The Salt on the Tongue

The air at three in the morning has a specific, metallic bite, like licking a cold iron gate in the middle of winter. It tastes of dry earth and ancient, evaporated tides. My skin remembers the feeling of standing in a place where the wind has forgotten how to be gentle, where the silence is so heavy it settles into the marrow of your bones like fine, grey silt. There is a texture to the dark—a rough, splintered quality that scrapes against the senses, reminding you that some things are only fully revealed when the sun stops its interference. We spend our lives trying to fill the void, but there is a profound, aching peace in standing before a landscape that asks for nothing, a place that simply exists in its own skeletal beauty. Does the earth feel the weight of the moon pulling at its skin, or is it just the body that aches for that celestial tug?

Mickey Strider has taken this beautiful image titled Red Hill Three and the Supermoon. The way the light clings to the branches feels like a memory of a night I once walked through. Can you feel the stillness of that desert air?