Wandering Stars

Charles Star’s memories [...] are a broken mirror, through which he only ever sees himself in pieces […] he knows there must be something worse beneath the worst of what he knows happened to him at school […] there is something deeper down, doing its dark work on him, some further forgotten thing, but what is it? His life is about knowing it is there but not ever wanting to see it. It is to be a kind of secret, kept over there, way over there, as he’s heard other Indian people say in prayer, referring to time, referring to a past long ago but not that long ago, when things were better for Indians, when praying was free of this plea, this begging, this please God have mercy on us haven’t we suffered enough kind of way it’d become for so many Indian people out there in the world.

When you push it down, when you go to kill memory, it finds its ways to haunt you […] He keeps the memory away from his thoughts, and is only reminded when something like rain touches the back of his neck, there where a man first held him down, gripped the back of his neck so hard his legs gave out on the floor of the bathroom of the boys’ quarters at Carlisle. This is the memory he keeps but doesn’t see, the one that lives in him, in a room he has all but abandoned.

There were connected points, events, and the people he’d come from that he wanted to try to save without delivering them into the vanishing, where it was assumed his people were headed.

Most of the dreams he had now were of shootings of one kind or another. The sounds, the running, the heavy sinking feeling of being shot. One time he ate the insides of a horse then crawled into its hollowed-out carcass and heard what he thought were drums from outside the body of the horse turn into gunfire […] Eventually he noticed that if he took more pills than they said he should, he felt even better, and he’d dream less, or not remember the dreams, which came to the same thing. And then taking more pills felt like it meant he’d have to take more pills to make the taking more pills thing keep working. Like more meant more meant more.

A bad thing doesn’t stop happening to you just because it stops happening to you. In therapy this is called trauma.

Lony recently googled blood, and Native Americans, and magic, and combined all of them to see what came up. He found on one site the name Cheyenne meant the cut people. That was enough for him to remain convinced that what he was doing with the cutting and the blood was okay, like something he was a part of, not something he was doing to get away from what he felt, or to feel some other pain he wouldn’t know he was feeling until he felt the cutting pain.

“You ever seen Native youth suicide rates?”

“On my best days [sobriety] feels automatic. But I’m probably doing like twenty things I’ve made into habits that help it feel that way.”

That was the thing. Something different. Transcendence was why people chose to die, to get high.

I went to running for a feeling. How it felt after the run. But something else happened on the runs. I wasn’t running away from anything anymore. I was running at whatever in me needed the way I needed before. I was running at whatever I had been afraid of.