The sunsets. The bugless, bone-dry summer nights. Hiking through saguaros and slipping into pines just an hour north. That strange silence on weekend mornings when no one’s in a rush, like the city itself is still stretching.
And maybe that’s how I know I’m not just someone who lived here. I’m from here—desert-raised, monsoon-baptized. I used to draw pointy mountains and corner suns on every blank scrap I could find, always with a lonely little cactus reaching up like it had something to say. One time—must’ve been third grade—I painted a watercolor scene of an ocotillo, all spindly and wild against a bleeding desert sky. It won third place at the Pima County Fair. My little masterpiece, hung up between pies and prize pigs, proof that I saw this place for what it was—even back then.
This isn’t just a list. It’s my way of saying: I belonged here.
I expect to miss Arizona—even though it’s time to hike on out of here, nothing more to cling on to. I’m not leaving for some soul-searching journey or grand reinvention. I’m leaving to chase my son’s dreams, because frankly, chasing his feels a hell of a lot more satisfying than chasing my own ever did.
Here’s the thing: The desert doesn’t let go that easy. It clings. It’s under the nails, in the blood. Arizona stamps itself on you like red dust on boots. Sunsets tattoo your memory.
When we roll into Carolina where the air sticks to your skin like guilt and the trees are strangers and the sky feels heavy, I know it’ll come for me—the ache. The ache for what I once swore I was done with.
- The dry air that didn’t cling
- The tacos that slapped hard at midnight under flickering street lamps
- The mountains that stood like stubborn old gods at the edge of the city
- The soft brown glow of the sun-worshipers
- Mexican food that made you close your eyes
- The way you could leap out of a pool in July and not shiver
- Hair that behaved (dry weather)
- Flip-flops at Durant’s
- Bugless nights that buzzed with possibility
- Halloween in F.Q. Story, where the ghosts got loud and the costumes got lazy
- The picture-perfect historic houses with glowing windows, little yellow dioramas of quiet lives
- The Suns games
- Booker like fire on a fast break
- Fireworks after the Diamondbacks lost again
- Mad hot days that made you a little dangerous
- Hiking at dawn
- MEXICANS (this was approved by Jorge)
- Driving two hours and watching the desert turn to pine
- Quail families bopping along with sing songs vibrating on their noggins.
- The quiet of weekend mornings when the city hadn’t started yet
- Lalo Cota murals flashing by as you hit every green light on Roosevelt
- No one dressed up, and no one needed to
- West Coast rap shaking the rearview
- Skin kissed golden by the sun and never sorry
- The smell after rain, that monsoon perfume
- The rush of leaving cold air conditioning and stepping into the world’s oven and loving it
- Running from shade spot to shade spot so your feet don’t burn off
- The smell of Creosote Bush and the wet, grey sidewalk after the rain
- MONSOONS
- (this is list on going and will consistently be added to via this page)
And all of it says stay, even as I go.
This isn’t a love letter. It’s a reckoning. A list.
Somewhere in Tucson – a little sunburned ghost with cactus dust in her hair fades away.
Slangshot 