I walked out into the desert today after an afternoon of thunderstorms. The sun set, as it will, and I sat in the darkening on the gravel berm of the unmaintained road I’d walked along for a half hour or so.

The night desert sky, pale northward with Vegas’ diffuse light, shifted overhead with the wind. Stars winked on and off. After some time there came a bright white glow beneath the eastern sky, and clouds illuminated from beneath by a full moon not yet risen.

A message came: she longs to watch the moon with me again.

My vision is clouded these days. I must back up a few hundred miles to see things clearly, and then i long to reach out, to touch the thing remotely beheld. Everything I was has sloughed off, fallen away, and all that has come in its stead is spare sustenance, save her. The writing comes slowly, the desert I sought only lately accessible without risk of heatstroke, the loves that were replaced by their absence. The home I left looms in my mind green and cool, populated with ghosts.

Friends take pains to remind me that no one is responsible for any others’ happiness. Insults like poison harm only if you accept them, they claim, and if those insults do not come labeled with skull and crossbones what then? (I have been bled by daggers emblazoned with hearts and flowers.) No one can make me happy, they claim. That’s my job.

The Raven makes me happy nonetheless. It is an odd happiness, and friends once worried write me with sighs of relief. I am unsure what to do in the absence of drama, unsure how to react to the fact that I can tell her anything, the only eggshells anywhere near piled neatly to one side as I make her breakfast. My life is still asunder, and The Raven does not fix that. The Raven will not fix that.

A message comes: she must sleep. She will see me in a few days.

Life alone and yet not alone and I have no shred of clue where I will be in two months. We speak of hypothetical futures and claim impatience with uncertainty. Even the present is uncertain.

The Raven makes me happy nonetheless.

The sun was low in the west today, a heavy rain descending between us. A trick of the light: the storm a mirror. As I talked to her the whole eastern slope of the Ivanpah Range was bathed in improbable green light, sun rays reflected and refracted around the mountains. We hung up and I watched the light fade through blue to indigo and then to black.