With love

The long goodbye

Today’s accompanying tune: “Wildflowers” by Tom Petty

We’re just about there. The boxes have been packed and neatly stacked in the garage, awaiting the movers. Clothes are stuffed in suitcases and the dogs’ supplies are in their respective duffel bags. We’re eating on paper plates with biodegradable cutlery. The pantry is bare, the freezer as empty as it was the day we moved in. Our time as stewards of this home, this small plot of land with Joshua trees and mourning doves and ground squirrels, is nearly up.

I packed my first box in January knowing the stress of a visually accumulating to-do list was not one I could manage. Thankfully, my overpreparedness has left us a free weekend, one spent in the sun and wind among the Little San Bernardino Mountains instead of immersed in mountains of cardboard and packing paper. One last hurrah, if you will.

We allowed ourselves no such luxuries when we moved out of San Francisco, though we had much less stuff and fewer options for entertainment, given that many of our favorite bars and restaurants were still shuttered due to the pandemic. We snuck out here and there for a hike, a walk, a beer on a hastily erected patio under the dense blanket of fog while we shivered but enjoyed it immensely. We didn’t so much celebrate our departure, our home, as sneak out in the dead of night, hoping no one would stop us and force us back into the apartment we could no longer make eye contact with. The city wasn’t recognizable, and hadn’t been for nearly a year. The place we were leaving felt as far from the place we loved, the place we knew, as it could possibly be. Our sentimentality kneecapped by months of loss, of grief, of deteriorating mental health, and a realization that we were slowly losing grip on the life we had had before, the one with early-morning gym classes and officemates and favorite lunchtime spots. We’d left that life before we left the place, the two disconnected long before we even thought about hitting the road. As I swung onto the I-5 heading south, I felt relief more than anything else. We’d survived the worst as best we could, and now the desert awaited.

Now, I feel like I’ve been saying goodbye to the desert for weeks. Circling our favorite haunts natural and non, ordering more food than we could possibly eat and eyeing hikes we never had the courage to complete. Intensely inspecting every Joshua tree bloom and willing the flowers to emerge, even just a bit, before we depart. Declaring forcefully, this is my favorite tree. This is my favorite rock, my favorite climb. My favorite sunset spot, my favorite meal. When commitment so eluded us before, so enamored we were with it all, it now announced itself willingly. We want a claim to this place, however ephemeral, as much as anyone. I dare not sneak out in the dead of night without telling the tree in the backcountry that it is, by far, my favorite Joshua tree of them all. I want the doves to know I will think of them every spring, even if I’m not there to watch this year’s flock grow. I was there, I want to shout. I was there, and it mattered. I loved it, I really did. I want to lie in the slightly damp dirt, absorbing its smell, bottle it, keep it as a reminder of the preciousness of such an oft-forgotten resource. I want the Milky Way to swallow me whole, to hold me suspended in time and space above this patch of earth. One last time.

This time, we are leaving both the life and the place, the two forever melded in a way that will never come undone. This place gave me life, restored it and shaped it in its own image. Though it felt like home long before we acquired a mailing address, it solidified its storied place in our lives, the one we created because the desert let us. The people we’ve met and the people we’ve become. The solitude and the community, the heat and the cold, the dichotomies of the life the desert nurtures. One of extremes, they say, but also one of nuances, of increments, of shades of beige. As I look out east, over Goat Mountain and on through to the peaks of the Cleghorn Lakes and Sheephole Valley Wilderness areas, as the sky melts into a gradient of blue into yellow into white, I’m nearly speechless. This place has become so much more than a life. It is everything, a universe unto itself. And for a few extremely special years, I was lucky enough to be a part of it.

I will be back, no doubt, because the desert has a way of entrancing even its most formidable opponents, to say nothing of its exes who left on good terms. It won’t be this time, this place, not exactly. The world continues on even in our absence, it grows and breathes and becomes its own entity. I hope it will welcome me back, happy to see my return and the glow of a new adventure upon my face. To hear of my stories as eagerly as I absorb its, catching up on the small moments in between that make a life something worth writing about. I hope it will envelope me in its warmth, its bone-dry air sucking the moisture from deep within my skin. An offering I am happy to make to remain on good terms. Because without this place, without this time, I wouldn’t have this life. And without that, well, there wouldn’t be me.

Goodbye, Mojave Desert. I love you with everything I have, everything I am. Until we meet again.

- Megan