Mariah Rigg's Desolation Wilderness

I had a dream that all the things you ever lost found their way back to you. That red bike you bought for $70 in Eugene. Your last girlfriend. We had just moved to Knoxville and were living in that double-wide with the fleas. Do you remember? You traced their bites in constellations across my back.

In the dream I am awake. I am lying in our bed. I look for you in the bathroom, the office and kitchen. Open our front door with the hope I’ll find you playing on our porch, fingers sliding up your guitar’s six-stringed neck. Instead I see the things you lost lying in the front yard. Bike on its kickstand. Soggy condom of your virginity. Your ex-girlfriend naked, legs spread before me. Dark curls of her center braided with blades of unmown grass.

*

Last summer, we made a pilgrimage to the West Coast after ten months of exile. Landed in Los Angeles and spent a sunset on El Segundo, where we jumped through waves of kelp, mouths puckered into kisses by the salt of the Pacific. You thought you had the virus but weren’t sure, your PCR marinating in a Texas lab. So we wore masks through our friend’s house, only removing them for breakfast beneath her kumquats. Dribbles of blood orange cut the corners of my mouth, falling from chin to chest, disappearing into the red of my tank top. Your eyes traced their path, while, in one breath, I drank my glass of water. My lips were so chapped.

That day, we drove eight hours to Lake Tahoe. I don’t remember much besides Jack Links and cattle ranches, the stale smell of my used breath through my mask. We only stopped to pee, to shit, and once at Mono Lake,

because our friend had promised us a swim. But when we walked down the dirt trail to what we thought was freshwater, we found an ancient saline sea, salt thickening the water’s surface like ice, gathering into stalactites that hung off rock formations. Preserved birds lay half-buried, flesh brined in the lake’s saltwater. You and I stood on a bluff as the wind blew, ripe as the residue of an unscrubbed toilet. Mono Lake had been drained to feed Los Angeles. Everything was dying or dead.

*

I had a dream that all the things you ever wanted found their way home to you. Dead Moon’s art book with the felt cover. The body you had before me. Terry Allen’s prints. I had just gone through the procedure and was bleeding through every liner. You were doing your best to comfort. I was doing my best not to think of what had been removed—the size of a strawberry. I wonder if red fruit will ever not make me nauseous.

In that dream, I don’t have a body; I am floating. You stand before me, in front of a college class. Your hair is short. You are lecturing about poetry. But before I can hear exactly what you are saying, the room cuts to an open field. The same one we fucked in the night before Trump lost his second term, back when we lived in Oregon. Though it is the same time of year—hazy with fall’s last light—you are with another girl. Your body moves over hers, crushing. Her nails scratch rivers down your pale back.

*

After Mono Lake, we drove past hot springs. Past cows and rivers, over a cookie cutter neighborhood at the lip of Tahoe’s basin. Dropping our friend off in the horseshoe driveway of one of South Lake’s resorts for a wedding,

we car camped for a night beneath pines. We woke early to get groceries, and then, our packs loaded with liquor and bread, hiked two and a half miles to the alpine lake, where, for the next two days, we planned to camp.

They call that part of the Sierras Desolation Wilderness because the crust is pure granite, hills and valleys carved by glaciers that receded 10,000 years ago. Some of it is still barren—faces and plains of nothing but rock—but by the time we found our way to Tahoe, life had eroded the path to Grass Lake. Trees thicker than me hedged its edges.

To summit, we crossed creeks and waterfalls, toed the muddied edge of an old spring house and sat on rocks purpled with aster and lupine. I did the whole thing in Chacos—my hiking boots, like your PCR, packed into a box somewhere in Austin. My feet blistered. My toes stained orange from the swaying paintbrushes’ pollen.

It was on the banks of Grass Lake, bent over—my back seizing with the weight of the cheeses we’d shoved into my pack—that I met your first girlfriend. She was not what I expected. No one ever is. I think she would have passed us if you had not whispered her name. Mckayla? I looked up just as her head whipped.

She wore leggings and a quarter zip, hat pulled low over her forehead. At first she did not recognize you—hair and beard longer, stomach rounder—but then she said your name. She hugged you and held on longer than she needed.

