A Story Idea Each Day for a Month — Day 22

This is the 9th year in a row I’ve run this series in April.

Today’s story: Can Love Sparked at Burning Man Last in Everyday Life?

There’s an adage that you should never make major life decisions right after Burning Man. Once back in your “default life,” wait three months before moving in with the man you met atop a giant rubber duck art car, quitting your job in tech to become a trapeze artist, or getting a shark tattoo. This is considered enough time for the exhilaration of spontaneous love, boundless possibilities, and radical self-expression to subside.

I had big hopes for Danny and me at Burning Man. We both had heat-seeking hearts. Out on the Playa, exhausted and exhilarated, without the tethers of daily responsibilities, we’d come together as our rawest selves. I had no doubt we would fall in love.

The Playa at night is a hallucination, a dream, an open-ended LED-lit adventure filled with a flame-shooting octopus and neon shark art cars darting by. Danny convinced my Aunt Kaye to dance for possibly the first time in her life, under a huge sculpture of a woman, naked and incredibly sad and powerful under the dark desert sky. Danny and I took ecstasy and couldn’t stop touching, until we finally split from our friends and groped each other in a dark part of the Playa. I joked that I didn’t want to die by getting run over by an art car. “It would be a heroic death,” he insisted.

At the Human Carcass Wash, we stripped naked and washed total strangers with our bare hands. We touched their scars and bruises. “You want your taint washed?” Danny asked a guy. “Then lift up your balls.” I marveled at his wholeheartedness.

You get the picture. A couple meets at the Burning Man festival. They… you know… couple. Several times. And generally get their ya ya’s out while falling madly in love.

Then they return to normal society. Kristin is a physical therapist. Max makes his money driving for Uber at night, writing plays during the day. They try to recreate their mad Burning Man love in the city… but it’s just not the same.

They feel pressure. They should be able to muster up something of the magic and wonder of their weekend together, but the trappings of modern life and the necessities of working for The Man to pay the bills, it’s not so easy.

And yet there were those surreal and splendid moments of ecstasy. Okay, much of it brought on by taking Ecstasy, but still…

Shouldn’t we be able to find that in our normal lives?

That’s the existential question at the core of this indie drama laced with humor. Instead of Before Sunrise, this is After Burning Man.

There you go, my twenty-second story idea for the month. And it’s yours. Free!

Here are links for all the previous posts in this year’s series:

Day 1
Day 2
Day 3
Day 4
Day 5
Day 6
Day 7
Day 8
Day 9
Day 10
Day 11
Day 12
Day 13
Day 14
Day 15
Day 16
Day 17
Day 18
Day 19
Day 20
Day 21

Each day this month, I invite you to click on RESPONSES and join me to do some further brainstorming. Take each day’s story idea and see what it can become when you play around with it. These are all valuable skills for a writer to develop.

See you in comments. And come back tomorrow for another Story Idea Each Day For A Month.