Love Takes Miles

Some 5 or 6 years ago, when I was not yet of age, my best friend Lorne asked me if I believed in second chances — not joking, deadly serious. Lorne was not the deadly serious type, you know, I’d witnessed his attempts at low-grade arson in the bottom of a pit in the landfill of rusted Impalas positioned like Grecian Art. His parents called it a backyard. Vinyl tops sun-shrunk into geodesic acne, oil pans dribbling a Rorschach that looks—if you squint—like the state of Utah giving God the finger. Little comedic experiments with WD-40 flambeau and an aerosol can duct-taped to a spark plug can go wrong all too fast, I learned.

I told Lorne that — yes — of course they are real, with significant caveats, the first being the world could never really return to the way it was before. A total overhaul was not likely. An act or event issuing a complete redemption was never really possible, not in accompaniment with a materialist view of the physical world. You can patch a hole, but it is only ever a patched hole. We ought maybe to be skeptical of any second chances offered, mindlessly, I’d said, “they could be a trick.” (It would be best to question the nature of such transactions. There is no such thing as a free lunch or whatever people say these days about the contestations of freedoms in an unforgiving world.)

Yes, he quite understood these things, he told me, and yet he couldn’t find any reason to believe the second chance he’d been offered had been anything but sincere. Yet he still found himself questioning the nature of that word: sincerity. It reminded him of his older brother, who was incapable of anything but sincerity, a disability of fluency in the modern tongue. I’d confess to not really understanding it myself either. Sincerity. It felt like treachery when offered. But anyway, he wasn’t sure it was right to call it an offering at all. Not when it lacked clear intent.

And I’ll tell you I’d wanted to be the good friend, the one you seek out like an eye in the storm. But I’d thought truth and care were two things mutually exclusive, and I was known as something honest, not careful, and not for the sake of sincerity. So, something like a keen observer — knowing where the hungry birds go to nest, and instead of feeding them, scares them out of their hiding place to shoot them dead.

This is not a good thing to be known for.

“Is another girl making you want to kill yourself?”

His head hit the back of the headrest. The lanky body slumped in its natural state of refusal to say the honest thing. Then he laughed. He thought the job would’ve been done with 5 tablets of Xanax. He swallowed them with warm Mello Yello, then lay back on the cracked dash of his Civic. He said he had felt life like a wet fire sweating out of his body, and he saw a void—a real shape—he swore it. Swore it was like the rear-mirror pentagonal wormholes we jumped into on DMT. But this one was an actual vortex swallowing him. Then he woke up, and now he was here, and he didn’t know how or why.

“Shit, dude. That’s fucking insane. That’s like Quantum Immortality or something.”

5 or 6 years later, I’m on the other side of the highway from the Bonneville Speedway, and I couldn’t tell you where Lorne ended up. Once you pass Bonneville on I-80 West, you have to drive miles and miles out before you can turn around. I tried to circle back, ended up here, and now I’m here thinking about years no one remembers anymore.

(Like, does anyone remember Optical Illusion compilations on Youtube? Those used to be my favorite things.)

Driving out here is like billboard, billboard, blank, billboard, a Morse code blinking out westbound until it’s only frontage road. It is November, something, 2025, and I am at least 15 miles out from Wendover on the opposite side of the highway from the Bonneville Speedway. Years ago, I took a girl there and she thought it so romantic how we lay under the stars at 5am at night, completely alone. She said the cratered alkali looked like the moon if the moon had acne and a meth habit. This subtractive plane, zero-degree of the socius. When it rains here, the ground can’t take any of it in; it just floods and fills up fast. (There is not much rain here, though, ground’s dry as a bone.) Intensities flatline and ablate until they spill into the exfoliated material of an extrinsic alien grid and cement into an impermeable calcite layer, an ecological zero-point monstrosity of nature and man.

I’m writing this on paper CD covers because I needed to get it off the brain. This is going to be written inevitably, so I may as well do it now. I’ll title it the name of a popular song, a Gen Z stylistic melodramatic essay. Something about honesty, or sincerity, or love.

What was the difference again?

I feel my phone vibrate on the empty seat next to me.

REDACTED: Hey

REDACTED: I need to talk to you.

