As I proceed down the hills the landscape changes as the sun crests the hills at my back and warms my jacket. The sun beats down in the cloudless sky and I sweat beneath my jacket, I shrug it off and tie it around my waist. The road begins to warm as the sun hits it, by the time it reaches it’s apex I’ve forsaken propriety and tied my shirt to my head to keep the sun from my eyes and off the back of my neck. The shimmering boil of horizon manifests a building along the road, I can’t tell how far it is but I take comfort in maybe sleeping under a roof and finding water before the sun’s threat of dehydration turns malignant. I trudge on through the day and the sun lowers to blind me as I continue my march down out of the mountains and to the west.
I reach what turns out to be a gas station as the sun is sticking the bottom of the horizon and setting the sky ablaze in red and orange that turns steadily to blue. The prices on the gas pump tells me it hasn’t been used in quite some time, since the prices are stuck up on the sign at just under five dollars a gallon for regular. The ground grows cooler as the sun sets and the heat of the day radiates into the cloudless sky. I break the lock on the rear window of the store behind the gas pumps. The place is small and dusty but it’s got a small one garage for doing oil changes or radiator repairs out here in the desert, a working bathroom, and a store filled with cans of soda, bags of chips and other snacks and a freezer full of melted ice cream. I scrounge around for something to eat that isn’t stale, rotten, or melted. It’s hard to gauge how long ago the power was shut off, the lines still stretch out to the west, apparently this building was the only thing that needed power, I wonder to myself where the clerk is, where the traffic that must have frequented this road have all gone.
Why am I the only one here? There is an eeriness that pervades my isolation, being in this building brings it to the surface. I’m afraid of being confronted with another human being before I know who I am and what I am looking for here on this journey. If I cannot understand my self I cannot hope to understand someone whose thoughts I can never know, who can never know me as deeply as I may some day come to know my self again. Therein lies the most basic assumption on which I rely, that this is not my beginning, that there is indeed a past to find. I walk be hind the counter with some food, water and some blankets, I lay out on the dusty floor, giving my feet a rest and pulling the blanket over myself to shield me from the outside world, to shrink my world to that rough wool blanket and my sore and weary body. The darkness quickly as I finish my food and water for the evening and commit myself to sleep. I am sheltered for a time from anything but myself which may already be too much for me to understand. I shiver my way to sleep and turn on the dusty floor as I hope for a dreamless rest.