Sedona
By: Annie Kemper
Tags: Travel, Pandemic, Hiking, Sex, Relationships

Once the city limits were in my rearview, the roads became pitch black. It was roughly 100 miles from the Phoenix airport to Sedona. Straight desert lined both sides of the highway, the darkness littered with the sharp outlines of cacti, shrubs, and other fauna so unfamiliar to me I felt like I just touched down onto a different planet. Every so often, I flicked on my brights to ensure I wasn’t about to rear end a car I simply could not see. The music was blasting to help me stay awake, which was ridiculous. I was wired, and had been since eight that morning.

I texted Paul through CarPlay. My voice sounded strange to my own ears, tinged with anxiety.

“Are you antsy?” I asked out loud to the empty car.

Two minutes later, Siri’s ever-calming, ever-present voice filled the speakers.

“Paul said, ‘A-li-tle.’ Would you like to respond?”

“No.”

A small yet grand, impulsive yet highly mulled over, semi-secret Christmas present to myself, I decided to touch down in Sedona for three nights on my way back to Los Angeles. I am not a camper, nor am I particularly outdoorsy. I don’t have an affinity towards crystals, and I’m unfortunately not part of a socioeconomic class that would allow me to book a room in one of the 900 dollar a night, immaculately curated spa resorts sprinkled across this strange town.

I was driving alone in the middle of the desert because a man from my past unexpectedly came roaring back into my present about a month prior. He was a cocktail combination of a friend with benefits / sexting companion / “situationship.” I am deeply embarrassed to admit I did discover that term on Tik Tok.

It doesn’t really matter what we were. The truth is, we were not really anything. We connected over the holidays for reasons which were not lost on me. He was separated from his wife, getting a divorce. I was single and back on the East Coast with family, with no real prospects and no promising push notifications from Hinge and Tinder. Also, there was a global pandemic happening and apparently those fuck you up. They make you long to get completely lost in someone, or to bake bread, depending on what type of person you are.

There are two types of women. Those who grew up having crushes on various male authority figures, and those who didn’t. Arguably, this could be simplified into those who have daddy issues and those who don’t. Personally, I’ve never bought into the cliche that our actions can be explained away by a one-off pop psychology phrase. We all have daddy issues.

I’m not talking about confessing in a giggly wine haze the desire to makeout with your best friend’s older brother, or thinking that one friend of your father can get it even though he’s “old.” I’m referring to a constant and steady stream of attraction towards most teachers and professors, bosses, older coworkers, personal trainers who exclusively wear red Converse high tops.

Inevitably, these girls become adults. Not like the “I’m 18 now and of legally consenting age” adult. Or even the “I’m 22, the world is my oyster, and I just bought my first vibrator” adult. Eventually, we find ourselves looking at the more dimly lit side of our 20's. We kind of know how health insurance works. And sometimes we wake up, look at ourselves in the mirror, and realize we could have this person if we wanted to. We have autonomy.

I did it for fun. I did it because I could. I was curious about what it would be like to be in bed with a man who had never used a dating app. Someone who is closer to my parents age than he is to mine. Someone who had not been inside another woman in seven years. That knowledge was intoxicating to me.

The first thing I did after I got to my hotel room was lightly beg over the phone to the concierge for a bottle of rosé even though it was after hours. And maybe even an order of fries if the kitchen was willing and if it wasn’t too much to ask. All the while I was washing the airplane off me with a warm, damp washcloth and rifling through the clothes in my duffle bag with my left foot.

Twenty minutes later, Paul knocked on the door so lightly I thought it was all in my head. But there he was. He greeted me in a chipper tone I had never heard him use before, which made me laugh. We kissed lightly on the lips in an almost too familiar way. Out of the various scenarios I had played over in my head of what our first kiss would be like, that was not one of them. It felt so comfortable. I told him to sit down, relax, and take his coat off. He proceeded to then walk around and inspect the room with his hands behind his back in a quintessential old man way. He pulled open one of the curtains and peeked his head through, taking in the still golf course that had been swallowed by the night.

His mannerisms presented themselves again, and it was like watching a memory suddenly come back to me. He still fidgeted in his clothes, pulling at the center of his shirt in a tic-like way, still insecure of his height and the space he took up. His salt and pepper hair was as unruly as ever. His brown eyes were steady and unwavering. Confident.

