We’ll wait until the sun goes down, and then the bowl of stars will be above us and the bowl of the playa will be below and we’ll be cupped in the hands of the universe. We’ll dance in the chill of the high desert night, the stars raining down like snowflakes and the rocks standing still, their potential energy thrumming, soothing, the quiet desire to move appearing as a warm, bright aura around them. They are calm but expectant. They can wait forever to set sail. We are not those rocks.
We will move like our lives depend on it. We’ll run between the rocks, pull each other along the tracks that stretch out behind them from when they last slid along the playa’s cracked floor like dice being shaken in a cup. We’ll play music with the portable speaker we’ve tucked into our backpack, our phones loaded with the songs we want to hear in that high, lonely place. We’ll flood the playa with jeep headlights, and the rocks will cast their static shadows, and our shadows will fly with us as we glide our feet over the brittle ground, so dry it’s not even dusty. Packed and fractured like an earthquake dance floor. And the rocks, inspired, will watch us drifting lightly through the night, catching air, and it will make them dream of ice.