I missed my aunt’s funeral this summer. She wasn’t the first in our family to die, and she won’t be the last. Both of her parents are long deceased. Years ago I watched her shuffle, slowly, to kiss the cheek of her brother in a casket. Her husband. Her sister’s ex-husband. Another brother. The in-laws of in-laws.

I keep returning to the lives of the women who came before me. As though there is something to tell. A story. But is it a story just because it happened? A life, I mean.

Elizabeth died in May. I have one photo of her, sitting next to her mother, my grandmother, holding me. We’re sitting in church and they’re looking down at me, pointing at a glass fixture on the ceiling. We all have the same nose. At the end of the summer that I chose over Elizabeth’s funeral, I begged my mother to board a plane to see me. As we drove through the endless boreal expanse of the Yukon, I asked if she missed her sister.

She shrugged. “Sometimes, I think about her voice, and it’s sad to think that I’ll never hear her again. Asking about her aliens. She loved talking about aliens.”

She tells me, again, about Elizabeth ordering her younger siblings to kneel down and count roaches when they were naughty. How her husband, Cleto, was “strong,” let her keep working through childrearing even when they didn’t need the money, a noteworthy thing in the cultural circles that surrounded their family. How after Elizabeth’s husband died, her sister Grace took her everywhere: “Grace, bring me orange juice. Grace, get my walker.” She spent her life in charge of her families. Until her heart began to fail. How she let it fail, demanded only morphine at the end.

Elizabeth, like her mother before her, died human. Nothing more, nothing less. She was known, once, but by the time the calendar loops around a second length of her life the world will struggle to remember her. In this, there is no hero’s journey to recount.

In the present, we’re fighting time. Each day, my mother and I drive another three hundred miles south. Across the north, we watch the endless expanse of spruce after spruce after spruce bleed into the red tundra of autumn. I count the Richardson milemarkers, watch my fuel dip low as it does each time I take the Tok cutoff. She points out every Post Office, “I should have worked there.” Each time it stings, a little. That if she could redo her life, she might choose the version without me.

It’s raining–is it sleet?–at the Canadian border. All along the highway the fireweed has browned with age, silken seed tufts dampening earthward. The ALCAN is better than I remember it being in April, but for miles it remains pitted gravel.

We camp outside of a hot spring resort, and leave before dawn without paying, partially by accident: the kiosk was closed, no Iron Ranger in sight. She waves me over to a waste bin in Tok, look at the raspberries, Driscoll’s organic, in great condition, no mold, did I want them?

When we get a motel in Red Bluff, mildew stains blanketing the ceiling, she lets me hide in the car while she fills a bag with complimentary boiled eggs. My mother still remembers how to live as though frugality were water: utterly necessary to survive.

I tell her to leave the raspberries. Later, I am grateful for the eggs.

She sees her reflection in a window, her hands cupped over her coffee, and laughs, “They’re probably wondering, ‘What are these Mexicans doing here?’” And laughs and laughs.

One day, I will miss being her accomplice.

It’s hard, being her daughter. I want to write down everything she says. But I’m driving every time she speaks. I want her to love me more. I want her to complain less. I want us to be happy, for once. But I leave her every year, and anyway, she has two children and a husband, even if I remember the early years of us, just us, by day.

“Tell me a story,” she mumbles into her sleeping bag.

But she made my life easy. I don’t have any stories. My life is a series of pretty scenes strung together, each as mundane in its retelling as the last. I live by no certain morals, with no defined outline, and I am at all times tumbling towards old age, or an older age, directionless. A compass incapable of finding its own north, let alone true north. What can I tell her? That I missed the bus in Providence, once? That I’ve never fainted, never broken a bone, never tripped, never known?

So she talks: recounts the plot of a telenovela, the doctor who turned himself into a worm, the girl whose boyfriend hung her in Griffith Park, every version of La Llorona she’s ever heard. She tells me about her sister’s suspected infertility, how tragic that a woman so utterly enamored by children, children’s books, children’s clothing, children’s toys, the design, the safety, the education of them, never bore her own. About the time her neighbor ate her pet rooster. About the store owner, a white man, who told her she’d go to prison for breaking a plastic figurine when she was five. About my aunt’s sister-in-law, who was cruel to my aunt, but was so ugly that the family called her Ant-Eater, a petty revenge. About sleeping without a bed, in a broom closet, on the floor, until her fourteenth birthday. About the roaches that marched linearly up the walls of her childhood kitchen, the one with the linoleum floors, yes, where I watched a dog succumb to worms, silently, slowly, thirty years later.

About her mother’s—my grandmother’s—life. How San Bernardino became a ghost town during the War, how her first love who was drafted, how her father (my great-grandfather) beat her for making a dress to wear to graduation. Whoreish. And so she ran away with an older man, 14 years her senior, gave him 16 children, moved across the country each season to follow his labor, and spent each year watching her hand-knit, hand-embroidered linens catch the wind from the freeway.

We agree: how sad.

I text away snippets because so many of my girlfriends love my mother's recantations. Each memory a story purely and simply because it happened. Tired and true and bitter and biased. I want to shout from the rooftops: this ordinary woman lived an ordinary life, and yet to me it is extraordinary. It is a story because it happened. I worry that’s the narcissist in me. That I am a narcissist. Wanting to repeat and save everything that has ever connected to me. Everything that has ever happened to me. Repeat and repeat and repeat.

From the Canadian border, we drive to my boyfriend’s house. He lives in a national park. I did, too, until a week ago.

“Alex, tell us a story.” Dinner is too quiet with the three of us. If I am from a different world than my mother, he might be from a different planet. He laughs, bashful. “I don’t think I have any stories.” She asks me to tell him about the time she got fired, but that story—it isn’t mine to tell.

So she talks.

I wonder if I will amass stories as I age, or if every day I spend as a middle-class American will wring me of any fabling capacity I might have had. If my stories will be limited to, I went to this place and left. I went to a new place and it was pretty. I climbed a mountain and saw. I sat in a valley and looked.

One would think I’d have stories to tell, by now. Or one great one, unfolding in real time. After all, over the past 5 years, I have occupied more than 10 different homes.

But the only consistency I’ve identified is the issue of space. There is never enough space, moving from dorm to house to shed to mobile. Like liquid, a small life expands to fill whatever space it occupies, no matter how grand. I found this enraging exactly twice: when I left the Oakland apartment with a trailer in tow, and the third time I moved from one unit to another within the same square mile of the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem. I leave behind many things each time I relocate. Some are material, and others are intangibles—lessons, selves, modes of living not fit to serve in a new place. From Alaska, the lessons feel overwhelmingly place-based, and unmastered. How to field dress a grouse. How to empty a revolver. How to gut salmon. How to accept that a story that is not yours, is not yours to tell. How. Understanding, it turns out, is not the same as fluency, competency, or ability.

I curl closer to her in bed. 27 years free of the womb and still, here, cheek against her shoulder. She laughs, “Are you scared?”

I am. One day I will never hear her laugh again, except in my own. One day I will never see her eyes winking in the sunlight, her hands gripping the steering wheel tight when semi-trucks pass us on the right, her feet shuffling along the sidewalk. I’m scared of time. I’m scared of the day that her entire blood family is passed, the day that nobody will be there to repeat her stories, which so often feel like the only tie I have to my bloodline, the only verifiable evidence I have that despite my zip code and my papers and my education and my painfully American single-language fluency (yes, even after seven years of Spanish coursework), I am Mexican. That my bristling eyebrows and undefined chin and wide, straight torso connect to any history of love, any history, any hands, any land. I am scared of the day she is gone, and there is nobody to show, proudly, that I’ve finally made something of myself. If I ever do. I am as scared of losing her as I am of telling her. Her life. Her story.

And then there is the present.

“This is the city where I was born,” and it is all heat and tomato canneries. Once, there were fields of winter beets; a mother of my mother stooped over, belly drooping where now there is pavement.

I want to remember everything and nothing.

We drove 3,545 miles, not counting the wrong turns, from Anchorage to Los Angeles. Proverbially, when we crossed our home county line at long last, we slowed to a crawl. The traffic alone was impressive, filling six lanes, dead stop. The golden hills were on fire, an evacuation of an entire town spilling onto the freeway, sunset pale pink. They say wildfires are getting hotter, stronger, more frequent. That one day there will be no water left. That one day they will let the state that feeds them, hand to mouth, crumble into the sea. A hundred thousand hands, tanned in the relentless sunshine, clawing at the flaming cliffs.

Yes. I am home.

xox

To my day one readers, thank you. This essay, or what I hope eventually stems from this essay, is to me at least partially tied to my 2018 publication, mo-ther-land. See the 2018 SOMOS Issu (< link).

also, if you feel like freaking out over epigenetic health histories, check out oogenesis, or, how your maternal grandmother was once pregnant with the egg that would eventually become you.

song: big thief/red moon

the sunset soon indeed will bleed in my horizon/that’s my gramma!

song:

Wednesday/cody’s only -

I want to remember everything / I cannot figure out what I meant /

By living all those ways I did

The weasel lives in necessity and we live in choice, hating necessity and dying at the last ignobly in its talons. I would like to live as I should, as the weasel lives as he should. And I suspect that for me the way is like the weasel’s: open to time and death painlessly, noticing everything, remembering nothing, choosing the given with a fierce and pointed will.

–Annie Dillard, The Weasel

The outcome of a life is hinged, largely, on choice. It seems to me that much of the American dream is built around a simple precipice: life is most fulfilled when the burden of choice lies with the living individual, to the greatest extent possible. That is, that the dream is really that the average person can choose wealth, choose education, choose faith, choose marital status, choose their life for themselves, through commonly available means. This, of course, stands in contrast to servitude, or feudalism, or enslavement, or dictatorship, when the outcome of a life is determined by an outside force (or series of forces) such as innate hierarchy, a master figure, or a series of divine-set or otherwise immutable laws.

For close to 250 years, “America” has offered this seductive promise. Choose America, and gain the right to choose: whether to rent or buy, whether to work, whether to have children, whether to live in a burgeoning city or on a windy mountain road, whether to follow in a father’s footsteps or forge an unrecognizable life for oneself. Choose, perhaps, to oppress. Choose, to wage war, to destroy, to kill, maim, rape, plunder. Yet somehow, for all the evidence against it, the prevailing narrative until recently remained relatively unquestioned in popular media: that the arc of justice would bend toward a future where most people in the territorial bounds of this country could gain access to this banquet of choice.

Choice is power. And power costs.

Each turn of a life unveils this cost. Children learn in fits: if you choose to throw the peas on the ground, you gain the satisfaction of watching the green orbs spool out into an invisible web, and lose both the praise of your guardian and, probably, the promise of dessert.

Teenagers long for choice, the right to its full intoxicating effects, regardless of their readiness. What could be more wanted than complete and utter control over one’s life? Looking at the onslaught of songs, movies, and novels written about 17-year-old-girls, I think we come to regret this yearning, and in so doing, we romanticize what we were before we shrunk under the burden of complete control. It’s easy to look back and believe that in the absence of choice, all possible outcomes remained. We might even have believed this then, at once horrifying, liberating, and a little untrue.

This year, I’ve made a lot of choices. And each has come with its own edges, its own shadows. I think choice gives facet, definition, depth to a life. So why am I still so shallow? So petty? So weak? Maybe those characteristics are the cost of the choices I’ve made. Maybe my burden is to remember–every other possibility, every other world—and to be encumbered by that memory. The trouble, I think, is that it is still early enough in my life that I can choose anything, but I am old enough now to recognize that the person I’ve become would be unhappy in many of those possible other lives. I don’t want all of the possibilities before me, but I still wish that I did.

In forty years, I know I will look back and regret some of my life–that’s inevitable, the only common destiny. But it’s hard to tell from here, standing less than a thousand feet above sea level, in the flat-topped muskeg, more black spruce than stars in the sky, each the same height as the last, which choices I will regret, and which ones I will value. And without that foresight, how could I not deliberate to the point of exhaustion? It’s my life, my life, my life.

“Are you serious about buying land?” Joanne looks me in the eye, sideways-like. Her shoulders are curled over, like she’s making this statement cautiously, a cat peeking out from beneath a stoop. I hold my breath for a second. My coworkers told me this moment was coming, and I’d agonized over what to say. The parcel would be dry, with electric capacity. There might be permafrost—so, bog, in the summertime. But five acres, in my own name. I could ask for owner financing.

She’ll only give it up if and only if I mean to stay. Stay, as in, move onto the parcel year-round. Become a full-time resident. Relinquish my California license plates. She means stay, starting now. Today. This winter.

“Realistically, I can’t develop it all,” she added, meaning: I would sell to you, if you meant to build a house. Building a house, for most residents, means from ground zero, with little help from contractors. It means borrowing a chainsaw and felling the logs, hauling the wood, chipping the stumps, and choosing either to build a cabin or order a kit to assemble DIY-style. For many, four walls of particle board with waterproofing paper and a roof ends up being enough. If you have a small enough space and a large enough woodpile, any centralized woodstove will do to keep a body alive through the winter. It sounds impossible when I describe the dilemma to my friends back east.

But it isn’t. That’s the frustrating—and tantalizing—dilemma. One of my coworkers turned 21 two weeks ago. He bought property in April, using the money he earned working hourly while living with his parents. He has no retirement investment accounts, but he does have an ATV, and drafts for his cabin, and a deed in his name. He assures me, “Plenty of people make a canvas tent work. They sell them fitted for woodstoves. You don’t need to finish the house the first year.”

The thing is: I could. There are no building codes or HOAs for two or more hours by highway in any direction. It’s a lot easier–and a lot cheaper–to build a house in unincorporated Alaska than Southern California. I can use a chainsaw, and a nail gun. I’ve dug pit toilets before. I’ve helped frame and hang drywall, not that any of the local homes I’ve been invited to have any. I’m not particularly good at tradework, and it wouldn’t be easy. Any of it. But it wouldn’t need to be pretty, couldn’t be. The standards for build aesthetic, here, seem to be relatively low, favoring practicality over anything else, in some cases even over longevity. Joanne reminds me that her second cabin, built by her ex-husband, collapsed completely one summer. That she is homesteading in her third self-built cabin is proof that you can always try again.

The reality is that it would be uncomfortable, and dangerous. Ordering propane, fixing the pipe fittings myself, crawling to work during the inevitable period where I would need to live out of a tent, cooking all of my meals with a camp stove for months at a time. Trying to get insurance with a non-address. The part where I would need to haul water to shower, or dig a well and then keep it from freezing when the temperatures drop to sixty below freezing. The literal subarctic.

In some senses, it feels like saying yes would be choosing resignation, accepting now what is already becoming: that the futures where I wore slacks, or pursued a doctorate, or lived in a nice condo on the outskirts of Boston, are long past. But another part of me wonders if it is really a choice, or fate. To have chosen my current job over graduate school despite its temporary nature, to have already watched my father build a house, to have already spent years showering with a water hose and bucket, to have met these people, and made these friends. Maybe I am simply cornered into truth.

It would be hard, even demoralizing. People die here, often. It seems my older colleagues attended a funeral potlatch per week this summer, and they say winter is worse. Anytime you pick at the stories of people’s lives, they are tragic, or at least have tragic elements. That feels doubly true, here.

In many ways, it seems this is one of the last places where choice runs rampant, to a damaging extent in some cases. There is little police presence. There is no governing authority below the state here. There is little economic competition, or demand. Parcel numbers and highway mileposts substitute for addresses. The closest gun range is a small pergola with posted rules and a bring-your-own target system. One of the local water supplies is a rusted pipe sticking out of the ground in a stream bed. Visitors ask me what locals do for a living, but often, it is just that: living.

Yet the temptation is still present. Few rules, near freedom, high consequences. A glorious wildflower season. A frighteningly feasible possibility of living fully, or close to fully, off of the land. A near complete divorce from all of the societal milestones I’ve failed to achieve. If a life is reduced to necessity, then every day survived becomes a success. That’s the real kicker: at rote survival, I know, I could succeed.

Could I give up the fight I’ve known for so long for this one? Accept at least a few precious years where my aging parents would see little, if anything, of me. Accept that at the end of it, many of my friends would fade by way of their unwillingness to find me, and my unwillingness to leave. For as long as I stayed, I wouldn’t need to choose anymore, I wouldn’t be able to: whether to believe that a ghosted text is or is not imbued with meaning. Whether I should look prettier or skinnier for my age, which hair product, which GLP-1, which cleanser to use to rid my skin of the forever textures and my body of its supple awnings. Whether or not to email this professor, or to spend the afternoon at that department store or the other, or whether I should schedule holidays around my family or his, or whether this apartment is a better price per square foot than that other, or whether taking a pay cut for different job duties would be worth the skills boost.

Or I could just. Day in, day out. Struggle through my lack of skill until it becomes something survivable. Light the propane stove with matches when the temperatures become too cold for the sparker. Shovel out a path to take the snowmobile to the grocery store. Live in bugnets for a few weeks each year.

Maybe.

“I don’t think I’m ready yet,” I tell Joanne, and she prods. Tells me about the school jobs in the winter, about how she’d sell it to me for cheap, and the 21-year-old chimes in: don’t forget the annual Permanent Fund Dividend. I could be another stitch in this community’s fabric. Named, knowable. Hated, loved, buried, forgotten.

Here, again, the burden of choice. Closing the door, at least for now, on a few years–or maybe a lifetime–where my choices would be intentionally limited.

There is always time, until there isn’t.

Later, my childhood friend calls me. “I’m almost ready to buy The Tumbleweed.” I smile sadly.

The Tumbleweed is a cafe in Gardiner, Montana, that a chef we used to know once owned. Her name was Anna. She was tired of the life she’d built–she was also the cook for the school district and a National Park Service residential work program, as well as the founding owner of the Tumbleweed, and her life had become too many school cooking awards, too much time, too much. The cafe was for sale about three years ago, and I said we should buy it–Misha can cook, she’s good with money, and I’ve worked long enough in customer service and literal pits to put the work in. She was scared, then, and brushed it off as a joke. But I’m never really joking, when I suggest these things. She tells me she knows–that I meant it. That she was scared then, but she just needs another year, or two, or three, to get “it” out of her system. I think she means achievement, or maybe her metropolitan nature. To see her intelligence and wit to a worthy finish line before starting over. To make a difference, first. In this moment, like Lila and Lenu1, I can see how sharp the divergence of our lives will become. She will leave this world with citations, stocks, the kind of career LinkedIn was made to chart, maybe even become a household name. I have slowly chosen, again and again, a trajectory comparatively more demure.

I try to laugh it off, keep it light, “I just think the moment’s passed.” Misha tells me it’s never too late, that eventually the current owner will find the operating costs too high. And maybe she will. But Misha left Yellowstone a year and some change before I did

The new owner was also my friend for a time, and I taught her child, and the cafe actually does quite well in the summertime. When Anna owned it, my friends and I would sit outside and use the WiFi on Friday nights. Under the new owner, we brought in bleached bones to paint on the patio. It’s not the best place for working when it’s crowded, but it does the job if you can find a coveted outlet. If anyone buys The Tumbleweed, secretly I think it will, unfortunately, probably be an out-of-state firm, the same kind that bought up both of the local bars. We couldn’t afford what Gardiner is becoming, even if one of us pulls a few key investments made today.

Misha insists. Waves a hand in front of the camera—it’s never too late, there’s time, it’ll go under, eventually. I try and change the subject back to her.

