The reservoir was lapping and lapping at my chest and my hair was silky wet. I closed my eyes to the sun and I let her warm me like a baking croissant. Ahhhhhhhhhhhhh, I thought. Ahhhhhhhhh. I am nervous I’m dreaming this entire part of my life. How bright the sun had been, how I walked freely and skipped every couple of steps, watched the children downtown tumble around in the fountain, gleefully hugging their arms to their chests when the water sprung from the ground and shot up, up, up! like six feet high then clapped against the tops of their heads. Their parents sat around, too, holding clothes and towels—but some kids were even fully dressed and they were so happy because of that special feeling when something unexpected happens and everyone is on board with it. Then I was sitting on a rock in the reservoir near my apartment where the mountains across from me rolled and rolled like bumps in a rug and I was into it— the way it looked like it could be stomped down without much force at all. Then the water was lapping and lapping at the lowest part of my thighs because I was sitting criss cross applesauce near where I had—three days earlier buried my sigil calf deep in the thick mud. “I know how the air cured Tuberculosis here!” I shouted it to my friends while I dug and dug at the mud while the folded piece of paper with the sigil tumbled lightly across the grass above the bank. My hair was still wet and it was like slap! against the skin on my back as I moved my head from side to side trying to see, all at once, the ever expanding mountain range on both sides of me. In Colorado, the air was so dry— I’d wake in the middle of the night with a killer nose bleed so I’d tilt my head and look up, up, up! and I’d wander to the glass slider door as I am waiting for the blood to stop and because I am looking up and back, I see the stars I usually didn’t see. When the aspens were changing color, my friends and I went about 15 miles into the Poudre Canyon and camped in the cover of the trees. We hiked up from 5,000 to 9,000 ft. and the higher we went, the more lightheaded I became. We stopped every ten minutes or so to take a picture or look in all directions, but my favorite moments were the very breathless and light headed ones—when we were climbing so so steep and I remember thinking about the air getting skinnier and skinnier and less and less and then the wind would blow and I would take a nice deep belly of air and its like, ohhhhh yes. It’d been worth it to see the trees—the neon yellow that I’d never ever seen before. And it was nice to walk in the cold rushing water on the way back to camp, and wonder how the smooth stone arrangements stay put in the rush! of the water when it finally rains.

Lucia Sabo is a first year poetry candidate at CSU | Lucia.sabo@colostate.edu