The Sahara in an Air-Conditioned Cubicle

A short story and song by Lewis Aldanis: Matchbox

I'd missed being around girls. On one stupid hot day, I was going to meet a girl who had rejected me as a friend in a sushi restaurant, just a block away from this bus station. For today, it was going to be at a Thai restaurant.

I am an unwritten YA book ready to be skimmed and skipped through. But there’s some pages that have me thinking of what I want to say about this girl when she arrived.

When she did arrive, she looked prettier than even before that dry winter years ago when we were giggling at that sushi restaurant, sharing a Sapporo beer. Her face was sunburnt pink, though her skin was pale below her dark crop top. She had mascara paint near the ends of her eyes that looked like half-blue-and-black butterflies, ready to fly away. Her straw hair fell in a perfectly imperfect mess to one side of her neck. Acid-washed jeans and Vans shoes suggested she skateboarded in another life. Maybe she had.

I grinned, because I liked the way she looked, and it was melting away my angst of us just staying friends.

“Hi.”

“Hi.”

She apologized and explained why she was late, how she was helping her sister find a dress for a wedding, how an autistic child was throwing a temper tantrum and she had been trying to calm him down. I nodded and probably felt as deflated as that boy.

“No worries,” I said. “At least you’re here now.”

The Thai restaurant took us a minute to walk to. It was a footrace to see who got to open the door first. She won.

I asked for a table, and she was quick to finish my mumbling sentence, “—for two, please.”

The restaurant was deserted, and she headed for the front. The sunlight came at us through the windows in waves.

"So," I smiled. "How have you been? How's life?"

"Well…" she grinned. And then she began. She began with Europe. Hitchhiking from Paris to Amsterdam, befriending an heiress' daughter in Belgium, clubbing in Marseilles. Meeting one of our highschool classmates living in Switzerland with his beautiful French girlfriend, working on SpaceX.

With each detail, I was surprised, suspicious, jealous even. I asked her if she had pictures, I had to see proof, it seemed so… grand, so interesting, so risk taking, so alive. She showed her phone: images of the Sahara desert. The nomadic natives had sent her to the nearest town, and asked her why she was there. I asked her why too. She shrugged and said, "I just wanted to."

She had worked odd jobs, a research assistant gathering finches in the desert, tree planting in New Zealand, a secretary for a hotel in the Blue City of Morocco. Every journey documented with her smile and life, a new detail with every picture, a different experience.

She'd asked me if I had my heart broken. I shrugged. "Some dates on… Hinge? That's it."

She'd asked what my goals were. I planned to move out to a condo not far from us, down the street, once it had been built a few months from then. I wanted to work for myself, do the things I loved like designing books and their covers and write my own stories.

I thought of my own life, settling into the start of my career, working in an office, cold even in the summer by the vacuum-like air conditioners, where the biggest risk was meeting the delivery man outside for my lunch. It was not wonderful, not different, just the same. Safe.

I asked her if she had been… okay. If it was dangerous at all, she was alright.

She was quiet. "There was a time…"

I listened and tried not to grimace, just bunched my eyebrows together and covered my face with my fists. She hadn't gone through anything bad, not terribly. Just a Canadian woman hitchhiking through parts of Europe and Africa, alone. I asked if we should get the bill, after knowing there was no harm, no bad intentions, before there were bad intentions known.

I didn't want to know the things she'd seen, the other side of the world that wasn't safe, wasn't bright and documented. Maybe it's what was always there, the risk of trying to find beautiful truths, that there were also hideous ones as well.

We noticed the restaurant was quiet. There was no one else, except for us. I turned back to the girl, and she was standing with a hopeful smile.

Behind her, the windowed front of the restaurant didn't show the busy street, but two different views from each glass wall: the Sahara desert, sand dunes so far and distant and beautiful. The other side showed my office, rows of cubicles and gray walls and fluorescent lights.

She had held out her hand. "Come with me."

I just looked down. "I'm scared."

She nodded sadly, then walked into the glass wall facing the desert. Her hand, arm, then body passed through the window pane like a liquid portal. Like a computer screen, I saw her walk over the sunny dunes from the other side. She moved away, out of sight, until I found myself staring at nothing but sand, as if it was all a mirage.

I blink.

The dunes are now my desktop background on my work computer, pixels that warm me in its virtual glow. Sometimes, when I stare long enough, I see the girl who walked along the Sahara.