Because I can’t help but remember the owner’s son, homesick after one night in Yellowstone. And all of the times I walked past the cafe at night, then over the bridge, then back around the south side of the school before meandering home, just to make my life move a little faster. Despite the obvious, I don’t really mean that the moment has financially passed, although I do wish The Tumbleweed’s current staff success and longevity.

I mean, more, that my life has moved forward.

There was a version of me that would have–happily–put everything and more into Gardiner. When I first moved back to Yellowstone, I really did want it to work out, forever. The dry grass and rolling hills, the way the clouds built parades twenty stories into the sky in the afternoon, how the Mormon crickets died fat and quivering on the asphalt in the fall. The way the fish jumped in the spring. I was earnest, once, and I meant to put that in its entirety into that landscape. I still miss my gynecologist in Bozeman, smart woman. But I threw in the towel. I found mentors in new places. I found a little more opportunity elsewhere, and a lot more frustration. I found love, I lived with my family for a few months, I grew a little older, and that changed me in a thousand imperceptible ways.

If I were to go back, and I think about it every day, I do—it wouldn’t be for the cafe. Not now. She isn’t the same person either. Our lives have facets, now, a series of choices and people having already carved small riverine canyons, impassable without extreme effort, across them. I can’t begin to imagine that it will be easy to go back to the selves that toyed with owning a cafe in 2023.

A few weeks later, I try explaining this to the aforementioned person I fell in love with, without losing my footing in an actual canyon. The terminal moraine of Hole-in-the-Wall glacier is rocky, loose. I’m a little scared of the patches of dripping ice, small yawning caverns, under some of the slopes—visible only once you’ve walked down their sides. I think Joanne would still sell me the property if I meant it, even though the moment has passed.

“Like, maybe all of the struggle was just meant to culminate in this. Or, like, maybe it’s just like, I should just give up, you know? Like, I keep trying these new jobs and hating what I turn into. We keep saying we need to give 20% more. Maybe I (we) just give 100% for a year or two. I know we could.” That’s an abridged quote. He isn’t quite convinced it’s a sound decision. But the land was offered to me, specifically, not him.

Next summer, maybe I could remember to bring everything–I mean everything–I left behind. Maybe I can work on forgetting all of the bittersweet happenings that have pushed me from one home to another, and called me to return. Maybe I can start choosing what’s given, stop waiting on others to follow, just dive, consequences be damned. I won’t know until I’m ready, I guess.

There was snow outside of my window when I first moved here, all of the branches bare. I watched them spring to life, these clusters of foliate greens that twisted the sky into glittering shadows. The trees are yellow and emptying, again. It’s frightening, how quickly a full season depletes. When will I be ready? Will I ever be? How much time have I lost—will I lose—to deliberation? Time, choice—it all tends to dust, in the end. After all.

After all.

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Some names in the above essay were changed for privacy purposes. As with all of my essays, I have the receipts to prove this was written entirely by me, with no outside or artificial assistance.

It was September, 2006, and every news station was broadcasting. Stingray through the heart, survived by two children. Bindi was almost my same age. My parents pitied her, and so I did, too. I don’t remember whether I heard it on the morning news before school, or if he died in the afternoon. I only know that I loved him.

It was perpetually sunny during that chapter of my life, which was grounded in a tract-style mock-farmhouse in the Mojave. Of course it was: I was a child.

Ours was a home that remembered the 1990s, which at the time was only yesterday. Orange-peel wall texture and orange-stained wood accents, even on the recessed ceiling lights. I wore plaid jumpers, peter pan collars, and bobby socks on school days. I brought a floppy disc from our closet stash to school for computer class.

Ryan can’t remember this, but we kept pill bugs in soda-bottle terrariums and caught lizards with spatulas and ate sugar cookies doused in nonpareils. We were a loyal PBS household: on weekends, my parents broke the screen time rules, and let the television run from children’s shows into nature documentaries into antique auctions. Belly-down on a shag carpet, I watched the world, and wanted to save it: Steve’s alligators, the oil-coated otters, the pillaged rainforest, the choking pika. It seemed every fast food commercial, every celebrity cameo on Sesame Street, every news clipping had the same positive spin: change was possible. The future was bright if only we acted now.

Barnes & Noble still functioned as a third space, then: low yellow lighting, except in the kids’ area, where across the nation suburban children could find weekly storytime, low-set benches, a wooden deck, and a permanent train set complete with a water tower. My mother tells me this is where we learned about 9/11. From the bench at a Barnes & Noble storytelling event, on a day the nation watched the same event in unison. I don’t remember this, but I do remember , five years later, the clip of the waves from the shoreline near Batt Reef, and the news anchors’ hope that loss could inspire good.

Michael Jackson’s death seemed to occur at a great turning point. I watched his funeral a hundred times, each against my own will. From the laundromat, the McDonald’s on Foothill, from our home screen, from restaurants. I didn’t cry for Steve, and I certainly didn’t cry for Michael. I didn’t realize at age nine, at the dawn of Netflix, thatI would never again experience real-time events with my classmates or my countrymen.

Well, never is a strong word. There was Robin Williams, and then Harambe, accompanied by Prince, and Bowie. But the difference remains: I learned about these later events from tweets, phone notifications, and tumblr fan posts—not any unified headline sequence.

Now, there is Dolly.

Everyone on staff at the park I work in agreed, when the phone notifications poured in. Really, we should just lower the flags for Dolly. We were joking, but only half.

The line of thinking: if we can do nothing else right, then let us recognize this one woman for any amount of her contributions. The 3,000 songs, the drag, the 11 Grammys, the book donations, the Hannah Montana cameos, the Buddy Program, the Hurricane Helene and My People funds, the vaccine and children’s and women’s health research funding, the remarkable publicity team that must have been held at gunpoint for 60 years to produce an icon so well-known yet so well-liked.

When the executive order came from Washington, we ran to the flagpole. Even here, in the literal Alaskan bush, where a subset of my coworkers commute from home-hewn dry cabins that lack addresses, Dolly is grieved not only by queer Gen-Z parkies, but by locals whose homeschooled children once depended on her free book programs.

It was and is stupid, that the flags will remain at half mast until September 1st.

Dolly Parton was an infamously gaudy celebrity, not a purple-heart veteran, not a supreme court justice, not a politician, not a firefighter.

But I’m not mad.

Maybe it’s because Dolly’s family was always reminiscent of the one that shaped my own mother: so many children, clawing at a chance to make it. So many hopes, not only for themselves, but for the children of those many children: that we would read, touch type, and go to college. That we could be working professionals by choice, someday.

I think I care about Dolly because of nostalgia, yes, because she heralds that brief flit in time when we, as a nation, experienced cultural events in unison together, instead of through personalized algorithms or a monthly mail delivery from the Pony Express.

But I also care because she cared (or, appeared to care) publicly, about so many things, including literacy, and including children, who despite forming a substantial demographic of the world each year have almost no control over the shape or quality of their lives. It makes me think I could care. Should care. Scratch that. Her death reminds me that I do. Care. And should probably do more to act on that care.

When I think of Dolly, I think of the era I am watching disappear in real time. Few people from any generation manage to tie their fame so deeply into their philanthropy, charity. I wonder if she will be the last. I wonder if it is even possible to have a universal impact in today’s world let alone today’s America, when each election cycle proves that we no longer experience the same universal reality.

Maybe it doesn’t matter. We are still here, living, and crying, and laughing, and loving. Loving, longer than always.

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Nepal/Tibet Flash Flooding Aid:

• https://www.globalgiving.org/projects/nepal-flood-relief-fund/donate/

• https://www.directrelief.org/2026/08/nepal-tibet-flash-flood-medical-relief/

• List of other Links: https://archive.ph/fKofz

Imagination Library fund matching:

• https://donate.imaginationlibrary.com/

Reading is Fundamental:

• https://www.rif.org/

Other media:

https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/dolly-partons-america

Somehow, I ended up here:

There was a narrative that was forming around my existence–that disaster would, endlessly and inevitably, find me. And that in the end, it would be fine.

It’s 2026. Alice, dear friend, once again finds me in some godforsaken corner of the United States. In 2021, I thought the two of us were going to die: there, in the thickets of whitethorn and burnt blowdown that coat the mid-elevation Sierra. We’re not there anymore; life has sauntered forward, equal parts monotonous and horribly emotive. My car is borderline unbearable, and so we’ve been walking for miles. For Thai food, in an unincorporated census bureau in rural Alaska.

“I think about your writing all the time.” Embarrassed, I scoff at her, roll my eyes, kick a stone down the Glenn Highway while she finishes, “the one where you said that the point of living is just to live.”

“Well thank you, but,” I swat a mosquito off of her hand, note the familiar reddened fingertips and slender wrists, still young, which we are, although it feels less true every day, “I got that one from the Russians.” She’s been reading Dostoevsky for years. Before that, Tolstoy. She keels over to laugh, her ponytail rising into the sun as her face bobs earthward.

Russian literature-esque or not, most of the time I believe it’s true. That the point is to get through.

I rant, shouting over the road of a semi-truck in the far lane: it’s true, it’s true–we’ve invented all of these goalposts, but in the end the empires fall and the corporations win the lawsuit and the oceans will turn into plastic and the old man’s diplomas will be discarded before the estate sale and every day a baby will blink wide-eyed at the shape of his mother’s hand against the sun and the flowers will keep blooming even if someday the fireweed gives way to white sweet clover and knapweed but they will bloom neon from the earth and the glaciers will melt and the soil will spring forth in bursts of isostatic rebound and the flames of all of our crimes–but the world will literally keep spinning and we will vanish and what will have been the point? Not for humanity, but for us. I mean what is the point for us, with our hands against the sun, shielding our eyes from the very contrast that first captured our attention. We are gods, and yet we do so little.

It’s true, in my eyes, and I look into hers, fiendish. “It can’t always be New York or Los Angeles. Someone has to hold it down in Glenallen.” It is a common meme format at the moment, just some silly over-saturated image and English text, but belying it: life can’t always be glamorous. We can’t survive entirely off of all-time highs, nor off of solely all-time lows. We humans can’t stand to remain swinging between the two forever without driving our minds to madness. Because that isn’t the point.

The point is to live: to sex, to breathe, to rage, to drown. I look to door-dashing groceries and artificial intelligence and robot vacuums and Alexa as antitheses to this ideology, although most of these wonders have their place in moderated doses in American life today (I am however suspicious of Alexa).

At what point have we engineered away so many of the simple, mundane, uncomfortable aspects that define a life lived, that the actual act of living is drained from it?

The arguments for automation always stoke the idea that we humans should use our time not for survival but for something great, worthwhile, meaningful: art, science, work, and finally vanquishing every statistic ever. I simply wonder: What happens to a brick wall after the grey, ugly, boring mortar is stripped4? It becomes a pile of bricks. And what is a brick wall constructed without any mortar to begin with? Also, a pile of bricks.

I know that someone wrote these same woes and wants by candlelight when the industrial revolution replaced spinning looms, and when we stopped lighting tungsten on fire to light our hallways, and when the record player almost became obsolete. At the end of every advancement, each its own wrecking ball for its century, there is still, somehow, more mortar.

I am not advocating for sloth or returning to an age before Polio vaccines. I just don’t think people need to want a purpose beyond something to do productively each day, and a place to exercise their capacity to love. Not everything needs to be efficient. Just effective.

The reality of life is all around us. In the cup of spilt peas. In the time spent flipping through study guides, waiting for a kettle to boil, waiting for the next train. In the time spent choosing between olive oil brands. In the familiarity of our palms braced against a steering wheel, a door knob, a tabletop–damp, soft, sturdy. Why is that depressing? To be able to name the texture of objects from rote memory, to recall the ways a corner has changed in imperceptible shades over a year, to be skilled in a thousand small but tangible tasks, to watch our skin sag, to watch the hummingbirds return, to watch the dew bead and the leaves rot over the course of several forgotten weeks, to choose again and again to wake up despite the monotony and loneliness of it all for as many days as we can stomach. Isn’t that the point?

In the case of my friend, I hope that the point of life is not only to love. Because what does that mean for her, then, when she experiences earthshattering heartbreak–or when she doesn’t? What if she never finds a great love–the kind that moves mountains? And what if she does? Will her life end then, when that love runs its course? When her spouse passes? Will her purpose cease once achieved? I hope that the point of her life is more than the green energy revolution, is more than politics, is more than promotions, is more than work well done. I hope it is more than mind-bending vacations to distant lands. I hope it is more than kissing strangers at a bar, alight with life and novelty for a fiery span of minutes-into-centuries. I hope it is more than succeeding, more than trying and failing again and again and again until her knees bleed into the hard-pressed dust. Of course I hope she uses her capacity to think and love to do great things, to make the world better for someone else somewhere, but I hope the point of her life–the driving purpose of her conscious existence–is simple. I hope it is to live. I’m not just talking about Alice.

The issue with this theory is that “the point of life is to live,” is only tolerable to a point. I cling to religion on the faithless hope5 that maybe there is something that equalizes the horrors borne unduly by some and inflicted by others.

I grasp for righteous principality, at “being a good person” because if the point of life is to live then why do we live for so long? Then why do I feel so innately furious that so many of my peers–”the best and brightest”–have willingly chosen career paths that actively contribute to human suffering and ecological collapse and national instability? Then why am I so afraid to stand for something—anything?

If the point of life is to live, then why does this impossible sum of time keep escaping through my hands, running down my wrists, a warm mess I don’t notice until the stains have taken hold in my clothes and all of the time I had in my cup–not half-full, not half-empty, just a few clear ounces–has evaporated?

But I don’t know what else I’m managing to accomplish besides living, as I weave sinuously between common adult goalposts. As I catapult from high to high and low to low, seemingly incapable of digesting the very banalities I preach as necessary.

I leave Alice one morning to go to work and when I return home, she has boarded her return flight. I can’t say that it feels like yesterday–2021, I mean, but I could also be talking about 2023 and 2016 and 2011 and 2004–because in truth it has become difficult for me to remember the banalities of my life once past. Blurry or absent entirely are all of the things I didn’t photograph, or write about, or post about, or tell my friends about over and over and over again. I remember I ate wild rose petals on my runs that summer, but I don’t remember where I ran to. Despite this, somehow, it is still surprising to me that time has continued, as I begged it to then.

I remember that 2021, which is both yesterday and also a lifetime ago, everything was sharp and brutal. It was, per the meme, Los Angeles and New York—even if I felt incredibly isolated from these places. I was making do with an Americorps stipend and a sleeping mat. That summer, I drove into a deer. The tow drivers had me wait at a bar until they got off of work, and then brought me to a campground, because there were no motels. I slept behind the bathrooms with everything I could fit into a backpack, all of it pulled from the car which had, until two hours ago, housed the extent of my earthly possessions. I lived out of my friend’s vehicles, a 1-person tent, and work rigs. I got bronchitis.

Every sweet June-into-July morning, I found myself wondering when my “fun” post-college summer would begin. But I think I overall managed well. I made a few humorous posts on Instagram during the days of Gen-Z “finstagram” popularity to chart my downfall. I joked with my supervisors that I was a magnet for unfortunate events. I was the only person on my crew who was denied SNAP benefits. I laid in the grass at the Whitefish farmer’s market and laughed. I wiped tears from my students’ eyes three miles into the northern woods. I quit a few weeks early to drive a quarter of the continent in two days, and to hike a portion of the PCT–my first time spending more than a couple of hours with Alice in one sitting.

I think back on that summer exactly how I knew I would: with envy.

Five years later, the urge to sell my belongings and live out of a RAV4 is tantalizing, again. I want my life to be ecstatic and promising. I want only sunrises. I want meaning to steep alongside my coffee. I want mornings with my parents, silent companionship, because they are rare. I want lightbulb moments, I want reinvention, I want urgency, I want passion. I want a forever home. I want forever6. And ever.

Is my purpose simply to live? It must be. If the whole point: living, to live–then I am “on track.” When my friends ask me if I’m “satisfied,” I should say yes.

Because I have lived. At least, for someone my age, I think many would say I have lived.

I have hiked hundreds of miles alone even through grizzly country, through the California alpine, through the humid bioluminescence of New England. I have my degree. I have lived in six states and two countries, I have had sex with people I hated and people I loved, I have swum in the rain, I have cried into a dark night, watched the midnight sun fail to set over a glaciated peak, I have kissed the heads of my friends and still managed to fail them, I have lost again and again and again. I have fine lines. I have done many, but not all, of the things I’ve said I would do.

I follow the veins of a leaf with my finger, show a young girl that nature is brutal and purposeful and messy. She returns her junior ranger booklet after peppering me with a dozen questions about wolverines and snowpack. I flip through the pages with her and ask, “What was your favorite activity?”

She grins and looks down, bashful, shy, and perfectly seven. She wants to be a biologist. Something marvelous and meaningful. My heart stings. I shower the child in praise and make her recite the pledge to protect national parks and brush her teeth.

What am I inspiring the next generation to do, really?

The clock strikes five, it is now July, and I drive home with the heater on and the windows down even though I claim to love the earth, because my heater is broken and runs forever.

I remind myself that this–discomfort, uncertainty, transition, loneliness, the very passage of time, and a few flits of passerine joy in between each of these–is living. Sometimes it doesn’t feel like it should be. But I think, in the end, it is. Living. And that I’m doing anything at all—even eating—with that aliveness is the point.

In the morning, I unintentionally follow Alice eastward and begin a 12-hour journey to reach a campground in upstate New York.

In the lake, wet and slickened, I am convinced again that time is circular. The air is soft. The hills flutter deciduously. I could be 19 again, writing awful poetry in an unsaved Word document and biking across Pawtucket and folding tarps in the Hillel attic. Except I am 27. Everything is different. I am different, swimming at a wedding for former coworkers (beloveds!) who knew me before I knew love. The clear glass is spilling time, all over my hands, all over my body, into the lake, between myself and my friends.

Half of the wedding guests are current or former park rangers, and it is difficult to escape the question: is this our job, forever? Do we want this to be our purpose? The guests are split. Many will likely be lifelong educators: this is their vocation. Many of us feel torn: yes, but.

The bride treads water in a beam of refracted sunlight. We chase fish.

After the ceremony, my former roommate–who raised secret chickens with me, in a government dorm–traipses the outskirts of the pond in search of beaver sign with me. We find a lodge, but no beavers. Just fireflies, blinking slowly between my cupped palms and the warm asphalt.

I tell Bridget that fireflies look different than I thought they would, like sticks. I mean when they’re not alight. Brown, long, fragile. I thought they would be rounded, globular—like the planets.

Bridget laughs: she doesn’t think fireflies look like sticks. I watch the edges of her eyes and mouth turn up, way up. A joyous thing, to turn to the sun.

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P.S.

How many sockeye swam up the Copper River this run: https://www.adfg.alaska.gov/sf/FishCounts/index.cfm?ADFG=main.displayResults

Hint: It’s Quite Low

It isn’t a bad life. My home routine is suspended in time somewhere between Dick Proenekke’s journals and an early 2000’s FEMA camp.

That is to say: somewhere in the depths of the Copper River Valley, while my college friends scurry across the country to our first reunion with new law and medical degrees in-hand, I am living in a shed.

My shed is fairly…nice. It is of the pre-manufactured variety commonly sold at commercial home improvement stores–outfitted with a window, lock, and smoke detector, even a few layers of eggshell interior paint.

