For a week you do not breathe, only race head first into a thousand deadlines awaiting your attention, a thousand deadlines who do not care that you are a thousand miles into the desert. The dogs walk you in the mornings, but then you are locked away in the sweltering trailer, spending data minutes like it didn't cost more than a long distance call in the nineties.
But then the week ends, impossibly disappearing behind you like it was only ever a trick of the lights. A full moon rises over the mountains in the east as a fire sets behind the mountains in the west. The desert is quiet but for a few late night birds making their way home and a flag waving in the last of the sunset wind. You begin to breathe, begin to think about why you came here.
It was not to outrun deadlines, after all.
It was to greet the desert like a confidant, to whisper secrets into the startrail, to rediscover the madness that brought you all the way across the American land after all. When Jack was your age he only had a few more years to live, so you may as well live yours now, not try to save anything for winter. When you were your age, you put what you owned into the back of an old station wagon and drove it clear across the land and you think maybe, maybe this is all there is to life and it's not a bad way to go. The road feels like home, and haven't you been looking for it for so long?
Just because you found the pearl,
doesn't mean you get out the water.
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