Before reading these words, I’d recommend pouring yourself a cup of black coffee and pairing it with an avocado grilled cheese. Crack open your windows for the first chilly whisper of spring—and now you’re ready for this feeling.
This is a combination of stories I wrote about feelings I had about adventures we took in 2016 and 2017
We listened to Bleachers as we drove south on the Interstate and I'm listening to them again driving south to the boot store.
It's too windy to drive with the windows down but I'm doing it anyways. It smells bad, too, but I probably won't remember that.
I'll just remember how it feels.
The song builds. And I begin to sing along. The wind takes my voice and throws it into the ocean of the sky and I shout louder and louder, until my stomach hurts but it feels good. It feels like jumping face first into the ocean, painful, but it wakes you up. You can't fall into the ocean and forget you're alive. The ocean may kill you but the whole while you're very much aware of your life.
The first time I listened to Bleachers was the first time I visited Katie in Colorado. It was the same time we drank tea in a small town and the same time her car broke down and we sat on a blanket by some train tracks and the same time I wasted two rolls of black-and-white film because I didn't load them right. I've learned since then.
But even though my film was lost, my memories are vivid.
The openness of Colorado swam around us, encased by mountains like a living snow globe and (pre-breakdown) we drove in Katie's car and we were alive.
My other memory tied to these melodies was the first time I visited Kansas City. It was September and my car nearly didn't start the next morning and I was full of coffee and late to work as a result, but I played Bleachers on repeat on the sepia September morning drive. Gloomy and grateful and praying I'd make it home.
I'm still learning how to pray. I'm still learning how to make it. I'm still driving.
That album is still playing. Faster now.
And now it smells like cut grass and the same song is playing
and I wouldn't mind remembering this.
Bleachers has written the songs of my in-between. The songs of the road between there and home. The songs between grief and healing, between hope and something a little more tangible. They're honest and of most people and most art, that's all I can ask.
Bleachers introduced a new song on a Sunday night, saying it's about the clarity in the moment between dreaming and awake.
Maybe all their songs are that clarity in the in-between. The words I sometimes need, for drives, for grief, for the in-between.
We're getting better. We're nearly home.
We’re chasing light in every way, bodies canvases of where we've been, maps to where we're going, dust churning up behind us, and we are on our way. I still don’t know where I’m going, but I'm growing into the belief that the intersection between the unknown and being known is the most human and alive place to dwell and
in that golden hurricane of dying light tonight, we were the most alive.
Author’s Note:
In the initial post about this collection, I mentioned an intention to share this piece on the 16th. As an afterward, I’ll offer you a bit of the story of why that didn’t happen and why that’s okay.
When I said that I intended to release this piece on the 16th, I did. I had everything written and edited and re-edited and condensed into the shortened format that Open Sea allows, but also into a longer format for this post, so you can read the whole story. I had an image chosen. My friend Trish helped me get my Open Sea account all ready to go. I was set. It was perfect.
Then my collection wouldn’t upload. I clicked the button and a cute teal cousin of the circle of doom popped up and asked me to wait patiently—then disappeared and nothing happened.
But that was alright, I told myself. While the photo was taken in 2016, some of the words were written in 2017, so posting on the 17th still felt poetic. The morning of the 17th, I took down every possible extension that could’ve caused an issue and it worked! My collection was up. Now the pieces themselves weren’t for sale yet, but that seemed like the easy part. After my first tattoo in 492 days, I sat down again to list them, carefully following the instructions and everything looked like it was working.
Then my little Metamask fox popped up, telling me with cheerful aggression that I was $57 shy of the amount of the gas fees (essentially the cost to list them, if you’re unfamiliar with that terminology and don’t feel like googling it). That’s unfortunate, but not insurmountable. I added the extra funds and refreshed the page so I could list my piece. But in the 5 minutes it took me to add the extra money, the gas fees had jumped to over $400. I refreshed again. $426. I refreshed again. $440. The cost kept climbing.
My dentist appointment is on Tuesday and the estimate they gave me was similar; if we are being frank, I cannot spend that amount twice in 4 days. Do I choose my teeth or my art—or wait, and forfeit the date I’d chosen?
By that time, it was 10:52pm. In that moment, I realized my plan of releasing the image and words I’d created in 2016 and 2017 on the 16th or 17th wasn’t going to happen. (I really do need to go to the dentist.) And I don’t want to wait another month for May 16th or 17th, since I have other projects I’d like to release in the interim. So here we are on the 18th. And the 18th means nothing to my project. The number has no significance or poetry or any deeper meaning.
But maybe that’s the whole point. Maybe the whole point of this whole collection is finding grace for the in-between and beauty in the middle and memory in the places we expected to gloss by unannounced and unremembered. Maybe it’s about letting go of what we thought we should be so we can find new songs on backroads and meet people we didn’t know we needed—even if it’s just a future version of ourselves.
So here I am, on a day that feels more bleary than blurry and far less than significant, still learning to lean in to the same words I wrote 5 years ago—which is strangely parallel to something I wrote in 2016:
“I feel like I'm still writing about the same things. The things I wrote about two years ago. The skin I'm still settling into. The words I'm still learning. Being known. Understood. There aren't often places I find where I can dwell both in the honest struggle and the chase of beauty. But maybe it's not about the places where you run but it's the people you run wild with.”
I wrote those words about an adventure with Katie—who is pictured in this piece—and our friend Hannah, but today it’s about you, too. Thank you for reading, for listening, for offering understanding to me by way of your readership. I hope my words leave you feeling seen, too. At the end of the day, all blurry and bleary with some hopeful crescendo of significance, that is the best thing I can do.