I had to go back just one more time. Everything I needed was sitting ready in my home office, down to an emergency pair of underwear and a couple of hydration packs. So at two thirty in the morning, I patted the dog, grabbed my pack, and headed for Arches National Park.

A remarkably long and snowy Utah winter had left me feeling like a cat pawing at the door to get out. On top of that, my partner had gotten a job offer out of state. With just a few weeks before the planned move, I wanted to say farewell to the desert that had enthralled me since I first moved here more than a decade ago. And I knew exactly the trail that would let me process my parting thoughts.

Rolling through the dark along US Route 6 toward Moab, Meat Loaf’s “Paradise by the Dashboard Light” peaked as I came over a mountain summit, and the bright Cheshire cat grin of the moon made me smile almost as wide. It would be a good day, and I wanted to be on the trail shortly after dawn. Even in early May, the Primitive Trail can cook you.

The trailhead is at Devils Garden, whose towering rock fins are slowly cracking into flecks of orange sand by erosion and each year’s freeze and thaw. It’s a tricky rut compacted by scores of boots, the kind of trail that will make you sweat and ache and maybe leave you with a bruise or two. It was exactly what I wanted.

The sun was rising as I tied my boots. I didn’t want to waste any time. I got through the hardened first part of the trail quickly before I squished into the soft sand at Landscape Arch. Time to climb. With every step up the rock fin, I felt like I was taken away from everything that nagged and bit and stung at the back of my mind. The morning air was mercifully cool, and for most of the day I was blissfully alone as I worked on a moderate sunburn.

Every segment of the trail brought back an old memory. I wanted to be folded into the desert, enclosed by the earth itself. I wanted to move at a leopard lizard’s pace and also to race to the next view. I wanted to let the desert’s coral-colored sand grains get into my boots, my shirt, and my heart as I moved.

Parting has never been easy for me. Almost every breakup I’ve had was excruciating, with no option to cauterize the damaged parts. I’m old enough to have entirely lost track of friends just by drifting, not even aware that we had seen each other for the last time. But saying goodbye to the desert—that was something I could be intentional about.

I took what moments I could for touch, so my body might remember as much as my mind. At Navajo Arch, I ran my fingers over a Utah juniper branch polished by the grease of untold other hands, the wood shiny and smooth. If there weren’t so many other hikers at Double O Arch, I would have thrown off my clothes and left a Venus outline in the cool, orange sediment. At every break, I grabbed handfuls of sand and let it sift through my fingers, watching each little stream pile up below.

So much loomed ahead—the move, shifting plans, the end of the trail. All I could tell myself was that I was lucky to have had the time at all. The ravens and rocks, the cacti and the arches—they didn’t need my sentiment one bit. I was a fleeting, near-insignificant part of their story, while even a few brief hours here were volumes in mine.