It doesn’t sound nice—I keep forgetting, as I recount the visible Oriented Strand Board texture to concerned former colleagues and ex-classmates, that among my primary gradeschool friends, I alone lived without drywall or functional plumbing for much of our shared suburban childhood.

But, I assure them—although I have to walk a few yards in the spring drizzle to reach it, although the kitchen is plastered with PFAS contaminant warnings–I have a heated shower with four walls, a window, towel hangers, and a reverse osmosis water filter. Once, many years ago, in my own land and life of plenty, I had a water hose and a bucket.

I know it isn’t the shed making me sad. I have a desk big enough to fit a laptop and a sewing project at once, an Ikea armoire, a heater, two lamps, a shoe rack.

It isn’t the sun making me sad, although the light provided is narrow, wan. The day never ends, here, the sun setting well after 10 pm and rising before my first alarm. I’m told that local doctors recommend summertime vitamin D supplements, despite the abundance of thin light.

It isn’t medication making me sad, although I forget, weekly, to bring my small tube of circular pills to the movie nights that end in my sleeping on a coworker’s couch.

It isn’t Alaskan isolation making me sad–I work with colleagues and the public again, and every day I return to the row of identically converted sheds, neatly waiting for their summer occupants, and dodge a friendly abundance gossip and gripes (I care, deeply, but I am tired of caring to the point of exhaustion). I’ve enjoyed three or four separate staff mingling events, where long-time locals and new staff from across four unincorporated townships shared grilled salmon, smoked salmon, jerkied salmon, baked salmon, and stories about salmon. When I run, people wave to me from the highway. I have acquaintances–new, tentative–to watch movies and get drinks with, without advance scheduling or calendar invites or transit snafus. So despite being two hours from a major town and three hours from an urban centre, I cannot say that it’s isolation that is saddening me.

It isn’t the grey making me sad, although the icejams and dwindling roadside snow piles are bleakly so. The pasque flowers are blooming.

I stumble down the side of a hill, one behind the gravel pit hiding behind our visitor center, until the earth sloughs into 140 metric tons of sediment-laden riverwater. The purple blossoms aren’t as prolific as the jacaranda litter my mother is sweeping in California, but they are bright things nonetheless. Their petals catch a slanted golden hour, scatter it between the fine hairs coating their pistils.

I lie in a bed of sphagnum moss, fail to capture the warmth of its hue through an iPhone, and remind myself that a photo captures the memory and not the eye’s truth.

The light stills against my wall. It flecks yellow-amber-orange between the textured chips of wood.

“Is everything ok-a-a-ay?” His is a faraway voice, and through the radio waves–miraculous things–I can hear the concern rising.

I’m quiet on the other line. I think he’s afraid that I’m crying, and I am, but I don’t know why, can’t say why without spiraling, can’t keep dragging the two of us down together. I’ve done it to enough people, do it to enough people, every day, every drunken afterparty, every time I speak, I write, I sulk. We’ve discussed marriage. You can’t marry someone if you’ve already drowned them.

“Mm-hmm.”

“Are you sure?”

“Mm-hmm.”

I try to answer the question–what are you thinking about–but it comes out tinny and garbled and tearful, though I try to swallow them (the tears). I hate my voice when I am weak. I am an articulate person.

“What did you say?” And in response, I am silent. Because I am not thinking about anything except everything I have ever done, regretfully. I don’t mean to repeat the double-edged quiet of my mother. But how do you put that admission into words?

For months, I’ve been meaning to write a piece entitled, It Gets Better.

This was a phrase written earnestly to me in a letter by a girl who now runs a wedding rental business. We went to church together, she was a sort of youth pastor and served as a counselor for an overnight youth retreat I attended with my parish. I was sixteen and despite every indication that I was lucky and promising and had every reason to be happy, I couldn’t imagine an adult life worth living. I couldn’t imagine the effort it would take to make it to eighteen. I tried to.

Everything before me felt laid out, plain, flat: I would never escape my fate, an alteration of the same misery every adult in my life complained of. If I told an adult, or a hotline, about the crushing angst of hormones and circumstance, I feared I would lose who I loved most. Or worse—that they would lose more than I would.

At the time I was the only member of my family who was actively working. My mother confessed to me her own desire to disappear, tempered only by her belief that any iteration of child abandonment would be a sin. It was early spring, everything jacaranda blossoms, still beautiful, still promising, still unrotted. Everything I was learning about brains and genetics in school suggested that my own psychiatric health would someday follow the same progression of those before me. Everything, everything, everything.

I kept a diary. I maintained my hobbies, grades, blogs, and group chats. I watched my peers with beautiful homes and educated parents and perfect teeth post cough syrup and scratch marks and busted walls on Facebook, to text chains, in reblogs on Tumblr and let the secret, vehement urge to follow pass through tears and the burn of biking uphill in an inland summer and a thousand pirated replays of Vessel. I stood, still breathing, in front of my classmates’ memorials. I stayed alive. We were Catholic, and suicidal ideation is canonically a sin, and likely a mortal one. One forgivable only by a priest through Reconciliation–a sacrament impossible to obtain after death, when one has presumably already been cast into some tier of Hell.

What a blessing–to have a robust and full life to be so burdened by. But I was a child, and it seemed to me that my parents were suffering another episode of generational curses: of dances with poverty, of loss, of angst, of irrecoverably disruptive change. A curse fated to become my inheritance.

In elongated bubble handwriting, under the yellow light of a chapel buried in the San Bernardino mountains: It gets better, Sarah. I promise that it gets so much better. She underlined the word “so.” There is an end, a light, there is something real in the cliche. We never discussed her letter or the tears or the shared vigil with classmates who I would go on to continue mutually ignoring at school. That was 11 years ago now. The letter has been buried in the onslaught of homework and diaries and memorabilia that my parents have harbored in my childhood home without complaint for the last decade. I have attempted to abandon Catholicism, and who I was then, more times than I can count.

But it did “get better.” And the phrase repeats in my head, on my best days, when I want to boast to the world: I am happy today. Today, I enjoyed living. I can appreciate a future. I would undo very little from my past, because it brought me to my present. On those days, which are more abundant than I realize, I think about the letter a lot.

Katie, the author, was young–in her early 20’s at most–when she wrote it for me. So I don’t know how she knew, with such certainty, that pain and reconciliation and joy and redemption could exist in the same lifetime, and even at the same time. But I guess she was right:

It got better.

So I don’t know why I’m still, so often, as sad as I am. Why I cry on the phone, but can’t admit to it. Why every change I choose seems to perturb me.

I spent the last two days eating ice cream and laying in moss and calling people who loved me once and might still. Maybe photos will never capture the full essence of a moment. But when I look through my camera roll, I am reminded that I have everything I dreamed of when I was sixteen, when it felt like my heart was lain prostrate before my life, before Katie, before the world. Everything, everything, everything.

My parents are living in relative peace again, and send me love in every form as often as they can muster it. I have a boyfriend, someone to sit in silence with me on the phone again and again.

I am losing my closest friends each year as we grow apart and away, but when I am able to keep track of planned calls and text replies, I can see readily that though the ties are fraying they have not yet broken.

I am writing from a shed, in Alaska, thousands of miles away from the sunny kitchen table where I first began writing this newsletter, but I am surrounded by people who mush and hunt and fish and love and bleed and teach and survive.

All of my childhood–before the intensity of high school–I dreamt of being free. Of being animal in my freedom, of a feral humanity. I loved Spirit and Felicity and Little House and sea otters and granite and pika and the disappearance of trees on high peaks and guinea pigs and broad-leaved shade and the lizard I caught with a kitchen spatula. I wanted to swim in the ocean. I wanted to cross the continent. I wanted to lie in the rain. I wanted to love.

And I have. And I do. My life has contained drunken kisses, blistered palms, coastal sunsets, backcountry hot springs, Patagonian thunder, desert petrichor, the wisdom of young women, the fascination of young men, dry blankets, and wet tents.

In other words, it got better.

But Katie’s piece still hasn’t been written.

I stare into the void of my Notes App and the phrase stares back, encased by emptiness. It gets better.

“No, really, I mean, it could be so much worse,” I repeat to a friend, tracing the outline of primed OSB chips in the wall of my shed. I mean it.

My former government-furnished abodes have contained three in-room roommates, lead-positive drinking water, collapsing ceilings, asbestos tiles, floorboard nails peeking through rugs, free windowsill mushrooms, free bathtubs filled with human feces, free mold-coated basements, free-range mice, bats, squirrels, lizards, woodpeckers, toilet millipedes, indoor anthills, weekly brown recluse sightings, and the mysterious stench of misplaced rotting flesh.

Here, my only real concern is the afterthought of Teflon coating my steaming skin during my midnight shower. Anyway, that’s what the water filter is for.

The shed–I mean, it’s spacious compared to the half-rooms I’ve shared. The ceiling isn’t raining insulation, because there is none, and the carpet isn’t peeling back to reveal a half-century of dead skin particles, because there is also none. It’s pristine, in that regard. I should be happy.

It may get better. But as it is, it truly could be so much worse. That’s something to be thankful for.

I’m not dissatisfied, per se. At least, not with the shed. Although I am frequently sad, I wouldn’t say I’m unhappy, at least not in the ways I have been so deeply aggrieved in the past. I just can’t say if I feel fulfilled. I still cannot say what I want, or what I mean when I say I want more.

I still cannot identify what I hope to glean from or give to my singular life.

I ask a friend in law school if they have any idea what they want do after a fast-approaching graduation, if law school has provided them what they hoped it would. The answer is no, not yet, not quite, maybe, but their mother also didn’t know what she wanted to do with her career. I ask if she was happy. The answer is no–for the entirety of her adult life, the sense of disorientation and continually misplaced ambition seemed to bring immense anxiety to her. Perhaps even to her sense of self.

I wonder if I’m sad because I lack a definitively secure direction, a higher calling.

We stew, laugh, agree: the two of us may yet be doomed. Desire, even a desire to know, can still be a root of suffering. Is.

But then, perhaps it gets better.

I love light. The blinds are open, and the sky is bright, and as I am writing this, it is 11:03 p.m.

I am already scared of tomorrow, and as I turn my hand over and watch the wan light fleck off of the lines of my palm I know I will be tired, again.

But it gets better. It gets so much better.

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I was lying, belly-down, on the carpeted floor of a conference room, my sibling next to me, books clutched between us. Deep-stained doorways. Baby blue window frames, clearly repainted for decades over. Everyone present at least two decades my mother’s senior. A Seeing Eye dog we weren’t allowed to touch. Ten copies of the Bible.

The last Olympian had fallen. I could feel the dreadful empty creeping in—no more pages. Not even the acknowledgments section remained. For weeks, I’d poured in-class reading time, recess time, and precious dinner time into the story of a boy I could never become. There was still an hour left of Bible study; absent another novel, I would have nothing left but to listen. In the back of my head, I could feel a cold weight sinking from the back of my neck to my stomach.

I had yet to leave elementary school, yet was already immensely anxious about completing homework ahead of time. I was always forgetting worksheets, missing negative signs, and losing pieces of my projects and articles of clothing. Reading was the only subject that quelled the fear of my own chaos: I never lost books.

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Every novel finished was followed by strained waiting periods: library holds. In the interim, I paged through series at Barnes & Noble to add to my list of county requests. Ryan was perenially a few books behind me; we had finally struck the perfect combination of ages. As I departed from each author’s world—Lemony Snicket, Rick Riordan, Dave Barry, Eoin Colfer, Joseph Delaney, Laurie Halse Anderson—Ryan entered, albiet at a much slower pace. It made Christmas easy; a bookstore giftcard could feed our family of two when the school and public libraries fell short.

Wooden chairs scuffling across the TrafficMaster carpet. Five copies of the Bible still visible. The guide dog stirred and stilled. I needed to know that I could smooth the gaps between dinner and sleep, between homework and soccer practice. I needed to know that someone, some genius storyteller, could and would fill in the time between digi-cam selfies and chicken watching. I needed something to fill the empty sinking, the internal blue that threatened to drown me as the sun began its slow, daily ritual of giving out. Giving up.

Through the church conference room’s small, heightened window, dusk was settling in. Predictably. With no skill or luck, I tried to keep my thoughts narrow, focused. On the soft-edged tick of the clock. On the lick of my brother’s hair.

On my forever project, which was to remember everything from my girlhood exactly: stare at the grain in my mother’s chair, at the heavyweight velveteen grids that blanket the setback. Blue into purple into stray threads of fuchsia. I repeated the image to myself in words, practiced seeing the chair and the cracked cerulean accents on the walls behind my closed eyelids.

There was so much blue. I remember the blue. How none of the shades matched. I can’t remember what the back of my hands looked like that day. Then. Only ten, only fifteen—sixteen years ago.

When I got home, I tossed the beaten copy of The Last Olympian on my bed. Stood before the desktop computer in our living room, which went through daily phases of posessing and lacking a chair. It was grey, boxy, was still running speedily on Windows 98, everything I could ever know pouring out from a tower that my father had built when dial-up migrated to broadband. Slow chickenpecking: what is the small of back.

I pressed my palm to my own spine, disturbed. What a terrible, vulnerable choice for one’s Curse of Achilles. That night, staring sideways at my wall, I thought about Percy telling Annabeth his one weakness, about bathing in the Styx, about the fragility of a man’s spine. My father had spent months facedown on our couch recovering from a back injury that year. It seemed so foolish. (I knew very little about the world at age 11, but I was certain that Percy Jackson was not entitled to worker’s compensation.)

As I write this, I am filling the small of my neck with a pillow. Propping up one of the weakest points of my spine, one of the easiest places to kill a person instantaneously, or at least debilitate them for life. The sun will hang in melancholy—the blue hour—until close to 10 p.m. AKST tonight. Only one night have I managed to catch a ribbon of orange on the skyline, running after dinner along the highway. I stopped to take a picture on my phone, and sighed when it didn’t capture the image. I am just as afraid of forgetting as I was on the floor of Our Lady of the Assumption.

My boyfriend tells me that photos exist primarily to jog our memories, not capture one. That’s why commercial photographers seek out the same images: a bison through the steam of Grand Prismatic, that one bridge in New York City, a hand-heart pressed against a pregnant woman’s abdomen. The prints never look exactly how we remember the scene. But they look enough. There is enough detail to recall the missing haze of an unwanted summer.

Maybe that’s why I stopped ritualizing memory so intensely. Stopped writing down in painstaking detail every joke, every name, everything I encountered on the playground in now-lost journals.

I got a camera, and a phone. I can snap a photo, and in a decade squint at the pixelated mess and pretend to remember what it felt like to see a stranger’s breath fogging—in plain air, at sea level—for the first time. I don’t need to internalize my life to remember who I am.

I thought for a very long time that I was good at memorizing, because I was obsessed with it. I was an incredibly scatterbrained child (and remain so), always losing critical elements of my backpack and my belongings—but facts, but images, but stories, I could remember. I can still draw the layout of my first house, and where which dishes were stored, and how the woodstain on the pews at my first church tasted, and how embarrassing it felt to go to speech and writing class on the weekends, and how the foam pit at my first grade gymnastics studio smelled.

I aced every English class without lifting a finger because I remembered every Biblical parable Steinbeck and Morrison were so obviously recreating (didn’t you fools watch The Donut Man?). I loved biology, even though I couldn’t read the blurry projector boards: all I needed to do was open the textbook, and remember the pages.

In truth, as I learn and re-learn the same park foundation dates and geological timelines and work schedules, I admit that I must have never had a very good memory. My brain must have always been this fraught. I just stopped practicing. I stopped trying to name the color scattered by a desk lamp shining against new wallpaper. I stopped journaling meticulously, in code script, every single night. Preserving what I suspected, in 2007, 2011, 2017, would someday become the past, had been a borderline religious obsession. And slowly I left the faith.

The result of that fervor—for memory—is that I can remember my childhood much better than my adulthood. How long has it been? Over a decade. And yet, as my colleague re-reads the last chapters of Percy Jackson during her lunch breaks, I can keep up. The sword, the promise, the river, the unbreakable trust between Percy and Annabeth when he gave her the one thing that could kill him.

Sunny and I debate whether Percy couldn’t have chosen a better placement for his pseudo-Achilles heel1. Roof of mouth? Inner ear? Pelvic floor? It is hard to imagine channeling all the many ways my body could fail and putting the sum of my mortal weakness into one small spot, a concentrate, without also imagining a stroke of horrific luck, and misfortune’s aftermath. I cannot imagine almost-invicibility, because I have only known humans, never demigods: our weaknesses cover our bodies.

Maybe the only choices Percy should’ve been given were brain, or heart. I’m not sure I’ll ever know which is weakest, or whether we can control which one will fail us first, and to what extent, or whether for some of us it is written into our epigenetic codes to be anxious, to crave control, to feel reprehensibly lonely among friends, to yearn achingly, forever, and ever, and ever. Even doctors can’t say2. Maybe Rick Riordan could’ve.

I don’t know how to access my collegiate medical records, to see the notes from the first time I saw a doctor about the pain in my chest. It was stronger upon inspiration than expiration, worse after exercise, and sharp enough to wake me up from sleep. “Some people only need to take antidepressants for a few weeks, maybe a few years. But if you have a grandparent and parent with a history of comparable mental health—it won’t end here.” I asked if I would always have to take Prozac, if I started now, for the rest of my life. It’s likely. I should’ve written the conversation down, word for word, and maybe I did, in the pile of journals I’ll never re-read for fear of re-feeling the age of 19, but the clearest thing I can remember was the feeling of falling, disbelief, betrayal. I don’t know why he thought it was a good idea to frame it as endless. I’d come in to have my blood pressure taken, not to have the rest of my life laid cleanly bare: pharmacies, antiseptic, phone lines. I know he said it because I asked him—will it ever end? I know doctors swear to the truth. I know his words made me write again for the first time in years: the unsought confirmation that I will, eventually, always return to a pill to keep me alive. Dependence. Control. I would’ve preferred a surgical solution: painful, once.

Sunny grabs her coat and I lock my computer. A good fed.

I ask if her husband has bought the bushcraft plane he wanted to. She laughs, happily, “Not yet. But he’s always coming home with machines. It’s only a matter of time.” She goes home to 57 chickens—actually, now 59; it’s chick season3—and a shotgun. I go home to walk on the highway.

When I get home, I send Jane 30 minutes of voice memos and apologize for the engine breaking in the background. “I’m sorry it’s so loud,” I shout into the microphone, cupped in my hands, in the wind. Even if there are no right answers, even if we haven’t spoken in years, I want her to know about my love life, and my fears, and all of the narrowing futures before me. There was a time when it felt that the world had fallen in love, and only a few unhappy fucks had been left behind. And that included us. Briefly, it didn’t.

But after I found myself crying, again, in the shower, tracking all of the times I began to cry in a Note that grew longer twice a day, after food lost its flavor, after I couldn’t even remember why him, why he mattered so much, when I couldn’t even remember his middle name or job title—after the memories were compressed into a supercut of unremarkable moments, but before the weeping ended—she understood. That for all of the misandrist memes I’d saved onto my phone, at the end of the day, there were no amount of half-assed hobbies that could fill the void behind my neck, which hung heavy under the weight of that nothingness, eyes pushed earthward. That the desire to love—mariachi band in the rain type of love—was, likely, a genetic curse neither of us had managed to escape. That for everything I’d done—to control the passage of time as early as elementary school, to secure my future, as obsessive as I’d been with staying on track for college since 6th grade, as many hours as I’d poured into my job, working until midnight on due diligence reports under the yellow afterglow of a thrifted desk lamp—I could not control my heart.

