Hey y’all! I’m taking a creative writing course right now, and I just finished the “Settings” week. It was really fun, and I got some fun writing out of it. Thought y’all might like to read them!

The church did not mind the cold. Its red-orange bricks and weathered stone benches in the courtyard looked unbothered – comfortable, even. I shivered. I am not used to this weather, but, I thought, looking up, I can get used to the sky. Gold, orange, aquamarine… Texas knows how to paint. The artwork sky was made of air that smelled like leaves and pews and pamphlets. I breathed in, and my nose told my tongue that the world tasted different on this planet called America. Where is the smoke of the street vendors? The humid greenness of trees’ breath, the dirt in dirt roads…

All gone.

But I am here, so I might as well enjoy the sky while I’m around.

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“Teacher, these woods are wild.”

Rabi looks at me, or perhaps past me, at the trees upon trees ahead. He does not speak, but then again, he never has. He closes his eyes, and I can tell another vision is coming. He holds out his hand, and I take it, anticipating the lightheaded feeling of seeing beyond sight.

It does not come. I look around me, and everything is the same. But something about me is different, I can tell. I now notice things about the woods, the way the trees whisper through the wind. The sky filled with fog refracting light through its vapors, the little flowers in the moss under my feet. There is a tree next to me. He looks old – resilient. I hear his story, how the woods used to come up to here, when he was a sapling, and then the mountains shifted and he was left alone. He is alone, I think, like me.

I let go. The world regains its riddles, the fog of my mind falls back down.

But I am no longer afraid.

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Salt, shrimp, fish, wood, mud, are all just words, but their scents are the foundation, the constant when you are on the dock. To “open a Coke” is just a prepositional phrase, but its hiss and crack are the sounds that start a peaceful hour of thought on the dock. A heron is a big bird, grass is grass, and an oyster bed is a lot of oysters, but of course, they are what is there when you’re actually there, making them so much more. “The heron cuts its silhouette out of the sky reflected in the still water, cutting the warm saltwater air over my head. The oysters pop their chorus, singing for joy now that the tide has let them breath, and the marsh grass is greener than emeralds. My Coke sits gathering moisture, but I have become full drinking the scenery.”

See? Now you are on the dock with me.

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Sand. Is. Everywhere. Rolling and blowing in hills and dunes and plains forever, and the sun hates me. I know because it has killed my camel and several layers of my skin. My tongue is dry and fills up my mouth so that I cannot close it to keep out sand. Sand, which is in my armpits, under my neck, between my legs, and between my clothes and myself.

Sand.