I lounged on the bed and sipped my wine, allowing him the space to come to me whenever he was ready.

“You look the same,” I said.

“Yeah?” he questioned as he folded and then refolded his coat on the sofa.

“How about me? Do I look any different?”

He grinned. “No.”

I was slightly offended by the finality of his answer, and I think he saw the flash of annoyance cross my face. Haven’t I grown more beautiful with age? Couldn’t he see I finally figured out how to style my curly mop of hair or that I had just had my eyebrows waxed?

I watched as he moved to the foot of the bed, climbed on top of me, and set my wine glass aside, all in one fell swoop.

“You didn’t like that answer?”

“Hello,” I whispered in return as I pushed up my body to meet his, beginning to wrap my legs around his waist. I realized I could now touch him wherever I wanted to. So that’s what I did.

In a past life, he was my boss. He managed the cafe I worked at when I lived in Austin in my fresh out of college years. I think he was both charmed and annoyed by me, leaning heavily towards the annoyed end. I was just another young millennial siphoning off Austin culture, catching the tail end of what was then an entirely different city.

Of course I was attracted to him, but I was twenty-two and attracted to everyone. I flirted with him innocently, knowing he would never reciprocate. Our rapport was effortless and quiet. I liked that he drove a Subaru and that there were holes in the wrists of every single sweater he owned. He had final say on the music the staff queued on the shared cracked iPod, and I would constantly attempt to lure him out of hiding by putting on a particularly horrendous song. He liked to come in early in the mornings, sleepy eyed, always a cup of drip coffee first. About an hour later he would emerge from the office and ask whoever was on the bar to make him a whole milk cortado.

We kept in touch sporadically after I moved to LA and he to Flagstaff, always picking up on the dropped conversation where we left off with no judgement or hurt feelings, no matter how much time had passed.

I reached out on election night, rather, one of the election nights. I congratulated him on the prospect of his great state of Arizona flipping, taunting him for probably nursing a whiskey and getting his news through the static dusty holes of a radio. It turns out, he was nursing a whiskey, and he was keeping up with the coverage, but alone. His marriage was over. I offered to help him set up a Hinge profile, to hold his hand through the new terrain that was dating apps. He assured me he would never be doing so. I laughed, knowing with utter certainty that he would be.

About a month later, I heard a former coworker was taking a road trip out West and planning on stopping in Arizona to see Paul. A flare of jealousy sparked in my belly. Later that night, out of boredom, loneliness, and restlessness, I texted him. I asked him if he was planning on sleeping with her. He was incredulous.

He replied, “I like that you think 25 year olds are trying to fuck me.”

I said, “You would be surprised.”

He teased me for acting jealous. I denied it halfheartedly. He tread carefully, unable to detect if I was joking or not. I said he must have known I always had a crush on him. He played dumb, or actually was dumb. That’s how it started. Both of us tiptoeing towards some invisible line until we both were certain there really wasn’t a line either one of us wouldn’t cross.

At the risk of stating the obvious, Sedona is incredibly beautiful. Like, I need to pull over to the side of the road and just stare at this vast rock kind of beautiful. While Paul went to work in Flagstaff during the day, I slept in and drank strong black coffee in bed. I went on these possessively beautiful hikes. My ankles hurt because I was wearing trendy Nike sneakers instead of hiking boots. My face gathered a light, tan sheen from kicking up the red clay. My lips turned dry and cracked from mouth-breathing in the dry desert air as I lugged myself up the side of mountains, in search of those five minutes of blissful and existential peace that comes from staring at an incredible view.

Perhaps I was searching for some sort of answer to why I was here. Why I was doing what I was doing. All I found were these colossal natural formations ever so calmly staring back at me, a long skinny cigarette dangling from their proverbial lips, cooing, “It doesn’t really matter why, does it?”

A mini routine formed when I got back to the hotel each afternoon. I sat in the whirlpool bathtub for as long as I could bear it until I was on the verge of passing out from the heat and devastating fluorescent lighting. I would then lie down in the middle of the freshly made, king size, spectacularly ugly hotel bed in a thinning bathrobe and drift off for an hour or so until my phone buzzed. It was always Paul, letting me know he was making his way down the mountain, on his way to me.

