The Canyon and the Sky

It was the year after everyone thought the world was going to end but the sun rose each day like a blister. The landscape unrolled beneath the wheels. We ate avocados and drank whisky, jumped into freezing lakes, were dubbed crazy by locals and played cards at night by a fire. Millipedes slalomed around the bottle caps we would later reclaim and jokingly dub post-apocalypse currency. We reached the canyon by nightfall. The world span.
Flakes of light accrued in golden pools on skin tanned by a traveled sun. We were stirred by creeping Arizona dawn and woke in dusty cool campervan air. The ground outside was still chilled at the peep of early morning. We rustled in duvets and nightwear, shook our mobile home, clanking tins and pans together in our makeshift kitchenette reaching for the makeshift cockerel crowing somewhere on our mobile phone.
The sun was coming. We tried to race it to the edge of the canyon, just like the night we tried to race it to the top of Robinswood. At the summit, I sat in your coat, last night’s heels in hand beneath a muggy sky and trembled. It took rising above our town to see just how stagnant our origins were. How low the clouds sank onto them. I knew we had to get out before they buried us in shroud, but I can’t call it premonition. I never dreamt that years later we would be peering across the Grand Canyon.
Do you remember the sky in Nevada? Hungry and hot, eating into the horizon, black tarmac fraying at the mouth of blue hue, swallowed before us. Or in landlocked Kansas, where my mind took issue with being so far from the ocean, projected it into the sky? It lay out flat before us like a blanket with a picture stitched of still white waves. It looked deep enough and wide enough to dive up into and drown a thousand deaths of lusty azure.
And the night before dawn at the canyon in the woods? Millions of pin pricked penumbras shed needle point lights onto our otherwise Stygian stroll. We knew not if we were walking towards the brink or away from it. Constellations arced round the earth and reached out bowed and starlit fingers to us and we marveled, appropriately, on the very periphery of the largest gorge known to man.
I thought of how far we had taken that sky. How it nearly swallowed us whole. I peered into the mouth of the earth and felt consumed by something, as I did on our hill. In sleepless moments, I think of us atop the canyon, beneath the sky. I think of all the space around us, of all the closeness in-between.