The World Pillowfight Championships this year? Same grassy knolls, same creek, same mud pit. I even recognized the people. Beery smell. Flags everywhere. Sweaty sunbrowned muscled men, the kind of men you could imagine dying for a vague, bloated notion called "my country". Tattooed trim blond teenagers & their mothers in tiny bikinis. A pit of testosterone, sloshy beer cups, flesh brushing against flesh: desire, Middle America style. Stumbling out of the shade, one girl said to her friend, I don't want to watch 'em fight anymore; let's go mingle!

After a few rounds, we left to wander Sara's hometown, past the houses with the vintage tools on display & the blues-blaring radios, through yards, vine-overgrown cuts, & dusty roads. We sat under a bridge next to a creek, the same creek that fed the mud pit back there, in that place I'll probably never see again, & nibbled on the domes of bubblegum sno cones, watching leaves fall, falling as if with purpose into the water, drifting past us to a point we could not see from our precarious perch on the stones.

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