I’m not someone who naps, normally, but this afternoon I fell asleep in my clothes atop the duvet. The sun slanted bright through the windows; the bed felt like a cloud. Our dog hopped up and curled behind the crook of my legs, too. The dryer hummed as it tossed a week’s worth of desert laundry in fresh heat. I sank into it all and out of the world.
I was bone tired.
For the last seven days, I haven’t been home. I slept and woke and slept and woke on the ground in the desert of southern Arizona, where the noons are hot and the evenings are frosty and each night my hips angled awkwardly into the unforgiving flatness of the earth. My sleeping bag swaddled me in a cocoon of my own dried sweat and dirt, keeping my body warm as the air chilled outside my tent—warm, but not comfortable.
Still, the week spent working with No More Deaths was glorious. It was rugged and heavy and hard. I was with about a dozen others, though I won’t violate their privacy by describing them. I’ll just say that I think we’ve all been marked by our collective experience, at least briefly. We’re tattooed by crisp red lines where forests of catclaw and cholla drew their thorns over our forearms. We’re a little sunburnt, a little back-sore, a little foot-blistered beneath our boots. We’re all weary this weekend, I think—or maybe not. Maybe some of the others were more accustomed to hours of hiking in the desert than I was.
That’s okay. We all survived, and I made it home to catch up on softer sleep. In the days ahead I plan to write more about the experience, but for now I’ll just post a few photos of last Saturday’s drive down from Albuquerque, New Mexico, to Tucson, Arizona. Then I’ll go empty that still-hot laundry from the dryer and see if I can fold it on the bed without nestling into it and dozing off again.
