I’m stopping for the night in West Texas - she ain’t really purdy, bless her heart. But she is a sign I’m almost to the place I’ve wanted to live for years: the Southwest.
This place is mostly massive oil refineries and corrugated metal bunkers to house the thousands of men working. I think I might be the only woman around for miles.
But the nearby town Monahans has stories under the sand. She sits atop the Permian Basin, one of the richest oil fields in the world. For over a century, men have come here chasing oil and fortune, living in those boxy bunkhouses and working through the night under floodlights and dust.
Before all that, it was Indigenous land - the Jumano and later the Comanche passed through these very dunes. The Monahans Sandhills are still here, pale and wind-blown, holding stories and memory.
So no, she ain’t purdy. But she’s real. And she’s telling me I’m close - close to the desert, to the open sky, to the life I came for. That I’ve dreamed of for so very long.
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