Boomerang

Adobe walls, still warm from the desert heat, presented fall’s chill with an acquiescent compromise: it may lay claim to the morning, but the beating sun still held the day.

Condensation wicked down the sun-clouded casement windows as a great metallic monster heaved beneath the irredeemably dirty wooden floor. And with it, the smell of crisping dust drifted through the bedroom’s doorway. Joanna straddled the threshold, her ridged back facing me as I emphatically reminded her that the floor would not devour her—as it had refused the nights before. Still, she stared at the heater grate skeptically; the apartment had not been cold when we’d arrived mid-August; but now, as the occasional snow-glutted clouds cluttered the sky and wept voluptuous flakes, the aged beast clanged to life. And each sizzled pulse that rose from the floor reminded me that I was far from the life I’d carved out inside my ’77 Beaver motorcoach months, a lifetime, before.

New Mexico’s pull—a persistent siren call—came unexpectedly, quickly, and demanded to be heard, over six months after I’d left the desert’s beautiful austerity for greener, more humid surrounds in the Deep South. But there, in the middle of the Alabama woods—having faced the unceremonious obliteration of each of my relocation plan’s carefully crafted stratagems—I’d answered the job offer with a mixture of seasoned caution and anticipation.

“I accept.”

***

Two weeks after I hung up with my new boss, I’d barreled past New Mexico’s welcome sign and murmured into my packed back seat where JoJo sat—peering out her crate at the wide open blue sky.

“Well, Little Bean, let’s try this again.”

I pulled into an abandoned gas station, peed into a bottle, and emptied it across the parched earth. Stretching, I lathered hand sanitizer across my dry, reddened knuckles and reached in for the coffee thermos I’d filled when I left Alabama, and pulled a long swig.

My eyes were heavy after leaving my friend’s driveway in Oklahoma—the night’s sleep continuously interrupted by rivulets of sweat trickling into my eyes; the summer’s heat and the cloistered air within the car had commingled to evidence the pandemic’s stifling grasp, overtly arresting society and planting deep within our collective consciousness the paranoia of imminent decay, the necessity of distance.

I stared across the reddish brown undulations—hints of sandy, rocky hills.

Am I really back?

Hours later, Albuquerque sprawled ahead, and the conflicting emotions of excitement and loss coursed through my veins as I passed the exit I’d taken to my ex’s home countless times before. Instead, I pulled into a weathered extended stay by the interstate, sidestepped a meth deal being made on the staircase, and introduced JoJo to our temporary lodging.

Thoroughly unimpressed, JoJo nestled within her blankets and fell asleep. After splashing water on my face, I acknowledged a bloody thumbprint just below the bathroom light fixture; as tired as I was, its presence hastened me out the door in search of an apartment.

Days later, I opened JoJo’s crate and watched her pitter patter across the apartment’s chipped, black-and-white checkered kitchen floor, before settling atop my foam mattress topper in the bedroom. Nary a stick of furniture to be had, I boiled water on the stove and cradled the steaming mug of instant coffee as I sat in the front doorway—my bare feet splayed across the cracked concrete porch floor, my mask dangling from an ear.

Wind purred through the railing—carrying with it a lens of sand that settled across the uneven, pocked surface and tickled my heels. Exhausted, I let my eyes wander across the barren front yard and the cool concrete—until they rested on a clump of dried leaves harbored within a dusty porch corner. And as the wind chided those discarded skins to flutter upended, I felt the brittle fragments of past lives—the strange and curious people I’d been—alight, cradle me, and propel me to chart another course: reminding me that each song need not be a ballad, every note a love story, one performance a triumph, that smattering of paint across canvas a masterpiece.

Creation can simply break the silence, heave me out from a monotonous rut—onto a different path not etched it stone, but freely forming and porous. Like the sand beneath my feet.