The bass drew me in, clicking fast to the treble of my heart like a magnet. “Can we please go?” I begged my friends. “It’s so much better over there!”
Over there, the bass took hold of our ankles, our knees, our stomachs, our shoulders, our heads. It compelled as the moon set over the dance floor. The DJ shot fire over our heads. We raised hands in communion.
I put a hand to my chest, almost certain my heartbeat matched that rhythm. Where the music went, I could not help but follow.
I had deemed it the all-nighter. We left the camp with water, drinks, snacks and jackets, in for the long haul, taking the turn toward the Playa on our bikes, sizzling with pent-up energy.
“It’s on,” I shouted over my shoulder. “I am a machine!”
“Machine!” echoed a guy riding in front of me, just before he disappeared into the crowds parting before us.
“I don’t understand why they named the C street Chaos,” she said, eying the sign three streets into Black Rock City. “How is Chaos part of Evolution?”
We looked at each other just long enough for it to sink in.
“Oh,” she said. “Oh, wow.”
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.
There was no particular reason for the phone call, nothing to be read into the connection. Words, converted to signal, blinked along fiber optic lines like fireflies. Cool, green words, some fast, some slow, some three syllables, some two. There was no time to decode what really came between hello and goodbye.
100 Proof 