If you could come back, I say, as anyone else
in the world—say you just stepped out of time
for a moment and then came back in—would
you come back as yourself or as someone else?
We are driving in the dark, but I know from experience
that we have just crossed the Dallas Divide
and there are mountains just south of us, and
Leopard Creek to our left, already slightly swollen with spring.
Well, she says, after some consideration, could
I change parts of myself? And I say, No.
You get to come back exactly as yourself.
The car in the oncoming lane forgets to lower its brights.
Then I would come back as myself, she says,
and I feel a flood of fragrant joy in her answer,
a perfume that fills the car with the heady
scent of self-awareness. I think of the infinite
choices and events that conspired to make her
exactly this girl who in this exact moment
chooses to be exactly herself. Except, she says.
I wish I could be better organized.
All around us, the world unbraids itself,
melting and charged with mud and change.
All around us, a fine and untamable chaos.
Inside us, the exact person to meet it.