The Library

ACT I First Scene

She'd been walking through the desert all night. She figured it was better to walk at night, despite the cold; at least she wouldn't get fried to a crisp in a place with no shade.

One could say Gwen was experiencing an existential crisis and was trying to find herself, even though she was only twenty-four and the middle of her road was so far into the distance she wouldn't get a glimpse of it for another couple of decades.

Regardless, she was indulging what she perceived to be her dark night of the soul, college behind her, unappetizing options in front of her, sensitive, idealistic and over-educated, the perfect symbol of her generation.

Gwen had always prided herself on her strength of character and being self-reliant.

Ever since she could remember, she had made her own choices, acted upon them decisively, and owned the consequences.

Her life choices would have met the unequivocal approval of any life-coach or counselor, if only she ever found a need for either.

Only people without direction needed someone to make plans for them, she mused, during the rare breaks in her busy schedule that allowed her time to pass judgment on her fellow humans.

How did she end up here, she asked herself repeatedly now, and by that she didn't mean how did she end up walking through the desert at night, she knew exactly how that happened: she decided to go on a spiritual journey to find deeper meaning, so she took a bus from Anaheim to Los Angeles, and then via Phoenix, to Sedona.

Once there, something felt wrong to her, something that told her to keep looking, to go back to the Village of Oak Creek, with which she had felt an instant connection when the bus passed through it. She was stiff from the twelve hours on the bus, and the village was only seven miles down the road, so she threw caution to the wind and started walking.

Have you ever tried walking on the side of a busy road in the desert in late afternoon?

Between the glare, the dust and the constant endangering of her life, Gwen found a more exciting and less accident prone route beckoning in the distance between two gorgeous rock formations that looked eerily familiar but she couldn't remember why, and abandoned the main road, relieved to no longer feel the powdery dust crunching in her teeth.

This had happened three days ago.

When the first night approached, Gwen was petrified with fear, alone in the barren land punctuated here and there by alien shapes she could barely make out in the darkness: giant cacti or karstic rocks or just plain boulders. She couldn't tell.

She feared everything from scorpions to sinkholes and cursed her own stupidity for twelve solid hours, expecting a sudden and untimely death at any moment.

At first she reassured herself that, in an area so famous for its hot springs, she was bound to run into people eventually, even at night, but no such luck.

She kept on walking, too afraid to lie down on something with stingers or thorns, guided forward by the light of the stars. There were so many of them, and they felt so close, like the entire sky lowered itself above her head, so she could see it better. Straight through the middle of it, the Milky Way cut an ethereal path, one she instinctively followed in her travels below.

She didn't even realize she'd walked the whole night until a pink and orange glow stirred up on the horizon, the beginning of a deeply spiritual and awe-inspiring dawn which revealed to her two things: she'd been walking away from her destination for ten solid hours and she could barely feel her feet and her back.

Wisdom dictated she should find some shade and rest. The walk at night hadn't been as bad as she expected, if only it didn't take her farther into the wilderness. She found a little shallow cave eventually, and figured she should sit down, eat something and take careful sips out of the water bottle she decided on a whim not to throw away when she got off the bus, and then use the sun to orient herself and plot a more useful itinerary for the next leg of her journey. She didn't make it past the second activity.