BLUE HOUR

Article & Art by Bella Houck

Dear Virginia, 

Long time no chat! It’s been a while — since high school graduation. I’ve found myself thinking about how excited we were for college, taking walks around the neighborhood where we’d talk for hours about college, love, and all the mysteries that felt so real at seventeen.

There’s a strange distance between us now, a space I can’t quite understand, and I think it’s my fault. 

You called me at 4 a.m., around 8 p.m. your time. I woke up to my phone buzzing and watched your name fade to voicemail. You sent a text after you called. I didn’t respond for days. I wanted to simmer in the ache I feel when you reach out — the slight sweetness in the sting. Like pressing softly on a bruise or picking at a scab, the purity that comes with the pain. 

Fear of the library basement; fear of noises from the heater; fear of leaving the straightener plugged in; fear of moths flying into ears; fear of hair getting cut off in the middle of the night; fear of UTIs; fear of not wearing your retainer; fear of men; fear of being vulnerable; fear of being queer; fear of falling; fear of merging onto a highway; fear of saying the wrong thing; fear of shattering glass.

Dear Virginia,  

I think there’s some weird irony in writing these letters to you. I’m writing this on Whidbey Island, off the coast of Washington, and I’m starting to get The Feeling again. You know the one. 

On the plane, I listened to a podcast called “I Had a Mental Breakdown.” The host talked about how people who suffer from poor mental health have an instinct that the good times are always fleeting, always waiting for the other shoe to drop. For the past week or so, I’ve felt good. Really good. Happy. Content. Grateful. All the things I so desperately craved last year. But as I drove home, back to my family in Littleton, the shoe slowly became heavier and heavier. I saw Tristan, and we laughed and smoked a joint at the hill where we’d watch sunsets in high school. I told him how much I missed laughing with him and how I wanted him to meet my college friends. I showed him pictures of Natalie, TWIT, Ellement, and my sophomore dorm. My gut seemed to be filling with pieces of lead as we walked around our neighborhood — weighed down by passing hours that fade without warning, like blue light swallowed by night.

Fear of God; fear of Satan; fear of church; fear of tight pants; fear of a nip-slip; fear of middle school; fear of being mediocre; fear of having children; fear of never having children; fear of cancer; fear of a relationship; fear of smoking cigarettes; fear of stuffy noses; fear of friends losing interest in you; fear they laugh behind your back; fear of your little brother hating you; fear of your little brother being right for hating you; fear of the slight gap in between escalator steps; fear of the longing. 

Dear Virginia, 

I want to tell you about my homesickness during my first year of college. I want to tell you that everything is slowly shrinking, but I stay the same size. I want to tell you about my grand plan to move to Oregon and live in a cottage along the coast surrounded by crashing waves and pine trees. I want to tell you about a new record I got that reminds me of you. I want to tell you that I wish I were cigarette smoke in an underground jazz club — swirling, dipping, and diving over people’s heads, slightly seen but never acknowledged. 

We used to talk about how badly we wanted to leave Littleton and explore "adulthood." You told me about your first kiss, and I told you about mine; both were painfully awkward. We used to talk about “feeling deeply," and I told you that The Feeling could swallow me whole if I’m not careful. We used to drive around for hours in my old Honda Accord with the windows down, even though it was winter. We used to talk about how all great love poems should be written by women. 

I want to tell you I’m sorry for pushing you away. I want to tell you why I don’t respond to your texts, but I’m not even sure I know myself. I want to tell you that this bright red button in my head flashes when anyone shows romantic interest in me, telling me to run. I want to tell you that The Feeling comes back when the sky is a bruised purple and my throat becomes sore.

Fear of getting a bad grade; fear of failing the test; fear of a nine-to-five career; fear of being stuck behind a desk your whole life; fear of hating your boss; fear of becoming an alcoholic; fear of becoming (too much of) a stoner; fear of being stupid; fear of hating the college you chose; fear that no one likes you; fear of missing out; fear of death; fear of food poisoning; fear of getting old; fear of growing old alone; fear of smelly feet; fear of heart attacks; fear of heartaches. 

Dear Virginia, 

I’m thinking about how much I want to walk around in the cold winter air with you, our hot breaths puffing out words unsaid between us. I want to go back and pick up your call this summer and put on the “Bella-smile,” as you used to say, and talk again. I want to tell you I miss you. 

Virginia, what if I never experience the entirety of love because I’m too afraid of being forgotten? Too afraid of not being good enough? Too afraid they’ll leave me, and I’ll cut open my chest and hold my still-beating heart as penance. What I’m trying to say is: I’m sorry. I’m sorry I can’t be normal about this. Instead, I’m writing you letters you’ll never read because I’m too consumed by blue melancholy to send them. 

Fear of the planet collapsing in on itself; fear of blackholes; fear of climate change; fear of nuclear war; fear of history; fear of stubbing your toe; fear of forgetting to wear cute underwear on a date; fear of blisters from new shoes; fear of splinters; fear of getting too drunk; fear of acting on drunken impulses; fear of finishing that really good book; fear of throwing away your childhood blanket; fear of being spit on; fear of using too much tongue when making out; fear of The Feeling. 

Dear Virginia, 

I want to call you right now. 

There’s no snow in Littleton, Colorado because the sun has already melted it all away. Instead, it’s bitterly cold, with chunks of ice peppering the dirt pathway. The tip of my nose has frozen over with rhythmic sniffs to keep the snot at bay. It’s only 6 p.m., but the sky quickly darkens, pulling a blue blanket across my eyes. 

The houses I walk by have yellow windows. Different lamps illuminate the inside, like  jack-o’lanterns, exposing the leftover guts and seeds. I’ve always found these windows nostalgic. Watching people go about menial evening tasks while you’re outside, shrouded in blue light.

That State of Drifting Need

Reflections on My Own Private Idaho

Article by Henry Moraja Art by Eden Miller

Gus Van Sant's 1991 cult classic My Own Private Idaho is a lot of things. It's a road movie about two street hustlers — River Phoenix and Keanu Reeves, perfectly cast as the narcoleptic Mike Waters and the rich mayor's son Scott Favor, respectively — who bounce from clients to dirty hotels to garish Chinese buffets up and down the Pacific Northwest. It's a loose adaptation of Shakespeare's Henry IV cycle, borrowing a few subplots from Prince Hal's exploits with drunkards and knaves before shaping up into the royal heir he was born to be. It's a landmark work of New Queer Cinema, renowned for its sympathetic depictions of sex work, poverty, and gay longing. Perhaps most importantly, it's a meditation on the road. It interrogates movement and rootlessness and the search for meaning in liminality, of the relationship between queer desire and societal fringes — back alleys, motel rooms — where it is able to come into the light for a few moments before disappearing again. 

I watch a lot of road movies for someone who hates highways and long car rides and cars. I adore the narrative tension of a few characters pushed together by fate, confined to tight front seats and dingy diner booths, all neon lights and flat desert skies and the rotting away of Americana. It's a deceptively simple storytelling technique — a small group of people depart from one place and go to another — that leaves room for a wide array of relationship dynamics, character development, and social commentary. But My Own Private Idaho is different. Even in contrast to other contemporary queer road movies like The Living End (1992) and To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything! Julie Newmar (1995), which move their characters in a straight line through the California desert or across the country, My Own Private Idaho is absurdly cyclical. Neon title cards inform us of every change in setting as Mike moves from Idaho to Seattle to Portland to Idaho to Rome to Portland to Idaho, first in an effort to get home, then to search for his mom, then to recover some purpose in life after failing to find her. If the average road movie is a straight shot down Route 66, then My Own Private Idaho is the downward spiral of an endless parking garage: no exit, no escape, nowhere to hide. 

Mike is defined by roads. He tells us everything we need to know in the first five minutes of the movie. On a flat strip of highway in the hinterlands of Idaho, he says, "I always know where I am by the way the road looks. Like I just know that I've been here before. I just know that I've been stuck here…" Mike works on the street as a hustler, falls asleep on sidewalks when his narcolepsy catches up to him, and dreams of the house he grew up in falling from the sky, crashing onto an empty highway, and splintering into pieces. He exists only in liminal spaces: in between places to live, in between clients, in between awake and asleep, past and present. The disappearance of his mother, who we see caring for infant Mike in wind-swept flashbacks, robbed him of any sense of stability in life. His journey to find her in Rome is fruitless, and he returns to Portland more adrift than before. The film ends with Mike asleep on a highway somewhere in Idaho while strangers steal his bag and his shoes. For Mike, the road is hell and home, the only cycle he's always known and will never be able to escape. 

Mike's closest friend, narrative foil, and unrequited love interest is Scott Favor, the son of the mayor of Portland. Scott is slumming it with the hustlers to spite his father, knowing he will inherit a fortune on his 21st birthday and return to his family's upper-class life. Though our two main characters couldn't be more different — Scott is confident, talkative, and privileged; Mike is quiet, strange, and dirt poor — they are united by their liminal positions within the world of the film. Scott, like Mike, exists in the in-betweens: he's an outsider with the other hustlers, who covet his wealth and hope he will share his inheritance; he's not welcome with his family because of his choice to live in squalor and engage in sex work; he is uncomfortable with his family's wealth and uncomfortable without it. However, in contrast to Mike, Scott is not confined to the road. He falls in love with a girl in Rome and slips easily into the upper class life of his inheritance when his father passes away, charging forward while Mike is doomed to the same roundabout, forever. 

The emotional core of the film occurs when Mike and Scott are on the way to Idaho to meet Mike's brother. Their motorbike breaks down, and they build a campfire in the flatlands to catch some sleep. Here, in this most marginal of spaces, Mike can talk about his feelings for the first, and only, time. Without looking away from the fire, Mike tells Scott, "I'd like to talk with you. I mean, I'd like to really talk with you. . . I don't feel like I can be close to you." Scott affirms that they are friends, best friends, but he "only has sex with men for money" and that "two men can't love each other." Mike responds, "I could love someone even if I. . . you know, wasn't paid for it. I love you and. . . you don't pay me." 

