I sit across the table from once familiar faces. We smile and try to make conversation but we live in different worlds now. We speak different languages.

 

My words are the language of dust and wind. Of stars, sparkling along distant horizons. They hover like smoke, scald like sun, and bake like heat. They inch forward on the backs of the multi-legged. They slip between narrow cracks in low, brown walls and whisper around corners. They sleep beside you for 100 years. And then 100 more.

 

I strain to remember their language, built of fog and freeways, metering lights and bridge tolls and ocean. Of all that water—as wide as the sky and deeper than any constellation. I can hear its waves humming in every word—including those unspoken.

 

I used to feel the crash of that water each night outside my bedroom window, each morning in my own veins. I used to be that water, rushing against the shore, then back again. The air was thick with it. I was thick with it, becoming soft and slow, unable to stand.

 

But not now. Not now. Now I am as dry as a bone. As prickly as a cholla. As grey as the mountains in the distance. I wear my skirts long and folded, in the shades of this desert, knowing that despite our thorns, even the cholla blooms clear and bright each summer, its blossoms as bold as the sun.

Lauren McLean Ayer is a San Francisco-grown poet and writer who recently moved to Santa Fe to find peace in the desert. Her poems have appeared in Gargoyle Magazine, Santa Fe oneheart, Adobe Walls, and online.