ioArt: Ride At Dawn

I was born beneath one sky
and taught to dream beneath another.

Asian in the mirror.
American on paper.

A daughter carried across an ocean
into a country that taught me I could become anything,

This is the strange thing about America: it can break your heart and still make you defend the dream.

Beneath the politics,
beneath the headlines,
beneath all the noise people make
when they are frightened of change,
there remains something beautiful:
the belief

that a person may leave one life behind and build a better one.

I have done this many times.
Maybe that is why the frontier has always felt like home to me.

It was the place humans went when the old world became too small. Once it was tents and backpacks, then it was horses and railroads.

Code runs beneath our fingers now.
Money has no coin.
Intelligence has no body.

Kingdoms rise inside machines and strangers meet in the dark rooms with big screens.

At dawn I ride into the new day, foolish enough
to believe art matters.

But every dawn turns into a busy day.
and eventually,
I need silence again.

So I close the laptop and silence the phone and
I ride.

Aimlessly. Wandering in the land of the brave. Touching grass in the hour where the earth belongs to itself.

For a few miles between darkness and morning,
the whole world is unwritten.

My American dream was never a pot of gold.
It is bigger than that.

I grew up believing a person could look at the life handed to them
and say,

No.
I will make a better one.

Maybe that is the part of America I still love most.
Not what is.
What it insists is possible.

Now I think the space between them might be where I belong.

Half old world. Half new world. Half dusty dirt road. Half digital frontier.
Between wanting a place to belong,
and wanting no walls around me at all.

The dawn is coming and I am riding toward something I cannot quite name.