I could control my mind even less. But I knew, that just as the worst of 17 and 20 had passed, so too would this. But the passage itself was out of my control, and in the hands of time. The soft th-tick, th-tick, th-tick of a wall clock. Red second hand never stopping.

We can’t control time. Which might have been the driving factor behind the fear that fed book after book after book through my digital bookmark, which was topped with an apple-green worm and a button to time the minutes I spent reading. I couldn’t stall tomorrow, but I could finish a 200 page classic novel between finishing my times tables and surrendering to my prescribed bedtime, and that was a pretty good fuck you for a 10 year old.

I couldn’t slow aging, or the eventual disappearance of magic from my world, but I could meticulously inventory the names of my stuffed animals in a purple address book, with an awful sketch of my mother’s dry garden and my collection of pill bugs in a bottle, writhing under the cool shade of pansies. And that was a pretty good fuck you for a 5 year old.

I couldn’t stop my parents from aging, or from coming home from doctor’s appointments with new medications, the same ones their parents had taken.

But I could remember.

And that’s been a pretty good fuck you.

For both of us: time, and myself.

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​The I-5 North is slow moving at the exit for Kettleman City. This is predictable. The green, screensaver hills are browning quickly. The sun is warm, and I catch the wind with my palm, squint westward. The Sierra is invisible behind the low fog of pollution that hangs over the southern Central Valley, save for a few white-capped peaks eking out of the hazy horizon. Another transition. I’m tired of moving, tired of knowing places halfway, tired of watching futures narrow and expand and promise and disappoint. I’m tired of waiting–for the right job, the right time, the right answer.

I hate waiting. More than this, I hate how much time, cumulatively, I have spent waiting: in line at fast food restaurants, for my ticket number to be called at the DMV, for the tow truck to arrive, for my life to begin, for a first kiss or first love, for the day I will finally wake up pretty.

It is a sin, inadmissible to anyone except for middle-aged priests in stale robes, to be everything that I am–a miracle in the fabric of time–and still yearn for traits as fleeting as clear skin, curled eyelashes, white teeth, better posture, an ass. I have been given everything that my predecessors could have possibly wanted: disposable income, an interracial relationship, freedom of religion, a college education, the bandwidth to choose my own profession. I have seen more of my home country than many of my peers and elders ever have or ever will. I have made more intimate friendships and seen more stars and swum in so many more wild waterways than a substantial populace ever will. And still, the corporeal urge: to be found attractive, universally. To be lovable from first sight.

How much precious time and thoughtspace has been wasted waiting–on a growth spurt, a summer tan, a new life, a new shirt, some new unattainable athletic goal–on something that will never belong to most people. The complete conventional aesthetic: white teeth, a summer body, an average height, a sense of style, the energy to be noticed.

As the small wrinkles and pained knees begin to become noticeable, at the young age of 26 it feels that I am nearing the turning point where “pretty,” in the surface sense, will become less attainable than beauty, in a more holistic sense. Beauty, which can be found in the aching depths of a gnarled hand, in the persistence of grey hair, in the dark wallows of peat bogs, in the bleak mundane of an empty vase. Beauty, which to me is more substantive than pretty–something that can age, something that can be inherent. Something I can be. But a secret part of me–the new elementary student with crooked teeth and hairy arms–is still waiting to be pretty, not only in the eyes of those who love me, but in the most conventional sense. I know that this is the kind of want that can be cured only by letting go of the desire itself, rather than actualizing it. I have no lasting interest in surgery, Botox, routine teeth whitenings, in Brazilian blowouts or full body waxes or in trying endless products to find the eyelash curler that will actually hold. I know these are the steps to take, to cure the want, to scratch the itch; I know many wonderful people who pursue them and find gratification in this. But I know.

I am what I am.

And yet.

The student and former therapy client in me knows–the desire to be this type of pretty is the result of socialization. I was taught to want pretty, and to fear ugly. I was taught that pretty is ephemeral; that aging is both a privilege and an enemy. And maybe this is the true desire behind my desire, unending, to wake up pretty: to stay young forever. To never watch my body change. Because I am afraid of hormonal rushes and hair loss, of becoming a scam victim, of losing my husband, of how difficult it was for my mother to reenter the workforce, of how my maternal grandmother couldn’t hold her own grandchildren without bruising, of how my paternal grandmother died in a hospital surrounded by her children and incapable of recognizing them. How in that sense, she died alone, in a country that didn’t speak the language that she thought in, even after spending her adulthood within it. I am afraid of living alone among others–that is, alone in a mind of memories and confusion, while the world outside moves on. I am afraid of living long enough to bury my friends, my family. I am afraid of becoming even more invisible.

And so, I am scared. Of the furrow bisecting my forehead, the stretch marks already gracing my hips that have never known motherhood, the gentle crow’s feet that will inevitably form a memory of all the track practices I forgot to bring sunscreen to. I am afraid of this fear. I am scared of waking up a senior, and realizing that my entire life, I have never been satisfied with the way my bangs frame my face, my natural hair part, or the side profile of my nose.

I knew it wouldn’t be so, but I did hope–that when I finally experienced some kind of lasting love, of the romantic variety, this urge would resolve itself.

And love, as I expected, helped a great deal–it bandaged the wounds of rejection, it made it easier to swallow my own beauty, it made it easier to believe the things that came so easy to other people: that everything will be okay, at its own pace, that time goes on without leaving us behind, that we are each capable of true change, that I am wantable. Love, as I needed it to, proved that for all these logical arguments there exists irrefutable evidence. And even if said love changes, or even ends–at least there was this. At least the proof existed, once.

But still. In passerine moments, whether flicking through a magazine, scrolling through reels, or watching a noticeably pretty person sort through the same pile of mangoes I’m waiting to access, it finds me. Here, in the Shasta Grocery Outlet: the feeling that I am still waiting. And I am tired of waiting for some glorious eucatastrophe to deliver me from the fate of normalcy.

I know that this will stay with me, as many things do. And I know that, if desire is the root of all suffering, then release is the only path forward. And I know that release will be impossible without the aid of time–of what I so greatly fear: aging. I only wish I knew how long, or how to accelerate the process of processing. Because that’s what this is, I think.

Processing. Processing love–for my life, as it becomes what I always dreamed it would be: free. Processing love–love for another, finally, having that love be not only reciprocal, but welcome at all. Processing proof–that I could be wanted, that my kinship could be wanted, that I could be beautiful to someone, that everything my friends told me could be true, that all of this could be proven.

Proof, because isn’t that the foundation of our judicial system, of our knowledge system, isn’t that why we insist on the separation of church and state, isn’t that why up to 29% of Americans lack a religious identity: the burden of proof?

When my first and only ex-boyfriend stated his ultimate reason for leaving me, it was the same number of words as the second-shortest Bible verse. “You want love.”

I insisted that I didn’t want love—because I didn’t. I only wanted proof that, if I was doomed never to know more than platonic attachment, I could at least be attractive, in passing–maybe, even pretty. A string of endless first, second, and the occasional fated third date seemed to further justify the idea that no matter how many cosmetic treatments I pursued, no matter how many interesting hobbies I pursued in earnest, no matter how much love I still had to give, I would never know what the songs, the legends, the scriptures, or even my students harped on for. I would not only never be pretty—I would never have a place to put this desire to love.

The apparent proof of this statement, or lack of proof to its contrary, felt physical, and urgent, and awful—a syrupy mud drowning my heart, cypress roots slowly squeezing the desire to desire out from my organs and into every interstitial space. A never-ending state of anaphylactic shock that no amount of time spent with my mother, or in the company of my long-distance friends and their partners, could assuage. A state of prolonged waiting. An endless hallway of closed doors. A forced liminality from which the only escape was an impossible task: the abandonment of desire. The relinquishment of control over my future, of whether I would have a choice in having or not having biological children, of whether I would have time to explore and learn and breakup and marry without rushed timelines or desperacy.

Of course, the answer is always time. It is why we wait–because time demands it, and we are subject to its reign.

A radio preacher, on the night of Easter Sunday, asks his audience to define it. Love.

In between pockets of static on a lonely Oregon road, I catch snippets of his assertions: love is not limited to acceptance, it demands growth, it demands improvement, it demands betterment. Love is not limited to emotion, desire, or attraction.

“Christ commanded his disciples to love—not to like—their enemy. By definition, your feelings toward an enemy are negative. We weren’t commanded to get along, or to become friends, or to vote for the same party—we were commanded to love.” Pastor Unknown fizzles out into static; I round another corner of starlit fern and hanging moss, leaves glimmering in the sinister night. That love can be more than lust, more than desire—and can exist even in the absence of positive neurotransmitter patterns is a powerful sentiment. One that humans seem incapable of consistently defining. But still I pause, as every young adult at the cusp of their future must, repeatedly, to wonder: what is love? And can it prove greater than time?

During its brief viral phase, I too read All About Love, hoping that the snippet quotes from Instagram therapists would guarantee something prolific. Bell hooks, of course, parrots that love must be chosen, that our current society is loveless, and this lovelessness is rooted in power-seeking behaviors. But I disagree.

I think there is an abundance of love in our world, but it is love without a place to go. We lack communal spaces, we’re taught to date casually, we’re asked to separate our work selves from our true selves. I think I would reconstrue bell hooks’ argument: society is not loveless, but it demands that we love less. Society demands that we bottle the utmost capacity of our emotions, seal them, shield them in the name of protecting our peace.

Indeed, for all our political differences, I nod when the radio preachers insist that the world demands that we love less urgently, less ardently, less selflessly, than we are capable. That if our ultimate guiding value was love–how could we wage unjustifiable war? How could we persist in crime, both individual and systemic? How could we racketeer, scam, or bully? How could we “cancel,” without providing avenues for change, redemption, return? If love was our guiding value, even over freedom, even over comfort–how much could we change?

The dramatic love stories that our society heralds recount extreme sacrifice only occasionally mirrored by the recipient of said love—Mexican love ballads, Greek gods relinquishing power (even family) for love and lust, Jesus on a cross to “save” his followers, the Titanic. Which suggests that love must be greater than reciprocity alone. Than convenience, than distance, than error. That love must be greater than compromise itself, even if compromise is a necessary component of the act of loving.

Maybe that’s the danger of it (love). That we have the power to choose to do and act upon the very sentiment that spurs wars, defines religions, breaks hearts, shapes lives.

The fog lifts above the Oregon coastline. Each seaside town passes by in a flurry of nostalgia. Driftwood signposts, wood-paneled studios, lighthouse-derived architecture, farmstands collapsing into salt-crusted heaps. It could be Cambria, or its outskirts, if not for the abundance of Oregon license plates and hours of consistent rocky shorelines. My parents frequently discussed moving before the housing crisis, and one such future might have seen them move to some beaten down apartment on the coast, if they hadn’t had children. They always discussed the maybes, the ifs, the somedays–some future where the costs of self-sacrifice recouped themselves in-kind. As a teen, I was thankful they never made the leap; I had friends, I excelled in school and in the community exactly where I was. As an adult, I now watch their peppered hair and slowing steps with angst. I drum my fingers against the steering wheel, watch the distance from the merging Corollas and old Fords in front of me. How cyclic; that time, and love, always ask for their dues. How similar, over time: just like their parents before them might have had a thousand other lives and possibilities–if not for children, if not for each other, if not for love.

It is Easter Monday; a few short days since Holy Thursday and Good Friday, in the Liturgical Calendar. These are the holidays my Catholic mother refuses to relinquish to the worldly ways of her children, but I resent these arcane nights somewhat less than other Masses, if only because their center themes remain applicable to my secular life: love, shame, greed, the limits of the value of limitless pleasure, self-control, reasons to persist, humility, hope.

This year, Fr. Montoya’s Good Friday sermon was simple: True love will never ask us to accept what is not worthy of us, but it will ask. Any parent will assert—love is not always easy. Enduring love always has a cost. Maybe—it’s the cost of free time, of loyalty, of compromise, of hard conversations, of unwanted but necessary growth, the pain of a first breakup, or remaining faithful during times of intense grief or illness. Whatever the cost, love—whether self-love, filial, or romantic—always has a price tag.

“The cross isn’t a decoration—it is an instrument of execution. For Jesus, it was the cost of love. So often we ask—how can I make love easy? You cannot. Even God’s own son couldn’t make loving easy.”

“But love,” the Father clarifies, “should never disgrace us.”

So love is something that might hurt, might demand humility, yet should preserve—even strengthen—our own dignity. It is something that holds the power to kill, to change, through the simple act of choosing whether to love, or leave behind.

But if love requires choice, requires cost, then maybe it is weaker than time. And so maybe I will never escape–the endless waiting. For a new day of pretty. For my life to begin. Because maybe love–self-love, filial love, romantic love–will never be enough to unteach what took a lifetime to learn.

Because how much are we willing to pay to numb ourselves? I look back–at the various opium and opioid and alcohol crises, at how easily we forget the crimes of media stars and leaders and the wealthy, at how readily Judas betrayed Jesus and how quickly my countrymen sell farmland and ecosystems and would-be affordable housing to data centers and private equity companies. I look at my own ability to touch-type while watching television, at how few protests I attend, at how I continually justify my passive nature with my recurring federal job appointments (which demand passivity by law). And the quest to define love, or even believe in it, to have faith sans proof, feels fruitless.

I pick at a plate of fried oysters, greasy enough to make me gag. My boyfriend accepts them quietly, as I move them from my plate to his. Once, I did this same act with my father. He spent my entire childhood sighing, wishing he could retire early so he could spend day after day with his children and wife. I can remember it clearly, the wistful Mijita, I’m going to retire soon–when he removed my training wheels for the first time, when Ryan finished their last week of kindergarten, and on my 11th birthday, at the beach, while I licked clean the HAPPY BIRTHDAY cake topper. That stupid plastic decoration, with its purple sheen, that I still keep in a wooden bedside box, because it shone like the inside of a mussel shell. HAPPY BIRTHDAY. I loved being 11.

Now my father is retired, and I am repeating the ritual: becoming so hungry on a road trip that I am one left turn away from crashing out, ordering a heaping plate, only to pass off a portion of my food to the man sitting across from me. Only I am no longer a child. And my father is a thousand miles away. And the time will keep passing, until one day, either myself or this boy whom I love find ourselves alone, with nobody to pick at our plates with as the sun fades weakly into a final morning. I can only hope this loneliness remains at bay until our hands are no longer smooth, strong, supple. Until our feet are too tired, too stiff to shuffle between tide pools. Whether death do us part, or our own choice break us first, only time can tell.

He tells me to hope, more. That I worry him. I sip at an icy cup of cola and I wonder. If a Nazarean peasant’s commandment to love thy neighbor as thyself, to love even thine enemies, can withstand the collapse of religious empire, multi-lingual translations, and two thousand years, then perhaps there is something begrudgingly universal in the commandment to love.

And maybe through love, there is hope.

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All her life, Sunja had heard this sentiment from other women, that they must suffer–suffer as a girl, suffer as a wife, suffer as a mother–die suffering. Go-saeng–the word made her sick. What else was there besides this?

–Pachenko, Min Jin Lee

In 2024, I was 24–an even and perfect number. Like most women entering their mid-twenties, baby fever overtook me. It was a bright winter morning in the shadow of the Gallatin Range when I caved.

I drove to the tractor supply in Livingston, and for $2.99 apiece, my roommate and I purchased two Rhode Island Red chicks. They cheeped the entire way home, and we filled a cardboard box with bedding, set a heat lamp on top of a microwave, and obsessed over their small, fragile bodies.

Baby chickens are small. Two easily fit in the cupped palms of an adult’s hands. But their size is disproportionate to their capacity to cheep.

They cheep when cold.

They cheep when hot.

They cheep when hungry.

They cheep when they fall asleep while standing up and topple sideways.

They cheep when they hop into their water dispenser and spill it.

They cheep when they see you–towering human–and when they don’t.

They cheep for sunrise.

They cheep because their broodmate has disappeared behind the food dispenser.

The two chicks were devoted to each other. If one chick was removed from the bin to be cleaned, the other cheeped with the ferocity of a broken smoke detector, its entire birdly body quivering with emotion. They needed to remain in sight of each other at all times. Motherless chicks do not have a high survival rate. We worried: how awful it would be if one of them died.

One week later, we purchased two Buff Orpington chicks.

The two Buff Orpingtons cheep-cheep-cheeped. In the warmth of the car, I took them out of the box, held them against my chest, and they quieted. Their eyes blinked, slowly, and they alternated between sleep and wake for the hourlong drive back to Gardiner. It was a beautiful afternoon, and I let them peer out from between my cupped fingers at the wonder of Paradise Valley.

The four chicks quickly separated into age-pairings. The Rhode Island Reds stuck to their side of the box, and across the bed of aspen shavings, the Buff Orpingtons huddled together and cheeped pitifully and incessantly through the night.

At around midnight I surrendered to my feathered smoke alarms. I wrapped the two new chicks–the Buff Orpingtons–in a towel and crawled into bed with them cradled in the crook of my arm. They slept in silence for seven hours.

My roommate and I marveled at our birds–which every day sprouted longer legs, longer feathers, and more frequent poop. We were mothers.

Although we were careful to divide our attention equally, the Buff Orpington chicks–Chickpea and Garbanzo Bean, respectively–were everyone’s favorite. They adored the affection of strangers. When April rolled in, I drove the four chicks across the Western United States–they saw Montana, Idaho, Wyoming, Utah, Arizona, and Nevada before finally nesting at my childhood home in California. Our family dog–now deceased–lay in the sun and watched them huddle beneath sprigs of rosemary and basil. The Buffs quickly settled in, free of anxieties–they loved to be held, they followed humans, they liked the dog, they even liked visitors.

But. There is always a but.

Garbanzo Bean–presumeably, as the two Buffs were identical–didn’t survive to laying age. Shortly after she gained her full adult plumage, she lay down in the dirt of the chicken run and uttered a guttural screech. A clump of flesh and blood fell from her cloaca, and she died almost immediately. No time for veterinarian or BackYardChicken.net consults. It was an unseasonably cool summer afternoon. Uterine prolapse, typically genetic, is fated to one in every several tractor-supply-quality chickens. “She was so gentle,” my mother lamented over the phone, “to die so violently.”

The other Buff Orpington spent her next few months of henhood largely alone, except at night, when all of the birds were closeted in their coop. By this time, two young ducks had been added to the flock. Another summer afternoon–summer in Southern California is nearly endless–and another tragedy. My mother describes running out to the bird’s enclosure as a hawk left. One duck missing, one chicken wounded. It was Chickpea–the other Buff Orpington.

Chickpea spent a month sitting silently in a plastic box of bedding, unable to walk, devoid of egg laying. She ate and drank very little. My parents moved the box from room to room, for variety, and changed the pine shavings daily. They held her but assumed she, too, would die. But she emerged from this depressive state, albeit with a heavy limp in one leg. She was never able to re-integrate with the Rhode Island Reds; the first time the three broodlings were reunited, they chased her–limping–across the yard. She was no longer a part of the flock she’d known since that first night in Montana.

My parents built her a separate enclosure; she spent evenings in her own bin of pine shavings. She enjoyed being held, eating bread, and watching my father repair bicycles. She came to thrive on human contact, and persisted through the occasional bout of unexplained illness, during which she would again cease laying eggs or eating and sit still for days.

