Your Cross in the Desert Sky

An erotic confession, an essay about confused love, and a story of passion without presence.A Twitter thread leads a writer to “meet” a Chilean poet in China. The lovers can't touch each other, they live a full day of time zones apart, and their only possibility of seeing each other is through a screen. And yet their connection is electric—at least for our narrator. She can’t stop thinking about this man, and that obsession makes the whole world its metaphor. Your Cross in the Desert Sky is a love affair that is consummated repeatedly, but never in person, and a collision that only one party may feel. In this territory of did they or didn’t they, Sanín roams her own history; the meaning of desire; and how we perform intimacy, seduction, and entirely new selves on social media, in bullfights, and on the page. The sex is charged, but so is the demand to look at everything—from Macbeth to the Panama Canal to Jesus's shroud—as a way to understand who we are, and how we relate to each other and our mortality.