I recently recited this story for a story slam with the Nebraska Writers Collective and the Omaha Public Library.



I believe that deja vu is your soul’s way of telling you you’re on the right path. Unfortunately, I haven’t had deja vu since, I don’t even know, maybe high school. I’ve been happy, growing, learning, but as far as I can tell, I haven’t quite figured out where I’m going in this world.

Almost two years ago, during a great debate about free will, someone I was in love with told me that he heard some Native American tribes believed that feathers showed you your path. That your ancestors laid them to tell you where you were supposed to be. Since then I’ve seen a feather every day but maybe 5—almost 2 years. I’m an active person. I see feathers in the woods. I work downtown. I see pigeon feathers on the streets. Even on days I don’t leave my house, some down feather will poke through a pillow or blanket and surprise me. Feathers everywhere, every day. I thought maybe the feathers were attached to him. That he was part of my path.

About the same time I found out about my feathers, I purchased what I hoped would be the ultimate road trip vehicle for my price range. A Jeep Compass. In less than 2 years I’ve put over 30,000 miles on my Jeep, largely due to best friend roadtripping with my friend Karyn.

Our first road trip was down to Stillwater Oklahoma to run a 50K race that we decided to sign up for 16 days before race day. We ran out of gas on the way down there—as I said it was my first road trip in a new vehicle—and had to get rescued by a state trooper, we got lead the wrong way in the race and ran farther than the 31 miles, and Karyn got a massive case of IT band syndrome—an overuse injury caused by us signing up to run 31 miles on a whim with little training. But there were feathers every day.

Our next road trip took us to Colorado for a wedding and mountain miles. By this time the feathers were becoming a real thing for me. I was starting to believe in them. Feather! Karyn and I screech at each other every time we’d spot a feather on the trail. This road trip we found that Jeeps have this neat feature where they basically power down before they overheat. Good for not overheating bad because we were stranded on the interstate not knowing what was going on. Next a trip to Kansas City where my struts went bad then our most recent trip to Steamboat where we had to leave my mom’s car there because it died. Just know that there’s always a car problem and always feathers in my life.

I thought with my feathers all around me that I didn’t need deja vu. That the feathers were my substitute. That even though this is nothing like what I thought my life would be like and even though I couldn’t imagine my future much beyond next week, I was doing fine. I didn’t think I was floundering. I’m stable. I have a house. I have a full time job. I have money saved. I’m not floundering. Then I had a dream and I died in it. They say when you die in dreams, it means big change is coming.

So I went to a reiki healer. To cleanse my shit, maybe help me read the feathers and my own intuition rather than just going with the flow and assuming I’m fine. The reiki healer had never heard that feathers show us our path, but she did believe they are sent to us by our ancestors to tell us we are loved. On our next best friend road trip—a road trip one of my clients sent us on to help me get over the love of my life feather guy—we went to the Black Hills to run in the forests. On our way home to Nebraska, I hit a huge ass black bird and it got stuck in the grill of the Jeep and we had to pry it out with the window washer things at the gas station. That’s not how I wanted to see my feathers.

Combine me dream dying, the dead bird, a Trump presidency, a refugee crisis, and getting broken up with by someone who tells you “I love you, but with all the effort that goes into caring about a relationship and all the shit in the world and love just isn’t worth the stress ” and I really felt like this is it. Time for the ultimate last road trip. Abandon all of my things, throw my dog in the car and hit the road and run away from all of it and live in the mountains in a Jeep by the river. There. Change. Done. Even better, living in the woods gets you off the grid. I was in Colorado running through the trees when the Charlottesville protests were happening living in ignorant bliss. Trump’s America makes it even harder to come back to regular life. How bad is it that I just called Trump’s America part of regular life? If that’s the case. Yes. I’m out.

However, even though I am a runner, inside me there is still this sane, responsible, stable person trying to talk the runner into compromise. So I’m selling all of my shit before I throw my dog in the car and I’m not giving up the good fight.

I thought I’d get to end this story telling you that it’s coming—my ultimate road trip—moving across the country to do good work for good people and make a difference. I had a job interview in Washington State 2 weeks ago and wrote this piece on the plane ride there. When the hiring manager picked me up from the airport, he had a giant feather sitting on his dash. A feather! A sign! This is my path! But I didn’t get the job.

So I don’t know that this story has an end yet. I don’t know where the road is taking me next. As I was going through boxes of crap in my basement, I found pictures from my first ever best friend road trip. In the fifth grade, my friend Carrie’s parents took us to the Black Hills. I took a disposable camera and in the stack of photos from this trip, there were probably 18 pictures from the inside of fucking Cabelas. Of taxidermy wildlife. I sat on the floor of my basement this weekend looking at the photos of fake animals on fake mountains and felt damn happy that on my most recent trip to the Black Hills I climbed to the highest peak and found real life mangy ass mountain goats with beards and missing patches of fur and all up there.

You know why it doesn’t freak me out that my car keeps breaking down on these road trips? Because I come home and I take it to a mechanic and they fix it. But being a human is really hard. There’s no one to fix things or no users manual or maps. I’m floundering. I’m wandering in the woods grasping for feathers, looking for some sign that I’m doing it right. The only thing I’ve figured out so far is that it IS all worth it. My best friend in those pictures, that group of people over there who love me, all of you people I don’t know—that’s why I can’t drive into the woods and never come out. I’m not taking the paved path, the path with taxidermy wildlife either. I’m out in it and the trip isn’t over and that’s OK. There’s nothing else to do but keep moving forward.