In her California home, Chickpea was named many times: The Gentle One, The Gentle Hen, The Little Hen, and The Broken One. An old friend chickensat for my parents and added to the list: “Girlypop.”

During the dogless year of 2025, Girlypop ran the household. When pressed as to why the chicken and her affects occupied half of his workbench, my father laughed, “She’s my friend.” The postal worker who serviced our block retired and delivered a last round of mail which included a goodbye card referencing Luna, and the chicken that spent most of her time in the garage. After a year, my parents brought home two more shelter dogs. They were careful to separate the birds from the dogs, in particular, the chihuahua, which was prone to chase.

A new year began. Chickpea, with her limp, had a surprise: she could lay two eggs in one day.

In early 2026, a series of heavy rain storms flooded the chicken enclosures. My parents moved the main chicken run to a sunnier spot. At some point during this process, the wire gate that separated Chickpea from the chihuahua was left open.

Chickpea did not die immediately. Ever unable to mercy kill, my mother held her mangled body until the chicken stopped chittering and stilled.

“What a terrible life,” my mother reflected. Referring to the smattering of other chickens and ducks, she continued, “She was the nicest of all of them. So gentle. And she recognized you.”

Go-saeng. Of all the pets I’ve raised–dog, chicken, guinea pig, hamster, rabbit, fish, cat, turtle, cockatiel, lovebird–it seems the kindest ones, the most sociable, the ones who seem the closest to exhibiting love, suffer the most and die the fastest. I am inclined to wonder whether it is true, that only the good die young.

But, this idea doesn’t transfer as cleanly to people. People are difficult. None of us are wholly good or bad; we are all cruel or spiteful at times. We are, for the most part, all capable of loving, of being loved. The best of us make mistakes. The worst of us, somehow, still manage a few good things for others.

I think of my high school physics teacher, who gave me so much, but later resigned over relations with a student—an unforgivable action. How tragic it still was to me when news of his passing reached us.

Charis, friend of friends, suggested that such conundrums are one reason why humans so often turn to the framework of religion–because, is it wrong to grieve a tragic and solitary death of someone who was deeply and perhaps unforgivably flawed? Are we justified in deeming someone beyond redemption, beyond accountability, beyond saving, beyond grief? If it is–then let he who has not sinned cast the first stone.

Is the price of good–pain? Is the price of comfort, of excellence, of spiritual and physical wealth–some form of evil?

From my sweet American life, where Iran and Venezuela and Afghanistan and the West Bank and the Haitian earthquake have only ever been headlines, it seems this must be true. Amend the “Freedom isn’t Free” stickers–comfort, love, intimacy, joy, peace aren’t either. Somewhere, at some time, there must be a price paid in pain. Maybe it is a balancing act. A judicial weighing scale of suffering-harm-agony and joy-peace-love.

What frustrates me is the question of why some of us seem to give only joy-luck-peace while receiving only suffering-pain-tragedy. Wouldn’t it be fairer that the recipients of joy-good-comfort are the same who suffer? Hand over a dollar’s worth of trouble for an hour of serotonin, the warmth of two chicks cheeping between your fingertips.

From unbearable heat and weight emerges a diamond. From unending comfort and privilege emerge perverse cruelties, distorted realities. Yin and yang, the dark and the light, from one emerges another.

Too simple.

Sometimes the bad is simply bad; no good comes of it. Sometimes good is purely good; no bad comes from it. Although, I would argue–this is rare. For someone, somewhere, even war is good. For someone, somewhere, heaven would be hell.

Take again, death. Even if we don’t suffer in our own death, our loved ones do. But death has value. Ecologically, death is a source of life, promise; it is the only foundation for the future that stands firm through hairspray induced ozone holes, meteoroids, and deforestation. Death is everywhere; the insects that eat their mother, the fungi that sprout from rotted wood, the fawn that feeds the wolf pup and the raven and the maggots and the mice. Good-bad, dark-light, death-life. The sad and brutal life of a hen was still riddled with companionship, happiness, worms, sand, sun.

Part of me wonders–deeply fears, gently hopes–whether purgatory might be real. But that it might be a great equalizer of those who have suffered and those who have not in this life. Perhaps commensurate with the suffering we have inflicted on others, especially intentionally.

I say purgatory, that postmortem intermediary, because I hope that at the end of it, there is a definitive answer and an end. To the karmic cycle, to the scrubbing clean, to the suffering, to the imbalances and the unknowns and the vagueness of the only life I know and will ever know.

Go-saeng. When I read Pachenko, this recurring phrase struck me. In the novel, it is translated as, A woman’s lot is to suffer.

Most online translators yield simply “hardship.”

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I find it difficult to poeticize geology. This, I have always hated about the subject. How rigid its language is, when rocks and soils bend, glide, morph, evolve over time. We can measure their plasticity, track it, see it change on both human and incomprehensible timescales.

Rocks move. They don’t grieve.

I watch the sinuous waves approach, quickly, and just as quickly disappear behind my rearview mirror. In the moment, I am unable to name the feature. Years have passed since I was a teaching assistant for a structural geology course. A half-decade. The word “syncline” repeats in my mind, but I know I’m wrong. I can see Jan’s face, wrinkled in frustration at a word I should know by heart. The fingerprint opens toward the earth: an anticline.

I didn’t attend Dr. Tullis’–what a strange title to assign to Jan–memorial, or the secondary memorial held at the commencement and reunion that occurred the spring after her passing. A few friends texted me photos: of her rocks, of the seashore where we begrudgingly measured strike and dip in a stranger’s yard, of a quote reminiscing on her nagging–her pushy attitude and belief that each and every student could do better than they already were. I forgot to respond to most of them.

I also never replied to Jan’s most recent email to me, sent during my last summer in Yellowstone. Sometime after her passing, I went back through my inbox to find it–her words, in digital typeface, read like chickenscratch. She had always replied to my inquiries and updates—when I quit my stable, career-building job; when I moved to Wyoming; when I found jade on the beach in Taiwan; when I was rejected from yet another graduate program.

I wasn’t Jan’s favorite. There was no reason for her to invest in me. I wasn’t in her freshman advising group, I struggled in her course, I was desperately afraid of her critique, I didn’t excel in any of the courses or laboratories I explored in the geology department, I dropped my thesis and changed my major the September of my senior year, I received no honors at graduation. Jan had been much closer to many other students.

But she knew my name, remembered my face, and although she had given mostly negative comments on the essays I’d submitted to her, she wrote to me–in the depths of the pandemic–that she’d read my senior column, it was moving, how wonderful, I should attend the (online) graduation ceremony for the department I had tried to abandon.

Jan–an 81 year-old professor at the time of her passing–was never my peer, never my singular mentor, never a parental figure to me. Her death was anticipated but nonetheless shocking. I am still in a Facebook groupchat of former geology undergraduates, some now married, some parents, some already completing their post-doc appointments. We messaged, blue pings on a fading platform. Heart reacts. It was some time ago, now.

The road quickly disintegrates into the muck that all cattle leave behind. I park in a frozen flat. It is unclear whether the white that glitters beneath the sage is salt or ice. The air is silent and waking, the breeze light, unencumbered by the faint scent of morning in an arid land. I eke my way across the icy mud, several inches deep in the ruts left behind by trucks and the hoofprints left behind by bovine.

The feet of the Inyo Mountains are rugged, disintegrating into squarish boulders, fist-sized rocks, pebbles, sand and soil mixed together.

I pick my way skywards, the hillside collapsing beneath my footprints, which criss-cross a small, nimble ungulate’s.

Perpendicular planes of weakness. That’s what causes the boulders to shear off in such perfect squares, to then break into smaller squares, like automobile glass. Crumbling, rather than shattering. At the molecular level, the atoms that cling to each other to form the mineral that builds the rock, which forms the landscape beneath me–the atoms follow a repeating pattern. And in that repeating pattern of atoms which cling to each other, there are bonds between certain atoms that are stronger than others. The weakest ones occur at 90-degree angles to one another. This pattern, molecular in origin, repeats at every scale until the mountain itself, comprised of this series of bonds, also fails in predictable patterns.

Perpendicular planes: cubes shearing off a hillside.

I can no longer name the rock that surrounds me. I guess, the crystals–white and chalky–are square, they have diagonal striations on their surfaces, there are limestone and marble to the northeast (evidence of the ocean’s memory)–they could be calcite (crystals). The rock in which the presumed calcite is embedded could have been sedimentary in origin, once, before deformation–before it was twisted into synclines and anticlines and thrust skywards from the dark underfoot. That would make sense.

But I can’t pick apart geologic sequences off-hand anymore, not in the neat and distinct order, so precise and with room for new hypotheses, that I was able to construct as a student and teaching assistant. Not without maps, keys, the internet. My guesses feel rudimentary and elementary.

I spend the morning traipsing about, turning over small rocks, stopping to pant, taking photos of the baby-pink barrel cacti and of the white peaks that rise abruptly westward. I stop again at a rosy cactus, a stub between stones, the shade of sunrise over snow–I’ve never seen a color so delicate.

In life, Jan scared me. I avoided the stairwell by her office during the semesters between taking her class and becoming a Teaching Assistant. She always said hello; I was disheveled and depressed. I never had a good answer for my use of time. I struggled to put into words what I couldn’t understand. At times, I think I disappointed her.

She had been the first faculty member to email me, during the summer preceding my matriculation to college (she emailed all environmentally inclined admits to explore the 100- and 200-level geology courses). I suspect she read or would have read our applicant profiles (which on paper promised brilliance) if she’d been given access. While I found it marginally painful to make small talk without collapsing under the weight of my mediocrity prior to the pandemic, in wake of the sorrowful digital era it became easy to send Jan meaningless updates on interesting stones, mineral questions, and my repeat episodes of destabilizing my life. She, in turn, remembered which alphabet agency I worked for, that I’d worked in Yellowstone as a teen, and that I had a decent memory for patterns and could navigate Zoom well.

It is now several years past the last time I stepped foot in Rhode Island, a few since I lived in Oakland, a couple since I last worked on a staff almost entirely of women. The ladies I work with at present are primarily several decades older than I am. When the sparse male staff depart, they talk about their dead dogs, their children and grandchildren, their past homes, their opportunities. They talk about the opportunities they hadn’t had, as women, born 15, 30, 40 years before me. They’re 15, 20, 35 years younger than Jan was.

My last grandmother died when I was very young; their stories stand out to me, singularly, echoes from a time I’ll never know but recognize as anything but distant.

Some of their stories are humorous; many are borderline sickening. More sickening is that I find an odd comfort in hearing these stories of dejection, discrimination, failure, perseverance.

Almost all of them are American middle-class women, white, born into neat suburban households. They remember the release of the Paul Simon album, they hate the Grateful Dead, they detail the recent normalization of public breastfeeding and their opinions of it.

They tell me that their swim coaches tried to drown them, to prove that a girl could never be a lifeguard. They remark, off-handedly and quietly–I became a teacher and a clerk and a mother because, well, there wasn’t much else for a woman to become besides a secretary, where I grew up, back then.

Where they grew up, being, a few hours away from where I grew up: Anaheim, Santa Clarita, Orange County, San Diego, upstate New York, urban Wisconsin. Back then being, within the last 40, 50, 60 years–less than my own parents’ lifetimes. Back then being, less than a half-century ago, when the suburban sprawl of Los Angeles. was still marked by dust kicked up on unpaved roads. The golden age of America: when there was no infinite possibility without struggle.

My childhood, it seemed, was filled with peers whose mothers had immigrated in the late 1980s and 90s (largely on education and professional visas), and achieved a specific kind of propserity. Their children bragged proudly. Their mothers owned businesses, had master’s degrees, and sold stocks to purchase their home without taking out a mortgage. They never defaulted on credit payments or purchased school supplies from Dollar Tree and had never put a vehicle on layaway. In these diluted stories, there was no struggle that couldn’t be overcome by night school and determination. In these stories, American success was anyone’s for the taking.

As a youth, I couldn’t figure out why my family—which was American enough to host policemen and veterans and civil servants and Hollywood talent consultants and 70-year-old no sabos—boasted no degrees, no publications, no vacation homes, no ski trips, no connections to property lawyers or Wall Street investors, and no friends in medicine. My lineage had apparently failed, for generations, in this land that seemed to gift only fruit, wealth, promise, safety, education, skyward mobility.

At work, I listen to these women whose status and comfort my parents fought to give me: education, a quiet life, perfect English fluency. Their lives were also marked by barriers.

Selfishly, I think to myself: so here again, outside of textbooks, is proof that it’s not so simple to change economic classes after all.

An American address alone can gift a lot on the global scale, this is true—but within our country’s metric of wealth, citizenship alone is not a blank lottery ticket, hasn’t been, for the duration of our parents’ and grandparents’ lives.

So nobody failed, it was inevitable, and I dwell on the thousands of sunsets my parents, grandparents, great-grandparents witnessed when leaving Tijuana, Laredo, Fargo, Fresno, East Los. No failure, no success, just luck, timing, fate, life.

Most people, I’d wager, have worked hard, in their own way, against their own obstacles and struggles. Physical, financial, emotional, circumstantial, extraordinary struggles. Struggles everyone has or will face: our mothers, ourselves, our children, our children’s children–that’s life.

All we can strive for, I guess—is that the struggles change, or if we’re lucky, become more equitable. If that is at all possible upon this cruel and grueling planet.

From that mixture of everything–luck, timing, effort, failures, spite, determination, privilege, connections, work, pain–there are stories that triumph.

Careening downslope, between boulders and prickly things, I think of Jan, over 50 years older than me. There is still sexism in academia, half a century after she would’ve defended her dissertation. And yet she went on to become a distinguished professor at an Ivy League institution. Spritely, biting, winking Jan. At my car again, in the desert, I recall the anticline and syncline worksheets she had us complete, and I reflect on the stories of my colleagues. Grown men trying to drown teenage girls, blonde pigtails flailing in a city pool, as punishment for the audacity to pursue something reserved for the greater sex.

It makes sense that Jan pushed us so hard. That she was disappointed, perhaps even disgusted, at times, by our softness. By our despair amidst comfort: we who had scholarships, supportive professors, dormitories, meal plans, jobs, Title IX protections, marriage equality, opportunities for economic independence.

The mud underfoot is beginning to defrost. I imagine a young Jan Tullis, maybe timid, maybe bold, but brilliant, persistent, determined.

I return to civilization, and, passing the radio satellites that bisect the Owens Valley, I panic–I didn’t close the cattle fences. I stop, consider the distance and the road that nearly swallowed my front-wheel drive vehicle, and settle that I must have–there were so many signs to close the gates. I must’ve been on autopilot. Anyway, the cattle grates that preceded and followed each fence should stop the calf-laden herds at this time of year.

I drink an acidic iced coffee, the liquid sweating off the plastic, and try to clean my car at a gas station. Sand and soil, small stones, squarish, in my shoes, in my car; everywhere, places I didn’t expect.

As I dig beneath my seats in search of clean socks, sandals–I find a cube of broken glass, from years ago, when my window was smashed in Oakland and the assailant took nothing. I have vacuumed my car, stripped it bare, so many times, driven it across the U.S. and back, and yet still I find them. The glass crystals—precursors to a manufactured sand. Relics from the past, disintegrating into smaller and smaller bits before my eyes.

A few media links and footnotes, to ring in a new heartfelt month:

• Essay location: juuuust south of the land of flowing water or Payahuunandu

• For those new to the term, ‘No Sabo’ https://www.npr.org/2023/07/27/1190427959/what-it-means-to-be-no-sabo

• How to form a cubic rock. Three cleavage planes (“planes of weakness”) work better than two.

• Anticlines vs synclines

• Live, Coat of Many Colors (First Performance)

• Hog of the Forsaken

• El Gato Bajo la Lluvia

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Hate is easy.

I hate LED headlights, biking uphill, the state of the union, cooking, and one or two people I work with per year.

I hate washing oversized blankets, I hate shrinking socks in the dryer, I hate looking for parking in San Francisco, I hate the memory of how certain homes made me feel.

I hate most men I dated between 2021 and 2023. I hate when picky eaters call foods you routinely eat gross. I hate when people say it’s rude for strangers to eat food with a distinctive smell–curry, fish, fermented products–in a public space. I hate the overglorification and also the shaming of becoming a stay-at-home mother.

I hate the smell of cantaloupe. I hate fruit flies, houseflies, maggots, cockroaches, tub scum, and emptying mouse traps. (Especially mouse traps. I hate the way the tenth mouse I killed this summer was crushed by the lever, the horizontal line so deep and the blood so congealed that when I emptied the trap in the morning, the motion had the consistency of pulling a knife out of a moist cake. I hated finding his littermate with only a broken hip and watery eyes, still clawing for life from jaws of wood and wire.)

I hate being alone at truck stop bathrooms, and being tailgated, and the high speed limits in the citrus groves of the Central Valley, and driving through construction zones at night, and weak laundry detergent. I hate feeling abandoned, misunderstood, socially isolated. I hate feeling cold. I hate hundred-degree summers. I hate pain. I hate going to sleep. I hate the feeling of overabundance, when my body is so comfortable it becomes soft and slow and pointless. I hate lacking.

Every year since high school, I have set elaborate New Year’s resolutions. Goals to check off, work toward, give purpose and texture to the passage of time. I have a reasonably high success rate, if only because of the sheer quantity of goals. Bigger goals–like getting a nicer boyfriend than whatever happened in 2022, or running a marathon, or switching careers–are much easier for me to achieve than the small dailies like keeping a journal or using retinol.

This year, I wanted to be kinder. I wanted to structure my life to a point where hate could barely edge a word out from within. Like all vices, hate is not an easy habit to give up.

It is, I am guessing, ingrained in my epigenetic lineage. Perhaps this hatred was first borne a century prior at a gasoline-bath or border check or quest to find a missing paycheck or forced pregnancy between Laredo and El Paso, honed through the bitterness of progress and financial mobility and ease finding other American families faster, driven like a stake through my heart while suffering through suburban friends preaching the wonders that their parents accomplished in just one generation in the United States.

Hate is an integral part of the American culture. It’s not just me. None of these friends had ever listened to Evangelical radio on the way to school. None of their parents had ever driven through rural Idaho, or the deep South, or tried to apply for a business loan at the wrong establishment in the 1960’s, 70’s, or 80’s, as a brown person. So I should forgive them–for telling me, when we were just children, that I was too cynical. Wrong. Misguided.

Hate kills. So I should work on forgiveness. People deserve forgiveness, and so I should forgive. Other people have forgiven me and rebuilt trust in me time and time again and so I should let the past go. Forgiveness is important enough to act as a cornerstone of most major religions. But spite is a motivator like no other. An armour. And hate breeds spite. So, hate is not only easy. It is useful.

Today is the first of the New Year–2026, a year I never thought I’d make it to. I have already begun to fail at my One Big Goal. To hate less. Be kinder. Have patience. Become generous. Be true. Smile more. I am sitting next to thinly sliced tomatoes (salted) and a withering orchid that appears sallow in the weak light of a mountain window between storm cycles. I was on track until after lunch. At least I had the morning.

Perhaps reading is a pathway to empathy. Maybe consuming words rather than simply writing them, festering them, could allow the unraveling of my anger at everything.