I've had these words echoing around my head for years. In more stable times, I use them as a litany against falling in love with heterosexual men, a reminder that this is all it gets you: a dying campfire, a rock for a pillow. I spent a long time feeling smug, feeling immune, in a fallout shelter of my own design. No one gets in, no one gets out. It's easier that way. 

In less stable times, when I'm 5,000 miles away from everything I've ever known and the new world around me glitters with graffiti and cheap wine and techno, they come back to me like a knowing hand on my shoulder. This has been happening to people like us for centuries, they say. They understand how it feels to be in love with the wrong man, the perfectly nice, funny, gorgeous man who, through no fault of his own, cannot love you back. The torture of proximity. The saying yes, to another drink, another favor, an international vacation, for just one more chance to be near him. Sometimes there is stolen ecstasy — a smile, a joke landing, his thigh pressed against yours at the bar as he buys you a drink. Often there is pain, excruciating pain, like when he falls asleep on the subway seat beside you, trusting your insomnia, your anxiety, your google maps to wake him up before you reach your stop. Which you do. Which you would do again, and again, forever. 

Film critic Robert Ebert likens Mike Waters to "a holy fool," to Dostoyevsky's Raskolnikov or Shakespeare's Falstaff, those otherworldly figures who flicker at the edges of their stories like hallucinations or dreams, inviting the audience to laugh at that which the rest of the world takes deadly seriously. But isn't that just what love does to us? Draws us into the corners? Makes us wary of the light, of taking it from someone who deserves it so much more? Doesn't it have us waking up in the strangest of situations, unsure of how we got there and unable to find our way back? Ebert argues the film's greatest strength comes from its evocation of "that state of drifting need," and I have to agree. It's that awake-for-thirty-two-hours kind of love, that desperation-doesn't-even-begin-to-cover-it kind of love, the love you can maybe only come across when you are young and clumsy and trying to find yourself in a foreign language. It's a cold glass of wine on a small bench. It's a kiss on the cheek in front of the club at 3 a.m. It's a drunken wild goose chase to the pool hall at midnight, the taste of Viennese beer and succumbing to madness and a beautiful sad song over cinematic tears on the train. It's everything and it's nothing. It's gone. 

At the end of the movie, after Mike has been robbed and left asleep in the middle of the road — his road — in Idaho, a new car pulls up. A man steps out, but we are too far away to discern any details. He picks Mike up, puts him in his car, and drives away. Van Sant forces us to linger on this uncomfortable image, doesn't cut to credits until the car has driven out of sight. It's left deliberately unknowable, but the eternal optimist in me wants to believe it's Scott. Who else would know where to find Mike? Who else has access to a reliable car? Who else has had enough practice picking up Mike's unconscious body to do it so instinctually, like it's second nature? As in the rest of the film, the ambivalence of the ending is its strongest feature. Maybe it doesn't mean anything at all. Maybe it means whatever we want it to mean. To me, it means this: yes, there is unrequited love, there is inconclusive hope — but at least there is love, and hope, and someone to pick us off the asphalt, to carry us further down the road. 

Valet Boy

You never know when you’ll need to drive stick!

Article by Will Garrett Art by Kristopher Ligtenberg

I stand at attention behind the “bell stand,” an outdoor valet booth containing check-in and name information for every guest on the property. There are thirty hotel check-ins to go; today’s busier because it's a Friday and one hundred degrees in Napa Valley. Worldwide vacationers have driven here in their rental BMWs and are ready for a weekend of poolside cocktails, spa treatments, and wine tastings. “Detoxify and Retoxify,” the mantra of Solara Resort & Spa, is embedded into our heads by our managers for the sake of job awareness. This is how rich people have fun. 

As bellman and valet driver, I’m cropped at the front of the property. Guests drive the bend of the circular driveway, past an oval median of shrubs and palm trees. I open their car doors and take them to reception. If their room is ready, I escort them to one of four neighborhoods: Oak, Orchard, Pool, or Creek. These private studio clusters surpass any normal preconceptions of a hotel room. Backyard patios with fire pits and chairs, hot tubs, outdoor showers, and a fireplace in the living room. The Oak and Creek studios lie beneath ancient oak trees. Nestled in their corner is a spa with mud baths, a cold plunge, and four geothermal pools. A cobblestone pathway with wind chimes marks the entrance. Eyes at half-mast, hotel guests on this side of the property clop along in bathrobes and slippers, content with their removal from the families by the pool. 

Two neighborhoods over on the poolside, a dad watches his son shove another kid face first into the water. The dad is unbothered, loudly sucking at air with a paper straw in his margarita. A waiter asks if he’d like a refill. Couldn’t hurt. 

From behind the bell stand I snap out of my daze. I run my hands over the wooden booth and open a drawer filled with valet car keys. Taped to every key fob is a paper slip representing its owner in ink; Martin Keeley: red Tesla on E-charger; Jack Fairfield: white BMW. I shuffle my hand through the loose pile of vehicle remotes like a kid fishing through a basket of hot wheel cars, landing on a red, hard plastic fob with a bucking horse and Italian stripes. A tap on the side button releases the ignition switchblade. When I hear footsteps, I sheath the Ferrari key and close the drawer. Before I can give the hotel guests a wave, they disappear into the parking lot. Bored, I draw a mini skateboard from my pocket and begin jumping it with my index and ring finger across the bell stand, hurdling over the Ferrari key. Every time it lands on the desk it makes a hollow clunk. Suddenly, the hotel reception doors at my four o’clock swoosh open. I sweep the key into the drawer and stow my toy skateboard in my back pocket, standing straighter than the two palm trees in front of me. 

“You have swamp ass.” 

“Fuck off, Pete.” It’s just my coworker. 

He passes behind me and leans over the drawer, yawning as he jerks it open. Check-in sheets, pens, golf cart keys, valet keys, and apparently, his tin of mustache wax all shift an inch in momentum. He picks up his prized possession, screws off the cap and liberally applies. It looks like Vaseline and it makes his mustache wiry. Pete, facial hair glistening, dons sunglasses and nods toward a middle-aged lady on a call in the parking lot.

“She wants me.” 

“Shut up,” I manage. His beady eyes glaze over

“You make any tips today?” he says, still watching her. 

“Some.” 

“I do all the work around here,” he sighs, plopping a wad of bills into the drawer.

Pete is a part-time firefighter, full-time bellman and valet driver. He calls himself the captain of the bell team, a fake position he orders his coworkers (me) to refer to him by. 

A black Chevy Suburban rounds the corner and pulls in front of us. I slide away from the desk, circle around the car, and open the driver's door. 

“Hello, welcome to Solara! You may leave your car here as we get you checked in. Reception is just inside these doors."

I walk back to my post. Pete grins. “Did you see who you were talking to?” 

“Barely. Was she cute?”

“Does Dolly Parton sleep on her back?”

Another car pulls up behind the Chevy. Pete takes this one, leading a man in his seventies who stinks of cigarettes and has braided gray hair tucked under a cowboy hat. For all I know, it could be Willie Nelson. Just outside reception, he interrupts Pete’s welcome spiel by holding up a finger and saying, “Would you mind showing me the little boys room?” Pete blabs out five different directional markers for a twenty-foot walk. Old man Willie gives him a thumbs up and gingerly leans into his steps. 

Pete returns to our post. “Old bastard.” 

I shake my head. “Young, legitimate child.”

Straight-faced, he scans my face with scrutiny. I force a laugh and look away.

“Will, for these two room check-ins, I’ll take that first Argentine lady that you failed to notice. I want her to have the best service. Try bonding with that old guy a bit, it’ll be good practice for you.”

Before I can answer, one of our managers struts over and interrupts: “Pete, we need you to make a delivery to room 118. Someone forgot their body lotion by the pool and they need it ASAP. Can you take these next two check-ins, Will?”

“Of course.” 

The manager leaves and Pete hops in a golf cart. As he drives by, he smiles at me and mouths a kiss. “Earn that tip, Will. Make Daddy proud.” He takes a right and speeds out of the driveway toward a back entry of the pool. 

I hear through the open doors of reception that the Argentine lady is confirmed as a guest and that her room is ready. A receptionist leads her over to me.

“Ms. Di Tella, this is Will, your bellman. You’re in good hands.”

“Thank you,” she says brightly.

“Hi Ms. Di Tella, great to meet you.”

“Nice to meet you, Will! Call me Isabela.” 

“Hi, Isabela. Are your bags over there in your car?” My neck twitches and I spastically point to her Chevy. 

“Yes, I believe so,” she smiles, her eyes calmly fighting discomfort. “You seem young. Are you from around here?”

“Yes, I live 15 minutes down the road.” We head toward her car. 

“Oh, lovely! So you must know all the best wineries.” 

“Of course.”

“Tell me, in your opinion, where can I find the best Cabernet?”

I answer with Sterling Vineyards, a tourist trap that Solara forces us to recommend, a gondola ride up to fancy hors d'oeuvres and sub-par wines. 

“It’s a truly stunning view of the valley. Whenever you are ready, I’d be happy to show you to your room.”

“Ready!” She urges a bit carelessly, but not impatiently. 

“Great. I’m going to hop on this bicycle. Just follow me in the car. Once we get to your room, I’ll unload your bags.” I swing my leg over the bike seat.

“Okay, Will. And what if I hit you?” She starts the car.

I sit on the seat and my toy skateboard snaps in my back pocket. “Ah!”

“I won’t actually hit you.” 

