I moved to Albuquerque in August. In the middle of, at the end of, during a pandemic that plausibly does not have an end. I got a job here, and in late-stage American capitalism that’s about all it takes to rationalize moving across the country.

“How are you feeling?” My new therapist asks.

We meet over Zoom. I have had three therapists I’ve met over Zoom. It has been three therapists time since I could see a therapist in person.

I tell my therapist that moving across the country feels like a type of conquest, like plunging myself through a land that is not mine. But this country does not offer me many other options. In 1922, the British empire was at its height in its colonial rule over 458 million people. Britain has, at some point in history, colonized 171 countries. The American dream is a colonizer’s wet dream, allowing the white man to assert himself as both persecutor and persecuted. An American experience is built upon ownership of place, conquest of place, in the guise of freedom, liberty, and independence.

I drove to Albuquerque from Chicago. I am not from Chicago. Though I had been there a long time.

“...but you’re not from Chicago, are you?” my therapist questions.

“No, I’m from Tennessee.”

“Where in Tennessee?”

“South of Nashville.”

“How far south of Nashville?”

The specificity gives me pause, but I answer, and add the name of the town.

My therapist says she could hear a southern accent, just slight, and unplaceable. Unplaceable is the word I savor. But I am thrown back to nearly half a decade before when a thesis advisor told me, “you don’t have an accent.”

“I dropped it,” I answered, as if an accent were a piece of trash I could discard, or a piece of paper I could gently recycle.

I do not know what I’m expected to sound like in Albuquerque. I do not know anyone here, and aside from my new boss and the occasional faculty member at the University where I work, I speak and hear from very few people here. I am in a pandemic flux of when and where and what is open publicly and where other people might be. I talk to friends from Tennessee daily, and I suspect this is where I’ve mistakenly picked up the accent I thought I’d dropped.

I suspect that it is my colonizer blood that assures me that I deserve a place. I am genetically predisposed to charge through the world claiming ownership, and feel angry when I do not have it. At night, I finish a chapter of my book and get out of bed to put a half-drunk glass of wine in my fridge. Tired and tipsy, I decide I should go to the bathroom before bed. In my bathroom I have more drawers and cabinets, so many drawers and cabinets, than I had in all three of my past apartments in Chicago. And I think about all the drawers and cabinets in the world. And I think of all the spaces. And I think of people, most of whom I do not know, who own houses. With as many, many rooms as I have drawers and cabinets which I cannot fill. And the people who have these houses, with all their many rooms, and sometimes multiple stories. And I think of stories. In all senses. And the layers upon layers we conceal ourselves in, protection, in an attempt at shelter.

I want to sound like I am from nowhere. I am from nowhere. I am not from a place that disowned me. I must clarify this when my therapist treads lightly over my sexuality and the place that I am from. I am not disowned. I am generally loved. And this is why I tell her the problem is me. I’ve untethered myself. And I don’t know why. I summarize for the therapist a brutal experience. Call it just that, until my therapist asks me to elaborate.

“Were you raped?” my therapist asks, dragging eye contact back.

My hands up, surrendering, I say no.

Again, I am thrown back to the same graduate advisor this time asking me, “Do you like Chicago?” I paused, because the answer was neither yes nor no, and the question was not a complicated one. Do I like Albuquerque? I ask myself daily. And the answer is still neither yes nor no. I liked Chicago because it was not Tennessee, and I like Albuquerque because it is not Chicago. I survive in a not place, not there more than here. And I ask myself what I want.

When I first moved to Chicago a man pointed out a bar across the street from my first apartment in Albany Park. “Never go there,” he told me, “someone was set on fire, on purpose, there recently.” Even still it is the phrase, “on purpose,” that holds my thoughts. And I cannot tell you whether this phrase is completely unnecessary — surely a warning that someone was set on fire there recently should have been enough — or if the phrase is the most important part of the entire statement. Being set on fire accidentally is simply a common occurrence, an annoyance, an inconvenience. A disturbance in one’s day perhaps. But someone set on fire on purpose is a particular type of tragedy. The kind of tragedy that necessitates crossing the street, looking away, and never ever going to a bar even though they offer $5 margaritas right across the street from your garden unit apartment.

In 1492, Columbus sailed the ocean blue. And we are taught now of the atrocities that follow, but I am still looked on with pity when I spend Thanksgiving alone. There are different flavors, textures, and sizes of loneliness. I do not feel more or less lonely than I did in Chicago, and I did not feel more or less lonely there than I did in Tennessee. It is not a measurement of quantity, it is just different.

When my therapist asks me if I’m lonely the easy answer is yes. The longer answer is yes, but. There is a difference between isolations, I try explaining to her, there is isolation that is safe, responsible, at least in the first layer.

“Not anymore,” my therapist challenges.

“But it is rational,” I respond.

My therapist nods, shrugs, sighs.

