All That Air Between Us
When I moved to Colorado for love, Joe Walsh was always on the radio.
This was an alternate ending to “Mine,” an essay published in 2022 on Joyland. Today, I’m sharing the standalone piece it became.
When I moved to Colorado for love, Joe Walsh was always on the radio. No matter the station, there was his gratitude: Life’s been good to me so far. The patron saint of Colorado, all these years later, I say, under a wide Texas sky.
Molly Ivins once said that the sky is bigger in Texas because the trees are so small. A raw truth unearthed by loss or less. She said that in the same breath that she said she loved this state.
I got me an office. Gold records on the wall. Just leave a message, maybe I’ll call. What I kept reaching for was the wonder under my nose. I saw it. I felt it real enough. But that love proved phantom. Atoms that wouldn’t mesh together.
Once, I hiked Royal Arch alone and sat at the peak while the only people I knew in town shot into a range dugout into the cliffside. A mansion, Joe forgets the price.
That’s how I tried to enter that world of the Rockies, that collision of city and mountain where the lie of Denver lives in the three hours to get to the parking lot, never mind the buses lining the road up the hill in long horizontal parking spots made for mass.
Eden overrun.
But didn’t Joe say? He’s never been there. He’s been told it’s nice.
I lived less than a year in Colorado and I arrived in Texas, crossing the New Mexico border at night with dawn breaking over the Hill Country later. One U-haul, 85 mph, two walkie-talkies. It’s hard to leave when you can’t find the door.
Thank you for reading. If this stayed with you, a single 🫧 Lava Drop helps keep the light on.