“No! I know, it’s not that. Something just broke.” 

I pull out the split deck from my back pocket and toss it in the basket on my handlebars. Wood splinters jut out across its middle like ripped stitches. It shifts in the mesh basket as I start forward, threatening to slip through the cracks. 

I try to look smooth with each pedal stroke as I balance in front of her car. Sticking my left hand out, we turn out of the valet driveway and to the Oak studios, past the highway entrance, and turn left at the spa, under a grove of oaks. I park my bike and she opens the trunk, revealing a small black suitcase and a red hat. Ducking under the trunk, I see the hat’s insignia. 

“Are you part of a Ferrari club?” I ask excitedly.

“My friends arrive later in my 250 GT Spyder,” she answers. 

Rolling her Eiffel Tower-stamped bag, we reach a winding path and its wheels start clicking against concrete lines. She follows behind in disjunctive clicks from her flats. At the door stoop, I scan the room key and wait for a green light before entering into a cold blast of AC. Talking through the basic room amenities, I explain how to turn on the backyard firepit, how to adjust the AC, and how to use the remote for the roll-tracked window blinds. She nods politely and I speed up the process.

“By your bathroom is a minibar. The water, coffee, and tea are all complimentary, but the alcohol will be charged to your room. Let me know if you have any questions. Would you like me to put your bag on a luggage rack?” 

“No, thanks. But I do have a question,” she pauses. “Can I hire you as a driver for tonight?” 

“Um—” 

“Just to the bar a mile away. To Suzie's.” 

“I’m off work at 7 p.m.”

“Hmm, that won’t work,” she mumbles. “If you stayed after, I would pay extra.” 

“I can’t technically drive your car on or off property since our insurance doesn’t cover that.” 

Undeterred, Isabela claims, “You can meet me off property on the side street over there.” She points south beyond the property’s hedges from our backyard view. “That way, your managers will have no jurisdiction over your whereabouts. Meet me after you get off, at 7:30.”

“Ok… sure. Thank you,” I stutter. 

Riding the cruiser bike back to the front of the property, I watch my broken tech-deck clutter around in the front basket. Back at my station, I flick the kickstand on my bike and slump back over my wooden booth. The sun beats down on my neck through the olive trees. I drum my fingers on the table, pining for my grippy tech-deck. 

Fake Willie Nelson stumbles out of the outdoor bathroom and spits. He passes the outdoor sink, completely missing it, and heads for me. 

“Hi sir, can I help with anything?” I offer.

“You minimum wage workers have no dreams.” From ten feet away, his breath smells like whiskey.

“I’m sorry to hear that, sir.” 

“Where is the service? I was calling for help from the bathroom for five minutes. There’s no more goddamn toilet paper in there. Is this all a joke?” He gestures into thin air. 

“I’m sorry if it appears that way. I’ll get you some toilet paper right now.”

“No, no. You know what?” He flips his braided gray hair behind his shoulder and extends a mangled finger toward his car. “I’m going home.” 

“I don’t think that's a good idea. Is there any way we could call an Uber?” He ignores my question, sauntering over to the wrong side of his car. Someone must have seen the interaction from inside because a manager approaches and tells me to take a lunch break. 

*                    *                    *                    *                    *                    *                    *             

Old Man Willie was kept safely on property and given a fresh new roll of TP, and the rest of my day went slowly. I replaced my tech-deck with a pencil and notepad, drawing stick figure skateboarders soaring off wooden ramps over shark-infested waters. Pete left early. 

At a quarter to seven, I’m doodling side profiles of the Ferrari that Isabela claimed her friends would be bringing. I draw the thinly spoked rims, the fish gill side vents, and the slight curve of the ceilingless windshield. With no red colors to use, I leave the outline slightly filled in with black ink. Rotating the paper to see the portrait from different angles, I realize I might be driving this car tonight. 

I clock out from my shift and walk back to my Toyota Camry. Kneeling on the driver's seat I reach into the center console and pull out my Old Spice. Like Pete with his cosmetics, I apply liberally. As I drive to our meeting spot, I pray to Our Father that the car will be a Ferrari and a Hail Mary that I won’t crash it.

I pull onto a side street and see the outline of her black hair moving down the sidewalk. I park across from her. Isabella stops her stride behind a Ford F-350 but from my angle I can’t see around it. I get out of my car. 

“Isabela!” No answer. “Isabela!” My feet mash acorns into asphalt and my neck stiffens. I reach into my back pocket and feel my snapped tech-deck.  

“Will? Is that you?” 

I stride forward, “Yes!” and put my hand in the air like I’m hailing a taxi. She steps out from behind the Ford in a black cocktail dress. 

“You’re two minutes late!” she chides. “My friends are waiting for me. Chop chop!” 

“Sorry.” I blush. My hands go from my back pockets to my front ones. 

She waves me over and outstretches her arms to showcase whatever’s behind the Ford F-350. I crane my neck, stunned.

A wooden steering wheel like a ship’s helm is perched over cream seats. Leather pouches caress the inside doors. A shiny black gear shifter… The color drains from my face. “I don’t know how to drive stick shift.”

She takes a second. 

“What?”

“I know everything about cars, but I never learned stick.” 

“But this is supposed to be when you say, ‘Don’t worry, I’m a professional,’” she protests.

I shake my head. “I’m sorry.”

“It’s okay, don’t worry about it,” she says with a look of pity. “Should I call an Uber?”

“Maybe,” I mutter, holding myself up by the bed of the F-350 for support. I shyly brush my shoes off on the edge of the curb. “We could also take my car, if you want.” 

“Really?” Her eyes perk up. “I’d love to.” 

“It’s just right over there. The 2009 Toyota Camry, hybrid, with traction control.” 

Isabela shushes me. “Please don’t make me regret this.” She hops from the curb and spins around. Pedaling backward, she sighs at the Ferrari receding from her vision. Across the street, I open the passenger door to my car and wait until she slips inside. I turn my head and mouth curse words into the air. When I open the driver's door I feel like shouting again; it smells deeply of Old Spice. I roll down the windows and Isabela laughs to herself a little bit.  

In five minutes, we are outside a brick building with a neon martini glass. I tell her that I’ll be parked here until she’s done. 

“Thank you, Will, you are very sweet.” 

The three-hour wait was no issue. I didn’t even need my mini skateboard.

A Kwik Trip

Article & Art by Jamie D.

“I think it’s broken,” says Cody as he cradles his ankle. He sits on the ground below the stairs and I can hear dirt in the bearing of the skateboard as it rolls away. 

“Uh…” 

“Get the car.” 

And so I unearth my keys on the short walk through the parking lot. I start the car and back it up onto the sidewalk. Sidewalks are more narrow than parking spots. I take great care to leave the grass on either side of the tires uninjured before coming to a stop as close to Cody as I can get. Sam is on Cody’s left and Cormac is under Cody’s right shoulder. I’m busy fussing with the passenger seat. The speed of the electric motor reclining matches the inching pace of Cody, Sam, and Cormac’s trek to the car. Cody is as comfortable as he will be in the seat. 

Let’s call Mom.

“Whose mom?”

All of them. (They’re hanging out, and it's their fault Cody, Sam, Cormac, and I are friends.) 

They’re laughing, seriously, a little bit garbled through FaceTime. 

“RICE. Rest, ice, compression, and elevation.” 

Cody’s not putting any weight on his right ankle. Rest, check. Compression, idk how to do that. He’ll be fine without it. Compression is just for comfort, and it’s just Cody anyway. Elevation? Well, his leg is kinda elevated by the way he’s sitting, so, check. Ice? Across the interstate, there’s a Kwik Trip gas station and convenience store. Any East-West road trip in the midwestern United States is haunted by Kwik Trip. They’re a co-op. Or, maybe they hate unions? We need ice. And ibuprofen. That would probably help, too. 

The gear shift clicks forward in a satisfying way that I trust will get us across the interstate. I am a pilot now. My position as a driver is elevated by the urgency of the situation. I stop as smoothly as possible at the light while we wait for it to turn green. 

“Get Cody the aux cord.” (Even though Cody is already the aux dictator.)

The light turns green and the volume knob is rotated clockwise. 

Smoothly, I pilot the car into a parking spot with the quickest access to the interior of the store. 

“Cormac! Find ice and get us some ibuprofen.” 

“What the hell is taking him so long? How hard can it be to ask someone where to find ice?” On second thought, we did send Cormac. 

When Cormac reappears from the Kwik Trip matrix, the outline of a milkshake in his right hand does not match the outline of the bag of ice I had in mind. 

“They didn’t have ibuprofen.”

“Cormac, you grabbed a F’real milkshake?”

Kwik Trip did, obviously, stock ibuprofen. We make Cormac go back and get it because there was no way Kwik Trip didn’t stock ibuprofen. 

While I drive out of the parking lot, Cormac spends the time explaining his commitment to F’real milkshakes. He simply can’t go through a convenience store without buying one. 

A police car tails us out of the gas station. Probably a coincidence. Or perhaps the officer wants to keep an eye on the car of hooligans passing through the small Wisconsin town. Could a broken ankle justify a police escort? Probably not. 

I merge into the left turn lane that will return us eastward on the interstate. The police car leers up next to us, in the right turn lane. We part ways and the song “Bitchin’ Camaro” by The Dead Milkmen rings in my skull and Cody’s already swelling ankle. A decision is made to deposit Cody at the Health Partners Clinic in Somerset, Wisconsin. They don’t accept his insurance. We wheel out saltily. Following council with the moms, we set a course for Twin Cities Orthopedics in Stillwater, Minnesota. Our route crosses the width of the St. Croix River between Hudson, Wisconsin and Stillwater. There’s no speed limit over international waters. I press the pedal to the floor and let The Dead Milkmen rattle the car. Cody’s ankle hurts, and in such circumstances, the music can be louder than I’d like. 

