The Wanderers- Beginning

When we walked, we kicked up dust. It changed over the miles- floating up and painting the air in front of us a different color. It was a secret road marker. Red earth: now we are here.

The “now” was important, the “here” less so. We hurried past the here to another and then another now.

The dust got in our eyes, on our faces, between our toes. It made Court cough. It tried to mark us and claim us as its own. It wanted us to slow down and remember that we were of it- connected and indebted, even if we closed our eyes to its sting or washed it from our bodies.

I doubt any of the others thought of the changing landscape as anything other than miles between, from. But I’d been fighting a guilt ever since we’d left home- left our own places. The earth made me think of mud pies in Stella’s front yard after school, and the stains on the knees of Court’s baseball pants when he’d come home from Little League. It made me think of the grass and pebbles that absorbed Jex’s mother's weight when she fell, the Saturday her body stopped working. The earth made me think of the store bought flowers my father brought my mother, the ones that died in their vase and turned to dust when he left. When he walked, away from our grass and our dirt and our sky- away from us.

We’d left because we didn’t feel any reason to stay. No one else seemed to doubt this over the weeks. But I’d made the first footstep, the one echoed and erased as the three people I loved most in the world followed me away.

The dust made me think of our mothers. As emissaries, it begged me to reconsider, to not lead my friends so callously away from the earth that held memories of scraped knees, spilled lemonade, and heavenly chocolate pies made just by adding water.

We were convinced that going was our only answer- that our footsteps away would erase something. But over the miles, I began to wonder what exactly was being erased.