She loved the desert. The stillness of the air, the gentle quiet that eluded her in the city. Her newfound ability to be unreachable for a few days, courtesy of the scarcity of cell phone towers. The warm air clung to her skin like an old friend, greeting her. Even all these years later, Lydia found herself enamored with the mahogany hues of the rock formations that framed this place. As she drove into town, she took in the familiar sight of the yucca trees. Bristling in the slow breeze, their spiked verdant branches waved her a hello as they twisted in the air.

        She wondered how long those trees had been there; how much life they had seen, how many lives had seen them. She thought about the first people who could have seen them, the ancestors of this place; how much different their lives would have been and what they would say about how things have changed. She let her eyes wander the desert expanse around her as she maneuvered through the cascading almond brown hills. Instinctively, she knew that she was searching for something; she just wasn’t quite sure what yet.

        She felt her shoulders start to relax as she made her way through town. Curving her car with the bends of the roads, she knew that she was finally getting closer. She took her tongue off the roof of her mouth, finally letting herself relax and a breath buried deep beneath her skin released itself from her chest. She exhaled. She strummed her fingers along the steering wheel, letting her body expel all of her anxiety through her fingertips.

    Since her first summer in Joshua Tree, she had made it a point to return once a year. For solitude and renewal, certainly. But there remained something pulling her back to this place, like a magnet buried deep in her belly. Imperceptibly, this was the only place she could still hear her grandmother’s voice. With that, this had become the only place she could truly feel at home.

        But what was home, anyways? Whenever people in the city would ask her where she was from, she had never quite known exactly what to say. Throughout her life, home had been so many different places. Such was the nature of every immigrant daughter, as far as she knew. Home had always felt more like an abstraction or a sentiment, than an actual physical place. In recent years, home felt like little more than a fleeting memory. Barely within her grasp, tickling her memory at different flashing moments throughout her trips. In college, she foolishly believed that home was a person. And what does home look like when every place you would call home is on fire?

        Her mother and grandmother would speak so fervently about going “back home”. A place she knew about in theory, piecing together what she could from photographs in her childhood home and catching glimpses of it on Al Jazeera broadcasts. A place she could almost hear, if she thought long enough about the gentle sounds of coffee beans shifting across the beret met’had. A place she could almost smell, if only she could hold on to the memory of the fragrant notes of onions sizzling in the kitchen, and misir wot bubbling in the steel pot. A continent that most strangers spoke about in hushed, somber tones. She remembered at one point, even her mother and grandmother would speak about it in apologetic tones. Pointing to home as an apology for the thick accents that shaped their voices. She shook her head, the thought of it still stirred something electric within her.

        Soothing herself, she let her mind return to the first night at the cabin. Something in her spirit had shifted that first night she looked up at the stars. She still remembered how she felt stepping on to the front porch, when she craned her neck up towards the sky. She had never seen the stars like this before. If she closed her eyes, she could still remember how they glimmered across the midnight black atmosphere. Beautiful bright orbs millions of miles away, winking at her. They knew me, she let the words rattle around in her head. Whatever she was looking for, she knew she would find it in the night sky.

        Jolted out of the warmth of nostalgia by a stop sign, Lydia careened to an abrupt halt and scanned her surroundings. She was almost there; she had grown to know these muted roads like the back of her hand. She chugged along until finally pulling into her cabin’s driveway. She turned the engine off and made her way inside. Turning to look down towards her watch, she breathed another sigh of relief at the realization of her arrival time. Grateful to have made it just in time for sunset, she placed her things down and hurried to get ready.

        By the time she went back out on to the front porch, she looked straight towards the horizon. The sun had started to make its way home, settling into the furthest point of the skyline. She let herself be consumed by the radiant pinks, purples, and orange hues scattering across the sky. Kneeling down, she steadied herself and grabbed her knees to her chest as she marveled at the world around her. She was sure she had seen thousands of sunsets throughout her life. Still, they continued to render her speechless. There was something so comforting about watching the sun depart, knowing it would return in the morning. She felt the same when she thought about the moon. Her grandmother used to say that Lydia was the sun, destined to leave her at some point, to break her heart. And that she would be her moon, always waiting to catch her whenever the darkness would overtake her.

        Breathless, she walked into the front yard and rolled out her blanket. She threw her journal down, kicked off her slippers and laid down. She had learned over the years that this was the best way to see the sky, to lay completely flat on the ground and to let it completely wash over you. She yearned for that submersion; surrendering herself to her environment was the only way she could quiet all of the noise. Knowing it was the same sun and moon that her ancestors had watched sink in and out of their vision and guided their days, brought her an overwhelming sense of peace. Knowing that these were the same stars her mother had looked at, and her grandmother before her, filled her chest with a warmth she could only locate here. She grabbed her journal and held it to her chest, squeezing her eyes shut. There, she listened quietly and waited as the tightness in her stomach began to settle.

        Slowly, she let her eyes open up and took in the night blanketing above her. She let her eyes traverse across the onyx expanse once more, as each star slowly reappeared, one by one. At some point, she lost track of time. Watching the stars flash on and off, she lifted her fingers to the sky and started to trace the constellations she could remember. The Milky Way came easily to her, jutting across the sky. Her grandmother would say that was God’s paintbrush swiping across the universe. She wondered how far these stars could stretch across the night sky. Turning her head from one side to the other, nightfall seemed endless. Could they reach all the way to the continent she was supposed to speak about in hushed tones? Could they reach the place her grandmother and mother once called “back home”?

        Home was here, somewhere in the stars – she was certain of it. Untouched by humanity, uninterrupted by any grief. In the stillness of the night, she felt the frigid distance in her heart start to warm, bridging the gap between heartbreak and belonging. These were the same stars she had seen that first night. Somehow, she knew intrinsically these had been the same stars her mother and grandmother had seen on their first nights under the stars. She noticed a star wink at her twice, in the way that her grandmother would. Slowly, she felt a whisper tenderly caress her ear: “hello, my sun.”

 

Published May 1, 2026
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.