I have long been curious about the craze and critique surrounding Haruki Murakami’s writing. I recently finished, What I Talk About When I Talk About Running. I found most of it comparable to my own experience running, although I have very little desire to pursue excellence to the extent that Murakami did at times. And I began having knee problems from the sport some 20 years earlier that he did. And I disagree with one of his early chapters–daily exercise and a decent diet does not always gift a slim figure. But the meditative portion–where one is caught between hating the activity, feeling absolutely miserable, and feeling euphoric, both sensations at once such that few thoughts can intercede for very long at a time–resonated with me. Still, his voice annoyed me some. I am not coming to terms with aging after 50, and so did not have much else in common. I’m not sure what I gained from the book, aside from passing the time and learning about a man’s journey from bar owner to novelist, but I suppose I should read Norwegian Wood.

In the sallow light, with this pitiful flower, I am reminded of a similar winter afternoon in New York. I had just finished The Virgin Suicides and 10th of December and Normal People. I felt emptied by these, and overcome by an immense feeling that I was an awful person, and always had been, and always would be, and that I had done an immense disservice to my collegiate friends by tricking them into thinking otherwise. It is much easier to hate elements of the outside world than it is to contend with the feeling that one is genuinely detestable. That there is justification for this. The next day, I spilled coffee across a bookstore floor and the friend who helped me clean it never spoke to me again. To be odious.

The Book of Proverbs, like most proverbs, is filled with epithets both wise and at times, inapplicable. One stumbled across my feed for its mention of “six, yea, seven,” which is also translated in some copies of the Bible as, “six–no, seven.” Six-seven, or whatever.

There are six things the Lord hates, yea,

seven that are detestable to him:

haughty eyes,

a lying tongue,

hands that shed innocent blood,

a heart that devises wicked schemes,

feet that are quick to rush into evil,

a false witness who pours out lies

and a person who stirs up conflict in the community.

Proverbs 6:16-19

If Yahweh hated a growing list of items–how is a mortal expected to move beyond the comforting exhaustion of always feeling upset? What's more–how to achieve this level of Nirvana when I am, daily, guilty of the majority of the list of things that the Old Testament God Himself detested? Haughty eyes, lying tongue, wicked-scheming-heart, lying, gossiping: is this movie about us?

Hate is difficult to abandon entirely in part because it is one of the earliest words we learn to express dislike, dissatisfaction, disappointment, hurt, and anger when our brains are too young to differentiate between these emotions. I’m not even sure learning to never hate anything or anyone again is entirely a good thing, or something to aspire to, if a large proportion of the world’s population worships a God capable of something so primal. If I am trying to learn love over hate–am I supposed to learn to love insurance companies, medical malpractice, private equity, and sexism, too?

Because the truth is that I hate cheap architecture. I hate electronic waste. I hate misused semi-colons and that em-dashes belong to ChatGPT, now. I hate unnecessary use of AI and its predecessors. I hate the entitlement rampant in surf and ski cultures. I hate nepotism. I hate that in my state alone, thousands of homes sit empty—foreclosures, AirBnBs, vacation homes, second homes—while the housing crisis continues to skyrocket. I hated—hated!—when I got coffee with my ex and he suggested I order Amazon Fresh to Yellowstone National Park (in February) to save gas.

I hate when you finally have the energy to take care of bills, onboarding, insurance changes only to find the one person you need to talk to is on holiday and nobody is covering for them. I hate large spoons and forks with only two tines.

I hate a lot of things I encounter in my daily life.

This morning, when I hadn’t yet failed my endeavor to be patient and kind and generous and wonderful and lovely and happy and excellent, the snow was so white. The air was filled with it, and it was hard to see beyond my feet each time the wind picked up and sent powder between treetops. I was surprised that after three hours of skiing and shoveling snow, I wasn’t nearly as cold as I’d been in Wyoming last winter. The world felt gentle. It felt like maybe I could be, too.

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Fundraiser links (non-exhaustive):

• Impacted small business/staff/community member mutual aid fund

• Flight fund for UFLi students (who often stay on campus during breaks due to high flight costs)

  • the above, and additional flight resources for students compiled by autumn wong

• Mutual aid for shooting victims (donations on pause as of 10 AM, 12/16)

• Family GoFundMe for Mukhammad Aziz (memorial costs)

• GoFundMe for injured student Jacob Spears

If anyone knows of direct fundraising efforts for Ella’s family, or other pertinent fundraisers related to this, I am happy to edit this list and share.

Other resources (non-exhaustive):

• LIVE masterdoc of links to aid, resources and news coverage

• Community Assistance organized by Brown UCS

Select Reporting:

• Ella Cook profile - Brown University shooting: Who was Ella Cook?

• Mukhammad Aziz profile - https://archive.ph/2025.12.16-000220/https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2025/12/15/brown-university-shooting-victims/

• Or Brown shooting victims were aspiring brain surgeon, talented musician - The Washington Post

• From President Christina Paxson https://president.brown.edu/president/mourning-loss-two-beloved-students

• Live reporting updates on the case from the Providence Journal - https://www.providencejournal.com/live-story/news/2025/12/16/brown-shooting-university-live-updates-suspect/87784303007/

…

And now, a few questions for the audience….

…

Truthfully, I remember Providence as grey, and my time at Brown as challenging. Bleak. A harsh reality check to both the existence of immense wealth, and the existence of many people I would consider nothing short of genius. Genius, as in, that type of person who is smart and ambitious in ways that can and will change big fields, systems, countries, worlds. Unsurprisingly, it’s hard to take tests with them.

Most students at Brown, when applying at age 17, are already a specific type of driven. By which I mean—studying as obsessively for fourth grade finals as in senior year, reading the Webster dictionary for fun, self-teaching biophysics to better understand how one became an Olympic skier at age 12, comeuppance from systemic poverty—type of driven.

After receiving an Ivy League education, you’re supposed to change the world. Or at least love management consulting. Most people I know came away with friends.

I swore when I graduated that I would leave it behind. Not romanticize or yearn. I went so far as to publish a column about letting go. Immediately after graduating, my friends drove me to the airport, whatever belongings I couldn’t sell, donate, or pack stashed away in basements to mold until I could stomach returning to the place where I’d developed stress allergies and cried myself empty.

So I was somewhat surprised to find myself tearful over the memorials and statements about Ella Cook and Mukhammad Aziz Urmozokov. Two students I had never met. At a school I don’t go to. Part of a community whose fabric has long forgotten me.

The New York Times reports that Urmozokov died in a review session for a class he wasn’t even taking. I read that, and my heart broke for all the times my friends and I had done the same thing: gone to lectures and review sessions for courses we had no interest in—just to be with each other a few more hours of the day.

The best thing Brown ever did for me was curate a class of kind, ambitious, insane, lost, interesting, morally upright (sometimes, morally uptight) individuals to learn alongside. Kindred to call home, and become home for, for a fleeting time in our lives.

How cruel, that our society has allowed this level of care to be taken from our fledgling adults—starry-eyed, still—so violently.

My parents were never able to visit me at Brown in the four years I attended—plane seats are expensive. But I wasn’t alone when I moved in that first weekend with the help of my soon-to-be-roommate. Nor was I without family at Thanksgiving, which every year was spent exploring other households’ traditions in rural New England. I was never without surprise ice cream deliveries or invitations to bike across the state on a Tuesday or peer support, even at 2 am in the basement of the library.

It’s difficult to tell if this is grief. Sticker shock. I have no right, really, to have any opinion on the permanent alteration of a campus or city I will likely never live within again. How many shootings were there this weekend? This year? Over 380, and counting. Why obsess over this one—not the biggest, not the bloodiest, not the first, not even the most recent?

Yesterday, I drove twelve hours and spent six of them combing NPR stations across the state, even tuning in to AM radio in Providence and Warwick. A million rumors flying between texts. Person of interest detained, released. 500 security cameras and no clear shooter identity. Wearing black. Wearing a green vest. DPS, IRS, ATF, FBI involvement and (so far) no progress.

Between Gano and Benefit Street is a space that I can only ever remember—truthfully—as forgiving. Quiet. Speaking as a former Safewalk supervisor, Brown’s campus after dark was (typically) so uneventful that it was often boring.

The profile of this case—its capacity to instigate change—could prevent it from becoming a neat line in the Wikipedia List of Mass Shootings in the United States. From becoming another snarky quip about the ineffectiveness of the surveillance state.

Part of me hopes that all of the Tucker Carlson bits weren’t for naught, that notoriety can seed action. But we said the same thing about Columbine, Uvalde, the Batman showing, UVA. So, realistically— it probably won’t.

But in another timeline, it could.

For all my gripes, for four years, Brown was my home. In so many critical ways, its campus and student body gave me the softest landing zone I could have possibly asked for when learning to fly, wet wings still shaking against the wind of adulthood.

This is a campus where students and affiliate community members teach each other how to shop for winter clothing. How to sleep on a ballroom floor. How to find the lead certificate for your colonial apartment. How to sing opera while riding a bicycle. How to call an ambulance. How to find the best cannolis, or sling an authentic hot wiener, or get rid of the fruit flies mobbing your bananas. How to befriend a stranger on a train—you’re both going to a Vampire Weekend concert, and love Bryn more than Cape Cod Kwassa Kwassa. How to survive walking pneumonia, melted kettles, pole dancing with an old crush, your first antidepressant prescription, walking up the crooked stairs of the health building with a broken ankle, ice on the stoop, the death of an advisor.

The act of living is something every student on every campus deserves the chance to experience. They deserve the chance to leave campus for the last time, bittersweet, tearful, alive, grateful, diploma in the mail already.

I wonder when the rest of us will consider, seriously: when paying $71,700 a year can no longer guarantee safety, what can?

When a daughter’s promise, months of studying ends abruptly before even taking a test—or when a family’s American dream ends in their child being shot from above, what remains for our own dreams?

Our own ambition?

What is left, not only of our own aliveness, but of our quality of life?

The calendar marks two weeks until el Dia de los Muertos, a holiday I never needed to celebrate as a child because my mother grew up next to a cemetery. The stories of weeping women, quiet period-piece outfitted men, and floorboard and window knocking were enough to prove to a child that the dead walk among us without a Roman timekeeper’s restraint, sans need for candles or shrines or cempasuchil. Transit, limbo, purgatory, it seemed her neighborhood had been some kind of liminal hell, at least for the eight daughters of Whittier Boulevard.

It’s October. By now, even the Southwest has begun to show signs of autumn: ninety-degree inland days are interspersed with rain. The poison oak of California’s foothills has reverted to its smaller, jagged presentation, with watercolor sunsets for leaves. Fat Bear Week has concluded. Instagram will soon be awash with Twilight edits and Chelsea boots overlain with drip-font stating, “We are the daughters of the witches you tried to burn.” Depending on the day, it is both winter and not-winter.

I still associate colors and objective moral rankings with school subjects and months of the year. History, obviously orange. English, yellow. Science, green, like plants. Math, blue, like the Kumon logo. June, good (June Gloom, though a regional phenomenon, is a misnomer in my world–June joy). May, even better. January, neutral. December, both infinitely good and infinitely bad–no in between, and both are true at once. September, bad, a sallow stomach pit at the end of a long, dreary blue hour, despite the month housing uniquely positive memories, and some of the best hiking in the intermountain west.

October, for which the ‘O’ clearly stands for Open Enrollment Period, is bad, in the way that the lidocaine injections before dental procedures leave a nasty prick of fear once the needle is removed. A cheek that is allegedly still attached but cannot be felt, and so how can it be proven that this piece of one’s body is still alive? One can only trust.

If Schrodinger’s cat could be alive and dead at once, might I not also remain on the precipice of death and utmost health?

Until diagnostic testing can definitively say otherwise, everything is anxiety. Or, an undiagnosed chronic illness. Maybe even an acute one! Innocent until proven guilty, or perhaps guilty until proven innocent. When health anxiety hit older members of my own family nearly a decade ago, in the end—after the cardiac testing, the blood tests, the ambulance calls, the weeks of listening to the low drone of an emergency room’s power after midnight—all that was needed was to avoid grapefruit juice for a few years.

I can’t help but wonder, each time the vertigo subsides and the nausea becomes controllable and the allergies die down for a period, if fear isn’t the real issue underlying my clinic visits. Maybe there’s nothing to heal. Maybe there is no invisible string connecting the years of illnesses, the allergies, the dizziness, the paresthesia, the headaches—no connection, that is, besides stress.

Time, curious time,

Cuttin’ me open, then healin’ me fine

Were there clues I didn’t see?

And isn’t it just so pretty to think

All along there was some

Invisible string

–Taylor Swift

Can I outsource this fear? Maybe this constant dread that something is lurking and will strike in a much worse way than the current condition later on, and during that later time, the fallout will be infinitely worse, is rooted in “the system.” How we reach doctors. How doctors are or are not valued, relative to the greater healthcare industry, and the price we pay for that. How we obtain care and how we, as a society, engage with that process: billing, referrals, pharmaceuticals, the Sacklers, the practically defunct “Find a Provider” engine provided by your insurance, pre-existing conditions, RFK, the set time of year to choose a plan that will best serve future you come next July, Luigi.

Maybe the inability of the U.S. healthcare system to operate sensibly is actually intrinsic. Maybe it’s rooted in our country’s broader identity. Or lack thereof. Philip Deloria, whose work I often refer back to, argued that the U.S. (its identity, sense of self) is defined more by what it is not than what it is. In its own eyes, it is not: England, China, communist, fascist, native, Mexican, socialist, Nordic, savage, African, fully developed (hence the importance of manifest destiny), old. The U.S., in its own words, is: free. The capital of the free world. But what is freedom? A lack of restraint, constraint? Again, a definition of not. Of lacking something. It is: capitalist. But, if it were purely capitalist, then explain pensions, social security, environmental regulations, consumer protection, Obamacare? We are and we aren’t.

The U.S. government is currently experiencing a lapse in appropriations; it is shut down, but it is also partially open. National parks are open, but visitor centers are closed, except in the parks where they remain open. Federal workers aren’t receiving paychecks, although there are a few exceptions to this. Federal employees are entitled to backpay, unless they aren’t. Law is and isn’t.

What is an American? What is the United States? A melting pot, flawed and favored analogy of the early 2000s, implies that there is no singular defining identity. If we aren’t enslaved and we aren’t immigrants, well…maybe we could be some immigrants but only the great kind and only up to a point. We’re not terrorists—we’re patriots, or at worst, troubled young men, but remember that if someone carrying a briefcase looks like a jihadist (read as: can grow a beard) then they probably are a terrorist, and you should see-something-say-something. We oppose apartheid and genocide except when inconvenient, or when signing a missile would make for a good photo op. If all of these conflicts can coexist, swimming together in a bubbling cauldron of hate crime and opportunity and caste and good jeans and ingenuity and odes to football stars—then what defines us? What even are we? (Ring, ring–hello? The American dating scene would like to ask the same question.)

Maybe the U.S. is trapped in its own liminal hellscape, similar to my mother in the 80’s, after she inherited her brother’s satanic worship room as a bedroom. We are and we aren’t. Things, systems, places, jobs—are there and not there. Most everything that could define our life exists transiently between good and bad, yes and no, a staunch take and a soft whimper. For instance: healthcare is good, when you compare our access levels to those in some very rural countries, but healthcare is also not so good, in the sense that you might be burdened with intergenerational debt resulting from an emergency surgery (it depends). When the job market appears to soar, so too does data mining. California, long viewed as the country’s environmental bastion, has never fully recovered from the effects of Silicon Valley’s manufacturing days, yet still bends to the technocratic rise. It’s like living in my version of October, except we’re all in October, all year round. Good and not so good. Lidocaine shots, good—no dental pain, but also not so good—weird sickly feeling of confronting enamel rot.

One of my former roommates recently sent me an article: Everything is Television. There were some compelling arguments, but I would argue that Everything is Schrodinger’s Cat. Or at least, a layman’s interpretation of the conundrum.

I’ve always imagined the cat trapped in the box as black, because you’ve gotta have some pretty crappy luck to get trapped in a box—lucky 13, the witching hour, the missing fourth floor in East Asian elevators, brujeria, that sort of thing. For me, despite the quantum physics conundrum, hope outweighs the negative possibility—the cat is in fact alive, even though it might be dead, even though there is an equal probability of cat-death, even though my childhood cat actually was found dead in a box (unsealed) after a few days of wondering where he went into hiding. I have always imagined the black comma writhing in satisfaction at the sight of its caretaker when the lid is at last removed.

Aside from the unknowable self (is there a medical crisis crawling beneath my skin?), and the inability of my home state to unify over anything, one of the most reliable is-and-is-not conundrums is romance. Romance is dead. But if it’s dead, why are all of my social media feeds filled with weddings and engagements? I guess romance is alive. I’m in love, too. So, maybe everything is romantic, like, actually romantic. But, hey, isn’t over-romanticization dangerous? The TikTok therapists claim it to be. Romance, in its sealed box, is alive and dead and both a war cry and peace brokership for the masses.

One only needs to spend a few minutes on r/lonely to witness the tension of American love—not only within the fraught dating scene, but more broadly speaking. I mean the Bell Hooks kind of love. Philadelphian love. Every other substack thinkpiece I stumble across seems to be a self-help guide to navigating isolation, community, “being a villager,” and utilizing inconvenience as a currency for love in all its types. Community on social media looks like: thematic parties, unique beeswax candles, and putting down your phone to a magical reality of joy. But isn’t this image of “real love” manufactured, too? And does that craftsmanship imply that the romance imbued in tomato-girl-summer, library-chic, coquette-fisherman-pinterest-core…is long-since deceased? Romance—is it now only available for purchase at an upscale farmer’s market? Is it only right and true if it has a matching Photoshop preset?

Phones are interesting.

How many photos of a tree-lined street can you find in your endless camera roll? When did you last say you loved somebody, from a rural highway four-hundred miles away? When did you last write poetry in your notes app on the subway? Watched pigeons commune? Forgot your phone, even? Such instances give me hope that romance, while perhaps dead in the same way that subscriptions have killed ownership, may also be simultaneously alive.

But then, maybe I’m searching too hard for hope. Secretly hoping for someone to tell me that it’ll be okay, that it actually is in my head, that I am crazy–everything is normal. Normal labwork. Normal economic conditions. Normal society with a normal moral compass. Normal hospitals. Normal cats, they’re alive or dead and never both and anyway what is this about cats in boxes?

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It is summer again, and my porch is shrieking. Acorn woodpeckers. One is nesting in my wall, or trying to. The air is heavy and sweet with humidity and something familiar. When I’m focused on my hands, the space around me smells like merengue. When I try to place it, I wonder if it isn’t whitethorn, or a relative, half-baked from another 100-degree day.

Across an ocean, the night sky is alight with fire in yet another country I’ll never step foot in. Al Jazeera is teeming with live updates. In my American paradise, I’ve only ever experienced war from the comfort of a screen. From the fictionalized pages of a novel. From history books. From interpretive sites and old journals. In my American paradise, the bombs land elsewhere.

Three hours south, the jacaranda trees are shedding lilac coats, flinging the flowers off as quickly as the sun rises each morning. From my childhood bedroom, now empty, the sound of mourning doves and great horned owls beckon dawn and dusk like clockwork. I am hundreds or thousands of miles from every person I claim to love. Running home after sunset, I hold back a scream when I nearly step over a dead lizard half the length of my arm.

Somewhere far, far away from me, a newscaster is working back-to-back shifts. If there are even shifts, anymore. A child’s breakfast will go uneaten. A grandfather will light a last cigar. I dip a toe into researching Iran’s allegiances, Israel’s, and drown. How many more cities will find themselves a new Grozny, Gaza, Tel Aviv, Kyiv—how many more millenia the human drive to displace, to fight, to kill, to divide, to seize, to defend till death, will last?

