I thought about the sleeping grass and sleeping gravel as I fingered my keys on the way to Steve’s lot, wondering, "Will they wake and know where they are?" I thought about the slip of soap stuck in our sink’s windpipe, tediously wearing away with the water. I wondered who I’ll be again when it’s finally disappeared. I thought about ‘Sonata’ meaning ‘sounding together,’ a feud between abstractions struggling together until one comes out on top. I tried to figure out how I feel differently when the searching cry of a single goose descends from the sky, and when the chaos of many falls like parcels of food and mail dropped by aircrafts.

Finally I thought, "Maybe there will be signs saying ‘SIERRA GO WEST,’ ‘SIERRA WAIT HERE,’ ‘SIERRA NOT FAR.’

I walked to the railroad tracks, pillaged by Osage oranges and overgrown with tall grass. The sun was coming through the trees like fistfuls of light staking each breath to the ground. I almost wasn’t aware of my body. The steady silence of light and air took hold on all sides. I might have been floating. I might have been gently carried away from myself, taken by a breeze—as though, "a boat departed from me carrying me away." And then it was night. I looked left. I looked right. I looked up. My throat opened to let all the sky enter. And maybe it was then that I felt it—my body, so small and so stupid. I realized I have nothing to guard. There is nothing of me so important that I shouldn’t be able to let go. I should fear no departure.

Suddenly, I knew how to leave. I picked myself up. There was a strange sort of music in the air, as though all the sounds of the night had come together in perfect alignment. Someone’s lips were moving by my ear. I discerned my own breathing among the music. I began to walk back through the woods, back toward the house.

The Tarahumaras believe that the soul ascends a series of heavens. It is reincarnated after each death, and after three deaths, the soul becomes a moth. When the moth dies, the soul passes away completely.

If I can always remember my body to be the body of a still, small, white moth, then perhaps I will always know how to leave.

I came through the back porch. The microwave clock blinked 2:03. I crept upstairs and stood in the center of my dark room like a stranger. Downstairs lay my sleeping mother. Across the hall lay my sleeping sister. Everywhere, everything was sleeping. I turned on a light and began to move about the room, gathering things into my blue backpack. I turned off the light. I crept downstairs.

The household appliances buzzed and hummed like snoring, heavily dreaming animals. I imagined the pattern of my mother’s breaths. Maybe she is muttering in her sleep, maybe she is trying to speak. I stood before the refrigerator rearranging the plastic letter magnets. "Mom & Iris I will write Love Sierra"