By Christie Chapman

1. Live miserably.
Be born on the wrong coast. Choke on fear when you try to speak. Hide in bathroom stalls during class. Hate your face. Hate your skin. Hate your smile. Fall in love and shatter. Watch him fall in love, and shatter. Your past-life twin: one of those fish at the bottom of the ocean where it’s so dark they did not evolve eyes. You played in dirt and ate bugs as a child; live like it. You are low; never forget this.

2. Now turn up the heat.
Despise yourself for thirty years; live with the wrong man for ten. These will overlap. The man will see things, hear things, that aren’t there. Comfort him. The man will fight himself; hide the kitchen knives and aspirin. The man will scream at you. He will rip up the book of Pablo Neruda love poems he gave you long ago, when you fell in love. Harden. The man will say that you are ugly, that you are stupid. Survive.

3. See a window.
In an arid place, at a work conference, meet a stranger. A little light, a little smile. “Hello, Sunshine,” he will flirt, and walk like a broken cowboy. He is from out West. You would follow him anywhere. He says you’re sexy, and you believe him; he’s a god. He takes pictures of landscapes out West, the land more open and vast than anything you’ve ever imagined. The world is so big, he shows you. And you are so much more.

4. Escape.
Get laid off during the Recession. Dump the man who’s sleeping on your couch, the one who ripped up poetry. Break your apartment lease early; sublet to a guy who’ll stiff you out of money later but what matters is that you go. Now. Fill a dumpster with the majority of your objects. Keep only a few books and clothes, in that order. The man out West will give you a map; follow it. Get in your car and go.

5. Erase.
And here, in the desert, is where you’re reborn. You have no roots here, no people, no blood. The drive feels like a passage, mythological. It is so long and flat and bright, and there is only you. Phoenix. You want your ashes thrown here. He wants his ashes thrown here. Someday, perhaps, your ashes will mingle. The West is a place for such romance. Skip to my Lou, my darlin’.

6. Fall in love.
The broken cowboy is in the Rockies; go one time zone further west to give him some space. Crash in the guest room of a kindly druggie-engineer in the Little Italy part of downtown San Diego. Under-employed, spend your days in wander. Live two blocks from the bay, and walk by it each night. Meet people who live on their boats. Say yes when they ask you to come onto their boats. Love the city. Love it so hard.

7. Make friends.
Become a voyeur; file these stories away for later use. Hang out with homeless guys until they know you by name. Sit by the bay with a man who believes you’re a literal angel, the way some believe in UFOs. Spend the night of your thirtieth birthday with a crack dealer at a gay bar; dance with him to Michael Jackson on the jukebox. Save a drunk girl in a long red gown who threatens to jump off the yacht she rents with her boyfriend; they sell sunset dinner cruises to millionaires. Later, after she’s sobered up and reconciled with the boyfriend, be a waitress-for-a-night on one of their cruises, because life sure can take a turn. Become a little dazzled at your new life.

8. Long.
Realize you have been in town for almost four months and the broken cowboy has never come to see you, even once.

9. Become a nihilist briefly.
Give up, again, on love. Let a Marine pick you up in a Starbucks, because he saw you reading the New York Times and thought you looked smart; go back to his hotel room. Let him take you to Navy bars on the nearby island of Coronado, where “Tuesday’s Gone” and everything’s “A Whiter Shade of Pale,” fin de siècle music. Run out of money. Run out of work. Drive the long way home to Virginia, your bold West life a flop. See strange snow in Arizona (yes, Arizona) at 4 a.m., or maybe it was the light blurred and asterisked by your stupid tears. Have a breakdown—the emotional kind—at a motel in Albuquerque because it’s not his home, not his bed. Watch a gallant cowboy make the waitresses swoon at a Waffle House in Arkansas in the middle of the night. Return to your parents’ house, where your family is playing virtual ping-pong on the Wii. Their eyes stay on the screen as they swing to imaginary opponents. Feel restless. Agree to meet the Marine in an Army town in North Carolina, where he has gone for work. Agree to sex on the beach where it rains on your face as you look up at the godless sky and scream “Yes” and lie, lie, lie. Let it out. Empty.

10. Begin.
Now you’re ready to rewrite, all of that behind you. Recall lessons of before: Fall in love and shatter. Survive. Fall in love and stay whole. The rebirth in the desert, it turns out, was one of many. And that’s the beautiful thing: There are more. There is more. You are more. He tried to tell you.

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Christie Chapman is a writer and mom in Springfield, VA. Her work has appeared and is forthcoming in Electric Literature, Midway Journal, *82 Review, LEON LIterary Review, L’Esprit, Ghost Parachute, Gooseberry Pie Lit Magazine, and elsewhere. She was a Lascaux Prize finalist for flash fiction and was nominated for Best Microfiction. You can read more of her work at christielauryn.com.