Which day will be our last normal day? Will it be spent alone? Outside? Behind a computer screen? I am always worried about missing my lasts. No matter how many times we orbit around the same routines, same geographic markers, so mundane, God, the suffocating stillness of the day-to-day—it is a terrifying thought to lose what seems immutable.

Yesterday I drove home stewing over my onslaught of inconsequential problems. One hairpin turn after another, windows down, suffocating on the bready breath of chinquapin and ceanothus. Brakes hissing over the sound of peeping frogs and warm insects, I stopped for a small fluff sidestepping between the passenger side of my car and the edge of the road. It was something about the size and a half of a kitten. Was I looking at an evening shadow, or an upright tail, black and white, a waddling gait? Against the night, it was nearly impossible to tell whether the creature sported stripes or spots. Was that pink splotch the smallest nose ever seen? Between my blind spots and the thick cheatgrass, he (or she) vanished quickly. My guess: Spilogale gracilis phenax. The western spotted skunk has 34 teeth in total; a human has 32. I run my tongue over my own plaque and the chips on my incisors. I had a dream that they (my teeth) fell onto my boyfriend’s lap. Would it be so difficult to have two extra?

There was a time when I would’ve watched the clips of war play live on television. Absent a home TV, I would’ve watched from a laundromat or food court alongside the rest of the country. We would experience desensitization together, a hive mind.

In my American dreamscape, the violence I was warned of was right here, at home. Our countrymen imprison and kill each other in close range on the streets where they grew up. Violence comes from within. A street corner with a new dead body every day, my mother recounts. Mae Louise Miller. Virginia Tech, Sandy Hook, Columbine, Uvalde, Santa Fe, Red Lake. Common parenting advice since the 1990’s has been to never leave your child alone or discredit their discomfort, even with trusted family members, even with teachers, even with public servants, even with religious figures.

Every time I go to a large event, I remember the Boston Marathon, Ariana’s concert, the Orlando nightclub, the Dark Knight screening in 2012. One nation, under God. Every reputable news outlet costs more to access per month than a standard Netflix subscription. I can’t imagine that our collective response to a real and purposeful invasion on home soil would go well. We are nothing if not divided.

In this same country where elevation sickness and blizzards claim lives every year, there are wild orchids, native hogs, manatees, and floating homesteads. This same country where buffalo coated the landscape, where the earth moved as one body, where the prairie grass swallowed families whole. This same country where wild burros still roam suburban neighborhoods and dry gulches. This same country where soil grows so fast and rich that new trees can spawn from the fallen trunks of their ancestors within human lifetimes.

Two hundred miles away, the jacaranda trees have lost their early summer flowers; the only evidence that they ever bloomed is the stray patches of rot that have escaped weekly street sweeps. I’m driving to the land of that lilac blossom, windows down as the citrus fields return their moisture to the thick night, when the black sky begins to howl: sirens. A head on collision on a 2-lane county highway; a mini van and a truck. The orange trees muffle the Sherrif’s 10 p.m. arrival. Two dozen drivers sit in stand still traffic, climb out of their cars, wave to one another before zipping back the way they came. I am among them. One nation, under God.

I wonder, as every generation does, if we’ll know when the end is nigh. If the future is kept alive through truth or hope. Those two words seem to exist on polar ends of the universe. Is there even unity, is there even truth, is there even hope in our personal relationships anymore?

In the darkness of my internet meanderings, I stumble across mention of Deviantart, and it reminds me of a friend who swore we’d write books together, someday. We met underwater because our mothers never learned to swim. It was the last summer I would collect bird feathers for my hair—all friendships are forever when you’re 12. You removed me from your socials, new beginnings, but I still keep the postcards you drew for me.

If you follow the circular path of a life, you’re bound to intersect with the same points once, then twice, maybe three or four times.

The sun sinks below the oak trees in my backyard. The cheat grass is alight, and every cobweb on my deck sparkles orange. The spiders are nowhere to be seen. Can spiders register beauty? Can they see how delicate their gossamer traps are, how subtly they glitter during golden hour? Is that all hope needs to be—precious thread on the wind?

A temporary ceasefire is brokered in Iran and the Associated Press reports on U.S. contractors shooting Palestinians at aid sites. Horse medicine and tranquilizer in flour. I’m half-listening, half-preoccupied with another bombless tragedy unfolding in the waters of my homeland. One hundred climbs to two hundred preventable deaths charted neatly across 100-year flood maps. Congress lays their own power at the feet of the president and beg him to take it from them. Relieve us. The Supreme Court siphons authority from the lower courts and hands it upward. Sotomayor’s dissents land in silence. Black Sabbath’s batman has died.

I spill coffee on my shirt, shorts; at least this time I’m at home, as opposed to a kitschy bookstore in New York. I’ve run out of free news articles for the month.

Alexa leans into the westbound night and screams. A bloodcurdling thing, it whips over and into the din of I-195, a thousand lives below us, tail lights blinking. I cling to the grate separating us from the brief abyss of the overpass and scream until my lungs all-the-way empty, diaphragm all-the-way tense, and feel only half-the-way relieved. We take turns, only four feet apart yet almost entirely silent to one another because of the wind.

I feel so lost.

Across the Providence River, red lights blink slowly, beckoning homeward bound ships to an oil company’s terminal.

Four, or is it six years later and Alexa might still be in the Italian district, in a crooked colonial-style home, floors creaking. We’ve been toying with phone tag for over a year, since we paced laps around a west-end park, another frigid night at the mercy of roadways. Slowly, we’re all disappearing from Instagram.

Slowly, I am losing direction—east, west, north, south, everywhere I go, I am equal-parts miserable and beloved.

I watch match-day play out from a MacBook.

It’s sickening, to realize that enough time has passed that I can no longer half-way plan to catch up x-y-and-z friends, once time-money-scheduling-other-priorities allow. All of the unofficial “somedays” have been released from their boxes and found, at last, to be dead, no longer straddling a Schrödinger’s promise of perchance. Time passes, daily.

Every day a new accomplishment, a new sorrow, a new baby, a new residency, a new flower blossoming to wither in another spring rain. All these things I’ll never see.

Every morning I rotate through the following website list, until my wrist hurts, which is a sign to make coffee:

conservationjobboard.com

jobs.rwfm.tamu.edu

query: job type: full-time

query: state: california

query: state: washington

nyt.com

washingtonpost.com

apnews.com

reddit.com

r/nationalparkservice

r/parkrangers

r/fednews

facebook.com

your groups: seasonal NPS employees

reddit.com

r/nationalparkservice

gmail.com

refresh

refresh

reddit.com

r/seasonalwork

r/nationalparkservice

conservationjobboard.com

jobs.rwfm.tamu.edu

refresh

refresh

query: state: wyoming

query: state: california

query: state: washington

query: state: utah

query: state: wyoming

I want a dog, or maybe a bird, so I should look for a long-term job near home to reduce the burden of rent and landlord vetting. But I want to live near my boyfriend in the winter, at least make an attempt, so I should apply somewhere where it snows. I also want to avoid wholly molding my life into the shape of a white man, so I should keep my options open.

I want to make use of the gigantic tote bin of park ranger attire, cheaply made and useless outside of the federal service. So I should hold out (for my would-be government job).

But every day that goes by without an official offer letter—I cleared the background check, the childcare background check, I scheduled a housing check-in for two weeks prior, I ordered the missing do-dads of my uniform—my ill-advised hope dwindles.

“...[T]he beginning of things, of a world especially, is necessarily vague, tangled, chaotic, and exceedingly disturbing. How few of us ever emerge 18 from such beginning! How many souls perish in its tumult!”

—Kate Chopin (The Awakening)

I toss around rehire in a group chat with my friends from Yellowstone, but my former boss ghosts me. If I go back, then what were all of the reference checks I put him through for? I swore to myself I wouldn’t stay, it’s a job that begets turnover, and plus I turned down a higher paying job in Yellowstone that would’ve started in April to pursue two job offers that dwindled to an empty inbox on the Pacific coastline.

I search for the late registration price of the Billings marathon.

I uninstall and reinstall and uninstall Instagram. I am in competition with people who don’t exist. Or who at least don’t remember that I exist. I love the Sierras but do I love them enough to repeat the loneliness of my Fresno apartment during the summer of 2020? I love the Sierras but do I love them enough to live out of my RAV4 again? I love the Sierras but do I love them enough to wait?

In the depths of my college email, two lottery permits tease me. One, for Mount Whitney. And one, for the full length of the Pacific Crest Trail.

The web is circular. Reddit reveals nothing concrete. My email asking for clarity on my paperwork goes unread. Is then met with confirmation: we know nothing. I don’t want to live alone in Diablo, Washington. I don’t want to commute to LAX. I don’t want to take another interview.

I just want to run 13 miles along the East Bay Bike Path and scream over India Point Park, over I-195, for wanting to be anywhere else, anyone else, doing anything else. I have everything I’ve ever wanted and still I just want. I just want time. I just want money. Above all else—I want clairvoyance.

“In short, Mrs. [Edna] Pontellier was beginning to realize her position in the universe as a human being, and to recognize her relations as an individual to the world within and about her. […] The voice of the sea speaks to the soul. The touch of the sea is sensuous, enfolding the body in its soft, close embrace.”

– Kate Chopin (The Awakening)

I hadn’t run more than five miles in nearly a year, but yesterday I plodded along Route 66 until the flutter in my chest made sense. Eleven miles.

Palm trees and dry heat fade softly into dusk, and a rat runs across the sidewalk. I pick a hibiscus, as pink as my shorts, and rub the salt grains from my forehead between my fingers. An ocean.

What I should do—really should do—is pick up a job at a daycare center and settle in at home for the next six months. No hard choices and no surprises. Easy enough to leave. I wanted to break free from education. There are no jobs that would put my EMT certificate to use within an hour’s commute of the bedroom that I just repainted. Everything on the news spells disaster. I should get a full-time job. I should choose forever. I should stop running. I should be still, to better weather what will inevitably arrive.

To go on and on, foamy wavelets curling about ankles, on and on, on and on into the musky odor of pinks. I think about Edna every time I feel the urge to run, on and on, on and one. I don’t want to die. I just want to give this unending feeling of forever a place to rest. The feeling that no matter how hard I scream, there is something untouched in the crevices of my heart. The feeling that no matter how far I walk, knees giving out, there is something still restless in the pit of my stomach. The feeling (knowledge) that no matter where I go, I will yearn to leave.

If I were to walk on my knees for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting, would I be free?

Through much of my 20’s (thus far, only halfway over), my deepest wish was not to find love, but to be released from the overwhelming desire to love. Freedom from an all-but-all-consuming need to understand singularly a person, their minutiae, the poetry of their body and mind, the map of their lives. If there existed a way for the hopeless romantic to wholly and cleanly detach from the primal desire for companionship, I might have killed for it. I wanted that freedom more than I wanted to be pretty, wealthy, or kind.

Imagine, how liberating, to be one of the lucky ones with exactly enough emotion for one body.

No need to share, intimately, daily–only an ability to do so, when chosen. No overflow. No overwhelm.

No need to wade into the ocean, into the desert to feel release.

No need to scream over a freeway, drowning in your own air.

I am learning that it doesn’t stop with love. The unending feeling doesn’t stop, I mean. The desire to walk and keep walking, long after rhabdomyolysis has set in. Kidneys failing, still walking, in repentance, one thousand Hail Marys worth of steps.

The burning desire-half-desire-dread to know what happens next, what’s the right answer, where’s the right choice amidst every wrong one? I worry that I was right in high school, crying into a set of wired headphones on a hot curbside, only one album youtube-to-mp3’d onto my phone (Vessel): I will never learn to live with the amount of emotion I carry. I will remain lost.

“now it’s august and the bees inside have stilled to a low hum. [...] alice and i giggle at [...] how easy it is to survive the unprecedented again and again and again in our lifetimes but so difficult to function [...] amidst stability. [...] and i dig into a tuna packet and wonder how i will ever know balance. and i wonder how i will ever reconcile the selves within. and i wonder how long i will wonder.”

–august 15, 2022 (notesapp entry)

Alice’s shirt is wet and pressed against her back. Dark clouds are gathering at the edges of the granite pinnacles that encircle us. She lays back into the water and we stare at the sky. Not a tree in sight. Not a creature in sight.

“A landscape horrifying to behold,” she tells me, again and again. We spent the morning scrambling near-vertical talus, lost on what used to be a historic segment of the John Muir Trail, and is now a seldom-traversed liability.

Lightning, like clockwork, will set in with the afternoon.

“Why is this the first time I’ve felt peace since Forrester Pass?” Brains quiet. Palms still. In the eye of a widening gyre: a brief reprieve from the gaping desire to. To do, to love, to live, to feel, to not feel, to give, to receive, to believe, to turn.

I close the door on my memory for a moment to pour sand onto concrete with a child, one fistful at a time. I wonder what it means, if there’s a hidden message in the cyclicality of this life. If there’s an escape. If there’s a way to accept inevitability. Turning and turning. I third-wheeled my junior prom with this baby’s parents. Now she laughs at me from a swingset. And in a few years, she’ll meet the people who will see her through adulthood.

My mom asks, again, what my career plan is if the environmental sector collapses.

conservationjobboard.com

query: job type: permanent

jobs.rwfm.tamu.edu

query: state: wyoming

query: state: california

query: state: wyoming

I ask my father if he’ll ever bike to the ocean. I ask myself if it’s too far to run.

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–Sylvia Plath, “Metaphors”

I will officially be removed from my parents’ dental plan in 29 days. Today I am 25. Soon, 26. The mean age of a Mexican-American mother’s first pregnancy is 25.1.

When I first read Sylvia Plath’s Metamorphosis, I was learning about pregnancy in AP Biology. How the baby’s blood can kill you, because although it is made from you, it is not inherently you. Something that’s not entirely you inside of your body. Leaching calcium from your teeth and bones–search for pregnancy tooth loss, pregnancy induced osteoporosis. Your blood pressure and pulse rise naturally to accommodate diverting liters of blood to your placenta to feed growing fingernails, hair, teeth, eyeballs, brain matter. Pregnancy diabetes. Third degree tears. We still don’t fully understand how to prevent eclampsia.

I applaud and appreciate people who have children, of course. For one, it has allowed me to get paid in sunsets to watercolor paint with third graders in nature. And, it’s a beautiful concept, really–to turn love (even fleeting) into life. Take two people’s DNA and make a new person. Test tubes or fallopian tubes–it’s impressive either way. Go moms.

The female body is an amazing thing. I will never, ever get tired of learning more about gynecology and obstetrics. And I will always stand–it doesn’t matter who you are, your circumstances, your life–you have a right to want children, to want pregnancy for yourself. (Whether it’s a wise or good choice at any given specific time is another question entirely.)

But the possibility of a baby being inside my body? A means, a stage, a cow, a calf.

My instagram algorithm has tailored itself to feed into a newfound fascination with pregnancy and babies. (Which came first? The interest or the algorithm which wanted me to be interested in the interest because of my demographic?)

Did you know babies can’t drink water until they’re six months old? A pregnant woman in her third trimester can cut off her own blood supply to her heart simply by lying supine. And so on, and so on.

This one instagram user (@hackyourhr) posted a video explaining what it feels like to be pregnant. She cupped her hands together, one on top of the other. You can do it, too.

Feel how you can feel your hands touching each other, how even when you close your eyes, your hands are fully yours. Like how when you have a stomachache, you can pinpoint the feeling to something that is yours–your own stomach.

Now imagine you put a tiny frog in between your hands. Imagine it trying to wriggle there.

You can feel the frog, but you can’t feel what the frog feels. You know even without looking that there is something besides yourself in between your hands. She compares the hands to her abdomen and the frog to the fetus.

“That’s how it feels to be pregnant.” The baby is not you, but it’s in there, and you can feel it in the same way you would feel an animal held between your palms.

And the comments all lauded her for finally putting the feeling of carrying a human into a digestible comparison. It, of course, might not feel the same way for everyone.

I love frogs and I would love to hold one right now. But I don’t know if I could handle any analogous feeling in my abdomen. Even if it’s natural. It’s the headiness of it I fear most.

Right now, I’m also wondering if I wouldn’t rather just be the frog caught between gentle palms, rather than the bearer of the hands. Warmth on my wet skin. A shelter above and below. A journey to a destination I don’t know yet save for soft giggles, and excited whispers. Set below a willow tree, on an opposite river bank, which is an ocean in itself to me. Maybe I’m terrified. Maybe it’s sunny. Maybe I’m drinking humidity up through my porous hide. Maybe I'll be given a slice of green apple in a jar. Maybe I’ll eat a whole bag of them. And still I’ll be able to hop free. De-board the train–the hand sandwich–oh, riddle.

Sometimes the logistics and ethics of becoming a parent mean a little less to me, fear-wise. So, too, the timelines mean less when faced with the prospect of forever. Of the rest of my life. Maybe, I tell myself, if I never find love–the lifelong kind–I can at least raise a human. They don’t have to be my friend. Children as friends–that’s never guaranteed, you know. I still think that’s a myth people tell themselves to stomach the cost, that surely one of these children will be my best friend in my old age, forgetting that each child is its own person.

But so what? The parent-child relationship is not an equal one in many senses, but maybe it doesn’t matter. Maybe I could make myself want that.

Isn’t the point is to give? To give endlessly?

The unending demand of self can be terrifying, demeaning–and it can also be meaningful. Maybe parenthood would be the natural progression from working with young humans all my life. I know so many nursery rhymes. I know so many silly children’s crafts. And if I never have my own, then, for what?

For what?

For what, really.

On the flip side of this argument, I am, and have always been, off-put by the cyclicality of producing babies. We spend the first 25 years of our lives “growing up” and immediately are expected to begin planning to help someone new grow up. What about me? Can’t I just enjoy being “grown up?”

Isn’t my life enough on its own? Isn’t it enough for me to know the rhymes, the riddles, to have experienced the playthings and the places and the people?

Why does my existence require a new, younger life that will repeat everything I just did (learn to walk, talk, go to school, get a job, find love, suffer, grieve, etc.) in order to give it meaning? Am I not enough?

Are my loved ones now not enough? Is it never enough? Are we never satisfied with what we have, here and now, to let it alone carry us to the end? Why are we so obsessed with being remembered—why can’t we remember? Why does every stage of our lives demand more?

Aren’t all forms of love an outlet for the unendingly human desire to give?

A frog wriggling between two palms. Is it trapped, or sheltered?

Do you want children?

Who’s getting married next?

These questions seem to arise every time I sit in silence long enough with another woman older than 23. These, and the feasibility of each.

It’s baffling, really. But it feels like clockwork now.

All but a handful of my girlfriends have four year degrees, parents and grandparents with graduate degrees, and increasingly it seems I am in the minority without at least admission into a medical or law program. A sizable portion of these women are queer. And five years ago, only a sparse few of us had any interest in ever childrearing–the ultimate career-ending, body-altering, climate-change-exacerbating prospect.

And then the topic of marriage. Well, that was somehow even more terrifying.

Daily there are new engagement posts on our Instagram feeds. It’s no longer just religious classmates posting baby pictures.

My college roommate wants a rose cut engagement ring, my best friend prefers pear-cut diamonds, and my closest coworker in Yellowstone wants, decidedly, a gold band. We admire the flush-set silver stack our friend at NPR is sporting anew, exchange shocked text messages when a former colleague kneels down in his fiancée’s old cubicle, and spend an hour over coffee trying to determine if the courthouse wedding photo an old camp counselor posted is real.

