Page 28 of Bones and Ashes

Save me, I think.

And I don't even know who I'm askin'.

Then I walk to the bike. My hands find the grips as I throw my leg over and settle into the seat.

I kick it alive and then I ride out.

Dust kickin' up behind me.

Road openin' like a wound that might heal or might not.

Doesn't matter.

I'm on my way home now.

CHAPTER 7

Here's something no one tells you before you start makin' grand gestures on social media and burn your brand to the ground.

When you throw away everything that used to fill your day—every sponsored post, every brand deal, every collaboration email, every morning spent curling your hair, and adjusting the light, and finding the angle that makes the land behind you look like something out of a hymnal—when you toss all of that into the fire and watch it burn, and blacken, and float away on the wind like ash over the plains, you no longer have a way to fill your days.

That's the part they don't mention.

You just have hours now.

Long, flat, empty hours that stretch out in front of you the way the highway stretches east of Drybone, and there's nothin' at the end of them.

No deadline.

No content calendar.

No reason to get dressed, or check the mirror, or care whether the sun is doing something beautiful behind the barn.

The sun does beautiful things behind the barn every single evening and it doesn't need me to photograph it, and I don't need it to pay my mortgage, and so we just—exist.

Separately.

The sun and me, doin' nothin' together.

And the hardest part about this realization is that it is entirely possible, maybe even probable, that I liked it.

That I liked the life my mother sculpted for me.

That I liked bein' pampered. Liked the way someone would hold the ring light just so and tell me to tilt my chin a quarter inch to the left and I'd feel the warmth hit my cheekbone and know, without even seeing the preview, that the shot was gonna be perfect.

I liked the ritual of it.

The preparation.

The way a morning could have architecture—primer, then powder, then the careful selection of a hat, and then the walk out into the golden hour with purpose stitched into every step I took.

I liked being photographed.

Liked existing inside a frame that someone else held steady.

Liked the quiet authority of knowing that when I posted, four million people would stop scrolling and look at me standin' in front of my family's land like I belonged to it and it belonged to me and neither of us had ever known anything different.

And I liked the aesthetic fullness of my arranged life.