My outlook on Yuma, and my current life, changes a lot from day to day. Some days I just get so tired of spending all day inside reading about the most boring aspects of law, watching the sun blaze outside and despairing of ever finding my place in this town. And that's usually when I wait until near sunset and go take a long walk. And I know this is weird, but the place that always makes me feel better is the cemetery. It is the most peaceful place, and also so fascinating. Yesterday I saw, in addition to the everpresent clouds of white doves, a pack of rabbits. But what rabbits! I've never seen anything like them. At first I thought it was a deer, because this rabbit is hairless and stick-thin, with the most absurdly large ears. I swear its ears were a foot long, and they stood straight up, so that this bizarre creature looked twice as big as it actually was. I followed it around until I could figure out what it was and then I just laughed at this space creature rabbit. So in the last rays of blinding sunlight, it was just me and the alien rabbits and the doves and an ancient probably homeless man with long gray hair and a half-empty bottle, sitting comatose on a tombstone. The hot breeze and the silence cleared my head, and I started thinking about the message I heard in church (full of sweet little old people) that morning. About freedom from fear. About how fear comes when we expect things to turn out one way, and our expectations come crumbling down around us and we are left with blind faith. Or in my case, blind faith in a cemetery with weird rabbits.
I'm not sure how long I will stay in Yuma. I know that this life I am living now is only for two more weeks, and then it will be time to really see what this place is like. But I have decided: I am going to take advantage of this time and place. I will not live in fear of having made a mistake. I will seize onto what is beautiful and strange in this place, and when it is time to go, I may not have a lot of soulmates but I want to be able to say that I know every street, that I have eaten truckloads of tamales and chorrizo burritos from Stan's grocery, that I know my neighbors and co-workers and the servers at every downtown restaurant, that I have attended at least one quinceaÑera and countless Scorpions baseball games, that I can make guacamole, that I have swam in the Colorado river and run to California (ha! did that yesterday!).
And Yuma has beautiful sunsets. Maybe Arizona sunsets in general are beautiful. The still clarity, how every surface has a subdued glow, a matte finish lit from within. It is absolutely glorious.