100 Proof

You suggested once that your friends go with you to Black Rock City to help you incinerate what was left of us. When I found myself there, I wondered if you ever made it.

On a bare patch of wood at the Temple’s third level, I wrote a message to you, to me, to everything flourishing in our wake.

I was already home when the Temple burned, the ashes cauterizing the wound I carried too long. Miles away, I cried, bidding final farewell to the tumultuous heat, the embers that whispered my message before turning stone cold.

In my dream it all happened in reverse: One last kiss at the tent flap; muffled laughter hours before dawn; a self-imposed rule broken; on our backs underneath undulating lights, hands clasped; arms around me as the explosions finally got underway.

I took a picture of the street as I walked back to camp, the residents of our neighborhood trudging beneath the morning sun. I wanted to remember it that way, hazy and new. I wanted to remember it as the beginning of something, not the end.

We rounded the curve hugging the fissured land. A plume rose above the nascent city.

I handed her my camera. “Take a picture so I always remember my first view of it.”

As we left the highway, the plume tossed fistfuls of dust onto my windshield. I could already taste particulate between my teeth, could see it settle on the dashboard, even with the windows closed. It replaced any flavor of fear I carried, for finally, here was territory as weatherbeaten, as windswept, as open to possibility as my heart.

“I’m very used to doing what I should,” he said. “And that is why you should put on that dress and go back to your room.”

I took his face in my hands and kissed him again. I knew he was right. My skin burned.

“It’s a really great dress,” he said.

We kissed again at the doorway, my dress rearranged, my shoes dangling from my fingers. I walked across the courtyard, my heart so disheveled I would not sleep normally for days.

Disjointed sleep; strange dreams: Hands in dust, lost direction, messages that disappeared when I looked right at them, stories whispered so softly I forgot them as soon as they were heard, crossed signals.

I’ll take your picture, she said. I want you to see just how beautiful you actually are.

“Do you know how to cook?” he asked.

“Do I know how to cook?” I replied. “Oh, do I ever know how to cook.”

That was when the conversation ignited. Blistered and charred peppers, macaroni and cheese, cowboy breakfasts and sole meuniere.

He described the ultimate hamburger. “That’s almost dirty,” I said. I stopped facing forward and turned toward him.

“We don’t eat anything artificial in our house,” he said.

“Of course not,” I replied, already contemplating what I would make for him if given the opportunity.

There was a moment of slipping, a comfortable sliding into the familiar dysfunction of the land of red flags and disaster.

The signs all pointed the wrong way. I recognized each one of them. But with a walled-off heart? Perhaps I could, just once, navigate this route.