There's Always Room For Desert
"To love someone is to learn the song in their heart and sing it to them when they have forgotten." ~Arne Garborg
A desert is not a very convenient place to grow anything unless it’s a talent for resilience. It has no mercy for hesitation despite not really having any sort of agenda. But if you want to smell a sunbeam, that’s the place. Devoid of dampness, you really get a proper whiff of ultraviolet. The brightness doesn’t bring clarity so much as it does reflection. It’s easy to start and stop, forget what you were just about to do, and then start over again. The wholesale sunshine and infinite dust are a velvet curtain filtering everything in an unreal shroud, muted in time and dimension.
It’s possible to fall in love wherever you are in the world, but if you want to time travel all you have to do is fall in love. Deserts are very accommodating spaces for falling in love, it turns out. I’ve only been twice but that second time reminds me of falling in love, far away and feeling so full of that Big Future Feeling — big enough to dwarf a desert as big as a state. To think that these vast valleys of dust have never cultivated something so alive as when my heart beat round and wet under that scorched sky, circling with carrion that would go hungry that day.
Heart memories, like bone memories, are difficult to remember. They’re memories of sensations, comfortably removed at an intellectualized length away from the immediacy of their original intensity, framed and filed away for posterity. Hearts contract and expand but they have absolutely no respect for the physical laws of matter and linear time. Like a black hole, we’re only aware of its illogical appetite, not its organizational systems. And there’s always room for more. All willing hearts, under the right circumstances, can reconcile reality with regeneration. No matter how many realities it takes.
Sometimes when I sit under the sun now, I think about how it’s so many millions of miles away — far enough away not to immediately kill us, but not far enough not to try. You’ve got to appreciate how far it’s come just to radiate. Sometimes, what doesn’t kill you makes you linger.