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INTERSECTIONALITY | WRITING PROMPT #2| SEPTEMBER 2024
Travel Haze — September Writing Prompt
How has travel affected your identity, practices, and understanding of self?
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At the gas station the morning after, I tried to walk out of the shop without paying for the bottle of water and the candy bar I had selected.
Not intentionally, of course, but I was out of practice.
The shopkeeper called me back, the stress in her voice, as foreign as the request she was making, causing me to startle. I hadn’t used money to pay for anything in over 10 days; it wasn’t the currency of choice in the desert.
After my initial bout of confusion, we managed to work it out. I paid for my items, and returned to the car and my friends, noticing for the first time how dusty they were. Looking down, I saw that my own sweat had left streaks in the layer of alkaline dust that had impregnated itself in my skin.
“Does anyone have a mirror? What do I look like?”
The year was 2011, and it was my first time at Burning Man.
