“I shrank my life to a box so often it became normal. So, when I saw how the University of North Dakota hid entire boxes of artifacts, a small, strange part of me no longer felt alone…”

“When you meet the other version of yourself standing across from you someday, you will know, immediately, all the ways in which you will tutor her in a sudden crash-course.”

“How do you explain that after so much time spent wanting, you’ve numbed yourself against constant rejection? That my indigeneity should’ve never been dangled like a carrot on a stick?”

“If you’re surrounded by fire, do you know where to go?”

“How do you tell someone oh, it’s not that your mom threatened to stab me, did you know the state is going up in flames?”

“In one moment, we’d gone from a maze of Zoom grids fiddling with mute buttons and spotty Wi-Fi, to feeling the same Santa Fe breeze together…”

“They saw your curlicue tail, ever-wispy and bouncing with each trot, and laughed. Your chihuahuas will never make it with those dogs runnin’ round…”

“In the crushing quiet of a campus under quarantine, I’d been starving for sound all along…”

Because I’d been so busy recounting all that went wrong, I didn’t realize we were in their midst until we were submerged at their core, waiting for them to be seen…