Clay-caked boots, sour stomach, starving, yellow bile churning. Cold enough to make the knuckles in my hands burn and radiate. Frozen bones banged around against crude barn tools felt hammer-struck. Barrels and latches. Blood and shit. Alone on the mountain, at the end of a disintegrating driveway.

The barn doors were blocked high with heavy, spring snow. Mud and rocks that fell loose from a steep slide. The moist leather bridle bands were frozen into the metal latch around her face, impossible to undo with blunted, numb fingers, split at the nails. Impatient puffs erupted in little fits from her velvet nostrils.

We wrestled, and when I finally broke the latch free, the same second she went sideways like a thunderbolt; stepped on the toes of my right foot. Her metal-tooled hoof, packed with shit, crumbled over my wet, leather boot. Some part of me throbbed- broken underneath. A whip snapped in the sand, put a hand to my own throat, adrenaline bath.

She was never going to let me catch her.

ii.

Garnet Pontiac Grand Am blazing across the Nevada desert, twenty-four-years-old with a five-stone diamond ring on my left hand, married on the last day of July. Constellations of airplane lights twinkled at dusk. Purple and gold sand dunes melded a cloud-blurred horizon and the rocky earth below. Losing radio stations, only the scientology preacher coming in clear.

“Do you believe in aliens?”

Driving all the way through the night to meet the wildfire at mile marker 119; smoke syrupy, so thick. A buck elk panicked by the roadside––swerving and weaving between the lines like a drunk––bolted into the burning woods at the sight of me. A wall of ashy, orange light cut the darkness where he disappeared, smoldering bark popped and squealed in a dance. A neon-vested road worker in a gas mask waved me through the barricade as though to promise it was safe to continue on alone, forever.

The sun came up over Vegas. Amusement park rides and water features unveiled themselves before me. But first, pulling over by the side of the road to nap- to curl up in the fetal position with a woven Mexican blanket bought at the gas station, I planned to sober up at 5am.

Reeling to be a Newlywed, to be alone, wandering the Southwest shanty lands. I was looking for edge and independence, clinging to a fleeting youth. I was dire to be red-wine-drunk through the night, still afraid of being hunted by dangerous men, confronted by wildfires. The morning belonged to me, though, the danger of it.

iii.

I loved him. I always loved him. Soft, wide hands and a voice that vibrated low in his chest when he laughed, doe-brown eyes and an engineer’s mind. A kiss on my front porch at seventeen, warm neck, boney, blonde-freckled nose pressed into my cheek. He was good, truly good, and safe. But after a decade, I just didn’t feel like safe was enough. It wasn’t his fault. When I married him, I wasn’t done being wild. I wasn’t done wandering. I was only just discovering.

Dayna Copeland writes experimental and narrative non-fiction from the perspective of a woman stuck somewhere between poverty and privilege. A mother, a wife, a middle child- Dayna seeks to offer a window into the humanity of the female experience beyond the pursuit of partnership. A graduate of writing programs at Yale and Florida State University, Dayna writes about the woman's pursuit of legacy, purpose, honor and spirituality.