It’s the little things.

As I walk back down the path I’ve walked for a year I’m not alone. I listen to the music fade behind me and the distant laughter. I feel the release of a month’s worth of stress from everyone I pass. All of the sudden I feel a chill in the 95 degree desert air. As I walk I see the faces of friends accompanying me. I silently listen to their conversations and watch as they slowly head off to their rooms leaving me to finish my walk in solitude, just as they did a winter ago.

It’s a strange feeling nostalgia. It’s somewhere between total heartbreak and your happiest memory. The crappy experiences of this past year far outweighed that of the positive. Yet somehow all I seem to recall is the tired smiles and the stories. The times where we got to simply be human again.

Weirdly, I yearn for it. I miss it and I haven’t even left yet. Nothing can compare to this; no bond is similar. These are men and women whom, in reality, I barely know. But we are connected in a soul-bond I don’t think any of us can escape.

The objective was simple: survive. It was easy to give into the dark mental abyss. I wanted nothing more than to isolate myself and not feel the emotional pain of being left behind. Despite my best efforts something about the cool desert nights brought us together like it did the tribesman of olden days. It’s a thing of magic. If you don’t allow yourself that sense of community you lose your sanity, all aspects of identity… perhaps even a sliver of humanity. But here all backgrounds, ages, genders, and races found common ground. Such stress and chaos turned out to be the perfect concoction of dysfunction…a type of addiction almost.

I didn’t realize it then but each moment, each name even, is a script written on my heart, intrinsically repeated in my mind like a spell, forever engrained in my soul. We all left a little bit of our desperation in the well hoping the ones after us won’t have to face as much strife. But this is the exact thing which makes us feel alive. Some may return to the well to look at their past efforts to justify that it wasn’t in vain. Others may never return. But this is a place that will never be forgotten, and it will never let us forget.

Right now I’m ok with all of this. It means I will always be able to remember the familiar in this now somewhat unfamiliar place. I can walk peacefully in the company of my memories, smiling as I silently listen to the conversations of my new acquaintances as they begin to slowly head back to their rooms.