In The Mouth A Desert

I left quickly, eventually driving through the crushing rush of Newport traffic slowly running into Inland Empire traffic. I was aching and confused, my head was shimmering with an intoxicating blend of denial and possibility. I smelled like someone else and I was looking to the mighty Mojave to wash me clean.

The suburbs of suburbs began to thin out as the highway stretched on and become darker and darker. You can keep going, I told myself. This line will take you to Vegas, into Arizona, into the ephemeral dream of the American West. But something held me to the small state highway turnoff.

There's something about only being able to see the buzzing of the highway's white lines that makes you feel like you could be flying.

Strange suburbs began to crop up again as if I had crossed some line of a mirror; these tracts echoing the very ones I had left behind with clouds of cigarette smoke and the blaring of English New Wave bands. But something about these communities sent waves of unease through my already ravaged psyche, it was like something bad had crept into the water, that the forest was tainted by something toxic.

I don't remember much about the house except that at one point we had to empty out the refrigerator as the power had gone out and so many things had gone bad. I remember sitting out back, eating military Meals Ready to Eat out of their polyurethane packaging and hearing music from the inside being dulled by the closed sliding glass door.

A few more cigarettes met their timely ends and the impossibly pink dawn ravaged across an empty desert valley as we began to drink the instant coffee that tasted so delicious at the moment. The dawn brought on this brief feeling of hope, as it tends to, but that was quickly overtaken by how cold that desert can actually get, by just how empty it was. I felt as though I were missing a piece of punctuation.