Before the Fade

On first love, desert raves, and the architecture of disappearing. Part two in my series.

Dec 13, 2025

The Drive Home

The sun was coming up as we headed east on roads that belonged to us because nobody else was awake to claim them. My white Ford F-150 cut through the desert like a knife through silk, the windows rolled down, and the music was still playing, still thrumming through my chest even though we’d left the dancefloor an hour earlier. The bass lived in my body now. It would take a few more hours to fade, to let me remember that I was a person separate from the rhythm.

Justin was in the passenger seat, head back against the window, smiling at something private. We didn’t talk on the drive home. We didn’t need to. The night had already said everything that mattered. We’d danced until our bodies found a language that had nothing to do with words. We’d done it surrounded by our people, our tribe, the friends we’d collected who understood that electronic music and movement and the desert and community were the closest things to religious experience we might ever have.

But we’d skipped the after parties. Neither of us wanted to chase the night any further. We wanted to get home. We wanted what was waiting for us.

The ranch appeared first as a suggestion, then as a promise. The house would be cool. The property would be massive and empty and ours. Hunter would be waiting, somehow knowing that we were coming, and he would lose his mind with the kind of joy that only dogs and infants can access. He would jump into my arms like I’d been gone for years instead of hours. He would cover my face in kisses. He would be pure, uncomplicated love.

And Raja, Justin’s mother’s old lady dog, would be there too. She’d become like a surrogate mother to Hunter. They played endlessly together through those long summer days, splashing in the pond when the heat became too much, exploring the acres and acres of property like they were discovering new continents. We’d spend the whole day listening to drum and bass and house music, the two dogs sleeping in patches of shade, their bodies intertwined, the way only dogs can sleep.

We barely drank back then. We didn’t need to. We’d get high on a joint, lying by the pool or standing at the barbecue, cooking food that tasted better than anything I’d ever eaten because I was eating it with people I loved, in a place that felt like home, with a man who looked at me like I was the only person worth looking at.

On that long drive home, with the bright sun spilling across the desert and the windows rolled down and the music still playing something deep inside my chest, everything felt possible. Everything finally seemed like it might be okay after all.

And maybe it was, for a little while. Maybe we did have something real.

How I Got Here

To understand that sunrise drive, you need to go back further. You need to understand how a girl who had just graduated high school and was working her first waitressing job could end up here, in love like this, driving toward a home and a man and dogs that felt like proof of her own becoming.

I had never experienced a man look at me the way Justin did that first day at the Bamboo Club. Not with the starving, transactional hunger of the boy with the angry girlfriend, the one whose house wasn’t actually his, whose girlfriend arrived home furious while I was still tasting his mouth. Not with the casual indifference of high school. Justin looked at me like I was someone worth knowing.

He opened a bottle of wine that day like he was performing surgery. The confidence in his hands as he worked the corkscrew, offered it to the table, poured with the casual grace of someone who understood that small rituals matter. He made it look effortless. He made me feel like I could be effortless too, if I just stayed close enough to him.

The night he handed me Hunter, I understood something I hadn’t before: love is a drug, and I was an addict waiting to happen.

The Gift

We’d been together only a few months. I’d just finished a brutal double shift at the Bamboo Club. My feet were throbbing. My apron was soaked in other people’s cocktails and gratitude. The flaming dishes had left my arms smelling like caramelized sugar and Bacardi 151, that specific scent that would later become the olfactory version of nostalgia. When Justin asked me to close my eyes in his mother’s living room on the eastside, I did it without hesitation. Trust, it turned out, was another drug I was hungry for.

The puppy was impossibly small, a warm, breathing creature that fit entirely in my palm. His fur was still soft in the way of newborns, and when I pressed him to my chest and inhaled that sweet, milky smell of him, something shifted in my chest cavity like tectonic plates. This was mine. Not borrowed, not shared, not dependent on someone else’s approval or affection. Mine.

“He’s part wolf,” Justin said, and I believed him immediately. It made perfect sense. The alert eyes. The lean muscularity even as a pup. The way he seemed to understand the world with an intelligence that transcended breed. Justin had a way of mythologizing things that made them feel true, necessary, inevitable. When he spoke about the world, I wanted to live inside his version of it.

We spent days naming him. Justin would hold him up, studying his face like a sage interpreting runes. “He’s wild,” he’d say. “Look at him. Pure instinct.” We cycled through names the way other couples might debate baby names, though we didn’t think of it that way then. He was our first child. Our family. Our proof that something good could grow between us.

