Coyote Woman

I was drifting off to sleep and saw myself overlaid the form of coyote, female, and we looked out across the night together - darkness all around - and I felt her steadiness as we looked around us.

August 3, 2025, liminal thoughts

Coyote
I am grounded
I am alone
I am not alone

I saw her form, still and panting, blood draining into the sand and, like a blueprint on onion skin, overlaid upon my skin, I saw the two of us merged. Our breaths paired, ears forward, we looked at the city before us, the small town lights, brash and jarring, and in the distance, winking or constant. I smelled the creosote and rabbit, quail, and dove and my stomach rumbled.

We were a crayon sketch, white and child-like, sketched over top one another, forever together, a whole being with four ears, no, two. Eyes: two, mouths: two, stomachs: two, no, one.

She told me her name, a color of grey that means warm and tender. We sat atop the small hill and simply breathed together. Her blessing, unintended, her presence alive and sharing.

She had come to me, or I had come to her, at the end of her life, several weeks earlier and I hadn’t seen her since. We met beneath the shade of the smoke tree, where I and two others had carried her. The piercing and violet blooms of the smoke tree, were blown and caught in the shadows of sand ripples. They were blown into garlands of not-shadow, and made complex and biting by the long thorns hidden beneath them.

I gathered the dried blossoms into small baskets and carried them into phoenix ritual - a blessing and tuneful dirge that I had facilitated later that day.

We had agreed upon something that day with no words, no promises other than presence. She had waited patiently, watching over my shoulder as I went through the contortions of growth, breakdown, epiphany and endings. She had waited till I turned off the light, one night.

This night. I had named what I desired and dreaded, the ending of a seven-year relationship. Though still friends, still bonded, with threads both toxic and loving, so entwined, so overgrown and root-bound that we could never separate one from the other.

He had named our ending numerous times, I had soothed, talked, and floated between bliss and destruction - always pulling us back from the edge of separation. Or he had. Both of us battling our ending. The ending of Us.

The Phoenix dies, but she fights death - what living creature does not convulsively fight the dying? She only knows that she is ending. She has no certainty, she does not see herself nor understand her true nature and the fiery rebirth that will soon follow complete collapse. She fights collapse. She doesn’t know that she will live. She only knows she is dying and ending.

I found myself in the dark tonight, mourning the loss of the poison I’ve become used to. Our shared poison. Mourning the sweetness and tenderness that we had fostered and grown in the midst of unnamed fears, acting out, words spoken, love withheld, love contorted and true caring. A cocktail that I had decided to walk away from because I knew, finally, what I was seeing and seeing truly and had decided to love myself instead. Love for self, like a self-imposed fork in the leg, a senseless pain - or a senseful pain. A kind sadism I usually avoided, instead waiting for the slow, long death of relationship.

Coyote walks beside and within me now, and we are counting the last of the butterflies. Two are caught in a net of creosote branches, wings ragged, they are already dead, even while they struggle on. One is carried by the wind, over the fence into the neighbors yard. We see three more before we move on.

We are not tallying the last rabbits, three.
Last ants, 2,428.
Last woman, 1.

—

Not only am I superimposed but everyone around me has this dual appearance - light, crayoned lines overlapping one another. Two stories flickering back and forth - the loving/the manipulative, the truthsaying/the deflection, the real/the pretend, the building up/the tearing down. If there ever was an upside down living beside the nightside up, this is it. Disoriented vision and I wonder if I’ve accepted this truth before I was ready to live it. There’s a reason why personal evolution takes time and I’ve been trying to race ahead - I have pondered and sought the answers immediately, and gotten them, and continued on – four years of therapy in a matter of months. I’m awhirl with what is true - it feels that my inner vision is suspect constantly.

—

The pink shell of her ear twitches and she is alert, watching in the dark next to me. She sees the wild landscape and knows the feel of it beneath her paws. There are no mysteries she cannot see through. She knows this world and is not afraid of the unknown and in-between but revels and thrives in liminal spaces.