In The Desert You Can Remember Your Name.

I want to go to the desert. I'm thirsty for it's heat and dryness, for it's vast expanses of emptiness. I'm not sure when I started thinking about it. It's been a few years, at least, and I haven't been able to get it out of my head ever since. I want to drive a car down the two lane roads and camp out under the stars at night. I want to see how far out I can walk before I feel the need to turn back, the way I swim out in the ocean. I want to make sounds that nobody else can hear.

I've said before that I'm a nostalgic person. I hold on to memories for fear that important things will go forgotten; worried that all my reasons will eventually disintegrate and all I'll be left with is behaviors. If at least one person remembers, then this hasn't all been for nothing. This isn't a recent development, or something that came about due to a pubescent longing for my childhood. I have always been this way. Collecting artifacts and moments as though in preparation for the excavations to come, someday when this is all underground. Things my sisters would cast off would be recovered by my eager fingers to be hidden away in secret corners. A miniature harmonica. A broken candle. The old notes between them and their friends passed in class and during lunch. I moved to this city in honor of all the other people who came here seeking something. I came for the gravitational pull that history has; a pull that could root me down. I came in search of all the years that have seen life spring up across the seven peaks of San Francisco. I came to remember. To be in amongst it. To lie at the intersection of hundreds of thousands of criss-crossing lives, criss-crossing breaths. To sit on the train and wonder where their children were, what they looked like when they were young, how long ago did they come here, what were they looking for. I go to second hand shops in search of the artifacts left behind, the ones that have lost their significance. They find it again with me. I remember. A vase that sat on a table. Silver that was polished once, and coveted by a child forbidden to touch it. A doll. I remember.

It's a heavy burden to be a scribe when your paper is your skin and your bones, when lead-laced ink seeps into your veins. And so I crave the desert. Where the traces of 'was' are carved into the rock, where the wind and water have written 'I was here'. I feel a kindred spirit in an empty landscape waiting to be filled, and tattooed by the elements it can't control. I don't know what I want there. Maybe to give it back. Lay down and let the earth take it, all the things that bleed from my skin. All the things that were never mine. A miniature harmonica. A broken candle. A note passed in secret.

-LG