Fiction

She is like the desert. Hauntingly beautiful with long stretches of an inhospitable sameness. She is water but it is best to bring your own. She has left me now to wander through sand and shale. Or perhaps I left her, slipping away under the cover of a monsoon storm. Red sky and thunder and fat drops of dusty rain. For a moment there are rivers carving a little deeper into the earth but pretty much the same for a long time.

The desert is a poor host and does not know how to treat the waters. Past the point of feeling spurned. Her dark eyes flash darkly than pass over me just as quickly back to the horizon. She loved me once. Her instincts know how to hurt me best by not seeing me at all. Not to be ignored. To ignore someone properly requires a great deal of attention. Time, the memory has been relegated to that sameness where she puts everything else.

My eyes now, which looked upon her with love and with love met, are grains of sand shifting against grains of sand. The water we shared baked into the clay. The crumbling tessellations formed by cracks could hardly hold a footprint.

Her instincts are right. I can't remember how long I've been here. Trying to find the last reflection of the way I was when I still loved her, and seeing nothing. Staring back when I look into the shrinking puddles. There is only the reflection of the sky with its wisp of cloud, and the gnarled trees, and the sand, and there is no place left for me.

So I'll go. I'll show her. I'll forget her too. If I cannot defeat a desert I will make my own. She in hers and me in mine, the forgotten and the forgetting. Perhaps all deserts start this way.