This weekend I pulled up my shorts, tied a shirt around my waist, and traded in heels for Keds. It all felt very unfamiliar. But I bit my upper lip and drug the hipster print wagon piled high with floppy hats, laptops and Fossil bags across a dirt filled camp sight.
I was in Marfa, and all I could really think was how this wasn’t Hawaii.
We walked streets with out seeing a single soul but our own. We viewed mind changing art installations that consist of only cement blocks in a field. Looked up to a sky full of bright beaming stars which might have actually plucked out a piece of my heart. And met people. People who had just finished law school. People that have an every day life of simplicity. And people who were biking across the country. Everyone was doing things. Everyone was living.
I watched out of the car window as dirt turned into hills, which crawled up into mountains. I noticed the definition of the sky. Shocking what one can see when their head isn’t parallel to a computer screen. I did this thing that someone once told me was the only way to live. I saw through eyes and not a phone screen.
It was a trip full of good conversation, overflowing hearts, and one incredibly awkward photo in which I hope my hap hazard stance will be something to bind us for years to come. My heart felt a burst much like the one my stomach did while eating the most bomb grilled cheese sandwich one mouth has ever met.
And while I experienced these feelings so hard to put into words, all around us was pain. Pain being construed by us. We, the bodies that carry us through life, were destroying things.
To the angry and the sad, the mistreated and misused. To the hateful and the hurt. To those who hold pride in something which is not fueled by positivity. To you I am no one. Just a girl who sucked up her city life style for one weekend to tromp around in dirt. But I am one of you. We are all one of each other.
We can choose to fight or choose to hug. It sounds simple and mildly pathetic to say in context not associated to two kids on a playground with scraped knees produced by pushing. But at the end of the day they both hold the same outcome. To choose love brings us together hand-in-hand. To choose hate brings us together in the end.
No matter what you believe in, we are all buried in the same exact ground. Our hands are laid across our chest in the same exact manner. Our bodies covered with the same exact dirt. And our loved ones grieve in the same exact way.
By killing we are only crossing paths more quickly. By hating we are only dropping others off to hold our space in line. I wish for someone, anyone, to answer this one simple thing: Is it truly worth your heart beating anger until you become part of an earth that can form nothing but love?