“How do you describe a person?”
How do you describe a person? Is it their smell, the rhythm of their breaths? The way they pinch their lips without even knowing it, the crimp of their brow? Or is it the force of their longing? The determination of their steps? Their wild joy? You can feel a person, can’t you, feel them even when they’re in another room, even when they’re gone? I think we all possess something inside us like electricity, a pulse, an energy—you feel it, but you can’t see it. It’s there even when it’s not. I suppose that’s a soul.
I know that none of us sees quite the same world. I know that as much as I touch and hold, grasp and yearn. I know that I am alone, even when I am not alone. And yet there’s always something beckoning us in the clouds. Something like a scent in the air, something out there in the distance. That’s the way I think of Dawn now: out there in the distance.
“The world is empty…”
The world is empty, but the mirror is full. The mirror is empty, but the world is full. “We need to see ourselves reflected,” she said. “We look at our faces like we don’t know who we are.” She was always looking at things through her camera. Big clouds huddling together, grease stains on the road, ant hills. Sometimes she took photos just to hear the camera’s shutter snap. The world didn’t exist unless it had first posed for a photo. “Big, dumb, handsome world,” she said. “You don’t even know what you’re doing. You don’t even know where you’re going.”
I asked her what she was going to do with all of her photos. “Look at them,” she said. “And then look at them again.”
“Tumbleweeds sad in the desert…”
Tumbleweeds sat in the desert like hundreds of Buddhas sunbathing. The car’s AC broke. The scent of the sun on our skin, on potato chips, on the seats of the car, on the dust itself. We listened to the radio of the land. We wondered if we’d have to drink the juice from a cactus in order to survive. We stole buckets of ice from hotel ice machines and filled our coolers, draping wet towels over our heads and shoulders.
“You can’t take a bad photo of a highway,” she said. “It looks good no matter the angle because it’s always going somewhere.”
A cathedral of emptiness. She wrote a poem in the dust that covered the hood of our car. She told me to go faster, then faster again, the car shaking, as if pushing forward into a new dimension, as if the engine was about to blow. The antenna sliced the air as we drove over highways that unspooled endlessly. She threw our maps out the window. “Everything is between us and God now,” she said.
***
Excerpted and adapted from something out there in the distance by Grant Faulkner, photographs by Gail Butensky. Copyright © 2026. University of New Mexico Press.
Gail Butensky has been taking photographs since the 80’s. Her work can be seen in several magazines, books and record albums. After years of films, darkrooms, gritty nightlife, and bands, she now mostly shoots with her phone in the California sun.
