The prickly bark of the tall cedar tree cuts into my bare back. One leg hangs limp over a muscular branch, the other outstretched, balancing in front of my torso, on the same limb. My fingers are sticky from climbing. My hair clings to my cheeks and forehead along with drops of sweat. Scratched feet are covered in a layer of sap and dirt — a side effect of wading in the worn-out cattle tank. From my perch on the middle branches, it seems like the crown of the cedar could touch the heavens, and clouds that looked like bits of stretched-out cotton candy could get tangled in its arms. I hear footsteps crunch on the dead grass beneath me. My back straightens. A shiver runs down my spine. A grimy hand, equally sticky to my own, slips over my mouth. Don’t move or we’ll lose. I suck in my breath and bite my tongue. Feet belonging to the footsteps turn on heels and walk towards the lilac bush and the hand removes itself from over my mouth and back to another branch.

There’s a lifelessness about this place. Strong gusts of wind perform meaningless, hopeless resuscitation on a long dead community. The abandonment allows me to see what forever looks like, staring out car windows and glancing from rusty bike seats at hundreds of miles of bare nothingness. It ends where the sun embraces the earth and the earth swallows the sun.

I miss it often, The Sunflower State, the involuntary solitude, the ability to own the night and terribly dangerous games of hide and seek. Ever since I can remember, we’d stuff the trunk of our 18-year-old car and drive from whatever state we were living in to the literal middle of nowhere. But, it was somewhere for someone. His land extended for miles. The mailboxes lining the main road to the edges of the unofficial garbage dump were all his — were all mine. My childhood’s here. My 20-year-old cousin lifting my six-year-old body to swing on the metal bars of the windmill. The long knife with a black handle thrown into the ground that my grandpa used to cut watermelon, but also to kill rattlesnakes. Feeling those same snakes slither underneath thin tent flooring.

The ignorant happiness that dictated youth faded fast. Moments that should’ve been seized and locked away for eternity rather fled from my mind like a thief in the darkest of nights. I spent many summers sitting on branches, catching breath and recognizing pain. Time spent admiring the brush strokes that made up the blue and purple and orange sky. There were expansive amounts of brown, running through wheat and mud to the glow of state lines and horizons. From the tree I could see anything. From the tree there was nothing and there was everything, and time flew past with each step upward.

In small town wasteland, the progress of a day is measured in crops harvested and miles worked, not hours and minutes and seconds. It’s easier to get lost when your mind runs to the edges of the earth and melts away with the sun. Twelve years passed in 24 weeks, moments spent sitting on ice buckets or driving cars before feet could lie flat on the pedals. No one is particularly in a rush, yet time slips through their fingers like sand encased in an hourglass, counting down seconds and minutes, breaths and moments.

He’s lost himself and found himself here. In the long unplanted wheat fields, in the rusted chains hanging from the ceiling of the blue barn, in the cars without windows or seats, metal frames consumed by hungry weeds-he was in all of it. When the government offered to pay him to stop harvesting his land, his spirit broke a little. Endless time is a sickening plague out here. Having no one to pass the sickness onto is a disturbing side effect. It’s unescapable. Half of a lifetime with nothing to do and everything to reflect upon. He used to sit at the head of the table and eat a bowl of wheat puffs and carve the peel of an orange with a pocket knife. I used to sit next to him and watch him read the paper, and he’d pour my milk with shaky hands and pass me the cartoon section. Seventy-seven years apart in age, there was never much more than silence in the room.

He once surprised his children with piglets of their own. The children, filled toes to nose with excitement, chased the pigs to death. His last twelve years though, years with his last grandchild, ran away like the piglets. His life was measured in harvests and auctions, in the lives and deaths of wife and children. He outlasted tornadoes and droughts and fires. Twelve years in 24 weeks. And loneliness, the fickle bitch that it is, pulled him down a familiar path.

Wind whistles through that which is silent and interrupts forgetfulness, and one cannot be alone when eternally surrounded.

There’s a place on the pacific coast highway where, if you time it right, you can see waves of clouds kissing the salty water below. Magnificent white mavericks curling from the heavens to connect with its watery counterpart. They are not the same, but they are linked. It’s hard for you to tell if they’re enemies, engaged in a lively battle over territory or lovers, one entangled within the other. Fate’s brought them together. If you had arrived minutes earlier, their introduction would not yet have occurred. Arrive minutes later, their love affair is long over. You pass by, looking through speed blurred windows, watching waves melt into waves, the horizon dividing their lustful friendship.

You were in waves of wheat and swirls of pigmented daylight. In massive concrete buildings that scrape the sky. In endless slabs of asphalt extending for miles, sealing your fate by delivering you off the edge of the earth. You were in the person to the left or the stranger with the striped umbrella several paces ahead. Your connection isn’t broken by the horizon, but rather by seconds and minutes and hours. Moments of falsely identified importance overtaking time that’s supposed to matter.

Get lost in order to be found. It’s encouraged to live in moments and memories and let time tick by until there’s no more to go around. Something eternal, with no boundaries and no limitations, somehow encased in waves and wheat, sky and sun. It disappears when more is expected, and drags down, like a cinderblock to the bottom of a lake, one without appreciation. It doesn’t break or bend under the weight of lives not lived. It doesn’t run in the face of danger or stand up against its enemies. It’s just there, constant and unwavering, controlling significance and scolding wastefulness.

The grimy hand left me to sway with the branches at the top of the tree. I wanted to join him, go past, up into the clouds where the view’s a little nicer, but there’s only room for one person’s thoughts up there. I try to imagine myself as Tarzan, as sticky hands and scratched feet make their way to the dead grass below. The searching footsteps hear me fall and I run fast in search of a new hiding place, because surely being alone is more fun than being found.