Tornado Weather

Hiding under a blanket in a storm. Invincible.

Article by Anna Crossley Art by Liz White

Once, on our way to visit my dad’s best friend in Michigan, my family drove into tornado weather on the highway. 

I was probably six or seven (maybe eight). The sky turned that scary green that flattens out the horizon and brings the clouds right to your nose, like driving through an algae bloom, the air heavy and buzzing. My dad took the next exit, and we sat out the weather in the tornado-shelter-designated bathroom of some unremarkable midwestern rest stop with a few strangers, who exist in my memory as more presence than actual people. I don’t even remember if my shorts were soaked from the dash between our minivan and the building. But I remember my gray sandals, and I know more than remember the color of the sky before weather like that.  

I guess I was scared on that trip, huddled next to my brother on the bathroom floor. I must have been. I’ve always been scared of storms. I still am. There’s no controlling the force of weather like that. You can’t stop it or escape it or put it off for later like so many of the mundane things that terrify me these days. When my brother and I were younger and still shared a room, we’d crawl under the blankets on his bunk every time a bad storm came, and we’d stay there until the thunder was no more than a distant rumble. The sweaty suffocating heat under the quilt was a price I was willing to pay for safety, and even though he pretended otherwise, I think my brother needed that fabric shield just as much as me. 

I’ve seen the sky turn that algae color other times: out the front window of my childhood home, blending our trees into the neighbor’s roof and bruising the sky yellowish green. I have this ill-founded conviction that when at home I’m untouchable. But in an old dorm room a thousand miles away, I’m more vulnerable than I was even on that empty highway twelve years ago. The wrong gust of Colorado wind could bury me under snow and rain and old bricks and the weight of all those years of fearing a crack of thunder. 

Two summers ago, a week before leaving my hometown for Colorado, I again found myself hiding from the weather on cold, bathroom linoleum. I was shivering in a favorite ice cream shop where I’d been coming for as long as I can remember, with a friend who knew me better than almost anyone. My shorts and shoes were soaked, and my glasses were broken from dropping them on the concrete sidewalk. There was a family with us, and as the wind shook the front windows, the mother was on the phone trying to push back their dinner reservation until the tornado passed. The absurdity of it was not lost on me. She saw the storm as something ephemeral, while to me, it was my entire reality all at once. I wished then that I was back under the covers of the bottom bunk, hovering on the brink of sleep in the warm and the quiet. 

Only a few days later, I left behind the pink and green tiles of the ice cream shop and the rain of Indiana for the novelty of mountains and a sky clearer and bluer and more distant than I’d ever lived under. As if to ease me in, the drive was dry and clear. It had been a year full of lasts, and it was a drive so full of ends and beginnings that I was trying to make it into something more than it was. I wanted it to mean something, that it hadn’t rained the whole sixteen hours across the country, but the weather can’t be controlled. I couldn’t squeeze significance out of dry air.

This August, it rained on that same stretch of country from home to school, just as my mom and I crossed from Missouri into Kansas. I thanked the kindness of fate that it was a gentle rain. It was familiar, but not threatening. Unlike those storms I’d had to hide from. From the highway, I could see the lighter sky to the west, promising good weather. Flat clouds and flatter cornfields are things I know, and that Kansas rain was something at least survivable if not controllable. Lightning might have struck once in the distance, made short in the tiny space between sky and earth where there aren’t mountains to stretch it out. 

When I’m back in Colorado, the Front Range holds up the sky like tent poles, pinning it in place, unfathomably high. When lightning strikes here it arcs forever, nothing like the short fingers of flashing electricity at home. Here it’s something supernatural, stretching to its limit to bridge the distance before shattering like glass between the raindrops. Last weekend it stormed in the Springs. I’d forgotten what it was like. When I heard the thunder rattle my window, I thought about the way my windows at home made the same sound way back in May when I first went home. It rained for five days in a row. It was a wet and heavy rain, the kind that Colorado doesn’t have, and I reveled in it. Now a thousand miles away, watching the rain pour down out my window, the dry ground seems to spit it back. 

It's like rain doesn’t belong here. When it rains at home, all the greens brighten, and our neighbor’s yard drinks in the water like it’s never seen a storm. When it rains here, the water skids off the sidewalk and skirts around rocks. As the rain came down outside my window last weekend, I thought that all the beautiful soaking mess was wasted on ground that didn’t want it. And maybe back in May I had felt threatened by the way the sky darkened or the sound thunder made crashing against the house. But now, hearing the same sound of thunder so far from home, I’d have driven all the way back home to hide from a tornado again just for the sake of familiarity. I’d have gone hours to see the flat gray of clouds I know and that terrible green sky speckled with hail that some primitive part of me read as an omen but the rest of me read as a sign. A drive away, the earth understood the rain, and I want to be there on bathroom linoleum or under an old quilt, cocooned in what I’d left behind.  

Crustacean Revelation

Article by Langley Murray Art by Avy Diamond

What knowledge does the crustacean soul hold? 

 A kid smushes their face against the thick, acrylic glass separating them and their new friend. The fluorescent lighting in PetSmart makes the SpongeBob painted on its shell excitingly enticing. Deep-red, stubby legs curiously begin to emerge from the shell, followed by two unthreatening claws, and finally, two spindly fixtures with round, luminous black eyes poised on the tips. They stare curiously back at the child — these ten seconds of eye contact are all it takes to convince the kid that the hermit crab needs to come home.  

The hermit crab is welcomed into its own little tank on the kid’s nightstand in semi-arid Pueblo, Colorado. It has a bed of sand, a bowl with fresh water, some pieces of driftwood, a pineapple-shaped cave, and a platter with the finest hermit crab diet pellets — all a hermit crab could ever want or need.  

For the first week, it happily scuttled around its tank, rearranging things as it saw fit. As the months went by, the child periodically noticed the crab lapse into some sort of stasis; it would bury itself in one of its four corners, shrink deep into its shell, and remain immobile for days and days. Panicked, the child would take it out to play, dunk the crab in water, offer it a new shell; but nothing could shake the crab of its cold-blooded blues. Just as the child began to lose hope, and the parents begrudgingly prepared their speech on grief and the cycles of life, the crab spurred into a sudden state of hyperactivity. It ceaselessly scoured its little world, rooting through the sand and turning over all its rocks, bringing waves of relief to the family. These episodes repeat in a cyclic, sporadic manner seemingly invoked and repressed by nothing except the crab's own whims. This confused the shit out of the parents and child alike, leaving them wondering: is this the crab equivalent of bipolar disorder? What is going on in that crustacean soul?  

Little does the family know, their new pet is responding to some thalassic force. Hermit crabs cannot be bred in captivity, consequently all “pet” hermit crabs are wild caught from some far-off warm beach, maybe in the Caribbean. Hermit crabs (along with many other intertidal organisms) exhibit these cyclic behaviors in response to the tides. Their displaced, captive counterparts still exhibit this — seemingly responding to tides — despite being moved thousands of miles away from the ocean. The biological underpinning of this behavior is a complex, genetically encoded internal rhythm. Instead of having a circadian rhythm, researchers have dubbed the internal rhythm phenomenon of hermit crabs a “circatidal” rhythm, which allows these creatures to constantly be in tune with their environment and respond to the ever-changing cyclic nature of the ocean. These internal rhythms have been shaped by thousands of years of evolution in tandem with the ocean; those behaviors have been ingrained in their souls, so no matter where they end up, they will always feel the pull of the ocean. Even though the crab now resides on a nightstand in dry, landlocked Pueblo, Colorado 800 miles away from the ocean, it feels the tides and acts accordingly. They are living proof that you can exist in two states at once.  

I feel the pull when I go to pick out tomatoes in the grocery store. They overused GMOs, none of them will taste as sweet as the ones grown in my mom and I’s garden. I feel the pull when I’ve grown too big for the shell I carry, and it’s time to try on a new one that fits me as I am now. When I’m on the roads here, I feel enraged at the Coloradans who don’t know how to use the left lane. I use my pinchers to scrounge up a morsel of tasty food from my new substrate, a skill I perfected elsewhere. Sometimes I wake up in the morning and look out my window, expecting verdant forest and disorientedly searching for the call of a Northern Cardinal. In their place I find mountains and Steller's Jays. This is the poetry of the hermit crab.  

In the end, we never fully understand the forces that shape us — whether they are the tides that guide a hermit crab or the invisible currents pulling at our own hearts. The crab's restlessness reminds me that we are always in motion, sometimes caught in stillness, sometimes caught in wild activity, but always moving toward something, even if we can’t see it. Maybe the ocean doesn't call us all in the same way, but we all carry that rhythm inside us — the ebb and flow of who we are and who we’re becoming. 

Sources: 

• Sakich, N. B., Bartel, P. C., Richards, M. H., & Tattersall, G. J. (2023). Hot crabs with bold choices: Temperature has little impact on behavioral repeatability in Caribbean hermit crabs. Behavioral Processes, 210, 104916. 

• Naylor E. (1985). Tidally rhythmic behavior of marine animals. Symposia of the Society for Experimental Biology, 39, 63–93. 

• Zhang, L., Hastings, M. H., Green, E. W., Tauber, E., Sladek, M., Webster, S. G., Kyriacou, C. P., & Wilcockson, D. C. (2013). Dissociation of circadian and circatidal timekeeping in the marine crustacean Eurydice pulchra. Current biology : CB, 23(19), 1863–1873. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2013.08.038 

• Iglesia, H. O., & Johnson, C. H. (2013). Biological clocks: riding the tides. Current biology : CB, 23(20), R921–R923. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2013.09.006 

• Hermit Crab Association: Land Hermit Crab Behavior. https://hermitcrabassociation.com/phpBB/viewtopic.php?t=23737  

• The Spruce Pets, “How to Build a Hermit Crab Habitat” https://www.thesprucepets.com/hermit-crab-housing-1236872#:~:text=Lianne%20McLeod%2C%20DVM%2C%20is%20a,at%20the%20University%20of%20Saskatchewan.&text=Many%20people%20mistakenly%20think%20that,crab%20exactly%20what%20they%20need. 

