Arizona Dreamin’ – One Shot Story

It was close to nine in the evening, yet the edge of the sky was still pale blue. The heat had not softened. Dry wind lifted sand and cut against my exposed skin. Eighteen wheelers tore past me along Interstate 40. Their low growl rising and falling in the dark afar. I lit a cigarette, exhaled, and watched the smoke trail after them into the night.

But my thoughts were already elsewhere.

An old mahogany drawer that hadn’t been opened for decades. Inside were things once gathered with passion. I could not tell what I was looking for, a specific object, a reason they had been brought together at the time, or the faint trace of the excitement I once felt while chasing them.

This month-long road trip carried more weight than two pieces of luggage. It was my first return to the United States in more than a decade, and my wife’s first time there. We drove across mountains and rivers, from Boston to Los Angeles, carrying a question that had remained unresolved in our quiet life in Tasmania, one of the world’s most forgotten islands. We stepped away from routine, locked the door behind us, and took the longest flight back to where I first encountered the unknown seventeen years ago, not to recover anything, but to see whether the stillness we had learned to live with could be disturbed at all, a condition I tried to describe earlier in Still, Like Yesterday.

We recognized the pattern almost immediately. It was like opening a candy can we knew well, and telling ourselves a new flavor was waiting. Prices changed from Australian to US dollars. The greetings sounded different. The phone numbers carried another prefix. Yet a day on the road still felt like another day, booking the cheapest acceptable hotels, calculating the best routes, comparing cities and towns while imagining where we want to live, taking photographs and hoping one would surpass something I made long ago. It all felt familiar. We just pretended it mattered.

Then, Arizona. Wind surged without resistance, carrying dust across long, open stretches. The straight road ran with it, reaching toward the horizon under a deep sky. The dryness felt familiar, remembered more by the body than the mind, like the Siberian winters of my earliest years. The pressure moved forward, making stillness feel out of place, as if running was the only move that fit.

There were no soft hills. The sky was never gray. I didn’t need a church to pretend I was praying. Even loud voices carried that way.

Over there, it’s never such a dead day.

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