The first night we spent together I rolled over in the middle of the night just to look at him. Men always look younger when they’re sleeping, their faces miraculously de-aging with rest. He seemed childlike, the crisp white hotel sheets pulled tightly around him and all the way up, so only the top of his head was peeking out. He was cold. I had stolen the duvet in the middle of the night. His seven-year-old border collie was warm and curled up at the foot of the bed, lightly snoring. The room had an electric fireplace I could turn on and off with a lightswitch. The flames’ shadows danced across the ceiling throughout the night.

On our last night together, he brought over all the supplies to make me a proper Old Fashioned, and I watched in content laziness as he assembled the drinks and sliced off orange peels with his pocket knife. We nursed them slowly as I rested my head across his legs in the bed and told him about my hikes. He told me things I didn’t know about him. His mother was currently in her fourth marriage. His father died suddenly when he was around the age I am now. I began to understand better why he seemed to be processing his divorce the way he was. He had not allowed himself to grieve or mourn anything, including the dissolution of his marriage. He was the type of man who just carried on.

Naturally, I had countless questions. I asked them in an anthropological sort of way, fascinated by both his and his ex’s behavior, especially when they both knew it was the end. I had never been in love, so the concept of wanting to be with one person forever seemed so foreign and out of touch to me.

“I think you have the right to leave a relationship whenever you want to for whatever reason,” he said. He paused and looked at the ceiling. “It doesn’t mean it’s not still really, really sad.”

In turn, he was endlessly curious about what dating was like for me. He wanted to know what the men in LA were like, and I told him there were no men. Just boys who continued to inflict themselves with Peter Pan Syndrome year after year. I flashed him a goofy smile to acknowledge the bitterness in my voice, perhaps even the irony of the situation. He perceived me and I perceived him, and I’m positive there were moments during our weekend together where we were inhabiting entirely different spaces, relishing in each other’s company for our own separate reasons.

On my last hike, I came upon a couple sitting side by side at the top of the canyon, taking in the same view together. They didn’t move or speak to one another. They didn’t turn towards each other once. They were just present, experiencing the moment in perfect unison both separately and together at the same time. I began to feel uncomfortable, maybe even embarrassed, like I had accidently walked in on two people sharing an intimate moment.

Undoubtedly, Paul had shared a countless amount of these moments with his partner of seven years. She used to drop by the cafe every now and then on her ride home from work, her cycling shoes clacking against the beaten wood floor, peeking her head into the office, looking for her husband. I used to think how nice it was that they had found each other. Mostly, I was impressed Paul had managed to find a woman so beautiful with such wonderful hair that would put up with his persistent grumpiness and wrinkled clothing.

I experienced that moment on top of the canyon alone. I went to Sedona not just to see Paul but also to have one of these moments with myself. It’s difficult to explain, but I just knew I would. I never want to lose that. I never want to lose the indescribable feeling that goes with deciding to trust your gut, to follow something that just feels right, even if it’s difficult to rationalize or justify.

Driving back to Phoenix, after a timid goodbye and the floating idea of another weekend, in another month, in another desert, I was able to see the full beauty of the Sonoran landscape in the daylight. I needed to mentally prepare for my return to LA and for a quarantine in my tiny studio, no roommate in sight to lift me out of my post-holiday, post-sex vacation blues.

I made the easy mistake of texting my most active friend group message. I told them my Sedona jaunt was officially over. The texts came pouring in.

“Where did you leave things?”

“Did you catch feelings?”

“Will you see each other again?”

A heartburn-like feeling of irritation arose in me, shattering my reflective mood. Of course they meant well. They were just checking on me. I had no answers for them, and I wasn’t quite sure how to explain that perhaps the entire point of the trip was to purposefully not have any answers. Just to be.

I got back to my apartment during magic hour and paused to take a photo of this quaint slice of the city I had grown to love, soaking up a moment of gratitude bathed in premium lighting. I felt grateful I had chosen to straighten up before leaving for the holidays so I could come back to something steady, clean, balanced. My body was sore from hiking, my hair greasy from the plane. I took off all my clothes and nestled in bed, giddy about the prospect of ordering a pizza, knowing full well it would temporarily ease my anxiety about rejoining reality. It did.