Pink adobe walls and buckling roof. The stacks of prickly pear on either side of its small frame. The door and windows in perfect alignment like a sad open face. I wonder who lives there, and if it is a woman. And if the woman has fits of anxiety. If she sobs and carries on over the smallest thing. If one time she calls all the hospitals in the area because the man she lives with isn’t home and isn’t looking at his phone. Wing night. And then a bar after. But he didn’t think to tell her. And when he comes home, she’s hysterical. And he says he was with the twins and she wonders what twins?
I wonder if this woman knows the roof needs replacing. And the mailbox out front, like a cartoon in its bent angle toward the street, its mouth hanging open so everyone passing by can see the contents of her mail. Two letters, a magazine. I wonder if this woman has slammed her head against the hardwood floors of her little desert house. If, in a rage, she has found her body and brain so exhaustingly inescapable that she hits the floor so hard with her skull she feels dizzy after. And then the man she lives with looks at her in horror and disgust, turns away from her when all she needs or wants is to be wrapped up in someone’s arms, to be escorted to a bathtub, to run the hot water over her skin and wake her out of herself.
House in the desert: its small dilapidation. A screen door peeling and off its hinges. And who has a screen door in the desert? But the door sags open and when the wind is up, everyone can hear it groan against the house. As if in protest. And I wonder if the woman cares. Or what she does care about. Does she hike the desert in the springtime, attempting to identify wildflowers? In awe of the spiked varieties of cacti all topped with fuchsia or white or brilliant yellow blossoms. I wonder if this woman has had a breakdown out there in the desert, away from her little house, out in the open for anyone to see. If the meds she’s taking have made it too difficult to move her body. She’s dizzy all the time and tired. So tired. And her memory is screwed by the benzos she takes three times daily, so she can’t remember wildflowers at all. And she looks out at the desert and sometimes sees beauty and other times sees death.
I wonder if this woman maintains the inside of the house or if the whole thing is just towers of newspapers and rotten furniture. I wonder if the man she lives with keeps his clothes in cardboard boxes under the bed, as if to say, this whole life is temporary. I wonder if he builds a bedframe, and it’s so tall and high that when she climbs on it, the ceiling feels like it might crush her. If perhaps on Saturday mornings, the man cooks waffles and the woman cuts fruit and they sit at their kitchen table, which is really a piece of plywood on top of some boxes. I wonder if the fleetingness of it ever gets to her. If she yearns for something that lasts.
And I wonder if this woman in her house in the desert ever wishes she could leave it. All of it. The house and the desert and the man. I wonder if sometimes in the bathtub, she imagines herself free and alone and on a coast somewhere. I wonder if sometimes she goes to sleep, wishing to not wake up. And I wonder what she feels like in the morning, the sun cutting through the glass, the bed so close to the ceiling she could peel the paint there. I wonder what she thinks then, seeing the man asleep beside her, hearing his soft breathing, wishing she were somewhere or someone else.
