Long are the nights that stretch between me and January. In Arizona, with my family — the air was dry and still, as if waiting for something. The skin on my nose was peeling in the shape of a jagged, rocky island, and little red dots were crawling between my shoulder blades like ants in the sand. In my head I heard all of your voices like music, and in my dreams I saw all of your faces moving like a silent film. I was sad in a quiet way, and lonely in a loud one. Phoenix — a low and hesitant city; I watched it breathe sputtering breaths from the top of Piestewa Peak and thought about February in New Jersey. 

Now, here, I long for that quiet month I spent in paradise, or some such place — where the cacti reach endlessly up toward God and the yellow dirt cracks from frowning too much. There, my mother was a little girl again, and so was I. She — home, at last, among her siblings and dying relatives — and me — trying to make out my real life beyond the endless, beige horizon. She and I would run through the neighborhood on the weekends, and afterward pretend we were going to buy a house. I pitied the poor realtors we swindled, but it felt good, in a sense, to assume for a moment an air of permanence. Such a strange concept, that we could have forever there. Infernal summers and our massive, furry white dog — an angel in heat stroke, every day of July. Me, on the patio, with a book in my lap — The Brothers Karamozov, for eternity. My older sister watching TV in the pool house at 3 A.M again, or out at a punk show in Scottsdale on a Wednesday. Our oldest sister, periodically visiting, always in love. My mom — on her birthday, with an older sister on either side. For two weeks, we played house in the Airbnb and dreamed up a life we’d never have. 

The days were long and the hours ran into each other like bumper cars. I closed my eyes and let it happen; let the sun sink into my rough skin on the patio. I played Blood Orange on the speakers and drank iced hibiscus tea, its astringent flavor dampened by melting ice cubes. When I got bored I would walk to the chicken shop. Formless fried soy protein, the vague impression of food. I’d eat it on the glass dining table and wait for my sister to wake up. At night she and I sat in hot water in the backyard— red lights and jets made the surface look like magma. She said she wished she had real friends again; like the kind she had in high school.  Too close and too alike not to love one another too much and in all the wrong ways. I nodded and put my head underwater. 

I spent those weeks peering out the balcony of my mind onto Edgemont Street and feeling the wind against my face. There, I had no one and was no one, and it didn’t matter, because real life was when I closed my eyes. I dreamt of an old friend in a New York flat and later of a new one in the basement of New South. A few nights afterward — my old Spanish partner was behind the desk at the dentist’s office and my academic advisor was serving me tiny, precious dishes in a Michelin-star restaurant. The night after the Bright Eyes show, the whole thing replayed in my head, only with the people I wished I’d been with instead. In Arizona my imagination was overactive, melancholic, digging its heels in.  Never once did I dream of my family or the barista I saw every morning at the coffee shop down the road. There was snow in the city and mist over the woods behind my house. There were no long, tangled city freeways and no putridly-sweet prickly pear desserts. Those days I spent in Arizona, but those nights I clawed my way out, again and again. 

I dreamt of my roommate on a train platform, checking for food in her teeth with her phone camera. Don’t watch me do that, she said, cheeks flushed with embarrassment, and swatted me away. A quiet moment, plucked from a memory buried in gray matter. Over the break, we talked on the phone once or twice, I think. I remember listening to her disembodied voice talk in circles about internship applications and eating club anxieties as I absent-mindedly traced my fingertips along the ridges of my textured bedspread — a nauseating coral color. The Wi-Fi was spotty; she told me she’d call me back but never did. 

The girl in my dream and the voice on the phone — who were they to each other? 

I watched Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind just after New Year’s. Afterward I scrolled through the Letterboxd reviews, but no one was saying what I was thinking. It was this — Clementine, the real woman, is hardly in the movie at all. Kate Winslet plays Joel’s impression of his ex-lover, the part of her that goes on living in his mind. It’s this idea of her that attempts to help him save his memories of their relationship. As if this vestigial version of her had a will of her own, as if the vague memory of a person can desire to exist and deserves to exist. It’s more complicated than a simple question of object permanence — when someone exits my line of sight, when we hug goodbye or hang up the phone, I know that they don’t cease to exist. But they also don’t cease to exist to me. More alone than I’d ever been, I still heard the low thrum of overlapping voices in the back of my mind. I felt the gentle pressure of my loved ones’ feet as they tiptoed back and forth across the folds of my hippocampus — a constant, dull ache behind my eyes. 

I carried my friends with me to Arizona in the bottom of my well-worn suitcase. But where were they, really? Living their own lives, in Seattle, D.C., California, or Connecticut. On dates, in job interviews, and at family dinners they went on living — I was sure of that. Who, then, were the shadows in my peripheral visions — the voices in my dreams and the faces I sometimes saw projected against my eyelids? Just petrified impressions, fashioned of the substance of my imagination, and waiting patiently for proximity to reanimate them? Where did our friendship live — on brief, garbled phone calls, or in my head once the line disconnected? There was a Lauren in a Barnes and Noble in L.A and a Lauren on a gusty train platform somewhere deep inside my mind, checking her teeth on her phone screen. And if that second girl disappeared, what would the first one mean to me? How much of loving someone is imagining them? 

These are the questions I rolled over in my idle palms in Arizona, in January. In the botanical gardens, my aunt told me that cacti only breathe after the sun goes down. I wondered if I too wasn’t holding my breath all day, waiting for the faces that would appear in my dreams — each night one long exhale. To see and be seen, to stand shoulder to shoulder, to feel laughter low in my stomach and heavy in my chest. I wondered if I could go on like this forever, or if eventually I’d forget the faces, the voices, and wind up talking to a hundred different versions of myself. I wondered if I wasn’t doing that already. 

There, in Arizona, in January, I was alone — but I loved you all. I loved to fill the hours I spent sunning on the lawn, at family gatherings and in the spaces between dull conversations. In Arizona I loved you from a thousand miles away. In Arizona I loved you with the city’s arid hands around my neck.  Somewhere in the sunset over Tuscon I swear I saw your face. Walking down Central as the wind howled, I heard your voice say my name and smiled. In Arizona I loved you even if you didn’t know, even if you didn’t care. In Arizona I was alone but you were there.