I sang to my daughter as we drove. It was our first trip together since the divorce and I was afraid to be making it. I was afraid to be living at all without her dad driving as lead. He had been the hero to get us there safe for all of my adult life, the only one I could really count on, and now he was gone. My entire life was gone and I was driving into snow, ice, and mountains. “What if we slide off a cliff…”

Capricorns are written to be fatalistic. I imagined myself a goat with hooves mired to rock, with horns to hold onto my daughter. I’d need to save us both and there would be no one to save me. I thought about that as we drove through the mountain pass without chains because he always put them on and now he wasn’t. He wasn’t here anymore. Love wasn’t here anymore.

I would die unloved. The thought was brief and then quickly whisked away by my own irritation, “That’s ludicrous. Quit feeling sorry for yourself and live. You better pay the f*ck attention to your driving Amber. Don’t die on this mountain like a cold dick.”

I often reason with my own reason in a most vulgar way. I suppose that for me the slander is most effective and it was especially today. I managed to make it through the pass just fine and now here we were with miles and miles in front of us. The earth was open to land with very little human. I sang to her as the road passed for miles. I sang to her the classics my heart sings to remember,