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Breaking

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Hey South Dakota, Why Can't We Make This Work?

dakota
I messed up. Let's try this again.
BISMARCK, ND—I can’t say this is easy for me. Or that I haven’t had my fair share of sleepless nights thinking about what this might mean. But I have to listen to my heart on this one: South Dakota, let’s get back together.

It hasn’t been easy for me since our last fight in 1889. I shouldn't have been so arrogant, so wrong about making Bismarck our capital. Ever since, I have been a wreck. Recently I started fracking, and the physical toll it has taken has been awful. I’m falling apart—the doctors have said I have four sinkholes down south already.
 
I keep drilling, pumping, extracting from deep inside me all the oil money I can. But it has never been about the money. All along, I have just been trying to fill the hole that you left when we split. 

I should feel great. The economy here is booming. I make 92% of the country’s rapeseed crop and 36% of the barley, and I’m home to the tallest man-made structure in the entire hemisphere. And they’re doing a fourth season of Fargo in 2019. Yet I don’t feel great. People say I’m a loner, a do-nothing, an ugly flat underpopulated almost-rectangle sitting underneath Canada.

I know I messed up. I know that I’m not good enough for you. You’ve got Mount freaking Rushmore, for crying out loud. But I will change! I’ll get off the hydraulic fracking (or at least in populated areas). I’ll let Pierre be our capital. I'll send you some America Pasque flowers, not that Wild Prairie Rose shit we have up here. I’ll do it all for you. Because when all of the soil is overworked and barren, when all of the sinkholes have finally sunk, when the last tumbleweed rolls across my desolate borders, it will all have been worth it if I could spend those dying moments knowing we were one.

Please, South Dakota. Let’s get us another try.

With love,
North Dakota
© 2018
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