Memories of Grandeur

Mesquite Flat Sand Dunes, Death Valley

Home, in the mountains, is never simply a place. It’s an experience of contradictions. How does my tiny body stand, larger than life, as if the stone faces of the ridgelines hold me their silence, and in that silence, I recognize myself — the version of me that has always been harder to name, harder to carry.

Maybe that is why I return to them, time and time again. The sand dunes fold themselves into my memory, flowing powerfully behind my lonely days in the city. On especially hollow nights, I think back to my sunrise hikes to wooden teahouses, my body wrought in an exhaustion that reminded me I was alive, that I once inhabited a place where my body felt no urge to escape itself.

Even now, when I close my eyes, I feel the windchill on my bones. The thin air scrapes my lungs until each breath becomes proof of survival. It’s the only place where I have ever felt at home: in that journey, tired, trembling, and alive.