The Desert Ahead

They told us on a Tuesday, or what I’d been calling a Tuesday on my wall, that the crossing was coming. Soon. The desert next. And I stood in the doorway that evening while the light went down over the scrub, and I looked north at the dark coming up out of the ground, and I felt something I hadn’t felt since Managua, since before the door at Mateo’s house. I felt my own attention point.

The whole long middle of the road I’d been a thing moved. Acted on. A line item carried forward by hands that weren’t mine, through places that happened to me. The desert was the first thing in months I understood I’d have to cross with my own body, my own legs, my own water in my own hand. It was going to ask something of me directly, the way the machine never had. The machine only ever asked me to endure. The desert was going to ask me to walk, and want it, and not stop, or it would kill me where I fell and the clerks would correct the entry.

And the cold part of me, the banked-fire part, looked at that, and it didn’t flinch. It leaned in. Because here, finally, was a thing I could meet. You can’t fight a clipboard. Can’t win against a debt built to grow. Can’t burn a relay of hands. But a desert’s a real thing, with real rules, heat and distance and water and dark, and real things can be beaten by being smarter and harder than they are, and being smarter and harder than the thing in front of me was the one game I’d never lost. The road had spent months teaching me I was helpless. The desert, before it even started, handed me back the one thing the road had taken: a problem I could actually solve with my own two hands.

I didn’t have a plan yet. I want to be careful and not make myself into somebody I wasn’t. I didn’t stand in that doorway plotting an escape, because I’d learned the hard way that escape wasn’t on offer and plotting it only got girls hurt. What pointed, that evening, was simpler and more dangerous than a plan. It was intent. The banked rage that had been waiting at a pilot light with nowhere to go, here it found a direction. Not a target. A direction. North. Through the dark. To whatever was on the other side, which I couldn’t picture, and which I’d stopped expecting to be good, but which would at least be different, and different was the first thing I’d been able to want in a long, long time.

My body was scared. I want that on the page too, because the body’s honest in a way the cold part isn’t. The body knew the desert kills people, that the dark out there had bones in it, that the water jug by the door wasn’t enough and never is, and it sent the fear up my spine in a cold wash even while the cold part of me leaned toward the dark wanting it. The two of us, me and my faithful scared flesh, stood in that doorway disagreeing, the way we’d been disagreeing since Carlos, and for once the disagreement almost felt like company. At least the fear was a real feeling about a real thing. At least out there, in the desert, whatever came for me would come for me, and not file me.

I slept that night, or the survivor in me did, the deep flat sleep of a thing saving itself for the work ahead. And somewhere out past that doorway, though I had no way to know it, the dark I was leaning toward already had something in it that was waiting for me, that would meet me at the end of the crossing and take everything the desert left, and hand me, in trade, the one power the road and the machine and Carlos had all, without meaning to, spent months teaching me how to use.

But that’s the next Notes. This one’s just a girl in a doorway, seventeen, scared in the body and pointed in the will, looking at the dark ahead and, for the first time since her parents died, wanting to get to the other side of something.