TRAMPOLINE

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I launch on a mighty PMS rampage.
I hate PMSing. Hate the way I grow so profoundly sad it's tragicomic. Hate waking up to find out that matter and antimatter have switched sides, that my stomach is hollowful of the world's emptiness, and that the universe thickly coats my void.
I hate brushing my teeth and feeling like after a night of bad sex. So bad it sticks beneath my fingernails, so I sit on the tub's ledge and whimper.
To clean my mind very carefully, with a Yaqui tale.

Once there were two Desert Girls.
One from the East and one from the West.
They journeyed as Desert People do, and since they shared a Desert Soul, their paths were bound to cross.
Soon enough, they met in a metropolitan area and settled a deal to cleanse each other until they shall be ready to resume their respective crossings.
The only problem was that these two Desert Girls were young and inexperienced, and their passion for one thing assumed the shape of another and so on, and within the first deal there dwelt a multilayered fusion of significance and none at all, and soon enough they were deep in trouble.
When one spoke of Coyotes, the other dreamt of Wolves. When one imitated the Condor, the other sang a Hawk. They owned different Demons in their hearts, some Wild Boars, others Cougar.
Their deal was exploding.

Things were getting so bad that they decided to initiate a journey together, to heal and relate. But they forgot their Demons and Familiars have mixed.
Once far from their city of origin, one Desert Girl suddenly saw her death. It was instant and sweaty and shot through her veins with all the mixed histories. The second Desert Girl understood this was the effect of their initial deal, and decided to make a sacrifice in order to save the Desert Girl.
The sacrifice included blood and submission. It was involuntarily and meant another deal was struck. The web of consequence grew thicker.
But she managed to save the Desert Girl's life. She brought her sustenance enough to last her until the next city, where she was treated and cured somewhat.
But their Demons mixed indefinitely. The revived Desert Girl was haunted forever.

'I wanna call off work,' I tell Benny. It's 4:30 in the morning.
'What's wrong?' I can hear him twist in his bed over the phone.
'Nothing really,' I say, feeling stupid. 'My fingernails are dirty.'
Now he's very alert. 'Tell me everything. What happened?'
'Nothing, dear Lord. I'm PMSing. I let you PMS three times a month, you can let me have some time off.'
'It's not that. You're welcome to take a break whenever you burnout. I don't find escaping smart. Wanna talk, instead of evading?'
'I can't talk about this,' and suddenly I'm very irritated. 'Talk doesn't solve everything. I'll take Vidoo to the desert for a few days. We'll learn about Virgo and Spike. Anyway, she wanted to ride a camel.'
I hear him scratching something. 'Ok, it's your call. But really, you're a terrible example.'
'I know. Did I wake you up?'
'Of course.'

Geoff drives us until the road turns white, and we wait for my friend Yedid'yah to pick us up. He's a camel driver with very blue eyes in a very red face. He comes hurtling with a trio of female camels. The heat off the dunes dries away the intensity of the void within me. I relax, and the camel heaves her butt up and knuckles off her knees with rough bleat.

When the Sun inches lower, I know I should warn Vidoo. When the sun hits the ground, absolute darkness falls.
We do not build a fire. Just the two of us, on the shoulder of a hill. The silence is heavier than all the grains of sand.
As far as I'm concerned, there is only one other person who gets affected thus by the desert. The other Girl, from the East. Her reality swerves radically too upon stepping on stretching plains, dreams and lizards merge in a hallucinated-but-not pyrotechnics of silence.

'Tell me a story,' says Vidoo in the dark.
I tell her about the Desert Man and Child who went off, one to die, one to deliver an embroidered pouch of herbs and a pipe. I tell her how the Man dried off in the sun and the Child smoked the herbs in the pipe and brought forth blue grass and mythological monsters.
'Tell me a scary story,' calls Vidoo in the dark, so I quickly tell her about the Talking Snake, and the one about the Coyote Woman and the Sack of Bones.
'A really scary one,' she commands.
So I tell her about the two Desert Girls and she keeps quiet.
Then she asks, 'Did the sacrifice include a lot of blood and submission?'
'No, but it's the idea of sacrifice. It's so out, to sacrifice.'
'Out?'
'It doesn't happen, or carry such weight. Of course, people lay out for each other when it comes to drugs, whoring around to sustain one another. But I was nearly dead and it was too symbolic to miss.'
'Get over it,' she says. 'It happens. Shit happens. All the time.'
'Nobody ever gestured such for me.' I reply, which silences her due to her share of neglect.

I lean back against the cooling hill, facing the stars at their full, frightening glory. I cannot cry in the desert. 'We are so diseased.'
'But beautiful,' says her silhouette from the sea-green horizon.
'But beautiful,' I agree.
'One day, you'll tell me the whole story?'
I swear to.

By dawn we trek to the Trampoline. I found it a few months ago: a lone trampoline on top of a dune, Middle of Nowhere. There is nothing more exquisite – even for a Desert Person – than watching a sunrise upon a trampoline.
We climb solemnly onto the taut fabric, and await the bursting sun.