re((vision)ing) in progress, aka old stuff that's finally getting reworked:

"Do what you feel in your heart to be right, for you'll be criticized anyway. You'll be damned if you do and damned if you don't."
— Eleanor Roosevelt

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Who’s to say where a road really goes when staring it down, front-seated and flying over freeway? There are the inked ribbons that flow over maps zigging and zagging according to the whims and dreams of glaciers, rivers, and engineers (past and present). And then there’s the road we keep preserved in blood and flesh – hope-heart-cranium-bound made manifest in internal tattoo and cauterized wounds…a figurative fantasy then made steel, a marriage of convenience between alloys and paint, sparking electric starts, slick oil, and gasoline. It is a vehicle of contradictions…of movement and liberation, and yet a sedentary vinyl womb for its passengers, searching for new-city virginities, and answers to“please please please me”-like prayers.

We like our roads and rambles, our Icarus inspired attempts at liberation, with infinite faith and hearts, cracked wide open.

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Miranda had always been a vivid dreamer, to the point where, upon waking, it took a moment or three to discern the “real” from the “dream,” but since “The Dream,” as she thought of it to herself, her dreams had been pastoral scenes at best, and now often nothing. In “The Dream,” she had been walking in a known/unknown city, downtown and yet on the outskirts in sight of trees and endless country, in that nonsensical just-outside-of-time-and-place way things in dreams often are. Knowing she was followed by a man who wanted her to stop, she kept walking, slowly, moving forward but casting all sensory perception behind her, taking in scent and sound.
He got closer and she smelled forest and fire. He also had a scent of something that she would later say could only be described as evidence of miles covered. He breathed on her neck. She shivered with pleasure, inhaled deeply, and walked faster. His breath was warm, and smelled faintly of cinnamon. He said, “find me,” in a deep, quiet voice. She kept walking, suppressing a half-smile at the order given by a seemingly pretend man, but also made nervous in a way that made her skin tingle.
He breathed on her neck. She shivered, inhaled deeply, and walked faster. His breath was warm, and smelled faintly of cinnamon. Judging from his footfalls, forceful, smooth, and even, he was powerful. He pressed his right hand onto her naked right shoulder blade, and said, “Please.” His hand felt like hot metal and it seared her flesh. Suddenly crying out from the pain, she woke up gasping for breath, only to find her eyes wet, and, grabbing with her left hand at her shoulder, she winced as she touched the inflamed skin, finding it hot, moist, and bleeding slightly.
She wiped her eyes as her breathing gradually slowed, her body damp with sweat and heart racing with adrenaline. She sat for a minutes, upright in bed, legs crossed, trying to calm herself. When she rose from bed, she walked the few steps into the bathroon, and, wincing in the light, angled the mirror to see her shoulder. Her breath quickened again. The man who had ordered, “find me,” had left a perfect hand print on her shoulder. It was tattooed into her skin in black and grey, complete with all the lines a palm-reader would expect to find, and, upon closer inspection, the looped, whorled, and arched ridges of fingerprints. It was as raw, shiny, and puffy as a new tattoo might be, and Miranda could do nothing but collapse onto the cool tile of the bathroom floor. She sat there, mind racing to nothing, until she dozed off, forehead and cheek pressed against the bathtub.


please feel free to gently tell me what you like and don't, if anything at all. it's been a while since i've done this. xoxo, she-