21 August

AG looked at me through fire smoke but I pretended not to see her. Rather, I peered deeply into the cloudscape building out to the south. She said nothing. The two of us just sat in silence, staring out over the great noiseless prairie. On these long journeys, with no respite from one another, such mutual consideration is valuable.

Like an omen, the sun crossed before us. It touched the rooftop and was quickly gone, disappearing behind a stack of cumulonimbus. A chaos of bright towers sailed above our heads, lit ablaze by the star’s last ditch effort to hold on. But, we chose to ignore it all. The cabin remained in profound shadow. We spoke little. Mainly of our fondness for this desolate place and of plans when we would someday return. I knew we would not. Confronted with the emptiness of this land, we watched the last of the daylight.

Now it was evening, and the house had fallen asleep. I enjoyed some time alone with an inhospitable air mattress. A slow leak left me too familiar with the contours of the hard floor. I shined my boots, read the news, then attempted to sleep on a tiny bench.

In the streets of far away cities, human beings rioted, continuing on and on in an endless struggle between one another for supremacy over absolutely nothing. Revolutionaries would soon become the Establishment in an eternal cycle of conflict, born of little more than an assortment of personal insecurities. And, somewhere in the deserts of West Texas, a pile of knackered war regalia and a dysfunctional French diving watch lay, waiting to be found.