I was in high-waisted black jeans, the knees and hem ripped. A fifth of whiskey where my water bottle should be. Baguette buckled alongside my sleeping pad to the back of my pack. Flesh burst from my pink bikini. Hair

matted below my baseball cap. I know how I looked because she took a picture. She sent it to your hometown group chat.

I had heard the story of how the two of you lost your virginity in a friend’s basement. How, as teenagers, you’d built bonfires on Massachusetts Bay, fire curling blue and purple from the ocean’s oxidation. I knew that when you came back to Boston after your sophomore year of college, before your parents moved back down South, she tried to get back together. You said no. You’d already fallen in love with someone else at the foot of a friend’s hospital bed.

She asked you to hike back down the mountain with her. Told you to stay in her cabin. You considered it. But then you remembered me. You looked over and smiled. You took my hand. We just made it up, you said to her. Can’t go back now, I echoed. So we left her to descend alone. We circled the lake as the sky darkened.

*

I had a dream that all the things that ever scared you hunted you down. The snake we saw, straight as a branch on the banks of the Colorado River. Collectors from the hospital you went to after you nearly chopped off your finger. Me, soaked in blood from the waist down, running after you in a wedding dress.

In the dream, I am you. I am lying in the dark on your childhood bed. I touch myself, and in the mirror above your desk, my reflection is lit by the naked bodies I scroll through on your computer. I cum to the sound of your father’s feet down the hall. I cum to your grandfather’s ghost hovering over the bed. I beg not to be damned. I pray. But God does not listen.

*

We spent two nights on an island in the middle of Grass Lake. Two days playing cribbage in the sun of the island’s summit, crawling up the lake’s walls to smaller ponds along its side, cutting the Parmesan and Cheddar from my backpack on a rock we fashioned into a cheese board, pairing that cheese with sunset, with nuts and fruits and slices of smoked sausage that, late at night, filled our tent with gassy stench. Every evening, the sun abandoned us behind the mountain’s peak, our lake’s water blushing pink in its absence. Every morning, the bellow of waterfall woke me, thundering like a god as it filled the lake with glacial spit.

Then, on the third morning, we packed. We left the waterfall and the lake, left the sky dark with rain to descend the gravel trail we’d summitted. We passed the same falls and creeks, passed the flowers that had dimmed, peak of their bloom past. Your bag was light from all we’d eaten. My bag was light from all we’d drunk. And though our hike down took half the time our walk up had, somehow we were still late. We told our friend we’d pick her up from the wedding at eleven, and it was noon. But you weren’t ready to leave, so I let you convince me to ditch my bag in our friend’s car. To return to the bottom of the trail, where we jumped in the water again.

The river was cold, even after flowing all the way from the lake where we’d camped. Clean, though it circled the parking lot and ran beneath a bridge. With our hands, we rubbed the sweat and dirt from each other’s bodies. And as the hikers above us walked the bridge, we kissed. You jumped once more into the alpine freeze, and I pulled myself up the rocks, watched you float, curls flattened with water past your chin. Then you got out too and we walked back to the car. We changed into clean clothes, left the parking lot and picked our friend up. We drove on to our next destination. And though

you promised me in the car that we’d return, even then, hair damp with Grass Lake’s refuse, I could not take you for your word. Even then I doubted that we’d ever return. That we’d ever be that happy again.

*

I have a dream that all the things you’ll ever love never leave you. Your mother and her clean sweep of hair. The poems you scrawled in journals scalloped from corners you ripped to make joints’ crutches. Those golding hills of aspen we drove past—in Knoxville, Tahoe, Oregon. Sometimes I am in this dream. More often I am not, my place blank, without replacement.

But in my dream, you are happier than you have ever been. The arthritis in your chord hand has healed. You stand, each weekend, on top of a mountain. You bike everywhere, even to work. You eat Thai food on the Willamette. Without me, you spend weekends in the warm springs where we first fell in love. They have not burnt down in this dream, like they did in reality last August.

Every morning, when I wake from these dreams, I hope to return to you. I dream that I need not return. That I might never leave. That we can survive this. But I wonder too, how long I must dream of and for you. I wonder: how long can my dreams last us?