*The desert was the landscape of my dreams, the mirage I had only imagined but never seen. Did you know that everything that grows in the desert is meant to repel? The dry heat of the desert; it makes us desirous and thirsty. The dust and the wind; it blinds us and scrapes at our skin. In the desert we are our most barren and vulnerable selves, unprotected, naked. We come as we are, aware of life’s dangers and the promises we want to reach for. We come face to face with the dissatisfactions we can't admit and the hopes we are too scared to call our own. Like lizards basking in the sun we breathe the light to feed our souls, and once we are full, we recline in the shade. The rocks, they bear our marks; they are stacked to mark the trail. The glass debris in the dirt, the broken bottles we left behind; they cut our feet and make us bleed. Young tanned hide, tattered t-shirts, the smell of alcohol and cigarettes plastered all over their skin. The boys at the cliffs, drunk and yelling, flaunting the desperate machismo of adolescence; the lone girl, slurring her words and flopped onto a rock, one leg in the water, croaking at the boys, helpless. How did she get here? Why did she come? Why does her heart beat? Where did she go?
*I came to the desert to escape the city; the city with its whirring and whistling; the motion and the clicking, the techno-logic that has pervaded the minds of these urban denizens and the flash-mob ideals of fame and riches we’ve wired into the electric synapses of our brains. I came to find respite in a place with little water. I came to see myself more clearly, disentangled from the loves and lives from a place that will always be my love and life. I came to visit a friend. I came to untangle heartstrings, hers and mine both. I came to drink iced coffee outside in the shade. I came to rest. I came to be a lizard, an ectotherm truly. I came so the sun could balance my insides. I came for homeostasis. I came not to do but to be. I came not to find but to see.
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