We hit Albuquerque first, only to find out the festival had been shut down by bad weather. So we did what lovers do when the world disappoints—we holed up in a Marriott, drowned our sorrows in each other, and killed time between rounds of sweaty atonement.
One night, we wandered into an Applebee’s—packed wall to wall with inbred cavemen. I don’t know what kind of genetic bottleneck was happening in that town, but every forehead was sloped like a Neanderthal fossil, every gut spilling over chairs like they were being kept alive on a strict diet of insulin and despair. I took a long look, did some rough calculations—these people were built at a 15-degree slope, minimum.
I ordered whiskey. Doubles. They tasted like watered-down lies.
The waitress, sensing my frustration, leaned in and whispered, They do that on purpose, sir. Because of the Indians.
Right. Because what better way to respect indigenous culture than by serving shitty, diluted booze at full price?
We stuck to our own debauchery. Five sessions a day. Every day. Like we were making up for something lost in a past life. And then, at 4 AM, when the radio whispered that the sky might clear, we dragged ourselves out of bed and drove to the launch site.
At first, it was nothing. A handful of balloons struggling in the cold wind. Then the green light came.
Go. Go. Go. Go.
The commander’s voice rang out behind us. Balloons erupted like a technicolor apocalypse. Batman. Scooby-Doo. Psychedelic swirls. Not a single one the same as the other. It was chaotic and beautiful—an unplanned miracle.
And for the first time in a long time, I felt alive.
The next day, we hit the road for Santa Fe and stumbled on this hot springs retreat with a name that sounded like it was made up on the spot—Four Hands? Four Waters? Who the hell knows. After shedding our clothes in the locker room, we settled onto a rickety chair, dangling our feet over a pool where little fish nibbled at our dead skin like nature’s own exfoliation.
Then, the attendant guided us to a door that opened onto our private torture paradise: an outdoor hot tub, a cold tub, our very own sauna, and a shower rigged with little buckets to douse each other with ice-cold water. We alternated between boiling ourselves alive and shocking our nervous systems, marinating like overcooked meats, all while slipping into wild, forbidden lovemaking in corners we probably shouldn’t have been in.
The intercom shattered our private bubble, barking for us to report to reception for the next phase. Once we got there, they needed more time to prep, so they herded us into a meditation room with glass walls—silent, sealed, soundproof. I sat there, inhaling the quiet, exhaling the chaos, waiting for over thirty minutes. And in that long, hushed wait, I finally grasped why people chase stillness—because sometimes, in the heart of all the madness, silence is the only goddamn salvation.
We it was time for our couples massage, I was already feeling half-drunk on heat exhaustion. When They introduced us to our massage therapists—a quiet, professional woman and Chad, a hyperactive, overly excited man-child with the energy of a Chihuahua on cocaine.
Chad wanted my woman.
He could barely contain himself—buzzing with excitement as he fired off a million pointless questions, his eyes practically popping out with desire. It was painfully obvious he didn’t even spare me a glance. In the cottage, the female masseuse pointed to her table, then to Chad’s, effectively handing my woman the choice who she wanted to work on her. It was a conversation we had dicussed; men are built to be horn dogs, and no 90-day massage certification can change that. My blonde shot me a look, then one at Chad, and in that split second, she made her decision.
Poor Chad got stuck with me.
But holy hell, he could work a muscle.
I wanted to hate him, but within minutes, I was a pile of meat on the table, melting under his hands. For an hour, he destroyed me. I walked out feeling loose, light, reborn.
When we finally stumbled into the reception area, I was so numb I barely registered that another session was about to start with a short, no-nonsense German guy named Wolf. Wolf was… different. Built like a brick wall with hands the size of baseball mitts, he and the other masseuse herded us into another dingy cottage. Before I knew it, my robe had vanished, and I was ordered to lie face down. A thin cloth barely covered my ass as hot oil splattered across my back like some pagan sacrifice.
Then came the salt.
Pink Himalayan salt, fistfuls of it, poured over my body like I was some cursed piece of meat. And then? The charge.
I heard him step back.
And then he ran at me.
He slammed his hands into my calves, grinding salt into every crack, every pore—forcing those raw minerals into parts of me that’d never known such brutal attention. Then he worked his way over my back, crushing larger salt rocks into finer grains until I was nothing but a salty, red, battered mess, with streaks of blood marking the damage on my exposed skin.
By the time I flipped over, my body was no longer mine.
I was a thing. A filleted thing. A burning, stinging, oiled-up, salted thing.
But I didn’t resist. I didn’t fight it. I let it happen.
And when it was over?
Wolf yanked my robe open and barked at me to stand up. With a firm grip, he guided me to the shower, stripping me bare as he turned on the water, and let me step into the cleansing cascade.
And for the first time in my entire goddamn life, I felt weightless.
I was clean. I was empty. I was at peace.
They escorted us back to reception, and I floated out the door.
I wasn’t worried about anything.
Not money. Not divorce. Not the past.
For the first time, I just existed.