Fleeing and Romance

On heartbreak and driving burnout

Article by Asta Sjogren-Uyehara Art by Eden Miller

I have always written about long journeys and running far, far away from here (by which I mean wherever my feet are, it doesn’t matter) and I do not know why. The places I’ve attached myself to are sometimes lively, always beautiful, fully unknowable to me. Before I came to this state or knew of this school, I always said I wanted to live in the Colorado woods: build myself a cabin, sturdy warm walls full of books and cascading greenery and plush velvet everywhere. A midcentury modern dream. 

From the ages of fourteen to sixteen, I would calm myself down by sitting in the driver’s seat of my mother’s car. But when I started learning how to drive, ostensibly my escape, a symbol of my ability to choose where I went and when I went there, my eyelids drooped, hands shook, chest tightened. I got my license the year I turned eighteen, two years after twelve-year-old me demanded I must. 

Once I had settled into being a person-who-could-drive I began to enjoy it. I would take my step-dad's car on quiet contemplative drives around my hometown. I settled into a comfortable position behind the wheel, a sort of anxious understanding of safety and preciousness. I bumped into a car pulling out of a parallel spot a few months after I got my license, but it didn’t shake me too much. I felt independent, adult, new. I still refused to get on the freeway — being afraid of changing lanes doesn’t serve you well on California interstates. 

I let my flighty instincts send me on a whirlwind gap year, to a boat in the Caribbean that sailed from island to island to island. I went into the backcountry of the Southwestern U.S.; we carried backpacks with two outfits, food and ropes to cling to rocks with and the wide open desert was there to surround me. No cars to worry about, no real responsibilities, I was refreshed. Away from home for the first time ever, I fell in love. Also for the first time ever, I forgot what it was to be empty of purpose and I forgot what it was to need to run. I was homesick and I never wanted to go home and I finished everything I thought I couldn’t. And I conquered a life-long phobia of heights. I came home feeling altogether new and different and less scared of living and moving. Suddenly driving seemed so minuscule and easy. 

My long-distance-gap-year-casual-not-boyfriend-boyfriend at the time came to visit me and I drove him to San Francisco, across the Bay Bridge, and nothing had ever felt so grown up. When he had to leave, I drove him to the airport and kissed him goodbye, thinking about every romantic movie I had ever seen. When I got back behind the wheel I tried to cry, to prove to myself that I was the same overly emotional girl I had always been. The tears were there, and one or two welled up, but I blinked them away. I couldn’t really cry. Not the way I wanted to.

Two weeks before I was supposed to take a trip to Arizona to see said not-boyfriend — my start date at CC looming ever nearer — I got into a car crash. It was my fault. Luckily, no one was hurt; I was a nervous wreck but there was no one in the other car and no pedestrians and I had no real bodily damage. A little whiplash, but mostly just shaken up. I had totaled two cars. I sobbed the way I had wanted to when he left, sitting on the curb with AAA on the phone. 

About a week and a half later, he broke up with me. My parents were still furious about the accident and I started a new ADHD medication, all in the span of a few days. I had stumbled back into real life — even my trip back to the Southwest had been canceled. I was being denied my escape from reality, my chance to run back into the desert. Soon, the desert of Colorado would become real life anyways. Somewhat against my will, I became untethered from reality, from my body, partially because of all the change (I was packing for school and visiting my family in Oregon and, of course, the breakup) and partially because of the new medication. And I flat-out refused to get behind the wheel of a car.

Over winter break that year, I drove a few times but my anxiety coiled around me like a snake and cuffed my wrists together. I shook like a leaf in the driver’s seat. I had somehow associated driving with being in love and any failure or shakiness in that driving with the end of love. I was fatigued — burnt out with being heartbroken. I’d forgotten that I once longed for that freedom, my own ability to escape and take myself into wild open spaces alone. 

I still do not drive. I have two bikes: one electric at home to navigate the steep hills of Berkeley, one analog here to take me to therapy and around campus, and they don’t terrify me — though I’m probably less safe on them than in a car. Every day this summer, I took the train to work. I allowed my commute to be my new independence, using it to write and read as much as I could and do my makeup and it made me feel thoroughly twenty-one. A new romance was budding. He drove me everywhere we went, at my request, and I did not fear the small dependence on someone else. 

I will allow myself not to flee, to stay stagnant in the passenger seat. The pedals of my bike can take me where I really need to go.

Sleeping Early and Chatting Late

Article & Photo by Mattie Valinsky

Mckenna–

“That’s between me and my wife, not even god first!” 

When you uttered this in response to some slimy men caressing the smalls of our backs to “scooch past” us at a concert, I bowed down to the random roommate generator from freshman year that paired us. Because instantly, I wasn’t thinking about the anonymous slinky fingers trailing down my lower back. Instead, we cackled together under dimmed house lights, danced around their outstretched arms, and thumbed through our never-ending Rolodex of conversation topics as we summed up their behavior as consequential of the moment. “Excuse me” does not justify their handsyness, but I'll still joke that perhaps they urgently needed to know the exact fiber make-up of my tucked-in t-shirt, 90% cotton plus polyester, or whatever. With that sentiment in mind, let’s “cheers” to god coming second, saving your lower back for marriage and your future wife. 

This quote lives on in my notes section under the title “Quotes I Quote” along with others we reminisce about whenever I find myself, once again, sitting in the passenger seat of your car, our endless chatter producing an energetic chorus that only quiets with the reminders of our responsibilities. To be continued, always. 

“That’s such a pretty curtain,” my mom exclaimed, during one of our first FaceTime calls after move-in, referring to your side of the room. We laughed about it in your red Toyota Camry as we drove up the highway to the concert, you guiding me through the history of the lesbian flag. I sat back, ears perked, and watched as the landscape of Colorado Springs blurred past.

On that drive, I smiled as I remembered that our first common ground was our shared distaste for the men who loudly watched wrestling outside our room. In the privacy of our forced triple, we frustratingly dissected how they would push their chairs into the cramped walkway, litter the floor as they continuously spawned from our neighbor’s triple, and refuse to move. We bonded over our hatred of how their presence forced us to awkwardly scooch past, towels held tightly, in a desperate pursuit of OUR door after a hike from the communal showers. The day the Covid patients claimed the gendy nooch, we mourned the loss of the last remaining sliver of alone time and privacy we had, as it was the only bathroom that avoided us having to wade through the sea of men with protein shakers. Soon after, we both started wearing robes. Yours a worn purple fluffy robe the texture of a weathered washcloth, mine a blue checkered flannel robe reminiscent of the ones grandkids give their grandpas on Christmas. Both were long. 

We called one of those men “Headphones” despite knowing his name because it felt more fitting as he would strut around with his head held high, a gallon of water in tow, wearing blocky headphones and grunting in response to having to move over in the hallway. Grrr, sometimes I wish it was appropriate to growl at people as I feel it is more representative of how I’m feeling, but for now, petty nicknames and texting you whenever I see him will do. 

Squirrel nuts. Forced triple. Sleeping early and chatting late. Every flavor of 99 percent shooters. All these flash in my mind as reminders of freshman year while we played a game of word association, intertwining stories to busy our minds on the long drive. We must’ve talked the whole two hours, only hushed by the destination coming into focus in the front window. 

My forever hope is that you keep undermining men without thought whenever they are a public nuisance because you are doing all of us a favor. 

From someone who’s always comfortable as your passenger,

-Mattie 

My Amala’s Birthday

Article & Art by Linnea Anderson

It was my host sister’s fifth birthday and all I could think about was whether my girlhood was fleeting. 

She was the textbook definition of girlishness. Plastic beads adorned her collarbones. She wore a crown and ate cake and danced. 

At my fifth birthday party, we hunted down beetles and bugs. But we ate cake too, I wore a dress just like hers. 

I have 16 levels of separation from a five year old. Poisons sold at corner stores are legal to me now, at least in my motherland 12 time zones away. 

Numbers seem to matter a lot to me recently. 

Most days, I wake up at seven to the hum of my host mom’s mantras streaming from her shrine room.

I have an eight minute walk to school. 

Every night I am expected to come home at seven for food and music videos. 

During dinner every screen in the house is blaring at once: the kid’s iPad, my Amala’s WhatsApp, and the occasional American pop song on the TV. 

Sometimes my host sister dances alongside Selena Gomez. 

Selena Gomez played through the speakers of my Barbie CD player at her age. The 16 degrees of separation start to dissolve.

Sometimes on Wednesdays, my Amala makes me a bowl of tsampa for breakfast. 

Her mother ate tsampa too, on other days of the week, different times of day, in different places. Now, there’s no account of it. No records, no dates, no ages, just memory. 

Pockets full of tsampa flour sustained her mother on the trek from Tibet to Nepal. She combined the milled barley with the running waters of the Himalayas. 

My Amala never enjoyed barley milled in the motherland. She was born here in Nepal. It is impossible to say how long ago. Her birthday was forgotten alongside the births of her siblings and the busy livelihood of refuge.

My Amala’s agelessness almost makes me feel closer to her. 

Like her girlhood never ended. 

She could celebrate my host sister’s birthday like it was her own. 

In some ways, my Amala finds comfort in her agelessness. Age is just another attachment that her mantras warn against. 

