The first week of summer, I took a writing workshop for teachers and worked on a piece about a trip I took to Joshua Tree two years ago. The second-to-last day of the workshop, I got food poisoning and spent the night throwing up, so I didn’t get to finish my piece, which I started right after I got back from that trip. I never have been able to get Joshua Tree out of my head, and I am still trying to finish my piece. It starts like this:

I almost didn’t want to go to the museum. I thought about the nine-hour drive home and how when I went to sleep that night, I’d still feel in motion, like I was driving through my dreams. We read about it in a magazine at the house we rented and decided to stop by on our way out of town.

Everywhere in the desert seems far away from everywhere else in the desert; it’s hard to find your way, even though Joshua Tree, the town, is more or less a grid. We didn’t get lost exactly, but it’s hard to track city blocks that don’t look like blocks. The parcels looked more like campsites with address numbers marking clearings in the sand.

We found the museum and parked across the street. There was a big welcome sign made out of tires, but the letters W-E-L-C-O-M-E were partially jumbled and there were two W’s and two L’s. A newspaper dispenser offered us rudimentary maps and brochures proclaiming Noah Purifoy’s assemblage sculptures “a critical and pubic [sic] success.” We were the only pubic there; it was a self-guided tour.

I said, “…”

He said, “…”

My companion and I went off in different directions. We had a lot to say, just not to each other. For the next hour, I only heard strains of his voice on the phone carried by the wind, fabric whipping around in it, the swish of sand and clatter of wood planks under my feet, a dog barking. The air smelled vaguely, subtly like herbs. It was late March and though the sun looked blazing, it was only almost warm enough. Everything in the desert looked hot–the glittery sand floor, the pointy leaves on the Joshua trees, the few wispy clouds in the sky–but the heat was a mirage. I couldn’t take my hoodie off, but if I stood still in the sun for too long I couldn’t leave it on.

I had to talk him into coming on this trip in the first place. He said the space-like vastness of the desert scared him and nothing was meant to live there. I hate space and knew he was right–I can’t imagine living in a place I couldn’t grasp or grow vegetables in–but for some reason, the desert didn’t scare me, maybe because the lawns of my elementary schools couldn’t be watered in drought years, which were all the years. It got so bad there was talk of trying to desalinate seawater. So chaparral, the color orange, and sand make sense to me, but when I’m in the desert, I can’t stop looking for the ocean.

It’s said writing is thinking, and I want to write about the desert to figure out what I think about it. I don’t remember what I thought about as I wandered in and out of, under and through Purifoy’s sculptures that day, down labyrinthine outdoor hallways of corrugated tin, under old clothes and mannequin heads hanging from low ceilings, inside a gazebo made of electronics parts, past stacked bundles of weathered newspaper, a Newton’s Cradle of bowling balls:

It seems to me now that the desert felt motionless but also moved by something other than wind. Heat moves things imperceptibly, the way glass is a liquid; it just moves so slowly you can’t see. The desert, the sculptures, the whole museum, my life are like this, moving invisibly, like those revolving restaurants I’ve never been to but in which I imagine suddenly looking up from my salmon and seeing a different view. Like the movement of a relationship and how in hindsight you think you can pinpoint when you knew it would or wouldn’t work, but that motion is actually perpetual and gradual.

The day we arrived in Joshua Tree, we visited The Integratron and had a sound bath from a blonde woman named Joanne who wore black-and-white striped arm warmers and rang Tibetan singing bowls while we lay on our backs on the floor of the dome. When the ringing stopped, I didn’t know how much time had passed or if I had been asleep. I wonder if the desert’s space-like vastness is not really a perception of space but of time and movement? If what makes people uncomfortable or enthralled is that its seeming stillness makes you aware of your own constant, imperceptible motion, what your heart feels like beating, your mood as it changes.