Some memories never leave your bones.

[buzzfeed quiz, midnight]

Eighteen years ago, I think. We're at a cabin in Big Bend, my parents and my sister. We're playing a board game, I try but can't remember what it was. What I remember is laughing so hard that I am about to honest to God pee my pants. I run to the bathroom and laugh like my soul is flying out of my body, emptying my bladder with the force of a firehose, and the person sleeping on the other side of the cabin banged the flat of their hand maniacally against the wall we shared but I could not stop. I couldn't stop laughing, I couldn't stop peeing. 

We put several objects on the mantel of the cabin's front door, hoping they would be back when we next returned. We never came back to that cabin, but ever since then, when I walk into a room that feels vaguely familiar, once everyone else is out of the room I run one hand over the mantel of the door. All I have found is a thousand spare keys.

Eight years ago. I'm in Colorado, hiking alone. Norah is with me and catches scent of something. She's gone before I 've turned around. I call until my voice gives out but she doesn't come back. If she hasn't come back by the time night falls, I'll have to leave her, and if I do that she will most likely die alone in these hills over the next few days or weeks. 

As soon as I let myself imagine this, I see her cresting the next rise over, flying, until she's bumping against my calves. That alternate universe spins away from us as we hike back to the car, night falling as we drive home.

Flagstaff. I'm in a store that sells bright clothes, there is fabric everywhere. I look at the back of the shop and there's an old woman standing in front of the three-way mirror, trying on a dress. She pulls it over her naked back. I just remember the way her grey hair looked as it cascaded almost to her hip bones. 

Last week. I'm lying on a table at my mother-in-law's clinic. She is a chiropractor, and the room smells like essential oils and the nutty smell in her skin, in her home, the smell that goes wherever she does. I feel her hands and arms cradle my head. Her fingers stair-step down my vertebrae, one by one by one. My husband hangs off the table next to me, clowning around. I feel so weirdly alive, so certain that this is where I'm supposed to be.

Ten years ago. I hear the squeaky sound of his Toyota Tercel pulling up the road. It's nighttime and the California air is warm. I run to the car, slide in. My sundress rides up one tan leg and he puts his calloused hand on my thigh, leans across the gear shift to kiss me. His beard is sun-bleached the lightest it's ever been.

Eleven years ago, my sister and I are running as fast as we can to catch the Metro back to our hotel. Our flight is leaving Paris and the surreal dream of the past four months in a few hours and the public transit is about to close for the night. I am so sleep deprived that I feel like I am watching my own life. I hope they make it, I think. We do. 

It's night and I'm twenty-one. We're going out to water the garden I've planted in my parent's front yard. I'm not wearing shoes. Hop on, he says, and I leap on his back and he jogs across the wet grass, my arms locked across his chest. 

I'm at a concert in Colorado with my sister. It's small but crowded. The music is so incredible, the people are so happy, and I think This is what it means to be alive, in every sense of the word. 

I'm seventeen, and my least responsible friend and I are stealing a yield sign for no reason. I drove by it, failing to yield, and out of nowhere turned to her and said I want that.

Turn around, then, she replied. 

At Tirzah's in Flagstaff. My skin is awful, broken out from the stress of moving away from home for the first time and several months of unemployment. It was the most insecure I'd ever felt in my life up until then. The woman at the salon reaches into a drawer and pulls out a comb with a white flower on it and slides it into my hair. Like a mermaid, she said, and laughed. I wore it all day. 

I'm twenty-four and sitting on a porch in Longmont, Colorado. My coworker walks outside, throws a peanut butter cup at me and walks back inside. I'm so happy, I write in my journal.

It's two or three years later and Mom and Dad and I drive to Fredericksburg on a random day for no reason. No reason at all. We stop on the way and peek inside the windows of a run-down friendly looking art-type building that I can't remember the nature of now. In Fredericksburg we walk, duck into a coffee shop. It rains all day. Nothing much happened. Dad played the tour guide. It was the last time he would and I didn't know. It's one of my favorite memories. 

Five years ago. I'm visiting Oregon. We're at a little farmhouse, crammed around a table with friends and family. There are tomato slices drying out over a woodstove, good thick bread, soup and squash sliced lengthwise and drizzled with butter. There's a piano in the corner, bright pans hung on the wall. I want to get married here, I think to myself.

This summer. I'm driving through New Mexico, alone but with dogs, the best way to travel. A storm is catching up to me, the streak of a sunset to my right, the black clouds to my left. I'm either going to Texas or going towards Oregon, I can't remember, but what I do remember is the old hotel signs stabbing the sky and knowing that there was no other place for me to be as that night fell other than driving through that precise corridor in the southwest. Every single alternate universe version of myself was doing the same thing. I felt them all converge beside me as we flew through the light and then the dark.

It's my last month in nursing school and I'm convinced I'm going to fail my practicum. I sleep not one single minute the entire night before, sitting on the edge of my bed, paralyzed. As soon as the very first light filters through my window I walk downstairs, into my mother's room, and climb into bed with her like I am five and not twenty-seven. Her eyelids flutter and she wraps an arm around me. In that moment I honestly could not fathom how anyone without a mother survives for even one moment on this earth.

I'm on a couch in Boulder. A tall, dark boy is next to me, nervous. Do I have a shot? he asks, looking at me. I smile but he watches my eyes without looking away. I say yes, but suddenly the feel of my arms locked across Ivan's chest rises unbidden in my mind. Hop on. 

In Arizona. Working on a trail somewhere. I haven't showered for a week and all I have left to eat are the very worst Clif Bars I brought. I'm sweating and exhausted, fantasizing about my future office job, and I turn around and see the world spread out behind me, the chorus of leaves in the wind, the colors each like some version of sunlight, and I hear a voice clear as day: It won't be like this forever. 

The voice again, when I woke up years later thinking about the dark haired boy: He's not the one for you. 

I'm sixteen. One of my teachers makes a joke about the "sub-Standard Times" and I sink down in my chair while the class laughs. Two of the most popular boys in my grade, Keith Swiderski and Garrett Frank, crane their heads around to see my reaction, delighted at my embarrassment. They know my dad works for the paper.

Years later, Keith's dad dies from dementia. When he learns that Dad has it too, he asks his mom if she can find out my email address or number. 

Last night I read The Luckenbach Moon to Dad. About a third of the way in I realize it's a lot dumber than I remember. It occurred to me that what made it special was the way he read it. I try to recreate it but he wanders off and I'm left holding my phone. Probably just a Nuthin', I say defiantly to the empty room.

We can't stand an encore! 

It takes too much out you. 

I'll remember these things forever, until I don't. But they'll be in my bones anyway, like every meal I've ever eaten, every book I've ever read. The names don't matter as much as how their essence knit me together from the inside out. Nothing can take that away. Right?

I catch up to Dad. Do you remember Grandad JB? I ask. He lights up. Sure do, he said. 

I try Hondo Crouch, Big Bend, me, my sister. Nothing. Marfa, the farm, Kerrville, Angelo State. He looks at me blankly. 

But when I mention Crockett Elementary, he lights up. Nanny, he remembers. Lost Maples. For some horrifically unfair reason, Abilene draws a response too. 

It happened, whether he knows it or not, and because it happened he was made, and so was I. But I know they won't believe we've got such a big moon for such a small town, I finish, just because I have his attention again, just to close out the tab on my phone. 

He smiled, turned away, kept walking.