She knows impermanence better than I do, knows that being in any state means having to leave it one day. It was her life, her mother’s too, and it became her son’s, now far away in foreign places. 

Tomorrow she will cook rice and give the leftovers to crows she’s never met. 

She will make me giggle and remember that her age is just another marker of distance between her humor and mine. 

And that maybe doesn’t really matter. 

That neither of our girlhoods have to disappear, given we could still celebrate a fifth lap around the sun for the little girl I have come to know.

But I think she still deserves the gifts, maybe a birthday hat, and definitely a party. 

The Right Lane

Caught between driver and passenger

Article by Marynn Krull Art by Kristopher Ligtenberg

My love language is: “Driving me [hand heart emoji]. Driving in this city takes years off my life. In return, I’ll feed you fries and scratch the back of your head. (On a good day, I can also give directions.)”

I deleted the dating app prompt with a grimace. A little bit of an overshare. Desperate. A little too lovey-dovey for my taste. It was shockingly effective at earning swipes and likes — which actually sort of turned me off even more. I only scratch the backs of heads that earn it.

For some reason, I thought about the Hinge prompt as I was driving home from a work thing — when the right lane abruptly ended. High-speed traffic zoomed past as I groaned and decelerated into the turn. It threw my directions off the route I thoughtfully plotted into Google Maps, which avoided construction, the highway, and the too-narrow one-way roads I don’t like. I probably could’ve whizzed back over into the middle lane, over the solid white line, but the thought hadn’t even crossed my mind. Why risk it? What’s a couple more minutes, anyway?

It’s so much easier to just let the lane end. That’s the takes-the-years-off-my-life part of driving: changing lanes on the fly. Or having to cross four lanes of traffic to get into the left turn lane, after just making a right turn onto the road. 

But it happens. Sometimes you can’t plot another way around on the GPS. So I grind my teeth to nubs and zipper across with alarmingly high blood pressure. I can only afford liability insurance, so I do my best to drive like it.

I was in a lot of car accidents when I was younger. Or it feels like a lot, but maybe it’s actually a pretty average number. My mom was the driver in almost all of the accidents, but never the one at fault. Now she’s an incredibly anxious driver. I’ve inherited this from her. She tucks little warnings into me like notes in my lunch box: “Be safe, people are crazy!” Rush hour traffic, merging onto the highway, the narrow streets downtown, parallel parking, being tailgated by a double-wide lifted truck, and icy roads all wind my knuckles white around the wheel.

I got my license later than most teenagers because learning to drive is expensive and hard when your mom can’t stand to sit in the passenger’s seat. 

When I finally got my license, sometime at the end of high school, I drove my dad’s honking-huge lifted pickup with monster truck wheels. The rims were neon blue, and the whole thing was slathered in matte black bed liner paint. It stunk like my dad’s cigarettes, despite the vanilla pine tree I slung around the rearview. The velvet seats soaked up the smoke like you wouldn’t believe.

In the agonizingly long years before I got my license, my first boyfriend would pick me up and take me to school in the mornings. He kept doing it even after I broke up with him. Especially on cold days. I was grateful, and I resented it. 

Some days, for no reason at all, when it was below zero and blizzarding diagonally, I’d insist on walking. I’d stomp through the snow with raw fists balled up under my armpits, steaming with red-hot indignance.

One day I got in his car, or maybe out of it, he gave me a hug and said, “Sometimes when you get in my car, you smell like cigarettes.” I slammed the door shut behind me. He never brought it up again.

We were entangled in this too-long relationship. I knew by December of my senior year that I didn’t want to be with him forever. I broke up with him in April, despite planning to wait until May. We kept hooking up until the following April, when I cut it off for real. 

It was like jumping lanes just to wind up at the same red lights, wasting gas for no reason at all. Or maybe closer to pumping the breaks, versus slamming on them. 

My next boyfriend lived 22 minutes away on US-21, 35 minutes away on I-25, and 40 minutes away on backroads with “Avoid Highways” on Google Maps. Mostly, for the first few weeks, he picked me up for our dates. I thought to myself, this is perfect. And for a while, he was. He could pass the license test with an invisible instructor in the passenger’s seat on any given drive. He was safe, skilled, and above all, always completely comfortable.

I used to joke to my friends that I needed a guy that could drive. It stressed me out too much. I was meant to be in the passenger’s seat with my feet kicked up on the dash (the fries and head scratches, and all that).

The first time I drove up to his place, I took the back roads. You’d think I was piloting a nose-diving plane the way I white-knuckled the whole drive there. The back roads were pitch black, barely-there dirt paths. I’m not confident two cars traveling in opposite directions could’ve cleared it. The road was walled in entirely by dense evergreens that loomed so tall they made the moon a measly key-chain flashlight.

I was terrified a deer was going to leap out into the road and send me careening into the tree well.

My ex once told me that if a deer jumps out in front of your car, you’re supposed to press the petal to the metal, drive through it, plow her down. It’s safer than swerving out of the way and losing control, he said. I can’t imagine that. A quick Google search confirms this isn’t true, but it’s stuck with me ever since. I don’t know what I would do.

Last year, my friend Cassidy told me about what happens if you don’t miss the deer. 

On a drive home from college, on the mountainous back roads near Telluride, Cassidy hit a deer. Or maybe it hit her? Either way, the deer’s body crunched the front of the car. She was told it was safe to drive it the rest of the way home. She was closer to home than she was to any other town, though not close by any objective definition. 

Her windshield was repaired, but not the body of the car. At the end of the break, they told her it was safe to drive back to Colorado Springs, so she did. Braver than me.

At some point on the highway, the hood flew up unexpectedly, damaged by the impact of the deer. It crashed upward and obliterated her windshield again, sending glass shards flying at her as she flew down the interstate.

I can imagine the smash. The unfathomably loud shattering sound, and the soft rain of shrapnel on her leather seats — probably all drowned out by the instant, ear-numbing roar of wind as her car unexpectedly opened up to the highway in an instant. I wonder if she could hear her own scream, a pin drop in an industrial plant.

I think I might never be able to drive again. I’m astounded she still can — that, now repaired, she drives the same car it all happened in. 

Sometimes, when I’m driving on the highway, I eye the crack in my own windshield and think about Cassidy’s story. 

A big semi-truck must have kicked a sharp rock up into my windshield and notched a divot in the glass. This disappoints me because I make a concerted effort not to follow too closely — but some things are just inevitable. After a big snow, something like a dump of at least eight inches, the diamond-sized crack blossomed into a big Y-shaped tree. The crack reminds me of the Robert Frost poem I read in high school: “Two roads diverged in a yellow wood.”

I could fix the crack. But I don’t. I just stare at it and sigh as I crank my key in the ignition. It doesn’t cross my field of vision, so it’s not illegal, at least. 

I know it needs to happen. I know it’s prone to getting worse, especially as winter draws nearer. It may not need the unexpected impact of an unsuspecting body to implode.

I broke up with 30-minutes-away-on-the-highway a few months ago after months of agonizing, two-too-many “breaks,” days of tears, and minutes with my fingers quivering over the Abort Mission button, the big red flashing one.

Big decisions like that are a bit of a curse, I think. Sometimes I wish someone would make them for me. Once it’s done, decided, out of your hands — that’s when you know how you really feel. And there’s nothing to do but ride out whatever comes. There’s no changing what’s already past.

This, and Cassidy’s deer, make me think of the Frida Kahlo painting. El Venado Herido. The Wounded Deer. It really disturbed me when I first saw it as a first-grader in art class. I chastise my art teacher for showing it to us then, at such an impressionable age. It might have been the first time I’d ever seen an act of violence. The memory is another note tucked in my lunchbox.

After her signature and the date, at the bottom of the painting, Kahlo wrote: “Karma.” In the painting, her own head replaces that of a deer standing in a dismal, desolate wood. Her face is painless, her eyes resolute, despite being impaled with seven arrows. They drip with blood in a slow crawl. Kahlo looks on at the viewer in the blissful moment of surrender to an impending death. Or maybe she’s in the moment just after, freshly free of agony.

That’s how it feels as the right lane ends in front of you. There’s no part of me that considers jumping back over, attempting to leap out of the way. Some risks are worth avoiding. Others — maybe the inevitable ones — aren’t.

I’ve driven myself to first dates, interviews, deathbeds, and epiphanies. And I’ve been a passenger to all these things too. The experience is the same. And so is the level of risk, I’ve realized.

The “paradox” is a simple one to solve: the bigger your car is, the safer you are — and the more dangerous you are to all the other cars around you. Instead of all driving smaller cars, we armor up. I’ve never felt smaller than when I drove that honking huge truck around. But technically, I was as safe as could be. Unless I was t-boned by an even bigger truck. Or a particularly skittish deer.

I changed the Hinge prompt, but it’s still about driving. 

I’ll fall for you if: “you’re down to drive.” I’m still contemplating deleting it entirely, but isn’t that the truth? I’m no Venado Herido — I can pull the arrows out, even if I don’t go out of my way to dodge them. The impaler and the impaled. Caught between self-preservation and resignation to the inevitable. There’s peace in the dance of it, the ritual. The beauty of it is not knowing when you’ll do it again — or if you ever will — but that maybe you won’t be alone next time.

Highway Noises

I want to ride a trolley to Tony’s

Article by Margalit Goldberg Art by Jake Greenblatt

I didn’t think what I was doing was LARPing till I found myself walking to the 7/11 in my medieval garb. We listened to Gregorian chants, drank mead, feasted, and then went to the backyard to mock sword fight… all part of a themed dinner party. So when we walked into 7/11, the serfs stood in the corner looking at sunglasses till the lords and ladies had purchased their various drinks and ice creams, and I felt shocked by the change from candlelight to fluorescent. The store became more crowded and, to add to the chaos, the 18-wheeler with the store’s restock had pulled up to the front doors. This is when I, as Lady of the Manor, decided it was time to leave the establishment if I wasn't purchasing any goods.

