Scorching sand sifts through my toes. Rolling hills, reminding me of my childhood, cascade through the landscape before me. My waning vision is populated by one lone color: tan.

Daintily, the sky intricately dances along the blurred horizon. Pale blues mix with the tormenting tan, creating a colorful cocktail that spills over the land. My eyes scan my surroundings; everything’s the same repetitious sight.

As hills composed of the coarse sand grains continue as far as my eyes can see, a minuscule gust of wind coats my exposed skin. While this wave of air was as faint as an earnest exhale, a storm of whipping wind conspires behind me. Fueling my hair, the wind separates the lengthy, loose-flowing locks and torturously ties them together.

My fragile frame, weakened from my journey through this desert, shivers beneath the wind’s raw ravaging of my body. Incapacitated, my knees wave a white flag, and I painfully plummet with only the blazing sun floating above as a witness.

Left vulnerable to the elements, my crumpled body aches as sand sweeps around me.

It aches from the interminable trek. Every step that led me to this very spot, unassuming in location, tore me apart. With every loathed lift of my leg, a pain unknown to mankind traveled into a hidden chamber of my mind. Each signal of torture egged on my failure.

But I kept going. And here I am now.

Stuck in solitude, doused in sand, and broken. Broken in a sense outside of physicality. Broken in a sense of not knowing where or why I am going. Broken in such a primal sense of needing a drink.

A drink of life.

Primitively, I follow that thirst for life. I call upon every observable ounce of willpower left inside my cavernous skeleton. Pulling from deep within me, I raucously rise to my knees. Every inch of me bellows out in parlous pain; however, I dare myself to stand.

Time slowly slips into the torrid air, pilfering my power. On wobbly legs that struggle to stay situated in the sandy hills, I timidly tip my feet forward, and I begin to powerlessly parade into the horizon.

With every step, my eyes longingly scan the endless and monotonous hills in a desperate attempt for that drop of life. With just a sip, barely anything, motivating my every momentous movement, the day in the desert obscures into a frigid, wintry night. Darkness blankets me like the sand once did, but I persist with a hunger for passion.

A terminal hunger for surviving this lonesome land.

I follow this hunger, this thirst, this passion until the hills fade into the pitch black sky. No sign of motivation makes an appearance in the blind night. Out of defeat, I collapse into the corrupt, cold night; all the effort was drained from me.

And as my eyes start to close, I recount my day in this desert. This solitary, forbidding, and defeating desert that berates my every attempt to win this battle.

This desert battle in my mind.