Respite

I walk on the desolate desert. All alone. The sun feels as though it's going to burn my skin off. I've been walking in this desert for what feels like my whole life, perhaps it is my whole life I've been trapped in this inferno. My legs are numb. I will fall through the dunes at any moment. The endless dunes, so endless they haunt me. I'm dying, maybe I've been dead, careening and careening with nowhere to go. I stumble upon a Jumping Cholla cluster and reach my hand out to it, but it shoots its spines at me. Spines pierce the skin on my hand and leave me there to bleed. Crimson blood drips from my hand onto the shiny surface of the dune. I look at the puddle of blood and it looks at me. A frail, hopeless and distorted image of a man others would define as 'me', but there are no others.