Night Songs

When we first arrived in Phoenix, it felt like we’d crash-landed on an alien planet, with the red Mars soil and rock formations, the agave with their spiked tentacles, the shops selling crystals glinting with energy.

And it was this strange backdrop, this separation from everything we’d known before, that had allowed us to build a new life together over the past six years.

That afternoon, Micah and I sat at our kitchen island while I showed him the teaser my partner had cut for our latest documentary. Micah paused it on a clip of a woman walking rows of heirloom corn, her dexterous fingers smoothing back the silks and running over the purple kernels.

“I like this, but I think we need a better sense of the setting—this is agriculture in the middle of the desert. Life in a place thought to be lifeless,” he said, tucking a piece of hair behind my ear.