The dial tone gets louder and louder; the ring gets longer. Sometimes those hard phone calls are the ones that stretch out in front of you forever. The words you just can’t say.
“I’m going home,” I think. But then, my brain knows better. I am going to the place that I was born. I am geographically returning to someplace that I have been. But my home is somewhere much deeper in the desert. Or maybe it’s simply the groove that has been worn into the front seat of my car. It could be the shower in the Noble while I watch bubbles of electric colored shampoo pool against a drain that isn’t working. Home is the place that I stop looking behind me and let my head relax against whatever is nearest.
I haven’t felt that pulling feeling in a while. Going against the grain, a hand brushed to the concrete, the abrasion of breathing too deeply in the cold morning air. But sometimes it likes to creep in. I no longer think of it as unfamiliar, even if we haven’t knocked heads in a while. I wonder if this is what he means when he says, “You have a spark”.
“Whatever happens,” he says. “You have that spark. You’ll be amazing. It’s going to be amazing”.
Behind us is the grocery store. I love roaming the worn wooden isles of this place, having just discovered this doorway, right off of Main Street. When I travel I look for bookstores, small grocery stores, gear shops. I look for gas stations close to the highway. I look for the mental explosion of a place that haunts you in your dreams.
Moab, UT is really good.
