I booked a camel trek across a desert in Rajasthan while travelling in India. But it was well into the hot summer so out of season and I ended up riding alone with two guides. At the end of the first day we stayed in a cabin in the middle of nowhere. The guides dragged the camp beds into the sand out and they sat up well into the night drinking, eating spiced peanuts, and talking. They tried to include me but none of us shared a language, but I was happy to share their warm laughter.

Then they got in a Land Rover that I never noticed was parked behind the cabin. And drove away leaving me with the peanuts and camels.

I reached for my phone and put on MCAIS

That night I lay on the camp bed, the cheap whisky taste still in my mouth and looked up to a sky I never thought possible. That far away from ambient light the sky was a firework display of stars. They don’t tell you how deep the night sky can be, so much so I started to get vertigo. And as the music swelled and dipped, it reached out into my chest laying everything I’d been hiding there out bare, breaking and fixing my heart a million times a song.

Alone in the desert, falling into the sky