Walking Contradictions
Long story short, there was a kid I knew in middle school who rode the bus with me to a sprawl of desert and dirt where his family raised quarter horses, or maybe they were Arabians, and I’d watch him walk down a long dusty road in his creepers, with his saggy bottom jeans and chain bouncing off his leg, his blue hair gelled into a faux hawk like an exotic bird had landed in the desert and was trying to find its way out, and I’d think how much I wanted to get out too, that maybe we were all just birds bouncing around these self-contained greenhouses, needing a window to be opened, the way we girls imagined ourselves in a childhood game of MASH, picking a number, counting and circling our futures, whether we’d live in a mansion, apartment, shack, or house, knowing we should want the very best of the best, that shacks were ruins off an even longer dirt road, and mansions were home base, slick with city lights, but for every category we’d have to add one poor choice so we’d end up with an oxymoron, a mansion and an AMC Gremlin to put in our five-car garage, or we’d get our dream job but be forced to marry the nose picker and come home to a sniveling brood, and I’m not even sure dream job was a selection, maybe we didn’t even allow ourselves to dream that big, maybe it was just number of kids we’d produce instead—cars, living arrangements, spouse, and kids—that’s all for us girls in the ’70s and ’80s.
Anyway, I completely forgot about this boy with a blue faux hawk and pointy suede shoes, didn’t think about him for entire decades as I flew away and lived along the East Coast thinking I was worldly, as if leaving your hometown makes you a better person, and maybe it does, or maybe contrast is all you crave when you’re young, using it as a disguise, a gimmick, then a necessary journey to find your place, but I thought about him when I moved back and saw how much everything had changed: the desert littered with golf courses and resorts, the brittlebushes and creosote bulldozed for wine bars and luxury apartments, and that horse farm from long ago turned into a Home Depot. The whole thing didn’t hit me until I needed flowers one day and found myself there in Home Depot’s greenhouse looking for anything that could last in the 110-degree heat—I was standing on that dirt road where he’d walked, quarter horses or Arabians on either side of him, and I looked around at all the flowers on display, at these tropical and coastal flora wishing to be somewhere else, having no business in the desert, as if they had any chance of survival under the Sonoran sun, and I picked up a prickly pear cactus I’d been eyeing and left with it strapped in the passenger seat of my Honda Pilot, driving past the acres of grass with their sputtering sprinklers and corner sign holders, twirling ads in furry costumes under the blaze of heat hoping that boy, now a man, found a road he could walk down, his blue hair piercing the sky.
Sabrina Hicks (@desertdwellera3) lives in Arizona. Her work has appeared in Matchbook, Pithead Chapel, Pidgeonholes, 100 Word Story, MoonPark Review, Ellipsis Zine, and other publications. More of her work can be found at sabrinahicks.com.