When I opened the car door, the wind did the rest, pulling it nearly into the car next to me. I watched the cars and trucks on the freeway glide back and forth trembling against the high winds. This was the kind of place where fast-food restaurants were lined up in a row next to gas stations that tried to edge each other out by the penny. Standing in the sun-bleached parking lot, where everything was covered in a thin layer of white dust, staring at the waning light of the sunset, I realized I had been here before. This gas station. Bobby and I had stopped here when we drove to Los Angeles, hopeful about our new life together. And, years before that, it had been where my mother and I had stopped when she helped me leave the city, drug-sick and depleted, to head east toward health and sanity. Now, years later, when I stood in the parking lot, I knew I was better off than when I fled the city for the first time, but I was still in a transient limbo. I tried to stave off these feelings of failure as I stared at this constant in my life, my crossroads a Gulf station covered in the sandy film customary in these struggling desert towns.

I sat with my car door open, watching the sun go down, the wind picking up, and forced myself not to put too much thought into how this place had seen me at my best and, more often, worst. But why was I looking to offer meaning to a meaningless place? I was passing through, yet my visit here felt like some kind of omen. It marked a passage of time at the very least.

Back when Bobby and I had crested the desert hills that would lead us into the Indio Valley on day five of our trek west, I was still feeling buoyed by the WELCOME TO CALIFORNIA sign that we had passed a couple hours before. I knew we were going to hit sunset in the valley, and I was not wrong. The God light breaking through the clouds crowding the immense sky felt like a cinematic homecoming. Dramatic in all the right ways, enough for me to lean over and say to Bobby, “It has to be a sign, no?”