The real ones. The backwards ones.
I buried them.
All over.
That’s the secret.
From Yellow Gap Trail in Pisgah National Forest to Abiquiu, New Mexico, I buried my notebooks. (In fact, the very first burial was in Abiquiu. Not in Ghost Ranch, but very nearby. Soon after mom died. Early March 2015. Remember how I said I just had to go?)
At that point it had all already gone terribly wrong and I knew they wouldn’t last in the attic. So Abiquiu is where I started. That’s the initial motherload. Those span decades. But those will be harder to find by someone else. And in most ways they’re far less relevant for the purposes of this exercise, because they cover the time before everything broke.
The others, they came after. When I went to Abiquiu I just knew I had to keep them safe. Abiquiu was mom’s idea. But those are different. They had yet to become what the later ones’ would become.
What did the later ones become? Letters, mostly, I guess. To The Three.
And as time went on I began to understand the unquestionable power of them, those little pieces of my soul; scattered, bared, and buried like time capsules. And so I began making sure they could be found by anyone. Anyone who knew what to look for. Anyone I told what to look for.
And therein lies the rub.
I have little doubt that I did enough to keep them preserved. That nature, even at her worst, couldn’t destroy them.
But it’s all worth nothing if I set down treasure maps that lead to the wrong person finding them. And there’s at least one person who would be highly motivated to do just that, and more likely to have the resources to do so.
That meant I needed an intermediary. One I could trust with my soul.
time to figure it out
time see past the ink
right in front of your nose
was the missing link
took your hands from my throat
put the phone to your lips
all this time in plain sight
was my left-hand twist
serene 