I once thought that if I ever returned to the Arizona desert, I’d be a lone biker in a leather jacket. I thought I’d be an invisible hiker, a silhouetted figure, descending a slithering trail to a place outside time. I thought I’d find stillness in the roaring waters, peace in the moon-cast shimmer, the essence of existence in the Colorado River.

I don’t think I understood the difference between quietness and silence.

I want barely echoing footsteps slightly out of sync with mine, metallic jingles from the fluttering zippers of your bag when I trick you into turning, the sight of your laughter when we descend into the valley and I say “I think we’ve hit rock bottom”—neither of us can hear each other over the waterfall but we don’t stop for ages.

I don’t think I realized I want the quietness of abundance, not the silence of emptiness.

I want us to camp at the bottom of the canyon (away from the river—2 a.m. confessions aren’t meant to be shouted), where we’ll live the moment of every coming-of-age movie when the universe unravels around us. We’ll gaze at the stars, and I’ll tell you about the time I ran around a beach stargazing with Stellarium on my phone, looking for Aries overhead until my battery died and left me trudging through the sand in darkness.

Some time later, between me reciting old poems and you composing new poems, I’ll burst into laughter, and you won’t even pause to question it before joining me.

Have you ever heard of the frog in the well?

Of course I—are you comparing us to frogs?

And then the clock strikes 2 a.m. and I think I love your pact with words and I wish I could make one too but I’ve only ever known how to make contracts where loss precedes glory and one day I’ll run out of things to lose and it will be the end of me but you’ll be something great and tomorrow we’ll be on diverging paths—

(I blink.
There in the sky hangs Aries overhead.)

but tonight,
in this moment out of time,
we’ll be frogs in the well and
claim this sliver of sky,
just for us.