I got trapped in a spiral of nostalgia for the coastal desert

It’s flat to the west and hilly to the east, and absolutely empty for miles, even of most billboards. At night, driving up the northern coast, there are no streetlights or anything in between towns; just rows of wind-blown dunes and the occasional house built of adobe and sheet metal on the side of the road, lit by a couple of bare bulbs. Some of the dunes are old huacas from before the Spanish, before the Inca, and the people who live in the area could probably tell you which ones, maybe even have collections of its pottery on display in their homes, but from inside of a bus it’s impossible to tell. There are occasional small towns, just a row of bodegas and menús and llanterías along the side of the road with some barely-finished houses wedged between. The buildings are all squared-off and flat-topped, brick whitewashed and painted in pastels that always need washing, with wrought iron bars on all the windows. The street lights are always yellow-orange, hung between tangles of phone and electrical wires. Depending on the town, the piles and piles of garbage bags and old tires either line the area between the sidewalk and the road, or fill in an acre of sour-smelling land just outside the town. Either way, there are always skinny, tick-covered dogs digging through the trash for food. Maybe they have people they live with; maybe they don’t. They flash by the bus, too, and then the road falls back into darkness. The sand dunes are white-and-black where the headlights reach them; then black-and-black until they meet the sky. When it’s dawn, the bus stops in a brick-walled compound with one or two bodegas, a lot of pickup trucks, a set of outhouses, and another rangy dog. There’s mist and condensation on the windows in the pale grey morning light, but it isn’t going to rain, because it never rains.