When we walked outside we realized that the 7/11 parking lot was being utilized for a mini-motorbike meetup. In that moment, a span of time lasting hundreds of years before and after 2024 collided. The bikers were adorned in futuristic suits and LED lights rimmed their tires as they wheelied and swerved through the cars who just happened to be there getting gas and were probably as astonished as I was. There was a furry on a one-wheeler and someone who had outfitted a folding lawn chair on top of a one-wheel (to have so much pickup I was surprised he wasn't wearing a helmet). They were just as much a spectacle for us as we were for them. As we walked through the parking lot, a biker asked us if we had just come from a renaissance fair.

“Something like that,” we replied.

 Just two groups pursuing their passions crossing paths at a 7/11 on a Friday night. The Springs is not a place you appreciate because it has everything you need; instead, it's because of the incredible juxtapositions and irrationality of the city. 

Imagine it is 1874 and you are riding the Denver & Rio Grande Railroad to Fountain Colony (now named Colorado Springs). You would cross Palmer Divide, to the confluence of Monument and Fountain Creek, where you would only pass one house standing alone, with the open treeless plains to the East and the Front Range to the West. There were apple trees and aspens planted in the quaint yard enclosed by a white picket fence which is still there because the house now exists as a museum and protected historical site. 

The first and only house one saw when arriving in Colorado Springs needed to look nice, but not too nice. Attainable for a family who was trying to move out west and invest in coal and iron. So, the house’s design is entrenched in the gilded-age style yet restrained by Quaker sensibilities. Old Colorado City already existed as a laborers’ community, but it was corrupted by prostitution and liquor. Fountain Colony, however, was to be pure, polished, and progressive. They adhered to the sort of Northern progressivism which was informed by the causes of abolition, suffrage, and equality for all. 

 The first house was not a Victorian mansion which otherwise defines the architecture on Cascade Avenue. Those mansions came later, like the W. S. Montgomery House (at CC we now call it Jackson) which was built from Willis and Julia Montgomery’s Cripple Creek fortune. The Cripple Creek Gold Rush built the glitzy, flashy, ornate gilded age mansions that Colorado College students now live in. 

The first house in Colorado Springs belonged to Major Henry McAllister and his family. Major McAllister was General Palmer’s right-hand man and was in charge of advertising Fountain Colony as the best frontier to establish. McAllister and Palmer met while serving in the 15th Pennsylvania Cavalry during the Civil War. When the war was over, they moved west to invest in the railroads. When the Congregationalists (a branch of Protestantism that was established in New England in the 1600s) decided to establish a college in Colorado, they were deciding between Greeley, Denver, and Colorado Springs. Major McAllister used his prowess in the railroad world to campaign and succeed in establishing Colorado College down the street from his house. And with that, the seeds of the Springs were planted: transportation and higher education.

I recently started biking on the wide roads of the city. The Old North End streets have room for a bike lane, but 18-wheelers will also whizz past occasionally and almost knock you over. I would still sometimes rather drive when my parents' warnings about bike accidents ring through my consciousness. On one of my latest adventures, I decided to bike to Evergreen Cemetery. When I arrived at the closest intersection, there was no direct path to bring me into the cemetery so I awkwardly walked my bike towards the entrance across the bumpy lawn. Inside the gates of the cemetery, a sign informed me that you could not place firearms, rocks, seashells, or vases on graves. 

I cycled my way to the end of the cemetery, whisking by names. So many names. There were people leaving a white lawn tent used for a funeral, all returning to their cars to drive home. As I passed by, an F-150 almost hit me because of how terrible the turning radius on those things are. Then, I happened to pass William Jackson Palmer’s grave. I didn’t stop because I wrongly thought I’d easily be able to come across it on my way out. The graves of famous locals interest me, but I like to go to the newest graves first whenever I visit a cemetery. At Evergreen Cemetery, the newest plots back up against Union Boulevard. Here there exists eternal highway noise, even in death. 

Nearby to the section of freshest graves, I found a monument which reads “erected in memory of those unsung pioneers who helped build the Pikes Peak Region, the infants born to pioneer settlers of this area, and those later residents, both known and unknown who came to this final resting place.” The first thing I thought was that those poor settlers only ever got to hear the sweet roar of a highway in their final resting spot. The etching on the bottom of the stone illustrates a man and his wagon being pulled by two oxen. He holds a rifle in his arm outstretched towards the West. The “promised” land. The benches in front look out across the tall prairie grass towards a clear view of Cheyenne Mountain which holds the Space Force and Fort Carson. I guess this is the promised land. 

The headstones in this pioneer memorial section date from the 1860s and haven’t been upkept. A few still stand with grainy inscriptions that have become indecipherable from time. The stones are mostly hidden by the switchgrass and white blooms that rise up to my knee. Despite being native, the flora feels out of place since the rest of the plots are on Kentucky bluegrass. 

I dreamt of the Wild, Wild West as a child. Denver seemed like a metropolis compared to anywhere else in the state. Laura Ingalls Wilder convinced me for a time that I would have done really well as a pioneer child. I also attribute my numerous visits to the Four Mile Historic Park — where we learned how to churn butter and avoided mentioning the genocide of native peoples — for the sake of fantasy. I still find historical parks fascinating, but now for more nuanced reasons. What do we decide to showcase from the past, in war reenactments and quaint preserved homes, and what do we keep hidden in the cellars? Wild West imaginaries, influenced by truth and fable and desire, are alive and well in Colorado Springs. The pioneer now works for the U.S. military. Manifest Destiny made it to the Middle East. 

A storm gathered on the peaks of the mountains, telling me I couldn’t stay for much longer. I biked away from the prairie towards the city of tombstones packed in rows. A sandstone memorial caught my eye, so eroded it was now unevenly pocked like the rock formations at Garden of the Gods. A marker with no trace of who it had once been for. I like the idea of a headstone made of sedimentary rock. Rock, too, must return. 

I wish they still had a trolley system you could take out to Cheyenne Canyon or Old Colorado City. Imagine being able to go to Tony’s by way of public transportation. Like how in the early 1900s, Colorado College students would ride out to picnic among the pines and try to return before sunset so they could meet curfew for their dorms. Now we drive our cars up Highway 24 on weekends to skinny dip in the freezing ponds and return to campus to try and have enough time to complete our homework for Monday. 

The last electric trolley ran in Colorado Springs in April of 1932. At this point, so many people owned personal cars that there was no longer enough demand for the trolley system, so the city abandoned the tracks, sold most of the trolley cars, and began running diesel buses. However, they keep the dream alive of reopening the tracks at the Pikes Peak Trolley Museum. I drove on I-25 to get there, thinking about how I probably would have contributed to the death of the trolleys. 

Upon arrival, I was greeted by the kindest retiree who was eager to tell me about his grandpa who drove a trolley in the Springs. He pointed out his uniform that had been donated to the museum and joined the collection of fare tokens, model trains, and electric bells among other railway transportation paraphernalia. The building holding these objects used to be the Rock Island train line’s roundhouse. The line went from Chicago to Colorado Springs and once passengers were dropped off downtown, the train would return north to the Roswell neighborhood and receive repairs at this building. There are no longer any passenger trains on the tracks that run parallel to I-25, but coal still comes down from Wyoming.

In the museum’s in-house shop, there are always old men volunteering to repair trolley cars. The work is so slow and tedious that it seems like the cars are deteriorating at the same rate they’re being fixed. Dave, my docent, told me the city will never agree to bring back the trolleys because they would have to rip up all the streets. Yet, he’s still volunteering six hours a week to repair cars to their original condition and run the museum. Time moves very slowly here. There’s a trust that someone else will finish the work you started. In their railyard, there are over fifteen train and trolley cars waiting to be bought or fixed. Trolley purgatory, or something like that.

On my bike ride back from the cemetery, I passed the statue of Palmer within the intersection of Nevada and Platte. He is portrayed similarly to any statue of a town’s founder, riding a horse that towers over the traffic. The statue’s prominence in downtown Colorado Springs means that it has been graffitied modestly during protests with “BLM” and “Love Wins.” This graffiti, however, was not a direct call for removal. That call has come from the families of car crash victims at that intersection. I looked it up and there have been 80 car crashes at this intersection since 2018. So tell me, General Palmer, did you think you, a transportation mogul, would end up here, disrupting traffic?

My Year of Rest and Constipation

Article by Sam Nystrom-Costales Art by Sam Nystrom-Costales and Willa Schendler

Textured vegetable protein, marketed as TVP, is a nearly flavorless meat substitute that comes in a small, dry, granular form. Driving from Colorado Springs to Eugene, Oregon, the thought crosses my mind that TVP is effectively just granola with more protein. Over the next 24 hours, I insist that Mira ensure the solo cup in the center console stays filled with the crunchy, dry snack. A veritable cornucopia. I eat about two pounds in total. As it turns out, dehydrated vegetable matter in your stomach tends to absorb a lot of liquid, a necessary ingredient for producing regular bowel movements. I sense a portentous sloshing as I go on a run the next day — soon enough, I’m lying in a fetal position on my bathroom floor, tiny condom on my finger, endeavoring to push a tiny capsule up my asshole. I wait for the rumbling sensation of imminent diarrhea. It never comes. I try another laxative — still nothing. The days go by and I’m just stuffing myself from both ends. I’ve blacked out the wreckage that followed. 

