Low Visibility
Desert heat and making it out of the fog
“What new miracles has the month of August in store for me?”
— The Secret Lives of People in Love, Simon Van Booy
It’s early into the evening and I’m already in bed, propped up on a pillow of my own, glaring down at more things of mine spilling out of a suitcase on the floor. Hours ago I was lugging it from the car to where it lays, and hours prior I was waking up in a storm of smoke and sand, ready and willing for a dust devil to sweep in and spare my drive back to Silver Lake.
The weekend enveloped us in heat I’d assumed only frozen dinners and middle earth could endure, painting the 95° of our morning departure as a mercy. Most Airbnb time was spent poolside, soundtracked by cicadas, watching a small flamingo inflatable ferry my beer across the ripples like a DVD screensaver. One excursion was a trip to the casino, where I miraculously flipped five to sixty, and left wondering what differentiated the screens from baby sensory videos, and could it be considered a house of prayer.
As my bespoke weight of living evaporated under a white-hot sun, I realized what flooring it into the desert could make available to me. Palm Springs was the first honest vacation I’ve had in years that wasn’t work-related or flying to the family. I couldn’t have told you the last time I was weightless in batch of chlorine, or recalled my own name truthfully, as my body and brain cells fried atop an inner tube. If I had a doctor they would’ve ordered this. They would’ve tried to come with.
After all that forgetting though, I hardly remembered how jarring the coming home can be. Met by the mess of a hasty escape, questioning if this is how I actually smell, or just the fragrance of dust accumulation and my presence absent. As my luggage hit the floor I caught myself in the mirror, and for a moment considered what returning must mean. Resuming, continuing, reverting. Low visibility, just as the highway home had warned.
My mind-numbing tricks are less glamorous here. I’m in the middle of waiting, on myself or someone else, to lift a current fog. Hunting for more work is the primary stressor, but even my solitude has a murky shadow to it where I can’t see the end. The days bleed together. This oasis of a trip poured a lot of light in, at least by way of close friendships, and I’ll remember a hazy In-N-Out conversation around love and lack the most.
I’m not sure I have the lexicon tonight to describe what it is I feel simmering within, or what I may be looking for. Only perhaps the question of where the next moment will find me, and who or what will meet me at the door of August before I swallow it whole.