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Who you are is a mystery no one can answer, not even you.

Are we all with acute loneliness,

chronic patients trying to recover

the will to love?

...Sometimes the love

of another wounded one acts like a salve

which soothes the dying self but cannot heal

our lives. And perhaps this is what it feels

like to be human, and we are all well?

Some of us got this feeling stuck inside, all the time, like we’ve done something wrong. Like we ourselves are something wrong … We drink alcohol because it helps us feel like we can be ourselves and not be afraid. But we punish ourselves with it.

No matter how happy I had been in the past I do not long for it. The present is always the moment for which I love.

I was driving down the mountain, the curves

were bad, I wasn't going slow, the day

was one of those that takes your breath away...

On hilltops, I made believe I'd take off

into the absolute, but as I swerved

again and again...

and as the sun's

autumnal, soporific light shone on...

something gave in me and I let go—

this driving need to make it all mean more.

In time, I turned the wheel back to the road.

It's UPS

with two parcels! ...

a handsome lad, guesses it's my birthday

and asks how old I am. He acts surprised

he's a decade younger. We linger at the door

one of us is not immortal anymore.

I say, Don't trust those men with better,

bigger versions of love if they refuse

the small, shabby sample they gave others

the tribute of believing it was true.

We know the sound of the freeway better than we do rivers, the howl of distant trains better than wolf howls. We know the smell of gas and freshly wet concrete and burned rubber better than we do the smell of cedar or sage or even frybread. We ride buses, trains, and cars across, over, and under concrete plains. Being Indian has never been about returning to the land. The land is everywhere or nowhere.

What doesn't kill you, makes you fat.

For me, the person I was becoming when we left was erased, and another one was created.

a memory cannot be trusted, for so much of the experience of the past is determined by the experience of the present.

To a parent, your child wasn't just a person: your child was a place, a kind of Narnia, a vast eternal place where the present you were living and the past you remembered and the future you longed for all at the same time. You could see it every time you looked at her: layered in her face was the baby she'd been and the child she'd become and the adult she would grow up to be, and you saw them all simultaneously, like a 3-D image. It made your head spin. It was a place you could take refuge, if you knew how to get in. And each time you left it, each time your child passed out of your sight, you feared you might never be able to return to that place again. (Chapter 9, p122)