Desert Flight

The desert makes you wanna do stuff, doesn’t it?

There are endless distances, that invite you to race across in a dune buggy, or a sailboard, or on wings you made yourself from found feathers and glue.

And suddenly, yes, you are flying. Feeling wind low off the sand, scrubby brush racing by like reflectors on the late night barren highway, when you raced decrepit muscle cars, held together with wire and rusty bolts, but chromed and painted like monsters of the night - money better spent on superchargers and detailing, than spark plugs and filters. Then, when it still seemed like everything was at your feet, when the scream of tires made it all feel right. When the girl giggling and screaming next to you made you feel more powerful than a boy ever could. And that road, and those flashing reflectors made the world slip away into nothing but a fantastical ride into the future, a warp of time and space and reality and the laws of physics, as you contemplated whether that supercharger could carry you forward to the speed of light, and then out into the universe to chase the dreams of astronomers and wizards and poets.

And the air under those decrepit wings pushes you higher, up over low dunes and dwarfish twisted trees, replacing the sense of speed with buoyancy and floating, decelerating the world to slow motion, dragging out time below and around you, until it is hard to measure whether it passes at all, whether we are moving at all. The land below, the sand crystals, seem artificial, arrange themselves in surreal patterns that cannot be real, that seem to be telling stories. Glorious colorful canvases swirled with hallucinogenic circles and stars and arcs of light. And floating amongst these abstractions, dioramas of my life, past and future, real and imagined, lived and fantasized, played out like Disneyesque diarrhea with artificial colors and strangely cartoon-like representations of all those from my life.

Flying flying flying. Burning from the heat of the sun. Gliding over mountaintops. Careening into space.

Here I finally feel the stars. Finally know what it is like to float through space and touch the clouds of the galaxy. Here, I finally am free of all the confines of my head and this bastard world.

My wings melt away and I fall like a broken bird.