a need to be free

B and I were travelling. We caught a plane and flew over the ocean and across countries. When we alighted, I was not sure where we were. We caught a bus to our hotel and slept soundly through the night. In the morning, I gazed through the window at the vast field of red, gold and green shrubs, stretched out as far as I could see. B asked me if I knew where we were and I guessed that we might be in Arizona. I was right. We hired a car and travelled around the continent, taking in the sights. In one place, we stopped at a huge building that was still being developed. There was a maze of paths and walls divided by pools of water, around a giant pool of water that adjoined the sea. A crowd had gathered as something was about to happen: an enormous ship sailed with speed into the pool of water and stopped only an inch from the wall that separated the water from the crowd. There, the ship morphed a few times into a sea creature and a whale, before resuming its shape as a ship (shipshape). For some reason, I lay down, fully clothed, in one of the shallow pools of water between the paths and rolled around until I asked B for a hand up.
We then journeyed on, stopping at a man-made beach area surrounded by shops where hundreds of people, both residents and tourists, were shopping and wading. There were about eighty or so women wearing the same bad outfit that they had bought at the shops. I felt embarrassed for them and vowed not to buy off-the-rack clothes that were so obviously cheap and mass-manufactured. I imagined that I could sew all of our clothes and maintain a sense of identity. We wandered on and entered a touristy building built on the side of a canyon. We walked down stairs and down sloped floors, rode down escalators and elevators, until we saw a cafe ahead. B visited the bathroom and I stepped carefully down the now steeply sloping floor toward the cafe where we would find something to eat and drink. I began to take in my surrounds: the floor was carpeted with awful pink carpet and the cafe was decorated in pale blue and pink. The room between the walls became increasingly narrow so that the cafe came to a point. It seemed to be the most southern point in the whole complex, hanging down below the rest of the building, and overhanging the cliff. I began to hyperventilate and started to back away, crawling back up the carpeted floor. B came out of the bathroom and saw what I saw - we had to get out. We felt the weight of the building pressing down on us, felt the precariousness of it, and noticed the ugliness of the place. We left the building as quickly as we could, travelling back up the stairs and escalators, until we were back outside in the open air.