I crawled into you and set up camp. You were warm, steady as a strong-blooded pulse, and I was shivering. I came because I was sure I could survive. But you wanted me, remember? I did not invade; I was invited.

Soon enough, I learned you were a desert. Everything that grew easily had been gutted. You were no mirage; I touched you, beveled, pocked, and longing. Every space where you hurt hummed under my hands; I saw the blood. Sometimes, I walked away with a spot of it staining a dress. Old blood, crusted yet somehow fresh: oozing from regenerative wounds.

I saw enough — felt enough — when I leased this square inside you, already so overrun with other squatting things. I thought I understood. There were memories and guilts and sadnesses you must nurse and not evict. They are the true lay of your land. And though I did not set out to save you, I still cradled a garden in my palms: every seed I thought you’d need not to die. I still prayed that I’d grow the right balm to properly bandage your gashes.

It was easy to ignore how dry your tongue remained after giving you so many gourds of water. Your kind of thirst is difficult to quench; you wish for a well whose waters bend time. At my best and on the keenest-eyed of voyages, I will never scout you this. But we remained silent on the subject. It seemed enough that, even when your eyes were sallow, listing, they still lit when they locked on my face.

(Didn’t they?)

Sometimes I followed your gaze and saw them: a family, waiting, their laughter carrying across these empty arcs of dust and air. You would rather be with them. Our circle of seeds was inadequate.

You could see what I had yet to: the futility of tilling. But it brought you the briefest of hopes. You have always wanted a garden. Something must’ve appealed to you: the gentleness, perhaps, with which I lifted sand and primly patted it back, my cracking lips dropping promises: someday, we’ll dine. You could see it, once, couldn’t you? A feast of eggplant and lentils, of grapes so pregnant with juice that their skins pulled away from the stems?

I could be so strange, sometimes, so withholding. But I wrote you so many loving missives in the sand. (You read them? The winds will let you hold them?)

Yours is a house of sorrow but your porch was built of cedar. We sat there, somewhat happily, awaiting signs of life.

It has been months since winter. But yesterday was cold. The frost bit our first — our only — emerald tendril.

(Or did it?)

Deserts are impossible places for love, overrun as they are with so many duplicitous images.

But I know that the family is real. Some of them are waiting. I see them, even when it seems I don’t. They are waiting, but they are also watching. Do not rush to them; they want you alive. They need you to drink and revive, to grow green things again.

So did I.