The Dunes

Written in December, 2016

It was 1pm, earth time. I looked out from the mouth of my cave and viewed the sky, same as it always was.  A tarnished, yellow-grey hue that reached out to the far end of perception. It was dry, always dry, the blanket of air that wrapped our planet. I viewed the skyline. It was nearly flat, filled with endless sandy dunes that stretched for miles and miles, miles farther than you could see, farther than any man had been in a long, long time. I looked a hundred feet down over the edge of the landing, directly towards the golden floor of the world. It reflected the heat of the sun and shone bright against my newly arisen face. I rubbed my eyes again, trying to get the sleep out so I could see a better lay of the land, but it was still the same.

        Breakfast that morning was as per usual. 2 eggs over-easy, a glass of milk, and toast. They only had basic rations at the camp, and I only visit once a week, so these are the only provisions I  can sustain myself on. It was tough at first, the move I mean. “Why do it? Why dash away your well-being, your career, your romance, and your life to live on another planet for what may be the rest of your life, however long it may be. “You’ve already got so much to live for.” and in response I would usually say something like: “There's nothing left for me here anyway, plus you can’t pass up an opportunity to travel for free.”

Free travel to nowhere.

        I chuckled lightly to myself, in a humble way, as if expecting to share it with a room of good friends, or at least one other person. But here there were no people anywhere near me, nowhere within a thousand miles would I ever find a soul. I sat down on my chair fashioned into the cave’s stone, and viewed the sun and the arid wastes. There was something about this loneliness, something cold. A man could feel colder than he would standing bare-naked in the middle of a hailstorm in frozen hell than he could riding alone in the dunes. Bolls of sand reach behind you with every passing stroke of the wheel and you see a blur in front but the blur is nothing but the same as behind and it's like you're traveling in place for a hundred and thirty miles and then you see the pale wooden pikes designating the border of the local supply center and it’s almost like you never traveled anywhere at all, but you were just asleep, asleep for 4 hours on your dingy motorbike; tires, body, and leather seat dried, rotted and sullied by the saltscapes and heatwaves, and when you wake up to the welcoming sound of a greeting from a mechanical supply bot built only to mimic basic human interaction, reminding you of the humans you haven’t seen in such a long while, you cry a little at first, but after a time you get used to it, and you can no longer feel tears running down your cheeks but the salt blowing in the wind from every grain of sand there is in the hundred thousand million billion miles between you and home.

        The supply run was done for this week, but there were more weeks left, endless weeks. Home, where is home even? That night I took out an old dusty map, dustier than the dust drawn back and forth through the bleak cold desert night. I looked at the constellations from my position. They only printed one of these for each settler, eight total across the entire planet. This was the only one within a hundred thousand miles and I stared at it for a long time, attempting to discern something, some sort of understanding. I was trying to familiarize myself once again with this map, this map I viewed once before when I first arrived, shoving away in a small crack, believing I’d never forget where home was, not in a million years. And yet it had only been ten, and I took the starmap to the foot of the cave and I put it up to the sky to relate myself to something in the endless cosmos and I realized I didn’t know where I was any longer, I had forgotten. Was it just myself though? Did I forget where home was or did home forget me? I wondered after all this time if anyone remembered me, if I had died to them. A millennia of time passed in the decade I had been gone and the wastes of the world had shifted, the dunes that were once me had been obscured, covered, and reformed. I was unrecognizable on the face of my home. The map held no more meaning to me than a blank twice yearly upkeep form at my old job that I had spilled my afternoon coffee on. I twisted and yawed it this way and that, and didn’t realize I had been crying until the tears began to pool at the edge of the page. I wanted to destroy that map, I wanted to destroy everything it ever represented. My foreclosed home, my broken family, my kids I never got to see, my dead-end job, my story I left behind derelict for my own selfish causes, just because I hated the world just a little more than myself. I tried to rip it piece by piece, tear it to shreds, but I couldn’t. No matter how hard I tried I could never muster the strength. I was tired, it had been a long day. My body hung itself down as I crawled my way to bed, dragging itself against the smooth stone floor, nearly unable to bear seeing it move. I shifted the covers down and slotted myself deep within them, still gripping the map tightly between my fingers. I slept soundly that night, I slept for twelve straight hours. I felt my eyes flutter open to receive the mid-afternoon light, and it was still the same, the dunes were lined out in front of my eyes, miles long, scattered across great distance, in the endless ocean of sand. And there I stayed for another day, another month, another year, another decade, another century, another eternity, at the foot of my bed, in my little mountain cave, in the middle of nowhere.