Don’t you know who I am?

I am sitting in my tent, and I hear the brassy rhythm guitars driving strings through the crickets and the laughter and the quiet murmuring generators and the silence of me in the tent with my thumbs speaking. And the dogs that sound like coyotes.

“Don’t you know who I am?” the dogs are woof-ing to the twinkling stars and the one or two still planets.

I am almost shaky, out of energy from the long day traveling and before that, packing. No glass, plastic sporks, all the minute decisions that go into the back of a hatchback, leaving the cats and a note for my aunt.

I’ve been happy today, talking to a woman I know who might be a new friend, the conversation rising like dough between us. You get it, I tell her.

And we are not on our first go round in this life. Flashing tickets to past rodeos, enough to line a guitar case.

Tonight, knowing no one, I sat in the campfire circle and dared play a song. I didn’t play all that well, my fingers rusty and cold, my voice rusty and soft and then spurting out like air in the pipes. People were kind, this is Mississippi, after all. And I was kind to myself, and that made all the difference in the world.