Denudation (Worn Away)

Gravel ground against itself as I took one step after another. Although I could barely make it out in the midnight darkness, I knew that the black asphalt stretched out in front of me like a calloused noir arm reaching into infinity.

The night breeze was nearly frigid, a stark contrast to the burning sun of midday. As soon as the sun set I slipped on my jacket. It's fabric slid against my sunburnt skin and sent a burning pain radiating across my arms and neck. I became keenly aware of my body at that moment. The way the fabric of my shirt moved against my skin, the way my feet ached so bad that the hurt travelled all the way to my upper thighs. My feet slid around in the vast house of my shoes, leaving bleeding callouses on my heels. My once soft curls fluttered with each whisper of wind.

My hands were in knots, shoved deep into my jacket's pockets. I listened intently for the sound of a car engine, for the promise of human life, but heard only deafening silence. If there was one thing I couldn't stand, it was being alone. And silence. Silence was a close second.

There aren't many sounds in the desert. So I decided to add my own soundtrack. It took a good twenty steps for me to analyze which songs I sounded best singing. My voice was an oddity. I wanted it to be powerful and commanding. My words were, but my voice wasn't. It was the perfect pitch for tuning out. I was used to being talked over or not heard at all. Growing up it wasn't easy to find singers whose voices melded with mine.

I only harmonized with Oh Wonder, Lights, Cher and Avril Lavigne...go figure. So I chose Lights and started singing Saviour. It seemed an appropriate enough song for the situation.

"Sooner than later, I need a savior," I sang to the cactuses. But they remained stolid and unaffected. There was no prickly applause as I glided over the well worn words or reached the final verse. And as soon as my throat stopped vibrating I felt once again engulfed by the dark void of silence.

Briefly I considered singing another song, but I was exhausted and out of breath. I looked around for somewhere to call home for the night, but I was surrounded only by rocks and unspecified critters.

I considered leaving the roadside, but couldn't bring myself to do it. This was not Rango and I knew that if I ventured into the Nevada dessert, I wouldn't be venturing back out. So I plopped down a foot from the road with a thud, every muscle and bone in my body aching. My eyes were as dry as the tepid atmosphere, they burned with every blink and blurred when I yawned. Scorpions be damned, I laid down on my stomach with my arms under me to keep myself warm.

I felt the burdensome square of my useless iPhone digging into my thigh and wished that there were charging stations in the middle of nowhere. My only hope at this point was that I wouldn't end up dead like my phone. I gulped out of fear, but my throat only stuck to itself it was so dry, and my lips were cracking as fast as my resolve.

I tried to fall asleep. And after thirty minutes, I succeeded.

One moment I was laying with my face against the unforgiving ground, finally free from reality, tossed into another dark void of space, of dreams. And the next moment I was in a vortex, unsure if this was reality or sleep. Dust rose from the ground and hung in the air in an ethereally blinding white light. Was I dead? No, if I was dead it wouldn't be so hard to breathe, my hair wouldn't be wildly whipping around my face, it wouldn't sound like the sky was being sliced and torn open with knives.

For a moment, as I wondered what hovered above me, I considered which would be scarier, being abducted by aliens, or by the government.