When I said “Hunter” after Hunter S. Thompson, my favorite writer and favorite chronicler of excess and consciousness and the American dream collapsing in real time, Justin’s face did something I’d rarely seen before or after. He smiled, his eye wide, like I’d finally said something that made complete sense to him.

“Hunter S. Thompson,” he repeated, testing it. “Yeah. That’s perfect.”

Tommy, the boy with the angry girlfriend, overheard us in the server’s station one afternoon. He scrunched his face. “Hunter? That’s a dumb name for a dog. You don’t want to encourage him to hunt.”

Justin and I made eye contact. In that moment, something crystallized between us: the understanding that there were people who understood us and people who didn’t. We were on the same side of some invisible divide, and Tommy was on the other.

The dog loved his name immediately. Of course he did. It became our secret language, the way we called him and he came bounding, the way we’d introduce him to people and watch their faces. Some lit up in recognition, in kinship. Others looked confused, vaguely offended. But more than that, the name felt like a prophecy. Hunter S. Thompson writing about fear and loathing, about the edge of the American dream. And here was Hunter, this small wolf dog, who would become the most constant presence in both of our lives, loyal in ways that made him feel less like a pet and more like a mirror to who we were trying to become.

The Ranch: A Paradise That Felt Permanent

The ranch at the end of Speedway Boulevard was a dream pulled directly from the fantasy I’d constructed about what adulthood was supposed to look like. The main house belonged to Justin’s family, a sprawling adobe structure that had stood since the early 1900s, surrounded by acres of desert that seemed to stretch into infinity. Our guest house was rustic in a way that felt intentional, romantic. Wooden beams. Terra cotta tiles. No running water, but that didn’t matter because Justin fixed it. He rigged a water line into the bathroom with the ease of someone who understood how to make things work, how to improvise, how to create comfort from nothing. In the summer, we’d use the pool. In the winter, we’d brave the cold shower together, gasping and laughing.

We were building something. This was the refrain I repeated to myself like a mantra, and unlike most mantras, this one felt true.

I was nineteen, finally out of my parents’ house, enrolled at Pima Community College and then later transferring to the University of Arizona. Justin was working, charming his way through the service industry with the kind of effortless confidence that made people want to hire him, want to trust him, want to be near him. Hunter grew alongside our relationship, his paws too big for his body, his intelligence evident in the way he’d stay beside me even when I took his leash off, the way he’d alert at any sound, any threat. He was protection incarnate, a living symbol of our commitment to each other.

Those months on the ranch were biochemically perfect. Serotonin flooding my system at the sight of him. Oxytocin bonding me to both the man and the dog in ways that felt irreversible. Dopamine rewarding me for staying, for believing, for being the kind of woman who could keep a home and a man and a dog safe. I was so young, so hopeful, so healthy, so deeply in love.

Justin and I did everything together. We’d go to work together, arriving early so we could linger in the parking lot, talking, laughing, stealing a few moments alone before the chaos of the shift. We had this secret little smile we’d give each other when we’d cross paths in the kitchen, arms full of sizzling hot skillets on their way to be flambeed. When someone ordered wine, I’d find him at the bar or in the serving station and hand him the bottle without a word. He’d take it like it was the most natural transaction in the world and go dazzle my tables with such finesse and charm. I marveled at how I had ever survived without him.

After work, instead of going home to separate spaces the way other couples might, we’d drive out to the ranch together. The far eastside was where his family always lived, and they’d embraced me from the beginning. His mother welcomed me into their new home and didn’t blink an eye when I regularly began spending the night. I was part of the family now. Part of the bigger plan.

The Scene: Raves and Desert Parties

What neither of us anticipated when we met was that we would become ravers. Real old school, PLUR (peace, love, unity and respect) loving ravers. Not in a professional sense, but in the way that matters most: we’d found music that spoke to our bodies in a language we didn’t know we were fluent in.

Justin introduced me to electronic dance music. We’d hear it at clubs, but the real scene existed in the desert outside Tucson, at parties that happened with almost mystical frequency. These weren’t the kind of parties you read about in the newspaper. They were 18 and over events, which meant I could go even before I turned twenty-one. We’d drive out into the darkness with friends we’d collected from work and from the rave scene itself, a growing tribe of people who understood something about the world that the daytime people didn’t.

