The weather is changing.
Yesterday, it was so hot outside that my shirt became limpid with sweat over the course of an outdoor meal. After our lunch date, my close friend from undergrad, Luis, and I went on a short uphill walk and when we returned to the foot of the hill, I convinced him to sit in the shade with me and eat strawberry shaved ice. Still not thoroughly cooled off when I came home a couple of hours later, I turned on my bedroom fan, took off my clothes, and napped.

But this morning, the wind was cold and strong. While looking at photos of two friends celebrating their first year of marriage, a sad nostalgia for the fall they met settled over me. I introduced Kiyomi & Landon in the early autumn of 2018, just as I was busying myself with desert road trips and casual infatuations.

That September, it rained the night Brennan & I went to a Doja Cat concert. The cold rain was the perfect excuse to turn in well before midnight, and he invited me into his apartment to wait out the rain. I knew better but I went inside just to prove myself right.

Less than a week later, I attempted to outrun my embarrassment by flying to Salt Lake City. It was jacket weather in Utah and I sent Brennan a postcard from Arches National Park with a list of 10 songs I was listening to in the desert. I sent the boy who reminded me of Tito a postcard from the Grand Canyon, wishing him luck on an interview.

That time tastes like sipping London fogs in the rental car with Darlene and it sounds like Erykah Badu and Patsy Cline. It feels like the constant frustration of trying to take a picture of the full moon on a cellphone camera; it feels like hoping you won’t be forgotten; it feels like looking out at a field full of birch trees—their yellow leaves dancing on tall branches—and realizing that everything was tainted by the feelings I couldn’t outrun.

Two weeks later, I returned to Austin with just enough time to pack a bag for West Texas. It was overcast and drizzling in Fort Davis where I lugged my leather bag around town and played Daniel Caesar on my headphones. When he saw my luggage, a man selling candied peanuts asked me, “you on the run?”

I guess I was.

In Marfa, I slept on a mahogany leather sofa in a teepee, lulled to sleep by the sounds of a crackling fire. I spent a weekend isolated in Terlingua where it was rainy and foggy. So foggy that when we drove through Big Bend, it felt like we were passing through clouds. On those mornings, I sat on rocks and smoked cigarettes outside before coming in to make cheddar and spinach omelettes on a cast iron.

When I came back to Austin, I gave Brennan a rusty train track nail I found in Marfa, to ward off evil from his house. He put it on top of a stack of handwritten letters from the girl in Sweden, next to a copy of The New Jim Crow I loaned him.

That time smells like burning mesquite. It tastes like drinking cranberry juice while looking out of your Airbnb window at the place where the slate sky and yellow desert brush meet. It feels like realizing your last serious ex-boyfriend is living with someone with curly hair just like yours.

A couple of weeks later, Brennan and I argued about the Swedish girl the night before we were supposed to see The Internet. Naturally, I spent the concert practically up under a PhD student from the social work school. He & I shared a cab but I ditched him at campus and walked alone to my car, pulling my sweater up over my mouth for warmth.

When I met Santos that November, I felt like a new animal: hungry, prowling, insatiable. I’d sneak into his studio after midnight and ask him about the mummified ants on his desk that he’d drawn pencil circles around. I FaceTimed him from Tulum that December and scribbled a Neruda poem into the back panel of a journal I bought him. In the market, a souvenir shop owner sold me a bag of reggie and I made pathetic little spliffs to smoke on the balcony while Kiyomi went running along the beach. At night, I made pathetic little collages about my heart ache. That time tastes like drinking coffee in the sunny and white hotel dining room. It smells like salt water. It feels like riding a bus to the Mexico City airport while listening to Juno by Choker:

I heard you joined the peace corps/planting ferns & feeding the poor/you’re not so bad anymore.

I guess some things endure. My two friends were falling in love and I had set about to create as much emotional carnage for myself as possible. I remember sitting in my friend’s office and whispering to her about Santos. “You don’t want to be known for being a hurricane—just causing havoc all the time,” she told me.

How else was I supposed to prove that they didn’t mean anything to me? The man dating a new pelua; Brennan and his stack of love letters from Sweden; Santos; the boy who reminded me of Tito; my rebound from the school of social work? How else was I supposed to prove that I felt nothing?