The Farm was a rundown but soulful place where history had happened. Where lovers had danced and died and the land had swallowed the memory of them but kept their feeling on the surface, palpable but never reachable, like the word you look for but cannot find—the one you know but cannot conjure.

​

And if you were at The Farm you would be able to taste them in the air. The taste would flatten you, and mold “you” into “us” because the feeling reminds you, and me, and everyone, that we are not just ourselves, but we are them: the lovers dancing in the field: they who left their bones in the dirt to mingle and make small talk with the roots of flowers; they who expected to dance perpetually and were offended when their ankles rolled and their knees gave way beneath them.

​

And they, who have always been us, reached desperately for the tractor near the farmhouse, for the edge of the grain bin near the field to find some sort of anchor, but the ground churned and dropped beneath us, the dancers. 

​

We are them, and we were not supposed to be like the corn and the beans, the lost seeds of crops turning to grow their sprouts toward the center of the earth and thus feed the thing that made us. The Farm replaced itself with itself, like the snake that eats its tail. And the dancers were outraged, we felt luckless and abandoned, so we yelled, “Just a little longer,” and grabbed each other’s hands as we drowned into Earth. 

​

The dirt swallowed us piece by piece as the land had always done on The Farm.

​

And right before our mouths were closed, with our arms reaching in defiance, we said, “forever,” and that is the word—if you could only conjure it—that has been on the tip of your tongue.