While I am preoccupied with my suppositories, the whole state starts burning. A mega-wildfire obliterates the small mountain towns east of me; the sky turns orange, ash piles up like drifts of snow. My family tapes plastic over all the entryways in the house. I am in a state of complete suspension — no more college, no sense of internal duration of time (aka my a.m. poop), outside reduced to a constant twilight. I become fixated on getting things moving again, the suspension — constipation, one could say — of my life becomes untenable. Much in the same way the laxatives provided normalcy for my bowels, I hope a road trip will have the same effect on an existential level. I pack a bag of random clothes, prepare an enormous tupperware of plain rice and beans, and drive north, alerting my ex-girlfriend somewhere along the drive that I would be coming to visit her.

In Spokane I check into a Motel 6 just south of town. It reeks of cigarettes and doesn’t have a fridge. Unperturbed, I keep my rice and beans on the counter, letting them marinate in the smoky heat and returning at mealtimes to feast on my fibrous snack. The cigarette smell is worsened by the nauseating arrival of paint fumes; my upstairs neighbor is painting a bicycle, holding the frame at arm’s length out of the window. The next day my ex meets me on an island in the Spokane river. She insists we keep our masks on and stay five feet apart — not the passionate reunion I had envisioned. I wear the high top Vans she had gifted me the year before as a sign of my dedication to her. Not having worn them previously, they badly blister my ankles and pinky toes as we wander the sad, deserted city. 

Having been certain that my presence would rekindle our romantic flame, I am dismayed to encounter nothing in Spokane but more stagnation. At least other things were moving: while the TVP produced blockage, the rotting beans liquidate my guts. At the time, I lived constantly between these two dietary extremes, attempting to regain any sense of equilibrium after spending months in the throes of an eating disorder. About a month previously, a meal of tofu, half-baked kodiak cake protein waffle mix, and scrambled eggs blended together had, somewhat blessedly, pushed me to a breaking point. 

The smoke follows me north. Not yet ready to confront the life waiting for me back home, I flee to Montana. I make it to Coram, near Glacier National Park, with just enough light left to grace the billboards of the Ten Commandments Welcome Center — one reads “‘be doers of the word, and not hearers only, deceiving yourselves’ James 1:22 (free magnet inside!).” I spend the next few days hiking. Soon, the clouds cut long shadows across the sky as Montana also begins to fill with smoke. The whole West is burning. I decide to visit my grandparents in Minnesota. I leave early one morning, the sun rising over desolate prairies, buffalo herds, and a flag of Donald Trump with guns blazing, riding on an angry velociraptor. 

It is perhaps terror of the punitive treatment entailed by most of the “free,” gun-blazing, velociraptor-riding Trump country that keeps me from just pulling over on the side of the highway when I begin to feel an urgent need to pee. Instead, I steel myself to wait until the nearest town, about an hour and a half away — gas station in sight, the pain worsens; I unzip my pants thinking that somehow the exposure of my dick to the open air of the car will relieve me of some of the building pressure. Tactical error — with the floodgates open and having effectively communicated to my dick “peeing time!” I begin to spray everywhere, soaking the steering wheel, my pants, the fabric seat of my car. I pull into the gravel lot in the back of the gas station and do my best to wipe off and change. As I rummage around in the back for a trash bag for my soiled clothes, a dog comes out of nowhere and jumps into my passenger seat. I pause. He watches me. Could this be the companion I need to start living life again? I close the car doors. He's trapped. I come very close to taking him.

I arrive at my grandparents’ house in Elk River, Minnesota. I’ll stay here for a month. I fondly watch the fall foliage turn a deep yellow and then scarlet, feeling that life was maybe starting to move again. The next time I’ll come during the fall will be for my grandfather’s funeral. This time, the yellow landscape will mark not the possibility of a new spring but merely the last moment before absolute decay — a sort of melancholic, wilted abandon. 

One day my grandfather takes me out to the field where his childhood house stood before it was destroyed by a tornado. We put empty beer cans on the ends of wild milkweed and take turns shooting targets with the .22 Remington he bought in the fifties. It is terrifying; he frequently stares down the barrel while fiddling with the bolt mechanism. He seems to have no patience left for life. The milkweed blows in the wind. Neither of us manage to hit the targets. 

I decide to visit family friends in Michigan. Having learned from my mistakes in Montana, I keep a three gallon water jug between my feet, using it to pee when necessary. To avoid any potential empty tanks, I fill a canister of gasoline and keep it in the trunk. Throughout the drive through the Upper Peninsula and into Traverse City, I feel increasingly nauseous and lightheaded. Arriving at the house, my friend mentions that my car reeks of gasoline. I lie, respond that I do not notice it. A Google search reveals my error: you aren’t actually supposed to keep those red tanks full. I panic, now aware that I’ve been slowly killing my brain cells, which I felt needed all the support they could get. I can’t figure out how to get the gas from the portable tank into my car — blame it on my gasoline-infused state of mind. I consider dumping it out in the alley, or maybe down a drain — this seems illegal. I choose the far more responsible option, finding instead a surreptitious spot in my friend’s garage in which to conceal the full tank of gasoline. I’d rather face the unlikely consequence of blowing up their house than face the embarrassment of revealing my error. I hope now, writing this, that they have since discovered the tank and blamed it on their aging parents with whom they share the house. I leave after my birthday, laying my sights on the natural attractions of the Rocky Mountain West.

In South Dakota, I visit the (world’s only!) Corn Palace, which turns out to be nothing more than a municipal basketball arena. A local high school is playing against their rival that day. Confused and dismayed, I head to the Mitchell Prehistoric Indian Village. Unlike the palace, packed with visitors who, like me, had been tricked by the billboards, the village is completely empty. I wander into the enormous geodesic dome that protects the site, confused by the lack of both staff and visitors. After ten minutes walking along steel catwalks, a young man enters and asks if he can give me a tour. I say no; he looks crestfallen and insists again on giving me a tour. I leave. A blizzard hits that night. I wake up at 5 a.m. freezing cold and search for the buffalo-hide trench coat my dad had asked me to take home from my grandparents.

On my way to a campground outside of Badlands National Park, a police officer pulls me over. A later investigation into his Facebook reveals his daughter has leukemia. He also posted a meme of a rumble strip with the caption—in impact font—“let me sing you the song of my people.” I tell him it's my first time being pulled over. I hope he doesn’t see the jug of piss between my feet. He charges me 20 dollars; I leave with my hands shaking. I won't speed for at least three years afterwards. 

I drive into Badlands, donning the trench coat. The clay turns to glue in the melting snow, sucking on my boots as I walk the frozen landscape. I decide to drive through the park into the  Black Hills on back roads and pause to watch a herd of buffalo grazing in the cold grass. As the sun rises the sky turns a beautiful purple. I arrive at Mt. Rushmore in the midst of a blizzard which renders the immense faces invisible. I try my luck with Crazy Horse Memorial. In the empty visitor center I can make out the nose, the hole that marks where the arm of the half-finished monument begins. A bumper sticker reads “Always Follow Your Dreams.” I push through the onslaught of snow into Wyoming, arriving eventually in Yellowstone. I eat a lunch of raw seitan and Uncle Ben’s rice on the freezing shores of Yellowstone Lake, and drive across the park, towards Mammoth. I am the sole witness of one of the steamboat geyser’s eruptions. I am too afraid of grizzly bears to do much more than visit the small attractions, and in any case I only have the trench coat. On my second day in Yellowstone I go to see Old Faithful; it erupts around 12:30 p.m. 

I feel a strong urge to go home. I drive 14 hours that same afternoon to sleep in my bed. I could make a deep, poetic, and meaningful connection between the enormous jetting geysers of yellowstone, my deeply constipated—and at times diarrhea-ridden—stomach, and the passing of time; that somehow seeing the national symbol of consistency, eruption, and faith in time’s ever-marching arrow inspired me to go home and get my life back together. But, at that moment, the fecal imagery of the scene had not occurred to me. Really, I was just tired of driving, lonely, and cold. Really I wanted to see my mom, not figure my shit out. Sometimes it's okay to be constipated. 

Lettitor

Dear reader, 

What do you think about when you’re on a long drive? Do you listen to music, podcasts, or maybe call a friend? Or are you dissociating, staring at the white lines until the rumble strip hits your tire and jolts you into a realization that you haven’t been paying attention to anything for the last who-knows-how-long? 

Dwight D. Eisenhower signed the Federal-Aid Highway Act in 1956, initiating the birth of the American Interstate system as we know it today. We could’ve had high-speed trains, but then again we wouldn't have Diverging Diamond Interchanges… Now, we get to live in a city cleaved in two by I-25, running through the landscape like a visual and auditory scar. 

Driving is the most dangerous thing most of us do on a weekly basis. We know this; it’s been drilled into us by parents, Driver’s Ed teachers, and car crashes on the side of the road viewed with morbid curiosity and a secret relief that it’s the worst day of someone else’s life, not yours. 

So why do we keep driving? For a lot of reasons, according to the writers of this issue. To assert independence, to visit ex-girlfriends, because someone’s paying you to do it. We keep getting behind the wheel (or in the passenger seat) and surrendering control to traffic lights and painted lines because we want to be somewhere other than where we are. Some of us are escaping. Some of us are trying to get somewhere we’ve never been before. Some of us are trying to drive to pasts we’ll never get back to, or to futures that may not exist. Regardless, we keep driving. 

Driving isn’t the only way to get from one place to the next. After all, life is mostly spent in flux, with only the security of constant movement to keep you afloat. Plagued by motion sickness, you might find yourself awkwardly hovering between various states of being, trying your best to swim in the gray area. Or perhaps you’re just waiting for a light to turn green, stuck on standby at the crosswalk for what feels like an eternity. 

With or without a destination in mind, these writers navigate spaces of in-between with humor, vulnerability, and sharp detail. If your mental state isn’t what you’d like it to be, we hope these stories transport you into a new one. Welcome to the Interstate Issue. 

Drive safe, 

The Cipher Staff