The air smells like rain and soil and denim and you tilt your head back and let it all in. There are holes in the elbows of your sweater and holes where the heel of your sneaker hits jean. We’ve been here a long time and I don’t think we’re ever gonna leave. You tilt your head back and holler—chest sinking once you’re done. Victory stars your eyes. You’re the master of the war cry, the hymn, the chant. We rule this land and you know it. We belong to this place and you know it. 

There are many ways to have a kingdom and the boys back home get it wrong every time. Sand castles and red soil. They never know where to put their hands and so they squeeze. Enough about boys, though. There are many ways to have a kingdom, and I’ll let you in on a secret. Sometimes you’ll have one out of sticks and tarp and firebugs, and it will keep you warm for the night. Sometimes you’ll find one made of silt under the overpass and eventually the water rises and washes you out. The cliffs go hollow in places and carve windows and turrets from stone. Kingdoms come and kingdoms go, but for however long they hold us, they are ours. Ours, ours, ours, and we are the best kind of rulers. 

We end up being so many things out here. We aren’t always as nice as we could be, but we try our best. We were cowboys for a day—shooting birds out of the sky. We leave ‘em too long and they rot on the ground so we spit-roast a pig instead. The next we are the birds and swoop and dip and think about going south for the winter but our friends are all dead. For what feels like a very long time, we are The Kudzu, and we climb and we climb and settle over everything. We eat trees and we eat old waterlogged houses and we eat brick and bone. The heat rises and our barbed tails flare—violet and mean. Cold kills the Kudzu and we aren’t it anymore, we look at the wasteland we’ve created and feel bad. Eventually we are sheep and goats and we always clean up all of our messes. Snow falls and we are arctic hares, we burst apart into the lazy stars that float down. The first law of being a ruler is to love your land. 

A lot of the time, we’re just us. Spring is like that, where everything falls back into step like it’s done for millennia, and we have no reason to interfere. So we live alongside it and sometimes we are humbled. We know a helluva lot, but not everything! Years back, it had rained for months. The pair of us hid inside the burnt-out body of a rusted Plymouth. It rattled like a steel drum and we ended up soaked anyway. Eventually, the sky stopped and tossed her head back—shaking the last raindrops out of her hair. Then everything was wet and worms. There was mud under our nails and streaked across our faces like warpaint and we wished the rain would come back to clean it off! 

Being out here means never running out of things to do. We climb trees all the way to the top and holler at the sky. We walk the tracks for miles and follow the powerlines and they never lead anywhere we don’t want to be. Dead houses pitch and whine and we help the forest kick them down. When the heat gets too much, you jump in the creek and I have to pick leeches off your back while you grin ear to ear. Once, the stars had exploded into greens and pinks and left lines all over the deep, plush blue. All I could do was stand and watch. Mosquitos eat us alive in the glades at night and gator eyes glint like dimes. We shriek. We are kung-fu fighters and we kick around and we run with the wild boars. Our sides hurt and we collapse into fields of goldenrod, hold each other tight and lie there for days. I pluck the burrs out of the long tangles of your hair. The wild never ends and neither do we. 

To be a conqueror you have to be a visitor first, and to be a good conqueror you have to be a good visitor. A bear den can teach you that. You can find a kingdom in a cave, but that is not to say you will not be sorely reminded of your place in the food chain. The mountains are the land of the Grizzlies and bear tooth is the word of law. A long time ago in an old country, the people lost the true name of bears—they were too afraid to speak it. Once we spent a couple nights in the tall trees and you pointed to the little bear and the big bear in the sky. Told me you were too scared to name them. I guess not much has changed. Anyways, we survived the night and when we crossed the river in the morning, the bears were too occupied by the salmon. Still, we tiptoed. You can conquer the land all you want, but you won’t always be the king. Victory is less about the crowns that you wear and more about how a place might hold you.

Sometimes in the throes of August, the midday gets so hot that I lie in the Sun and I think of the way that the world used to be. Before it got like this, I mean. Life in boxes, box TV and colourful boxes of cereal with tigers and leprechauns. Shoebox houses and the sky was a grid. The entire world fit in a box, a glowing box in my living room. The house smelt of potpourri and the floral couch sagged in the middle. In my hand, God’s word, and I flick through the channels. Lions tear into antelopes and big silverback gorillas pick bugs off each other. Cowboys with their beautiful wind-whipped skin and shiny spurs blow each other’s brains out. A man in a suit tells me someone’s mother has died. The knight saves the princess. Man sets foot on the moon. We used to be half a nation of conquerors and the rest was all sun-bleached photographs and moving boxes full of nothing. 

I have a dream of my daughter. I have a dream I have a girl and she looks like you. I pull her, laughing, from the mud, knees skinned. She grows taller than I and rides bareback on the wild horses. How she calms them enough to let her up, I don’t know. On her fourteenth birthday, we climb up the plateau and she hollers to the heavens. We are smaller than the cacti and we disappear as you get further away. The plateau disappears as you get further away. I have a daughter and I die, I have a daughter and we are the same age. I remember the kingdoms of dust and pink PVC but she only looks forward, to the next forest or marsh or mountain, the next stretch of land to conquer. The wind on the plains turns dust castles into nothing. From her seat on the horse, she doesn’t know they were ever there. 

I wake up from this sun-induced fantasy and I am back here with you, back here in the wild. We collapse into fields of goldenrod, the summer threatens to end. Time moves slow around here. Hours or days stretch out above the tall grass. You hold me, and I tell you that when I die, I don’t want to be remembered. I tell you when I die, I want to disappear. You agree. Days, hours. You change your mind. You tug on my sleeve and whisper to me, tell me it’s a bum point, cause we ain’t ever going to get there. Days, hours. You tell me you think we’re going to live forever.

This story has no meaning because it hardly is one. There is no story if it never ends. 

There is just us, us and the great wild.

This story never ends and neither do we. 

Girls Curled Up, 1997. Justine Kurland.