Mental Picture 1

In this one, imagine a mango tree, seen from an archway, its leaves heavy with rain. Young red-brown leaves gather on some of the branches like lazy hands. Two young lovers venture closer, take pictures on the damp lawn. The air is heavy with steam, this afterthought of a downpour. I am seated on a bench with someone I barely know, and he instructs me to take a picture of the mango tree beyond the arch. It is very humid, and I am very nervous, and I could not help but apologize for ruining the moment by being a sweaty, fidgeting wreck. He tells me it is natural, and that I looked pretty anyway. I cringe inwardly. A silence follows after, in which I can feel him quietly looking at me, and I wanted to reach out and wrap my small, small hands around his, but I was not brave enough. 

There is an actual, physical photograph of that mango tree, but I wish that by the time I see it, I wouldn't be as much of a terrified wuss.

Islanders in Desert Country

A patch of vast, vast Arizona

I've been wont to repeating the same phrases whenever a situation calls for it, and perhaps for something as large as a desert (to which any thing made by man--even words--fall flat, or dim, against its endless, excruciating horizons) such a weakness could be forgiven.
        "I could not," I wrote on several postcards to friends, "even begin to comprehend the vastness of the desert." My sisters and I drove for miles, and the desert spread beyond the reach of sight, beyond all my islander's comprehension. Miles upon miles of bare land, essentially; uninhabited land.

Oh but how they burst with color, and life. At times, a stretch of desert with sand so bright and yellow it hurt to look at; purple and blue and rust--oranges and reds--spread out in patches of open space, under cloudless skies, indifferent and blue. Small, hard plants growing in clumps, waving to us in the harsh wind. Tiny bright red flowes. Curls and waves of color and movement etched into enormous walls of rock where rivers must once have flowed.
        "America is so...big," one of us said. And then I wonder if America's need to turn to other shores came from this--this same unfathomable emptiness.