway. But you just don't understand about water. It's the only way I can get to River." When we were little and too young to talk, she'd mention River every now and then. Now, she stops at rivers and stays silent, like Phin did after the ice-pick rod, for days. But rainstorms are different. She'll go out in them like it's the last thing she ever wanted to do in life.

Me and Phin watched her climb out of the car and run down the road and we climbed out of the back and stuck our faces to the window. When she came back, she was completely dry, as if not a drop of rain had touched her. This happened often. She'd run out into the rain, into storms that should've left her dead and drowned and she'd come back completely dry. Untouched.

"Damn it!" she always said when she got back in the car. "Damn it." Then, she'd remember we were there and look at us with a puzzled expression, as if we weren't supposed to be there, look ahead, stick the key in the ignition and start driving again without mentioning anything. So Phin and I grew up on the road with a mother called Early, who did everything she could to get soaked in a rainstorm but always came back out of it dry.

"I suppose, little brother, man," Phin said, "that she's just got herself followed around by a column of air. No rain for her, no sir. She's got a pocket waiting on her in the sky."

IT's only February and I'm already thinking of Eve. I guess it's appropriate. Her one year anniversary is coming up. A year ago, she was still alive, and probably more alive than most of us ever will be. She was unsuspecting. She had her whole life ahead of her. I only regret one thing: losing touch with a person like that, who did more in twenty-two short years than most people do in a full, long lifetime.

She was the first of four, but the rest weren't like this. There was always a cause, a reason: loss of intellect, leukemia, heart attack. But Eve died for nothing. There was no cause. No freedom to fight for, no ideology to save. Just...pointless violence because a teenager and a twenty-one-year-old were looking for money to blow and a thrill. So because of that, she got a shotgun bullet through her skull and four more pistol bullets throughout her body.

That's when I realized that I'd been wasting my time searching for the meaning of life. It really is 42. There is no meaning, except what you make of it, for yourself. In the end, we die alone just like we're born alone. The crowd surrounds us but we live our lives trapped behind our own eyes. All other perspectives are imagined.

I sang your song, Eve, probably twenty times yesterday. You're the bridge, you're the bridge, you're the bridge, and the point is to not be afraid. But I am afraid. I'm not a mystic. And I thought it was supposed to be me first, with the doctor's clock ticking so close now. Three-and-a-half years to go. I'll beat that, I'm sure now. As long as a tree doesn't fall on me, or I'm chosen for those mid-night games like you.

I'll dance like there's no tomorrow, Eve, like you did, because for all we know, there isn't. Everyone separates into factions: extremist this, zealot that, political left and right. The question is screamed out in the veins of all the people: "What do you want from us? What are we supposed to do? Sit back and take it?" So the bombs drop and the guilty and innocent, alike, are slaughtered. Nothing solves the problem.

Maybe you're lucky, Eve. You didn't get to witness this. The dead are the lucky ones. They don't have to deal with themselves, or the burden and the guilt the human race forever lays upon itself. No more searching for love or hate. Just eternal rest, eternal Oblivion. The cement must have been better than their eyes, when they left you lying there. No more fear. No more questions. Nothingness. For nothing.

As usual, I'm an empath, so the emotion wells up inside of me and I package it within myself because there's nowhere for it to go. I turn the music up really loud--I can't take it. Too much love turns sour after awhile when all it is is stagnant. Love turns sour, like rotten milk. If you open me up, that's what you'll find. Underneath, I'm still a little girl, poisoned by the whispers of Seraphim and impossible dreams.

I turn to small things, like calendars filled with Hopper's sunlight, and soapstone, ready for me to carve what God tells me is inside. I already know. It's myself. As cold and lonely and imprisoned as the stone with nowhere to go and no means of getting there.

But that's life.