west ovenbird I was born in the East with a name that sounds almost like the word for “garden” in a language I don’t speak. And all my life the people there disparaged the place I called my home. They told me to leave. They said that to grow into who I would become I needed to travel far from the place I began. And soon I could hear whisperings inside myself. A voice that said, “go West.” So I broke a man’s heart and I broke my own and I took the pieces and made my way to the ocean. West. Land of wicked witches, frontiers, the plot of land that once held the house my grandmother slept in when she was a baby. I went West thinking I was chasing my destiny. I found a life. Or a life found me. And still the voice, “go West, go West.” But there was nowhere else to go without wading into the Pacific. Oh, what a trickster fate is. Speaking in riddles and twisted rhymes. Twenty years perched on this land that threatens to fall into the ocean when West is just an arbitrary name applied to imaginary lines of longitude. It was never a place I could go. But I got there anyway. And when I did, everything made sense, and I laughed and the eagles laughed too, their cackles bouncing off the mountains. 260524 what's it to you? who go blather from