For my birthday, Bear and I go to the desert. We drive through Fontana and Redlands, then continue further east. Billboards alternate between Palm Springs luxury condos and local dentists. We pass the churning windmills, the casino that erupts out of nowhere, the strip malls that become more and more isolated. Advertisements for fat freezing. Guns for sale. Appliance outlets, computer repair. A Confederate flag flaps wildly behind the antenna of a monster truck next to us. After a while, the roads become sand and we have to slow down to a bumpy snail’s pace. We see the shell of a building blackened by fire, an orange Lay-Z-Boy sitting in the middle unharmed.

“Do we have reception?” I realize the music has stopped and we haven’t spoken for a while.

“Two bars,” Bear says.

Two is enough and though we’re unsettled by the desolation, we’re comforted when we find the house we’re staying in, a desert chic bungalow with concrete floors, full of happy midday sun and Aztec-inspired throw pillows. A record player sits under a blown-up black-and-white photo of a ’70s musician I don’t quite recognize on a peyote trip. The shelves in the white-tiled kitchen display a French press, a bag of locally roasted coffee beans.

We unpack, then mix whiskey and root beer in mason jars and take out our watercolors and pastels in the kitchen. Bear makes coral and teal dashes coming down like rain on paper that curls at the edges. We open the French doors onto the back porch and listen to the silence. It thunders and roars.

The next day we come back to the house at 5:30 after a late lunch at the Joshua Tree Saloon to find the power out. It’s nearing twilight. Bear goes around the side of the house and tries flipping the fuse. Nothing.

“I can hear someone’s generator on,” Bear says, coming back inside. “It must be out for everyone.”

We grab our camping headlamps from our backpacks and pull them over our heads. I look out the window and see cars bobbing in the distance on the main road and wonder how long it would take for the police to get here if anything happened. I feel exposed, the daylight disappearing, the beams from our lamps sweeping like lasers through the house.

I think of the gun shops and the orange chair in the burnt-out building and feel prickly. As it gets darker, we watch as little lights pop up from the desert, revealing that we do have neighbors around. Not too close, but close enough. I think how these lights are not comforting, how light can be warm and sweet like the orbs of fireflies, but it can also be harsh and unflattering, revealing an ocean floor rife with deep sea creatures.

Bear tweets to the power company, asking when we can expect it to come back in our area. We sit on the couch, huddled close with our books. The quiet of the desert is nothing like the quiet of the woods or suburbia or loneliness or death. We read for a while, then brush our teeth. It’s seven o’clock. There is nothing we can do. We go to bed.

A month after the trip to the desert, our country elects the forty-fifth president. We don’t know what to do or where to start. We are disappointed and angry and hurt. These feelings last a long time, worsening as we start to understand why it happened, how. We watch with dread; we stew and balk. We retreat.

At work, I’m hurtled into a promotion, where I’ve been put in charge of managing people. It wasn’t anything I’d ever wanted to do, just one of those situations where someone leaves and suddenly there’s a few people who need to be told what to do every day. I don’t feel qualified to be anybody’s manager, so I try to make up for it by working the hardest, staying the latest. We hold standup meetings in the mornings, each of us rattling off our projects for the day. Sometimes we meet outside in the quad, and the air is cool on our skin.

I often work through lunch until my stomach growls so loudly that I bolt down the stairs to the gas station next door with the deli. I wolf down turkey sandwiches on the back patio. I have a creeping feeling like I’m just barely holding on, waiting for something terrible to happen. And that’s just it—terrible things are happening in the world. Travel bans turning refugees away, nuclear threats on Twitter, people no longer believing in the science of climate change. But it’s easy to work so much that the news you scroll through fades when your eyes close at the end of the night.

It’s warm again, too warm. The California summer is sticky and volatile. He’s firing FBI directors and banning transgender people from the military. In Charlottesville, we see the incensed faces of white supremacists glowing orange from the light of tiki torches, the type we used in college to decorate for tropical-themed parties.

We live in a stuffy attic apartment with no air conditioning in a city that never needed it before, like many coastal cities where the temperature has been rising each year. One scorching Sunday, it’s 90 degrees by eleven in the morning, and as we drive by the park down the street, we see an elderly couple lying under a tree. No blanket or umbrella to shield them from the elements, just two bodies on the ground. We stop the car and walk over to them.

“Do you want some cold water?” We hold out a plastic bottle.

No, the old woman insists. She swats us away like flies and looks at us with clear eyes.

“Our car is air conditioned. Do you want to cool down in there?”

We’re fine, she says, and the man doesn’t say anything.

We’re fine, she repeats.

At home, we make a swamp cooler out of a stack of sweating blue ice in a bowl, a fan blowing over the top. We treat ourselves to trips to the ocean and In-n-Out and look at the waves. Buy pink peonies that look pretty even when they’re dying.

It’s snowing. We watch the flakes fall toward us, look up at the millions of tiny white dots turning cottony as they make their way down. It’s slow and it’s silent.

In the fall, Bear and I drove up the 5 and stopped in Portland, a city that had its own too-hot summer, its own rabid wildfires, its own devastating hate crime. The smoke had just cleared when we arrived in early October, the air faintly tinged with ash and haze. From our new apartment, we watched the leaves outside turn a brilliant golden yellow.

There’s been another school shooting, but this time it’s different. The students are on the news, gaining followers, giving fervent speeches through their tears. #MeToo has bolstered us. We believe that black lives matter and signs in windows tell us others believe so too. Now we rise and we speak and we create and we hold ourselves together with the words of women we admire. We send out signals to connect with people who believe in acceptance, who see that light is love. We remember the powerless night in the desert and keep moving forward with one ear open, listening for the quiet.

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