Loneliness is an Arid Place
The desert is described as “a barren area of landscape where little precipitation occurs and, consequently, living conditions are hostile for plant and animal life. The lack of vegetation exposes the unprotected surface of the ground to the processes of denudation.” [i] In the online Oxford dictionary the action of denudation, to denude, is defined as “to strip something of its covering, possessions, or assets”. [ii]
The word desert, both as verb and noun, is defined as follows:
1. desert, verb:
1.1. abandon (a person, cause, or organization) in a way considered disloyal or treacherous.
1.2. (of people) leave (a place), causing it to appear empty. ‘The tourists have deserted the beaches.’
1.3. (of a quality or ability) fail (someone) when most needed. ‘Her luck deserted her’
1.4. Military; illegally leave the armed forces. ‘His life in the regiment had been such a hell that he decided to desert’
2. desert, noun:
2.1. a waterless, desolate area of land with little or no vegetation, typically one covered with sand.
2.2. a situation or place considered dull or uninteresting. ‘A cultural desert.’
Origin: Middle English via Old French from late Latin desertum ‘something left waste’, neuter past participle of deserere ‘leave, forsake’. [iii]
2
When I was about fourteen years old, my father started a new job in Abu Dhabi, one of the three United Arab Emirates, and moved there with his second wife and her two sons. She was a tall woman, wearing her black hair in an elegant bob. Her clothes were always the colour of grey or beige. I think I had seen her a handful of times before they moved away. Perhaps I only thought of her as tall because my mother was smaller.
My father offered my sister and I to move with them to the UAE, there was a small private German school we could attend. But we didn’t want to join them. My sister was about to graduate the following summer, and I couldn’t think of anything more terrifying than to leave everything remotely familiar behind. Nevertheless, we went for a visit on our Easter holiday from school.
3
There’s a desert on the Arabian Peninsula called Rub’ al Khali — the Empty Quarter. It spans over 650,000 km². On one of the days my father was off from work, we went for a visit.
In the desert, it’s 50°C and there is no shade. The five of us were standing somewhere in The Empty Quarter next to a big white bulky Jeep: my father and his second wife, my elder sister and I, and our desert guide. I’ve never breathed air as hot and dry as this air. This is the desert, I thought, it looks exactly as you would picture a desert. Wherever you turn, there’s nothing but heat. The sun appears to burn from above and below and from within your skin that’s not hidden well enough under the white linen cloths you have wrapped yourself in. My tongue felt dry and wooden. We stood in the middle of a sea of sand, barely able to walk over its surface. Rub’ al Khali, the Empty Quarter. The name was rather fitting — there was no one there but us.
But where did Rub al Khali’s emptiness end? I tried to make out its edge at the horizon, but the heat obscured what should’ve been a clear line. Above the sand dunes, the air flickered, bending the dune’s contours. That’s what I remember. Heat, sand, and silence. For some reason silence weighs heavier in the desert.
4
There was almost no one on the streets of Abu Dhabi—people avoided going out during the day. My sister and I were two blonde teenagers strolling down the street in a deserted city, holding out a thumb for a taxi to go to one of the numerous shopping malls. There were three malls in proximity to my father’s flat. They were large, metropolitan, and air-conditioned. They were almost as empty as the Empty Quarter. We seemed to be the only customers. We went to the mall every day to take long walks. It was too hot to walk the city, to walk the beach promenade, too hot to sunbathe on the rooftop of the 30-storey skyscraper building my father’s flat was in. Although it had a pool. A small pool that was cleaned every day but didn’t look it.
5
What is home?
6
My sister is tired of babysitting me all day and talking to taxi drivers.
“You tell him where we are going,” she says and leans back, “in English.”
I hesitate. Then, I lean forward, clutching the driver’s seat from behind with both hands.
“Al Wahda Mall,” I say, sneaking up on the driver’s right shoulder. He doesn’t understand and starts gesticulating as if in despair, my sister says nothing. I say it again, this time he nods and hits the gas pedal. We are being catapulted through the city.
I didn’t talk to my sister for an hour after that. We silently meandered through the shops and isles of the mall, each avoiding the sellers, each avoiding to look at the other.
