I thought she was gone…

The first time she came to me, she began as something beautiful. But the embers of the feelings that held on after the channeling were all wrong. They burned. They hurt.

She has shown me sides of her I wished not to see, faces and spaces I never wished to be.

“This isn’t you,” I told her.

“This isn’t me,” she answered.

And I burned her alive.

But in the four years that followed, she haunted my dreams. She drove me awake at 3:30 AM every night of that first year. By the second year, her heat gnawed my flesh, drew my sweat like poison. And then the third year brought cold. Then mourning came.

Four years, that followed… Four years, she followed.

Her bird is the eagle. I asked mine, Phoenix and Raven, to take me to her in the Dreaming, so we could speak again face to face.

“I am infinite colors, degrees, elements, dimensions, senses, sexes, natures,” she said.

I smiled, happy to see her. “I know. And I wouldn’t have it any other way.”

She smiled. And came to me again. She understood. She understood that I understood.

I understand now she is both the flame and the wave, the dark and the light, nature and supernature, black and white, up and down, broken and unbreakable, Heaven and Hell, push and pull... She is all these things and so much more.

And she is so, because we are so.

It isn’t our sameness that makes us her children. This experiment was never meant to yield a consistently similar result—only infinitely varying outcomes.

It is the essence of evolution.

It isn’t for me to say what America is. It’s not for you or anyone else to say what America is. Only that we are America.

I am infinite colors, degrees, elements, dimensions, senses, sexes, natures. I am both the flame and the wave, the dark and the light, nature and supernature, black and white, up and down, broken and unbreakable, Heaven and Hell, push and pull... I am all these things and so much more.

I am America.

And although our stars, stripes and colors may differ, so are you.