I piss in the canyon sand. My urine is dark, amber-colored, like my father’s in the bag in the hospital. I am a mammal, and mammals need water. I dip my finger in the froth and taste it. Bitter and salt-laden. I will collect it next time for drinking if I feel desperate enough, though it could be more of a hazard than a help to drink. They should teach these things in school. Forget algebra.
With my finger, I write the word HELP in the sand. I am open to help of any kind: human, animal, cosmic, divine. It’s a nice word, help, the gentle flying h to ease you in, the juicy el sound middle, and the hard p that sticks the landing. It’s confident, that p, as though through the act of asking, one will definitely get the help one needs. I feel far less confident than the p.
Seek and ye shall seek.
The thought occurs to me to suck on a rock—that it may produce saliva, like a piece of hard candy. I take out my friends the rocks and give a brief interview as to who is best for sucking.
“I’m translucent,” says Door. “So I give off an aqueous vibration.”
“I’m strawberry-esque,” says Pink.
“Think of me like a geological milkshake,” says The Egg.
“I’m not worth it,” says Gray, always humble. “I’m flinty and tough.”
I go with “geological milkshake.” But The Egg is too big for my mouth, and no moisture is made (if anything, the arid rock sucks me dry like a sponge). I spit The Egg out on the sand. I don’t pick it back up. I put the other rocks in my shorts pocket.
I feel irritable and despairing. I hate everything (nature especially), and I know now, I know (I couldn’t know until I knew) a small taste of the frustration of my father’s five-month thirst.
“Orange juice!” he begged, during one of my visits.
I told him I had no orange juice.
“Grapefruit juice!”
I told him I had no grapefruit juice.
“Water!”
I tried to explain why he couldn’t have water. Not even ice chips.
“We don’t know if you can swallow. We don’t want you to aspirate.”
“Don’t be a nurse,” he said.
“I’m not a nurse. I’m your daughter.”
“Don’t be a nurse and my daughter.”
The nurse came in and gave him a swab with some balm on it to moisten his lips. He spit the balm out on the floor, disgusted.
A medical cart came rolling down the hallway. He turned to look at me.
“Hot dogs?” he asked.
It was never about me. It was his thirst, the raging thirst, which I could not overcome, though I wanted to desperately, to be stronger than thirst, bigger than hunger, more powerful than injury and illness, physical and mental; I wanted to be that powerful. The magic daughter.
Is love not that powerful?
I lift my pointer finger and write a word in the sand. I write the word LOVE. Is this the word I’m looking for? Is this what I mean?
I cross out the word LOVE and write the word IS. They are the same word, love and is, yes, love and is are the same. To be with. To be there. Of all the love languages, I think the greatest is to be there, the greatest of the languages, to be here for, to have been there with. Love.
Well, I am here, here I am: a new here in the desert, but same as all the other heres, because I am afraid, and I have always been afraid, that’s how it’s always been; no matter where the here, I am always afraid, and so I deflect my mind to a not-here, because the here is too scary, it hurts too much, which is why it’s easier for me to be there for my sick father than my sick husband; the depth of my sick husband’s here, he needs me, and the need makes it a vortex, a here I could get stuck in, trapped, while my sick father doesn’t ask that I be in his here, I enter willingly, I come and go as I please, an optional here, a here where I am not even wanted half the time, a here I have to jump to, an aspirational here, which makes it more of an elsewhere.
But what about the first here? The big here? The I-exist here? For that, my father is responsible. I do not recall choosing. I did not ask for it. It wasn’t even elective. He summoned, and I came.
“Come to the big here! You’re coming.”
Talk about stuck. And ever since, I have been resisting all the heres: the indoor heres and outdoor heres, the city heres and desert heres. I am resisting now.
But if this has always been the case, then why do I fear dying? Why am I afraid to die? How much more scary can it be? I may be on the way there now. Death. If nothing else: a reprieve from all these heres. Death. A big elsewhere. The biggest elsewhere. Unless, of course, it is another here.