He makes love to her wondering if it will be the last time. He walks out afterward, but not in a cruel way. He’d held her, run his fingers through her dark hair, massaged her scalp with his fingertips, looked into her brown eyes and told her he loved her. He leaves knowing he had told her the truth.

            He drives away trying not to think about her tears or her confusion as to why. He was terrible at trying to explain why; to her, to his parents. All he knows for sure is that something inside—his heart, or conscience, or spirit, or whatever the fuck, is pulling him away from everything familiar. He has to leave. No forwarding address, no plan, no idea where he’s going. He also had no answer when he was asked when they would hear from him again.

            The pull started a few months prior, when he began obsessing about the bleak condition of the world—the affair his pastor admitted to, the tax evasion by his favorite uncle, his younger cousin’s stage-four cancer, the never-ending war, the government corruption, the suspicion, disrespect, or pure hatred between one side and another, one gender and another, one race and another, one goddamn astrological sign and another.

           The swirl has become dizzying. He must go.  

           He knows it doesn’t make sense. The world is permeated with hostility and adversity so what good will it do to head into it in an effort to get away from it? He decides not to think so much and concentrate instead on driving until his instincts tell him to turn here or there. He trusts that whatever’s guiding him, will lead him to some sort of understanding of himself, the world, or nothing at all.

           A “Welcome to Arizona” sign greets him just before sunset. He pays a camping fee at a state park and once inside, drives around until he feels it’s time to stop.

           He sets up his tent, then heads for an escarpment. A muddy pawprint on gray stone catches his attention. He kneels down and places his hand on it. “I acknowledge your existence,” he feels compelled to say, knowing it will be washed away with the next rain.

           He climbs onto a flat-topped boulder and stares up at the deep blue sky streaked with lavender and apricot and primrose. It’s so close, he reaches up to touch it. But like time, or sound, or God, he has no choice but to settle for the belief that it exists.

           He brings his gaze to the canyon below—orange, pink, yellow, and red. Dirt, rocks, boulders, and cliffs. There’s no room in this boundless place for anything but sanctity. It’s everywhere. He has the oddest urge to make love to what he can’t: the profound beauty. He takes a deep breath instead, bringing that which he can’t enter, into him. Become One with Life. For Better, For Worse. The words form in his mind without forethought.

           He notices a single wildflower with a long, thin stem growing out of a pit in the boulder. It’s within his reach. He resists the urge to pick it, and instead opens his water bottle and pours a little on its base. The center is yellow surrounded by red, the petals a pinkish-red with yellow tips. He knows its seed probably laid dormant until the exact melding of conditions allowed it to develop into a burst of colors that match the surroundings so well, it seems to say, I belong here. “Yes, Indian Blanket, you do belong. You certainly thrive in the most desolate of places.”

           He picks up a stone and tosses it over the ledge. It does not fall silently. It too, wants to make sure he knows it’s a part of this place. He listens to its dull thump and sharp thwap as it tumbles below.

           “YOU ARE HERE!” he yells out.

           “YOU ARE HERE!” the rocks and flora of the canyon yell back.

           He rests his forearm across his knee and strips a piece of wheatgrass as he stares out over the land. He thinks of her. He thinks about his parents. He thinks about everything he promised himself he wouldn’t. But his love is too strong. It dawns on him that love is like beauty or nature. It can’t be contained so why try? Love continues to exist whether we’re together or not, whether we want it to or not.

           He awakens in darkness. Two animals, racoons or foxes or coyotes, something with vicious, throaty snarls and screams are going at it. Either mating or trying to kill one another. He is amused at not being able to tell the difference. He thinks about how the act of making love can be as violent as a murder, with the repeated stabbing of the penis into the vagina, claws tearing into the back’s flesh, screams of pleasure and ecstasy that can just as easily be pain and fear. He falls back to sleep beginning to grasp how fluidly, how effortlessly, dark and light coexist.

           In the mauve morning light, he wakes up from a dream where his spirit guide told him he had a choice to see the world through the eyes of a psychologist, or the eyes of a child. Analyze, or just accept.

           He unzips his tent and steps out into the coolness of the morning wearing a pair of baggy khaki’s rolled up at the ankles and no shirt. His bare soles kick up dirt as he dances in a circle. He then stretches out his arms wide and faces the sky with closed eyes and twirls.

           “I AM HERE!” he yells out to the trees, the rocks, the flowers, the animals, the sky.

           “Yes. We are,” they whisper back.    

– Raquel Levitt