When I remember Abu Dhabi, the first image I see is the skyline: glass towers set in sand. They make you squint when you look at them, because they reflect the sunlight, and the sun is relentless. The second thing I think of is a shopping mall.
7
Home is the comfort of the familiar. The essence of feeling at home lies in the feeling of belonging. There’s no being out of place. Everything fits. There’s a notion of normality to it that doesn’t draw attention. It’s a comfortable, reassuring feeling that can easily be taken for granted because it is subtle and unobtrusive. The way to learn what home or the comfort of the familiar is to you is to leave whatever normality you are living in.
8
About twelve years ago, I went to the desert. It was the farthest and furthest from home I have ever been. There was no little prince in the desert, there was only me. The desert is a vast place made of sand. I was fourteen, now I’m twenty-six. It was the first time it occurred to me that life was random. That things could be out of place, dislocated. When I try to remember the desert, several images come to mind and it makes me reflect on what the process of remembering actually is.
First of all, it’s an unreliable process. You can never be quite sure whether it really was as you remember it. Did the contours of the sand dunes flicker in the heat? This uncertainty increases as time passes, and the past is further and further removed from the present moment.
Our experiences are impactful. They make us what we are, they test us, how we handle them says a lot about us. Thus, experiences shape our understanding of who we are. But memories are merely the shadows of experiences. When we want to revisit experiences we are left with memories only. Regarding the unreliable nature of memory, I sometimes wonder how accurate this image of ourselves actually is — independently of our regular self-deceit.
For me, my memories resemble images, photographs even. In this sense, moments are stored as photographs in my mind for safekeeping. Put together they form a film of autobiography. I wonder if everything of the past that we integrated into this narrative of ourselves is to some extent obscured, is, in fact, mostly fiction.
9
I have a mental picture of a city that’s a state that is located next to the Persian Gulf. It’s called Abu Dhabi. The Persian Gulf looks just like any ocean, but when you step into it you realise this is an ocean made from lukewarm tea temperatures. And you reconsider going for a swim. It might not be as refreshing as you would like it to be.
10
I needed to leave what was normal to me, in order to discover what aspects created the notion of home for me, personally. What was it that created comfort for me? I didn’t understand in what kind of familiarity I took comfort in until I left and then re-experienced it.
It was a minor moment. I lived in Istanbul during that time, just for a couple of months in my early twenties. September was hot and humid in Istanbul as you would only expect maritime high summer to be. Walking through the crowded city the salt of the ocean, and sweat settled on my face. The sky was a clear blue, completely cloudless, and, in its pleasantness, it appeared strange to me and foreign. It wasn’t until mid-November when I realised why.
It was cold and rainy, and most days the sky was a solid ceiling of grey. But this wasn’t enough to lift the feeling of strangeness off me. I sat on a stone step in front of a small café on the university campus. I held a cup of hot black tea between my palms. The sun shone white. I could see my breath hover in front of me and the steam rise from the tea. The bad weather in Berlin, the town I’m from, used to bother me. I disliked winter and the cold, I disliked rain. I disliked the fact that you wouldn’t see the sun for maybe two, three months at a stretch. Now, I felt the cold on the back of my hands and I thought, Yes, this feels right.
What is home? It’s familiarity, more precisely a certain comfort that we experience in the familiar. There’s no strain to adapt, and with this, a certain relaxation sets in.
To me, home is the chill of autumn and winter, brisk rain and clouds. If there are no clouds for too long, if it’s hot for too long without interruption something is off. If the weather remains stable for too long, something is off, too—and I’m somewhere else, but I’m definitely not home.
11
I kept a journal during the days I was in Abu Dhabi. I still have it, it’s somewhere stashed away in a box in Berlin. I would like to read it, to leaf through it, but I moved away again recently, to Dublin, Ireland. I doubt I was very committed to writing regularly into the journal, but I remember it being a deep blue notebook, tightly bound, and either it had red ruled paper or I wrote in it with a red-inked pen. I think the latter was the case. I suspect it is mostly empty, I wouldn’t be surprised if there weren’t more than two or three entries in it.
