The woman with a face like poetry had abandonment issues. Though everyone has at one point or another been stranded alone on an island, Auburn’s desertion arrived when she was small. To cope with the sudden absence of her mother and the blind and drunken wrath from her father, she turned first to literature, then to opium, then to prostitution. By the time she was thirty, she had slept with hundreds of men, women, and transsexuals. Now at thirty-five, she no longer knew who she was or what she wanted from life. She started to wonder if portable and makeshift Magdalenism was not her thing. Purposelessness is a railroad track built like a circle, and no matter how much progress she thought she’d made, she found herself always at the beginning. 

When she was young, time was on her side, and now she had grown older, time was still on her side. 

With her degrees in history and geology, she found honest work in Utah as a park ranger. She loved caring for Bryce Canyon with its spire-influenced rock formations, its lavish hoodoos dressed in vermillion, its sprawling amphitheater. This was the opposite of a cul-de-sac, professionally and geologically speaking, yet she hated so many aspects of it: the harlotry of the sky, its shameless sunrise and sunset, its empyrean tourism. It was all natural whoredom to her. She grew to loathe her job with a wild recklessness that bordered on unrestrained apathy. But when the government transferred her to Zion National Park, something changed in her, like an emotional virus. 

One day while dressed in her park ranger uniform, Auburn met a woman near the Altar of Sacrifice who seemed lost, but wasn’t. The poor dehydrated thing was stalking some collared lizards and jackrabbits. 

“Hello,” Auburn announced as she strolled toward the woman. The casualness and warmth in her own voice surprised her. 

“Are you lost?” the woman asked.

Auburn didn’t know what to say.

“I could have loved you deeply, you know, Auburn.”

“Have we met?”

“I don’t know how to answer that.”

“Your word choice,” Auburn said, squinting. “Did you mean that for me?”

“Yes.”

“Perhaps you are mistaken.”

“I am not.”

“Why would you say such an intimate thing to a stranger? Am I a stranger, or am I not?”

“You are, but you aren’t.” 

The sun reached its zenith in the sky. “Resolve my curiosity,” Auburn said. 

“We have made love a few times.”

“Really? When?”

“In a distant future.”

“How far into the distance?”

“Three months from now.”

Auburn studied the woman who appeared between blinks to be blurred at her edges.

“And, you are here…?” she asked the stranger.

“Because you ran.”

“It seems like me to.” This was true. “Are you here to tell me to stop running?”

“No. I understand why you ran. Your intuition was just protecting you from me.”

“You don’t seem like a violent person.”

“I am not.”

“Then why do I need protection?”

“I am, by nature, suicidal.”

A jackrabbit dashed into the shade of a boulder nearby. Auburn frowned at its shadow. 

“Forgive me–I love you very much,” the woman said.

“You said you could have loved me deeply.”

“Yes.”

“Are you asking for my permission?”

“No.”

“Why are you here?” The heat churned Auburn’s demands.

“I am clumsy. I have fallen while climbing Angels Landing. I need for you to come retrieve me.”

Auburn nodded, but causality was not adding up. “If I save you, in three months I will still run.”

“Yes, I know.”

“Why would you repeat a heartache?” 

The woman paused, thinking. Her skin glistened. Then she said, “This time around, my love for you would deepen.”

“How?”

“There are mesas, canyons, rivers, buttes, and monoliths in you that I haven’t yet explored. I would like to. I would like to continue each day. And, at one point in climbing one of your arches, I will fall. Because I am clumsy and suicidal prone. But, I will visit you again months from now to ask you to retrieve me. As I am doing now.”

“How many times have we been here?”

The woman shrugged and shook her head.

“Tell me what it is about us that compels you to return.”

“Your lips when you kissed me. Their plateaus felt right. I sensed a hint of your tongue – searching my mouth for warmth or shallow water. And, the way you kissed my hand, a trail of kisses, after I caressed your cheek. I didn’t expect such immense, infinite tenderness from someone with such a past as yours. I thought you would be brutal. But you were gentle and lenient. Resolute but ardent. And acutely fierce in response. You are the opposite of everyone I’ve ever met. Why would I want anyone or anything else?”

Time felt both limitless and impossible then. Auburn looked to the horizon, toward Angels Landing. It would be a few hours’ hike if she hurried. “How long do I have to retrieve you?”

“You have some time.”

“How much time?”

“Ideally, all the time.”

“Un-ideally?”

“A few hours.”

Auburn hesitated, “I must ask…”

“Yes?”

“What will stop you from killing yourself?”

“Nothing. It’s how my soul is designed.”

“What would diminish the urge?”

“Pulling me into your arms and holding me.”

“You don’t ask for a lot.”

“No, I don’t.” 

“I must go.”

“Run, Auburn. Run!”