My cousin had a baby six months ago. I told my friends at work, back in Chicago, all of us childless. My cousin brought the baby up from Florida to Tennessee for Thanksgiving, and my family texts me, calls me, tells me daily about first preparing for the baby’s visit and then the baby herself. “Do you want to be a mother?” my therapist asks. And the fast, correct, rational answer is no, obviously not. And how could anyone willfully choose to exact such a level of cruelty on one who does not have to be born? But, do you want to be a mother, isn’t so simple a question. This baby is soooo cute and she is just great! My family texts me. Even your brother will say she is adorable.

I do not think I understand love. Can feel it maybe, want it certainly, but understand it enough to have never. I have fallen in love with my new therapist. And I fumble through our sessions, claim sometimes to feel no desire at all just to mask myself, and struggle at other times to describe any attraction. I am all want, cyclical craving, but inaction.

“It is okay not to want,” my therapist says, “it is okay to say no.”

But I am unable to explain wanting, while not wanting. There is no word between yes and no, and always and never, and forever and not ever begun.

Over the past three years I’ve taken to burning myself to relieve the pain. Especially my last year in Chicago. I bought packs of cigarettes just to light them and press their burning, beautiful ends into my left arm and upper thigh. On one particularly horrific day, I came home from work and turned my oven on, my leg bounced up and down dancing in anxiety while I waited watching the oven preheat. At 350 degrees I opened the oven door and lay on the ground beside it. Then I placed my left hand on the inside of the oven door and let it rest until I couldn’t stand it any longer. For minutes, I meditated in the pain, letting it bake into my burning skin.

“I don’t get asked out on coffee dates,” I tell my therapist. My therapist mirrors the almost laugh. In empathy she tells me a story of a dinner date, the worst date she’s ever been on. I tell my therapist about a Monday morning orgy, the only rush in skipping work. We are not talking about the same brutality.

Albuquerque was settled by the Tiwa people around 1250. When I research Tiwa, I only learn about Spanish conquistadors, the Tiguex War, and what should more accurately be called genocide. The land Chicago rests on belongs to the Ojibwe, Odawa, Potawatomi, Miami, Ho-Chunk, Menominee, Sac, Fox, Kickapoo, and Illinois nations. There is little to no clear answer as to who the land in Tennessee belongs to, at least none I can find, and certainly none I have been taught.

In therapy, I try to describe, in my body, the re-panic, the panic again and again, over and over again. In live time. And I try to describe now how it feels to reassociate with the body. I cannot say which is worse, the dissociation or the panic of the return.

I have a nightmare. There is pus bursting out of my navel. And in my bathroom I slice my stomach open, cesarean, and pull fistfuls of pus out of my abdomen. The pus clumps in the sink and re-forms inside of me, while my butchered flesh decays around the edges. There is no blood.

A few weeks before I left Chicago I saw a man set on fire, on purpose, outside a bar in broad daylight down the street from my last apartment.

I was walking down Morse Ave when a man splashed what I thought was a drink all over the man sitting across the table from him. Before I made it down the block toward them, the man was doused in flames and sat there, silent. There was no scream, only flesh burning and melting into his plastic chair. When I got close to the bar patio, a fire truck and cop cars filled the streets and blocked off the sidewalk. I needed to get to the train, I needed to get to work. But I watched the train pass over us as first responders covered the charred corpse and loaded him into an ambulance with no siren. There was never any sound.

“I like the buses here,” I tell my therapist who is dismayed to hear I do not own a car.

“Why do you like the buses here?” my therapist asks.

“They’re safer here.”

I offer the therapist chopped slices of assault after assault after assault on the Chicago Red Line. The man on my way to work at the craft store off Belmont, who mumbled words I could not hear, but could only assent to. Whose only sentence I could make out was, I won’t touch you. Who pulled out his dick standing over me and pleasured himself until I got up to leave at my stop. When he grabbed my shoulder, breaking the only promise he had made me. I yanked away. And left to start my work day. I tell my therapist that, statistically, it would be safer to jump in front of the train.

“What did you want?” my therapist asks. Past tense. As in, before I dropped whatever it was I once held.

The want is hollow and old, eroded to dust from years of not wanting and not having.

“You look so sad,” my therapist soothes, “they didn’t silence you.” She offers.

But I know that silence would be better than endless deafened screams. I describe how they muffled the flames, smothered so much, I say that I forgot I was being burned. And my face rests in the silent, endless scream of an American who is set on fire, on purpose.

-Taylor Croteau

Taylor Croteau is an Albuquerque-based (currently) artist and writer. She received her BA from the University of Tennessee, in 2016, and her MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, in 2018. She is a Tin House Winter Workshop alum of 2019. Her work has appeared in HCE Review, Verity La Journal, SMASH Magazine, The TEST Literary Series Anthology of 2019, Surviving the Mic: Surviving Social Distance Zine of 2020, and Blue Moth Press.