That visit at my father’s new home was definitely the furthest I was from feeling at home myself. Since familiarity and the comfort in the familiar are, to me, the anchors to what it means to be at home, I believe that you’re the furthest from home when everything is strange. When everything is strange and the eerie sense of isolation will not leave you no matter who you are with. I think the furthest place from home, for everyone, is loneliness.
12
My image of Abu Dhabi hasn’t changed although I’m sure the city has. To me, it’s a place void of history. It’s a landscape made of sand, skyscrapers and the absence of people. It’s hot and, to me, entirely uninhabitable. My father lived in the Emirates for almost a decade.
13
Digging into the past like that makes me wonder. These days I keep a regular journal, but even leafing through that I wonder where the coherence in all of this lies. I wonder whether there actually is such a thing as a narrative in our lives.
I think there’s too much randomness in human existence. I don’t actually believe there’s much coherence in anything. I know, at least, that people lack consistency. And I know that whatever comes tomorrow is unpredictable. As a child, I was certain that the routines of my days would never change but would go their peaceful ways. I would have never expected that there’d be a day when my father wouldn’t come home after work anymore.
People do things for a reason, of course. But ultimately, there isn’t much meaning in anything we do, at least there isn’t any great importance to it, I think. We are just getting by. This becomes especially evident to me when I regard the process of remembering, and the process of imagining the future. We are an accumulation of moments. Every one of us carries a myriad of moments with them—past moments, future moments, and one present moment. Take all moments of all people and sweep them up into a heap with a broom in the middle of the floor. Take a good look at the heap. The heap is a mountain that rises high, breaking through the outer shell of the atmosphere, the mountain grows and pierces deep space.
In the face of these mountain-myriads of moments, it’s evident that there’s no special importance to one single moment. Everything’s in flux. One moment replaces the next, and the next, and the next. There’s no need to be attached to one particular moment. The moment will pass when its time has come.
I suspect there is no consistency. I suspect there is no coherence. Perhaps, there’s cause and effect, but the origin of everything lies in the random, lies in the chaos of things. And that’s how, in the end, it will conclude as well.
14
I visited the desert twelve years ago. It was an arid place. It was a dry place. It was hot, my skin was almost burning up in the shrivels of the heat like newspaper in the fireplace.
15
Home for me is the wet, water, rain. I’m standing outside of Dublin castle, holding an umbrella. It’s pouring. Water’s flooding vertically. In the rain, I can breathe. I don’t mind the cold. Temperature is crucial, we are a body in space, after all, we are homoiothermic animals. We depend on temperatures. I don’t mind the chilly, I think a chilly breeze is pleasant. I don’t mind my shoes getting damp. I like it when the sun breaks through the clouds after it rained. I like how the sky darkens before it pours. Without water, there’s no life. And a desert is a place hostile to vegetation, it’s hostile for both flora and fauna. There isn’t much life in the desert.
16
Once I thought if I were a place, I would be a desert. I would be dried out. There would be nobody there. An arid area, dry terrain. A field of sand spanning from horizon to horizon— spread between all the horizons.
But nothing remains the same. A long time ago — a time so long ago it becomes difficult to grasp — even the Sahara Desert was flooded. Maybe it takes a billion years, but there will come a day when water washes over me. I’ll sit at the bottom of the ocean, masses of water around me. I’ll look up into the endless blue, and it will be perfect.
17
The sound of rain falling onto the canopy gives me comfort. Drops drumming onto my umbrella calm me. I don’t mind damp socks after I walked through the wet—I don’t mind at all.
18
I don’t know where I feel the most at home. All I know is that, right now, I’m here, and that it just started to rain again.
[i] Online entry for “desert”, Wikipedia, the free encyclopaedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desert, last accessed on January 12, 2020 at 20:59.
[ii] Online entry for “desert”, Lexico, powered by Oxford, https://www.lexico.com/en/definition/desert, last acceded January 13, 2020 at 12:31.
[iii] Cf. ibid.
Annie Peter is a Dublin-based writer. She studied philosophy and comparative literature in Berlin and is currently working on a poetry collection. A set of her poems was published in Dodging The Rain. Find her on Twitter @Annie_Peter_.
