Found In Joshua Tree

I went back to Joshua Tree last week to show it to Mr. International.

At first, I told myself it was just a way to escape the chaos of living back at home with my boyfriend for over a week. All of a sudden, $130 to sleep in a yurt in complete nothingness was sounding like a small price to pay for peace. What I didn't quite grasp was the absolute wonder of a parallel paradigm this trip was going to be.

One of the first stories I ever wrote for this column was titled "These Two In The Joshua Tree." It was about going there for the first time with my two best girlfriends, our final hoorah before I took off to Barcelona. The core of the trip, and then the story, was U2's "I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For," off the album of course called The Joshua Tree.

As Mr. International and I headed down the 101, a hilarious memory came flooding back. I could see it so vividly: Miranda and I in the front seat of her convertible, Samantha in the back, blasting our favorite songs. The core memory that rushed in was Miranda and me at the one-hour mark of the drive, which was also the one-hour mark of a conversation about our future husbands. I looked down at my map to see how long Mr. International and I had been driving, and thought, god damn, we literally worried about that for that long.

From memory, sharpened by rereading the column just now, we were stuck on a repeat loop: how we were going to break trauma bonds, find someone we actually wanted to spend our life with and believed we could even grow alongside, how many soulmates we truly have, and whether ours was ever coming. Turning 20 seemed like the end of searching and the start of having to tie the knot. All of which Samantha kindly answered with "shut the fuck up, we are 19," after which the conversation got tabled for the rest of the trip (at least the parts she was around for).

I started telling Mr. International the memory and found myself gawking at how distant it felt. A memory of a self I no longer was. Of a girl who didn't know a thing about true love, who couldn't have imagined what was coming for her.

And that is precisely what I find so funny about life. The things that concerned us can truly go out of style. They can become so last year. The body and spirit that would have rocked them are no longer there, and they’re in need of a new trend. So that's exactly what I did. Wearing my new graffitied overalls and a big sun hat, I drove down the road with my present from Barcelona and decided to become this season’s model.

We arrived at the yurt, which sadly looked very different from the marketing. The nice bathroom I had somehow believed was connected to the tent turned out to be a porta-potty without a shower. After mild complaints and some laughter, Mr. International and I realized we did have something money can't buy: pure quiet.

That first day, we truly didn't say much, beyond an essential starlit conversation about aliens and the universe and an excited "look!" when the restaurant fate redirected us to turned out to have a Vegas-style Elvis in it. We were purely present. Present in the fact that this battlefield for love has been conquered again and again, first by finding it, something so pure, and then by preserving it no matter the distance and all the barriers thrown our way.

The next day, I woke up to Mr. International going, "Hurry, love, it's 8 am, we have to get to the national park!" Fucker. It was 5:50 a.m. Hey, at least he knows how to get me up, and that will only come in handy for the rest of our lives.

Soon, we found ourselves in something that, once again, had been advertised online as entirely different. And like last time, it was all in what we didn't see. Marketed as an easy trail to a beautiful dam full of water, it set us off into the rock abyss, and soon we were bouldering for hours. While horrifying at many points, and yes, Mr. International did put his hand through a cactus, the romance of him taking the leap of faith from one rock to the next and turning around to grab my hand so I could survive the journey was to die for. Literally.

Eventually, we accepted there was no possible way this led anywhere good, and we traversed treacherously back, only to find a walking trail full of babies and grandparents leading to an empty dam that had dried up decades ago. After a good laugh, Mr. International said, Don't worry, this will make a good column: ‘Lost In Joshua Tree.’

And it did make a good column. Only I wasn't lost. I was in Joshua Tree and found. I had found what I was looking for. I finally have a male soulmate, and my female soulmates are burning stronger in my heart even when it's memory that holds us together right now.