The eye doctor’s office walls are retina-thin, and that is how, as my pupils widened under the influence of drops, I heard her explain to the man in the next room that he had advanced glaucoma.
I’m not going to lie to you,, she said. This is pretty bad.
The man muttered resigned assent to the treatment ahead, to the application of more powerful eyedrops, to appointments every week or two.
This is not going to be a walk in the park, the doctor said.
After I return, there are nights when I dream I’m back. In some dreams, the city is full, in others empty, but it seems not to matter—I awaken, breathless, my head thrashing from side to side, and I have to put a hand on the wall to steady myself, remember where I am. The plaster under my palm is different enough from the metal wall of a truck that it grounds me again, back in the world, and the sounds outside my window regain their mundane context.
It is a long ride to the city’s back edge, where a beacon circles lazily, the only bright light for miles that is neither steady and still or bearing a rapid pulse. There is a terminal there, a tower, a customs office. There are call signs and procedures. But it is still wild up above the runway in the late afternoon, where a small plane struggles to descend, gliding through misguided currents and disappearing in towers of dust for long seconds. It is still a wild mirage that appears, then dissipates, settles into the desert at week’s end.
I noted these moments as we arrived: A long-falling star above the highway, a white owl swooping up toward and then away from us in a silent arc, a dragonfly darting through camp the first morning.
Why do you go out there? people often ask, and I always forget to say it is as much for the small things as the large, for what can only be glimpsed out of the corner of one’s eye, for what is so fleeting it breaks your heart, but that leaves me grateful, lucky, thrilled to have been there as momentary witness.
The moonshadows crossed the desert floor in ragged strips of light and dark. Stars blinked above us as the clouds obscured and revealed them. We had no idea a storm approached, but the cloud-motion’s tempo was already increasing, the striations pulsing in smooth waves. In a city filled with immeasurable art, it was the most spectacular installation we’d seen so far.
The dreams begin again around this time every year: a bicycle ride through thick dust, a conversation with a strangely dressed man, lost belongings, missed opportunities. It is as if there are not ever enough hours once there, as if my mind scrabbles for extra time by creating that place out of sleep and starlight. I wake hungry for more, ready to finish packing, one eye on the clock, my heart already gone again.
None of us get to choose when happiness arrives. It is magic when two wide-open hearts find each other after wandering a desert. It cannot be charted, nor marked in ink on a calendar. We recognize that familiar spark in the other person, and then must be brave enough to grab hold with both hands, and prepare for the happiest of surprises.
We all approach the dust with plans, sometimes small, sometimes large, and then we learn what we wanted most of all is often right there: our wildest dreams, realized.
100 Proof 