desert love

During three months during the Summer, my boyfriend had to go to Twentynine Palms Desert, California for training. I would drive three hours to visit him weekly on Sundays. The hotel was brown and in the background there were mountains. There was actually two hotels in the same parking lot but they shared the same lobby. There was one young woman working at the front counter, it was always the same woman every Sunday. The hotel was off the main highway, next to a small shopping center. Just ten to fifteen minutes from the Military base he was staying at. The temperature during the day was low 100’s and at night low 90’s. Twentynine is a small town right outside of Palm Springs. Not many people around, just a big Marine Corp. military training base and small mom and pop stores. One warm night, the stars were visitable in the sky and you could hear crickets in the background. We had nothing to do so we decided to go in the hotel hot tub. The hot tub was next to a swimming pool inside of a fence. While being in the hot tub it was getting a little too hot to want to stay in, because it was during the Summer in the desert.

Around ten o’clock he and I were swimming around the pool, there was three teenagers swimming as well and their parents watching on the side. He was wearing black swimwear and I had on a colorful one piece. I remember him getting out to do a flip into the water. As he flipped into the water, he tried to grab my feet and I tried to run to grab the rail. He came up and took my arm off the rail to put me on his back. He smiled at me. As he went around the fool, he made funny boat sounds while I laughed. He would say things like, “we are running up on the wall like matrix” then he tried to run the side of the wall and we went under. I didn’t want to get my hair wet that night but the fact that we were having fun, it was okay. The smell of chlorine was in the air and the dust of wind felt cold against the wetness on my face. Time was standing still, on a July summer night all I saw with just me and my baby, During that moment I feel in love with my boyfriend.