REDACTED: I’m going to REDACTED in 2 months.

REDACTED: I want to know that you’re okay.

Funny how the past is always there, whether it’s welcome or not.

REDACTED: Things have really gone to shit lately.

REDACTED: I need to know that you’re okay.

REDACTED: Don’t say anything and I’ll know you’re okay lol

REDACTED: She’s okay!

REDACTED: 🥳🥳🥳

REDACTED: I’m going to China in two months for a year.

REDACTED: This will be very easy and good.

REDACTED: I’m still your friend whether you need it or not.

Inexplicably, my hands are shaking. The paper CD cover that was in my other hand, not holding the phone, is now crumpled, and that hand is now a fist. It twitches. I can’t feel it. My mouth opens and closes like a zero and one, and I couldn’t tell you how. It just happens. The messages keep coming through like wah-wah-wah oatmeal spiraling in on itself.

REDACTED: Okay I feel fine now

REDACTED: Moment of weakness my b

REDACTED: I appreciate you for tolerating this

There we go. Now I feel something that’s definitely not nothing, though I’m not sure exactly what it is but my fingers are moving faster then I can say what the feeling is and—

ME: You are pathetic lol

Okay, that’s a feeling.

REDACTED: Maybe

REDACTED: Are you angry

Let me confirm with myself, are you so fucking serious right now?

ME: Yes.

REDACTED: Why

I loved you, I loved you, you dumb motherf–

ME: Because you don’t respect me.

Okay. Yes. Respect, you have a right to that. Love, you can’t be angry at love—that’s a violent thing out of your control. But respect is tolerable. Everyone deserves respect.

REDACTED: How can you say I didn’t respect you.

REDACTED: Tell me how I didn’t show you that.

ME: Why do you keep doing this? I’ve told you I don’t want to hear fom you.

REDACTED: I’m sorry.

REDACTED: I guess I’m hoping you’ll change your mind.

REDACTED: Love as letting go doesn’t exist to me.

I blow a puff of air out of my mouth. A scoff of disbelief (maybe?). I can’t tell how I’m feeling right now.

There was an ocean here years and years ago, and you should know, I want to believe the world keeps an order, things die, things change. Even as an ocean once stood here, its ending made a desert. People say deserts can’t die. But I’ve watched the sand forget itself year by year. The moon-like craters don’t recognize (or misremember) my shoe soles. Wrong tread, wrong year, signature smudged by gravity and time. The water fills up here slower now, or it rains less, or both. I can see that girl’s face and remember the outline of her smile in the dead of night, but I don’t remember a damn word she said. She texted me a picture of her baby’s ultrasound a couple of months ago and I double-tapped, closed the app, opened another, forgot.

Some 40 miles east of where I’m parked right now, a tire exploded in the middle of the desert, and I almost died in the passenger seat of a dudes car. We skated some yards, came to rest facing east. He texted me a few months back. I told him I thought he had died because I couldn’t find anyone under his name on the Internet.

I mean

You’re kind of right

I did

I’m a girl now.

She said I was the first person to treat her like a girl.

I wonder if Lorne’s dead. I google his name + obituary. I google his name + mugshot. I google his name + “remember when.” Maybe he just transitioned. What’s the difference?

I wonder now, when the desert dies, does the ocean come back?

My shaking hands tell me it does. I say every love I’ve ever known is a remnant of an earlier love that dried up and left behind arsenic dust. Just like the Great Salt Lake is a remnant of Lake Bonneville is a remnant of the Pacific. That fact is an absolute betrayal.

I guess we are all just trying to get back to the places where we felt love once and realizing we never really can. It does come back, though—like the rain that shows up here every April/May, thin and surprised, laying itself down on the alkali. For one split second, the crust remembers it was seabed; two eras stutter in the same frame, the old Cretaceous shoreline superimposed on the frontage road. A moment of weird bleed-through in time where you realize it never fully left, it just calcified, salted over. Then the ground rears up, white crust sealing the pores, and the water beads off like it’s been insulted. The desert keeps a memory of water in its own way, even as the ground rejects it. You can wish you’d done it differently, you can rehearse a better exit in your mind’s eye. But the hole is still just a patched hole.