The music was transcendent. It didn’t just play in your ears. It entered your chest and rewired your nervous system. It made your body move in ways you’d never moved before. Justin was extraordinary on the dancefloor. He had this fluidity, this lack of self-consciousness that I envied and absorbed and tried to emulate. He’d dance with a smile on his face like he was having a conversation with the music itself, like it was the only language that mattered. He explained the music to me, he would show me with his hands each time the DJ introduced a new track. To the uninitiated, it might sound like EDM is just a bunch of computer noises and occasionally a vocal track. What I learned was that these DJs had to be incredibly skilled to be able to scratch using vinyl. To cue up a record and drop it into an all ready moving bassline. To take two completely different melodies and stitch them together seamlessly. Back in the day, before mp3s and complex computer programs, DJs hauled actual record players and crates of real vinyl out to these desert events. Justin, patiently, showed me the ins and out of the music and the scene. We became friends with all of the promoters, the DJs, the dancers and light artists. I began to appreciate all of the creativity and originality that was the hallmark of the scene back then. While the mainstream dismissed the PLUR Movement as cheesy or even dangerous, I was living the millennial reality of peace, love, unity and respect and I loved it. As an undiagnosed neurodivergent woman, I had always struggled with fitting in. I had friends growing up and in high school but could never shake the sense of feeling like an outsider. I always knew back then, even though I didn’t have the language for it yet, that the way I experienced the world was fundamentally different than my peers. In the rave scene, I found many other unique and beautiful people. While we were the outsiders in normal life, here we were friends. We had a community, and I loved being part of a group where I could be myself. I was loved and welcomed in a way that felt so new and exciting.

I started smoking weed around this time. It happened gradually, naturally, the way these things do when you’re surrounded by people who do it and there’s no judgment and the whole world seems softer and friendlier when you’re high. Justin helped me pick out my first really good bong, a beautiful piece of glass from a company called Sweetwater Glass. We went together on a Friday afternoon, and I was overwhelmed by the options. There were so many ways to smoke, so many pieces of engineered glass designed specifically to make the experience more intense, more pleasurable. He pointed to one and said, “That one. That’s the one for you.” And he was right. It became my thing, my ritual, my way of easing into the evenings when I needed to decompress.

The weed opened something up in me. It made the social scenes feel less scary. It made the dancefloors feel less crowded. It made me feel like I belonged to something larger than myself. I’d hit the bong before we went out, and by the time we were in the desert or at a party, I felt like I’d finally figured out who I was supposed to be. I began to accept that I deserved to be happy. I tried it on for size and found that it fit well.

There was a group of us. People I genuinely loved. People who seemed to love me back. We had code names for ourselves. We had inside jokes that made no sense to anyone outside our circle. We had plans and rituals and a social life that felt infinitely more real and important than anything I’d experienced in high school. We were building a community. We were building a culture.

And Justin was at the center of it. Or rather, he was at the center of my experience of it. He introduced people to each other. He knew where the parties were. He understood the vibe, the music, the rhythm of it all. When I was with him, I felt like I was with someone who had already figured out the secret to living, and he was willing to let me in on it.

The Sam Hughes House: Domestic Dreams

Eventually, we moved out of the guest house on the ranch and into a three-bedroom house in the Sam Hughes neighborhood, within walking distance of the University of Arizona. It had a white picket fence and a large fenced backyard where Hunter and the Raja could play safely. It had a large front yard, and I became obsessed with the idea of growing things. I planted vegetables. Tomatoes. Peppers. Watermelons. I wanted the full domestic experience. I wanted to be the kind of woman who grew food, who had a home, who had a man, who had dogs, who went to raves on the weekends and woke up on Sunday mornings to tend to her garden.

It all felt possible. It felt like the logical conclusion of the life I’d been building since I graduated high school early and met a man who understood the language of rituals and confidence and love.

I had a boyfriend who loved me. I had dogs who depended on me. I had friends who wanted to see me. I had a social life that felt rich and real and authentically mine in a way that nothing growing up ever had.

Looking back now, I can see the architecture of it all, the way each piece fit perfectly into place. The way I wove my life so completely around his that they became nearly indistinguishable. The way I learned to read his moods and adjust myself accordingly. The way I discovered things that made everything feel better, easier, more manageable. The way I slowly, methodically, with the best intentions and the purest heart, began to disappear.

But I didn’t know that then. Then, I was just a girl who’d gotten lucky. I was just someone who’d found her person, her place, her people, her purpose. I was just building a life, one day at a time, one rave at a time, one hit from the bong at a time, one gardened vegetable at a time.

Everything was looking up.

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