Sometimes, surrounded by the endless Minnesota sky, I believe I have come home. Other times, I am sure moving from New York City to rural Minnesota was a mistake.

It is morning, and I walk the half mile down my gravel driveway, humming a melody that may one day grow up to be a song. Pastures unfold in every direction, separated by copses of aspen and pine, oak and maple. Like most autumn mornings while burgundy leaves linger on the oaks, I take Meadow for a walk. Really, the yellow lab is my ex- cuse to walk myself. Every morning when I start my walk, I hope that, this time, motion will help me outpace my melancholy.

A breeze pulls the warmth from my body, stealing the last skin- sense of Chris next to me in bed. He was the reason I moved here, the beacon that drew me away from the concrete sea of city.

I am no longer sure he is enough to keep me here.

Regrets have escaped their trap again, and I am glad I am alone while they stalk me. Away from Chris, I stop pretending everything is okay.

I unravel a tangle of earphones and select a recent “This American Life” podcast, placing one earphone in my ear and letting the other dangle free. In my right ear, behind Ira Glass’s nasal drawl, I hear the background noise of New York City traffic. In my left ear, the chuckle- call of sandhill cranes. I cannot tune out one ear in favor of the other, just as I can no longer be only one version of myself.

I stand at the intersection of two lives.

In my old life in New York City, I woke to a world alive with activ- ity. Trucks grumbled at idle underneath my window, and the air was thick with diesel and the scent of cumin from the Mexican restaurant across the street. The only sky was a thin slice at the top of my window. In Minnesota, the sky has its own topography. Over a monotony of flat landscape, the sky is filled with crags and altitude, mountains and valleys, color and elevation. Today’s sky is an expanse of soft gray blankets. A pink sun shines through a small opening to the east, a crack of morning light beneath cosmic bed sheets. The air is thick with the promise of rain, and I inhale earth, pine, and sweetgrass, hoping the

scents might cultivate the barren terrain inside me.
In New York City, I walked a purposeful vector to the subway,

along the way accommodating crowds of pedestrians in a practiced dance. Over the course of four blocks I passed eight restaurants, four boutiques, a laundromat, a Dominican bodega, a gourmet grocery, and a Korean deli.

Meadow and I have walked the equivalent of four Brooklyn blocks and passed nobody. We are not even halfway down my driveway. The driveway bends sixty degrees toward the road, and I can no longer see my house, just fields lined by clumps of thorny mountain ash.

To the north, a rotting wood-plank deer stand is poised like a macabre Tinker Toy on stilts. The empty rectangle of its window stares at me, an unlidded eye where hunters rest their rifles and sight their prey. I am the deer before the hunter shoots. I long to run, but I don’t know which would be worse: standing as still as I can, hoping to blend into my surroundings, or bolting back to where I came from.

PREORDER HUNDRED MILES TO NOWHERE BY ELISA KORENNE.