further down

Where I am, there’s little opportunity to check in, and my on-line journalling has suffered because of it.  These moleskin notebooks, though – I’ve been filling them up.  It’s not quite the same, however, having no-one to read them.  I complete the last page of one, toss it on the stack of others, and start a new one.  It all seems rather impotent.  Though, should something happen to me, I guess it’s a nice thought that I’ll have left something behind.

Eight hundred kilometres away from any sort of major centre, I’ve been instructed to wait.  I do.  Wait and watch, they said.  And I have been.  Beginning to feel like I’ve hit the pause button on life, it’s as though I’m on standby.  And I am, I suppose.  I await further instruction.  They’ll call someday.  In the meantime, I count the days to the next airdrop.  More food, more water, more moleskin notebooks, more pens.  Contact.

I can’t say much more than I have, but I can tell you a bit about the sand.  It’s everywhere.  It’s there, as I push my bare feet further down into it.  It’s always between my toes.  I recline a little, pushing the palms of my hands back further behind me, fingers outstretched, digging them deep down into hot sand.  I push them further down until I find the cool layer beneath.  It reminds me of growing up on the beach in Santa Monica.  Remember that?  I’m only missing a red plastic pail and your little hand to hold.

The sky here is a different shade of blue than back home.  I can’t explain how or why, but it is slightly different.  Almost imperceptible.  The sky, it’s so clear, bright, and blue that I can barely stand to look at it without squinting most of it away.  My eyes water a lot.  I can sit like this beneath the blazing hot sun for a short time, an ocean of sand all around me, but I eventually have to move to shade.  I retire to my khaki canvas shelter for the rest of the afternoon and write.

Yesterday afternoon, I thought I saw someone coming over a dune in the distance.  It was a motorcycle, I thought, but when it disappeared over a ridge, it never came up again.  Afterwards, I walked in that direction for about a kilometre.  I found nothing.  Thinking about it today, I feel like I probably imagined it.  It’s not unusual for gusts of wind to kick up small clouds of debris now and then.

I can say I miss home.  I prefer to be in the city, surrounded by concrete and glass.  But, here I wait.  Limit your contact, they instructed.  And I do.  Curb your signals, they told me.  And I will.  You’re a ghost, they said.  And they’re right.