I can't control a single fucking thing.

March 2020 came with the arrival of the state of emergency that was COVID careening into the US. I was alone in Tucson, a few months out of a breakup. By the middle of the month, we were back together, terrified of living alone and terrified of dying alone— our couple status singularly influenced by the unknowing that comes with deep disaster. So many people spent the pandemic alone, but also let us not forget those of us who dove back into situations that were doomed so that we didn’t have to be with ourselves. We could not stand the thought of our lungs filling with fluid. We could not stand the thought of a fever that spiked so high that it left our brains as sponges in the microwave. There were so many things to be afraid of in 2020. We forgot to be afraid of getting back into the relationship that obviously wouldn’t work.

In the relationship that obviously wouldn’t work, no one was bad. We were simply not a right fit. We decided this in December 2019, in a truly spectacular fashion that decimated the spirit for us both. When March 2020 hit, we gave it one more six week try. By May, we were broken up again. Of course! How could it have been any other way?

That final breakup was different. It was for real and it was forever and I hated myself because of it. I hated that I couldn’t be somehow better, I hated that I couldn’t be more of what she wanted. I hated her! I hated her so much for proving that I would never be loved. I hated her for the hurt she caused me and I hated that this final abandonment left me so drastically gapingly alone.

Love is so close to hate. I look back now and see that the ire I was feeling was not rooted in reality. I did not hate myself. I did not hate her. I hated the loss of what I had known. I hated the loss of the structure of the thing that put me as one in a part of a unit. I hated that I did not know who I was when I was not a part of a duo.

We’d moved to Tucson, Arizona together. I had a couple of friends in Tucson, but no one very close. People were mandated inside for seven days, ten days, fourteen days, twenty one days. We were told we were flattening the curve. The people near me hung around with their childhood best friends, their partners, their biological families. I did not have a childhood best friend, a partner, a biological family. I had dust motes floating through the sky at 3:00 PM. I had laying on the floor of my trailer in a sun spot until I got an isosceles triangle sunburn across my belly. I had humming to produce a thrum in my chest to remind me that I was alive. I had the act of not eating enough, the act of crying, the act of skinning my knees because I fell face first while running on sun bleached sand.

My greatest friend in Tucson was the land. The desert trails I ran at dawn with the flowering saguaro and the jack rabbits and the coyote and the cholla and the prickly pear. The me on Earth, the one that was born in 1984 somewhere in the middle of California, didn’t really know anything about Tucson, Arizona. The me on the astral plane, though, had an intimate and devoted relationship with the Sonoran Desert. Every time I listened, the land had something to say to me about what it was that I had to do. I Had to be there for awhile, a little longer than was comfortable. I Had to run, until the browns and reds and yellows and greens of the flora melted together and blurred. I Had to walk slowly with my eyes closed, to see what the heat smelled like. I Had to stay and stay and stay and stay. I’d been doing so for many lifetimes before. And then I Had to leave.

I knew I had to leave in June. In June, the average daily temperature hovered around 100 degrees by ten AM. When I closed my eyes to listen to the land all I heard was HEAT. When I opened my eyes, pointed my nose toward the barrel cactus and stared hard, all I heard was HOT. The temperature never went below 80, even in the thickest part of the night. I woke up earlier and earlier to run and to listen to the land until there was no amount of early that let me in to what it was that the land had to say. I began to see that I was constitutionally somewhat fragile, at least this lifetime. I didn’t have what it took to be out in the desert past the last days of May. My beloved land told me so when it stopped saying anything at all. GO the geodes screamed, GO the cactus wren warbled. Get out for a little bit of time. You can come back later if you want.