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| Dawn by Marc Chagall |
Where I was, where I am, wherever I go, I can always picture myself on a great, curving, three-dimensional map, except once, when I was a child, and I let a girl who was one year older take me so far into the foothills in a canyon in West Los Angeles that we got lost because she told me, come on, there will be bunnies and policemen to take care of us, so I followed her, as if enchanted—
the sky dazzling blue and the clouds spun-sugar, the dusty earth shimmering gold and the milky quartz moonstones gleaming—
and as I walked on and on behind her, wordlessly, dazed, and dreamy, I lost all track of our turnings—
the sharp, earthy smell of sage—the crumbly granite, the dry dusty earth—the tall, proud spikes of yucca, the scrubby sumac, the sticky orange monkey flowers—the distant howl of a coyote, the glimpse of a deer crashing through the brush, the tiny gray lizards scooting across the jagged outcroppings—
until she said, “oh, no!” and “I think we're lost” and “this doesn’t look right” and “I don’t know where we are” and then she threw herself down on the dirt, helplessly sobbing, and with that my mind suddenly cleared—I didn’t even mention the policemen—and when she would not get up, I left her on that hillside, and followed a nearby path down, down, wherever it went down, until I reach a familiar street, found a grownup I knew, and brought the grownup back up the hill to where my friend had been, and there my friend was, still there, still crying, so we took her home—and for many years I thought that our getting lost together meant something about the two of us, my friend and I, maybe that she was fantasy and I was reality or maybe that she was art and I was dry fact, but I don’t believe that now because time gradually revealed that we were more alike than I once thought, and eventually it was her turn to rescue me—I felt like I wasn’t going to make it through the night, so I called her and she talked to me for hours while I sat in on the kitchen floor in the dark, clutching my phone, until, at last, dawn broke—
and the early rays of summer sunshine began to flood the kitchen with light.
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