You have come to the opening of the Maze. There are no instructions. There is no map. You have been here before – and you will be here again. Or not.

The Mojave desert sun is soft. It might be November. Or mid-March.

You may have brought yourself here with nothing but paper and pen. Perhaps not even that. Still, you have used your phone to take this picture, so you open up email. You begin to write a message to the person who needs it most. Dear one, I am finally here. I am alone. In that, I feel safe for the first time since we humans became plague vectors. I take off my mask and take in deep breaths of this fine dry air.

The first time I drove with a friend through the Mojave, I couldn’t breathe. There was so much nothing. Too much nothing. Now, there is precisely enough nothing. There is enough nothing to contain my patience – a patience which contains my fear that I contain nothing; a nothing which I have tried to fill with all the usual busyness and addictions.

For the last two years, I have contained a plague-induced near-silence that I thought would drive me insane. Or, perhaps, a fear-of-the-plague induced insanity that nearly silenced me. Now, I look at the picture of the Maze and feel myself standing there. Without needing to be anywhere else. Without fear. And, with stories.