A place like Joshua Tree makes me feel closer to a God that I don't even believe in. There is an air of magic over it, almost separate from reality. Yet if anything, it's more real than all the rest of the manmade reality in which I live.
I don't know how I haven't been to Joshua Tree in my thirteen years of living in California, but I'm not sure I could have ever been as grateful to see it as right now.
I remember dismissing a friend who said that life might never go back to "normal" a few weeks after lockdown began. Looking back now, it really does seem like there was life before the pandemic, and life since the pandemic. I feel as though I need to access a different vault in my mind to search for an old memory. But I am learning to be okay with that fact, and with every other thing I cannot control.