We ponder the timelines.

If two children is the ideal, and you need at least a year (if not two) between pregnancies, and the cost of fertility assistance is too high to ever be on the table, and substantial geriatric pregnancy care is frightening because of X,Y, and Z pre-existing conditions–then a first pregnancy would ideally occur between the ages of 30 and 35. Plus, you need time to get to know a partner, maybe two partners because your first post-college girlfriend was ‘the one’ but couldn’t support you through a loved one’s death, a job loss, major personal growth, a cross-country move. Maybe you were a late bloomer and didn’t know what love really meant when you landed your first serious relationship. Maybe you’re seasoned on the dating scene, but beginning to doubt whether you’ve ever really known what the word means.

The clock isn’t ticking as fast as it was, say, forty years ago–we have fertility treatments and better care for older first-time mothers, and there is always adoption if done correctly–but. There’s still something, some primal pull, to have a biological child spontaneously. It’s what has kept millions of people in the loop of reproduction for centuries, despite war, famine, terrorism, and choice. Even Charli asked us, in the scorching hyperpop prelude to an American election–if it was worth it. If her career meant more than something as simple, as human, as childbearing. Or if it was time.

Maybe we don’t even really want children, not definitively. Maybe it’s just the sense that time is, for the first time, actually catching up with us.

Do I want a child or do I just want to control one marker of adulthood? (Not the child, but the decision to have one.)

Across the board, my friends below 30 have sleep apnea, high blood pressure, low blood pressure, PCOS, brain tumors, abnormal pap smears, reconstructive knee surgery, hip surgery, hand surgery. Student loan payments are beginning for the first time. First layoffs have come and gone. Half of my LinkedIn connections are in residency, presenting their PhD theses. My primary college reference is dead. My friends are marrying people we didn’t even go to college with, that’s how much time has passed. We’re young, but we’re not carefree young anymore. There’s always time, but not necessarily for our bodies. But there’s

So we release the grasp on the question of children. If it’s meant to be, it will be. Except for our friends who really, really want children. For them, planning is a little more important. Actually, you know, maybe they have a point. If you want children, you need a plan. It’s a major investment—financial and relational. And it can take up to a decade to plan for, at least, well.

So maybe we don’t want children, if we’re not ready to plan with such gusto, such commitment, but we’re old enough to be aging off of our parents’ health insurance. Maybe it’s telling.

Made in my mother’s image, bitter sea, I confessed to lying and selfishness during my First Reconciliation. I prayed often and fervently throughout first and second grade that I would never be asked to immaculately conceive. How many rocks I’ve laid on, 13,000’ above the ocean, thankful to be free, thankful to be alone.

Life demands hope. I’m not convinced—I only rarely ever have been— that I am the right person to struggle through post-partum hallucinations and depression, sleepless nights, sick days, and five years of teenage estrangements without losing what hope I need for myself. To keep me alive.

Every year, millions of other people find it—enough hope— within themselves. And maybe that’s enough—for this world, for me: that people like that exist somewhere, so willing to give, so capable of creating hope, so filled with love and bravery and chance that they would choose to have a child, two children, a busload of children. Even if that pull is not necessarily here, between my hands, between the corners of my body.

Maybe it’s enough to just stop wondering—is it right for me or is it wrong—altogether.

I imagine light peering in only through the slats between salty fingers. I wonder if the light is a signal of hope to the frog, or merely blinding. I wonder if frogs cope with hand tents better than mice.

When you slide a field mouse out of a Sherman trap, corner it in a bag to take a hair sample, you have to move swiftly and gently to avoid sending the mouse into cardiac arrest. You can feel their heart beating 500 times per minute between your fingertips. Frog hearts average around 50 beats per minute.

About now is where I’d pitch–well, if you do have kids, I’ll run a nature kindergarten in the summers and you won’t have to worry about them for however long you want. Let them play in the mud, decorate eggs, turn acorns into people, make handprint turkeys, and catch their own spring peepers. Hold life between their own palms.

I’ll hold their backpacks for them at the creek and turn them over to you at the end of the day, their eyes glistening and wide.

We can practice long division–or the box method, whatever they’re teaching now–if you want us to.

In ten years’ time. Or five. Or two. Or in the next life, maybe.

Time will pass and tell. As it does.

For the nth time, I try and fail to recreate an iced matcha latte at home. Something is off. It’s probably that our ice maker has been broken for years, but I wonder about the simple syrup, or maybe it’s the soy milk I usually pay another 25 cents for in lieu of the low-fat dairy my family purchases by the gallon.

I’m sitting in the exact spot I fell asleep on top of AP Biology flashcards exactly a decade ago, when I still missed living in the Mojave and had big dreams of living a surprise prom-centric high school love story, studying for a PhD or maybe the bar, writing a breakthrough novel, achieving “something great,” of moving far away from Southern California for good. A lot has changed.

In the time it’s taken me to write this paragraph, my glass of matcha has grown warm in the springtime heat.

Probably two weeks ago, I called my friend Alice, as I often do in times of emotional duress.

“I feel insane.”

“Oh buddy, me too.”

“We’re so cooked.”

“I can’t tell whether this is the end of life as we know it, or just kind of a shitty time.”

Women are DEI Hires. Any brown person with a degree was admitted through DEI policies. Anyone in a position of power who doesn’t agree with republican politics is a marxist plant. After lunch I’ll spend another hour scrolling through comments left by the right, spouting that the vlogs of young women trying to conceive who were denied septic care during ectopic pregnancies or pregnancy losses, are lying, were brainwashed, are hellbound.

Before bed I’ll read about how it actually doesn’t matter that we bombed Yemen from a group chat, or that Trump’s pick for Secretary of the Interior is using the National Park Service Police helicopter for personal errands. Because of course,this is better than having Crooked Killary Clinton in office, or God forbid, Kamala, former prosecutor –she of all people would have destroyed our country, somehow, in a much worse way.

I’ll pick up a journal and try to channel the same fervor, same panic that I had for the practice when I was 17 and my prediction that Trump would win came true, only to put it back down and wonder: how deeply will I regret staying my pencil when the tides have finished turning?

Alice and I circle around the subject of Russia, Siberia, and Baltic life every now and then. I’m no expert. I read a decent portion of Maria Bochkareva’s autobiography in high school, and the summer before my freshman year of college, I finished The Tsar of Love and Techno and have since read the suite of Marra’s works, a bit of Tolstoy, some attempts at Dostoyevsky. Alice is better at sitting down with a dense novel than I am.

There’s this character in The Tsar, a painter before the communist party took power, and a censorship artist after, who is eventually targeted for disappearance because of a loophole in his work. I think it’s the drastic shift in what daily life consists of that is so often portrayed in similar novels–before and after various regimes have occupied, invaded, retreated, fallen–that continues to pique my interest. There it is, spelled out, the cold truth that one day your life can be career-oriented, based around a new family or the freedom of young adulthood, and the next, based around simple labor and a fear of government or vigilante justice. That you can grow up near forests and quiet villages and die beside a strip mine or mass grave, having never left the same house.

It’s a story familiar to people across the globe, even our own country to a degree. Women still go missing on reservations at alarming rates, and corporations have risen and fallen and taken midwestern and southern towns with them through boom and bust. American citizens have been routinely deported in ICE raids and administrative faux pas since at least the 1930’s, and last I checked Obama’s three million deportations still exceed Trump’s count, but—for daytime raids at least—the green buses usually circle Kern County, not anywhere near the San Gabriel Valley. And, anyway everyone in my family who worked in California’s agricultural fields has died so I shouldn’t worry. And, plus, few people my age, in my circles, know about or care to admit that these things happen in the country that gave their newly naturalized parents college degrees and successful businesses. So I shouldn’t either.

By population, most of us live in cities and suburbs, isolated and shielded from the life-changing tragedy in books, in local newspapers, on social media. Most of us are too separate from nature to notice or write home when protected land outside of Yosemite or the Washington cherry trees changes in a meaningful way. Most of us are too separate even from each other to realize when a family member or coworker who lived alone has died for one or several days.

I’m part of that. And I can’t tell if this life–matcha lattes, concrete sidewalks, social security deposits, equal opportunity employment, increasing college education rates for children of the working class, and the freedom to date and eventually marry who I choose based on love instead of race or caste or stigma–is coming to an end in an imminent way.

Should I buy a gun? Should I withdraw my 401K? Was it a mistake to leave my high rise consulting job two years ago? Am I watching the window of opportunity to marry without racial or gender consideration close for myself and my friends?

On Wednesdays and after 8 pm, I hate everyone who still has living family members in another country to send money home to, who has a long-term visa elsewhere, who is eligible for secondary citizenship through a grandmother or spouse’s sister. It’ll be myself and a couple of friends whose great-grandparents fled Crimean pogroms–the children of the children of the melting pot–we’ll be the ones left behind as the U.S.S.of A. sinks, quietly pinging into wet darkness on a ham radio.

Life today is: I was so surprised to see a small roach, about the side of my big toe, circling in panic on the sidewalk around lunchtime today. It was 76 degrees and sunny, only 25% humidity, and neither a cloud nor tree in sight. It couldn’t fit under the rock it tried to hide under. On the same tract of sidewalk, a gray squirrel lay still, bloated but breathing slowly. I can hear sirens, a wind chime, the hum of the 210 freeway, and the soft chatter of my mom’s ducklings in the garden.

While I was in high school, I used to go on runs at night through these same neighborhoods to see if anyone would notice my absence. It was a test for something I was scared of. I couldn’t figure out what the point of being alive was, and it felt like I would never reach it.

Slowly, I’ve come to accept that the point of living is mostly that, to live.

It’s not exclusively to feel joy, always, or to have security, guaranteed. How could that be the point, when by and large the world’s majority will lack one or both of those for prolonged periods of their lives? How could that be, when grief is so intricately woven into the lived human experience? When grief is so human?

The point is not to make money, or else the celebrity class wouldn’t be riddled with suicidal headlines and self destruction. I don’t believe we were put on this earth exclusively to work in the traditional sense–clocking in at 8:45 A.M. every day to generate profits for someone above you, and an annual inspirational LinkedIn post in exchange for just enough money to be trapped renting with a cat and no children for the next thirty years.

The easiest answer is to say we were put on this earth to love, which on its own neither pays the necessary bills nor serves as an acceptable answer in wake of divorce, death, or the crippling loneliness that so many Americans grapple with every day.

So, again, I think the point of living is to just live. Not necessarily to live the longest, or the fastest, or the greatest. Just to be here and make it through for as long as is necessary. To help a child make change at the laundromat and share forks and take note of the perfect imprint of your friend’s lipstick on the cup. To spend the extra thirty minutes at the grocery store deciding whether to buy tofu or chicken, or stick to lentils, and do I deserve a kombucha, and do I opt for enriched or organic cereal for the next half-week. To spend a year crying, which becomes two years, which feels so endless and hopeless and jagged inside that you cannot imagine that this could possibly be a part of a meaningful life, until one day the tears slow and one day they stop. To read some and make art some. To memorize the shape of your lover’s ear and the pattern of a dog’s breathing in dreams. To watch the petals wither from flowers and bury loved ones and trudge every autumn to the job you dread, except for your deskmate, who of all people gives you the best advice on how to keep doing what you’re already doing: living.

I’ve never understood the appeal of excessive technology–robotic girlfriends, nannies, maids, automated everything. I hate cleaning as much as the next person, but it’s nice to vacuum sometimes. It’s freeing to have to think while driving. It’s a reminder of our own pulse points, to be able to kiss a flesh and blood human. It’s humbling to struggle with a manual can opener. It’s shocking and comforting and awful to feel rain and sun through clothing when we least expect it. It’s interesting to read books and maps ourselves, to learn, to craft, to watch a roll of film slowly materialize into negatives under red light, to need to buy deodorant to survive the walk home from the corner store with dignity in July. I’ve enjoyed the process of living, overall, but even through the periods that I didn’t, I’ve done it, and so has every reader present here.

It’s scary and comforting to think that through the potential end, the point of life will remain both the same as ever, and as unknowable to we humans as ever.

Even if the point of living as simple as being here while your time allows, I grew up on the narrative of hope that defined K-12 curriculum in the early 2000’s. We can send women to space and put a Black man in office and your best friend can be Muslim and you can marry someone entirely unlike your family. Your life can be colorful and multifaceted and you can control your own outcome, with help, which won’t be hard because the world is rooting for you. Every single one of you has the power to invent and reinvent yourselves to do good and great things.

Few people remember that republican president George W. Bush spoke Spanish during multiple speeches, and even with some foreign diplomats, in limited capacity. The America that I live in as an adult would have ousted him, for supporting the corruption that is diversity. He would have been shunned for backing the terrorism of the woke left when he spoke of the wrongs of racism upon the 50th anniversary of Brown V. Board of Education. Sometimes I think about how my mother is older than the number of years that Brown University has admitted women. She is older than folic acid supplements in flour, older than Sesame Street, and older than the Civil Rights Act.

Throughout my 20’s, I’ve watched our country repeat the same cultural cycles and policy making decisions that held my grandparents and great-grandparents back from financial stability and educational freedom, which would in turn limit the outcomes for my parents’ lives. I used to think of our generation–generation Z– as one of the first to really be able to benefit from the drastic social changes of the 50’s and 60’s, the recovery from the cold war, and the educational push of the 1990’s. It feels like the window is closing, a few decades sooner than I’d thought.

Like I said, I can’t tell if that’s a forever change. If I’ll spend my 30’s scrubbing floors like the scene in Our Friend, Martin, if I’ll watch my family members lose citizenship, if I’ll be targeted for some kind of removal act because I hold a college degree or was once more confident in my bisexuality, if my now-boyfriend will eventually leave when the legality of interracial marriage becomes state’s choice. If everything I’m doing or not doing is the last time, like the series of unknowing lasts I had when I left my campus before the pandemic and emerged in my mid-20’s.

It has to be the ice. Lack thereof, I mean. It was $4.99 for nearly 200 servings of matcha. I can try again, maybe chill the tea longer, and another 30 minutes of my life as it is now will pass.

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There are a great many things the current administration despises about me. That I’m of Mexican descent, but so American that even my grandparents were citizens. I’m so American that I must have been a DEI admit to my university. I’m so American that I went on church mission trips in high school, vacation bible school, catechism. I’m so American that I predicted, both times, that Trump would win: I know this country, its roots, its racism, islamophobia, anti-semitism, fanaticism, and its short attention span. I am a product of it.

I’m so American that I have a plush jackalope from a gas station in South Dakota, circa 2007, in my room. I’m so American that I’ve been to the Gene Autry museum more than once. I’m so American that the first vacation I went on was a road trip to Redwood National and State Parks when I was a newborn. I’m so American that I still have a scar on my nose from when my cousin accidentally hit me with a stick in Yosemite as kids. I’m so American that I’ve driven 17-hour days through 16 states, raised chickens, ridden horses, and backpacked for 21 nights straight.

I’m so American that I was an employee of its largest employer. I worked seasonally for the National Park Service, so I wasn’t fired this weekend; I was more prepared to face summer unemployment than the scores of civil servants that moved their families across our nation to serve it. Still, like many others in my social media feeds, I’ve been left on edge. Tentative job offers that never went through. Federal programs that got me to where I am today on the chopping block, if the judge’s blocks are ever lifted.

My friends tell me to return to the private sector. My advisors tell me to serve myself. My family tells me to please just come home. My faith, which I had once, would have told me to serve God and the vulnerable earth He left us to steward.

I’m so American that I’m stubborn.

So here’s a stubborn story: it starts with the smell of rotting pine needles. Sweeter than the scent of wet leaves on a Boston sidewalk, I promise. Heavier than the Oakland magnolia blooms in March. Do you know what the live edge of a ponderosa smells like in the heat of summer? Can you tell what surface you’re walking on with your eyes closed, boots on? This one is soft. Your footsteps are silent, just how every magical novel you read as a child described walking in the woods to be. Your knees are tired, a man died here just last week, and when you walk so far the needles become granite underfoot, you’ll spend the night walking miles before finding another suitable place to pitch a tent. Do you know what that feels like? The trust it takes in yourself and in the natural world that begat us, to lay in the needles with your eyes closed, backpack beneath you, for just one minute.

We all know the Natasha Bedingfield Song. Feel the rain on your skin. When was the last time you stepped out into a bout of clean rain, head back, mouth open, clothes sopping wet? Can you describe to me the feeling of mud between your toes, dust in your hair, or blood on your lips under an unforgiving summer sun? Can you tell me what it feels like to be human?

If the workforce argument isn’t convincing, if the beautiful places mean nothing to you because AI can paint something more beautiful than real life, then let your living humanity be the argument. If you care nothing for the futures of children at the ocean’s edge, then care for the watersheds that will be demolished by waste or sold for profit before you have a chance to notice the rising metal levels, plastics, or cost per gallon. If you care nothing for the discomfort of a breeze through your book in the afternoon, then care for the breathability of that air. If ChatGPT and self-driving cars mean more to you than the soft print of an ermine’s body in the snow, so quiet, so small, so empty–then care for the food we’ll miss when our aquifers run dry from so many cover letter requests, video prompts, data sets given to the self-teaching bots.

If you care nothing for the filthiness of dirt, then care for the integrity of the soil that someday will crumble beneath your home, barren and lifeless. If you care nothing for the cached fawn in a thicket, caught unawares in an early season forest fire, then care for the homes of the rich, of the poor, that will burn from poor management. If you care nothing for the history and culture of the land, of the life of it; if the land means less to you than carbon-copy tract homes cheaply made with disregard to local code standards; then care for what you’ll lose when it too is lost. Care for what you’ll never experience, see, feel, touch: the rain, the smell, the mud, the light between trees, the relationship to something greater than yourself.

I’m so American that I believe we can be better. I’m so American that I believe if we can’t improve “in time,” that even if we as humans aren’t okay, maybe it won’t matter: there’s always a silver lining.

I studied Geology for most of my undergraduate career, and my biggest takeaway was that no matter how colonial our urges: to conquer, destroy, profiteer–we will never be bigger, or stronger, than nature. Wealth didn’t save homes from the LA Fires. Someday, we will sink: our empires, our books, our children’s toys will burn, or be buried in mudslides, or be washed away in floods or crushed beneath bombs and earthquakes until there are no historians or geologists left to document it. We’ll destroy ourselves, and the earth will find a way forward, without us. Someday, when the wealthy leave the drowning poor for outer space, those planets will collapse into stars, too.

If our public lands don’t matter to you because you’ll never visit them, because there are wars bigger than the budget of all of Idaho’s forests, because you earn six figures to invest them in mining and not forest integrity or people…I am certain that you’ll feel their loss–now, or later. Directly, or indirectly.

But anyway. I digress. As they’ll ask me to: I’ll go back to where I came from, because the ones who read this and find themselves angry–well, most of them, at least, will be too scared to call me a w*tback or b*an*r. So they’ll demand I go back to the place that raised me, that made me so distinctly similar to them, so awfully alike: the same schools their children went to, the same workforce, the same poll booth, grocery store, embassy, DMV, agricultural inspection, rest stop, truck stop, Maverick, Flying J, Love’s, Buccee’s, same McDonald’s, Carl’s Jr, Burger King, Wendy’s. They’ll demand I go back to America.