Missing

 Missing the desert is like missing a limb. The body remembers what the mind tries to forget—the weight of the sun on your shoulders, the dry whisper of wind that coats your skin in dust so fine it feels like memory itself. Even after you leave, the desert lingers. It clings to your pores, to the corners of your mind, to the ache behind your ribs that flares like phantom pain when the air grows too damp, too full of noise.

There is a silence in the desert that becomes a part of you. It moves beneath your skin, a pulse that syncs with the stillness of distant mesas and the soft hum of power lines vibrating under a wide, indifferent sky. When you’re gone, the absence hums louder than the place ever did. It’s a ghost—warm and hollow at once.

Only the lonely understand this kind of missing. The kind that has no face, no end. The desert was never meant to love you back, yet you crave its cold nights and cruel light, the way it stripped you bare until you were nothing but nerve and dust. You see shadows out of the corner of your eye—rogue figures walking the highway shoulder, mirages of the people you once were.

The desert never leaves cleanly. It’s a haunting, a hunger, a limb you keep reaching for in the dark, still expecting to feel its shape, its heat, its quiet promise of infinity.