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American Bus Ride, Part 4: On the Road Again

Effingham, IL — I sleep through it. Indianapolis, IN — They make us get off the bus while they clean it at 7 am, which really feels like 6 am, since we have just changed time zones. I sit bleary-eyed in the bus station. The bus driver warns us about a couple who live in the bus station who are known for stealing people’s luggage.  Cincinnati , OH — I wake up at some point in Ohio. I have not yet taken it for granted that there are trees now. Cambridge , OH — At first, I think that we are simply in stand-still traffic, and I don’t take too much notice. I knew that traffic would come back at some point as we ventured further north and east. Perhaps more foreign than the landscape of the first leg of my journey was that throughout the entire twenty-one hour trip, there was no traffic. Soon, however, the lack of motion sparks interest and disgruntlement among the bus passengers. There has been an accident on the highway, and not just any small accident—a semi truck has skidded and cras...
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American Bus Ride, Part 3: 40 Hours in St. Louis

  A series of comical failures: I have been messaging an old childhood friend who lives in St. Louis with the intention of meeting up. The first day I’m there, he’s sick with food poisoning. The next day, when we’ve set a tentative time to meet before his work shift, his dad loses his car keys and he has to drive him to the DMV and wait with him. I spend most of my time walking around the city. Unlike a bus which takes you on a predetermined route, I am now an independent agent responsible for making decisions of where to go, what to see. I go to a museum when I realize that I can store my unwieldy backpack in the front and temporarily lighten the load. On my way to the AirBnb, my phone dies just before I read the code for getting in. The sky has already lost most of its light. Desperate for help, I see a mail delivery woman and ask her if she knows of anywhere nearby I can charge my phone. There’s a church across the street that she says might have an outlet.  The AirBnb is a...
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American Bus Ride, Part 2: Amarillo by Afternoon

I am a bit sad to have only spent a few days in New Mexico, but with the thought of the trip ahead, I feel alive inside.  Tucumcari, NM . We stop here for 20 minutes. I buy coffee and two protein bars and walk around parking-lot land. The first time I had diverted my attention from the window, I was scared that I would miss things. That I would miss the state of New Mexico. We pass fields of green, the first big swaths of green I have seen out here. Green on one side of the highway, emaciated yellow on the other. The distant mountains to the north vanish at some point. Rolling hills. A little stream in the red clay soil under the highway that cows drink from. Distant plateaus, startlingly flat.  Texas—miles of wind farms. Signs advertising seventy two ounce steaks. Signs facing the opposite direction reminding cars that weed is legal in twenty miles, thirty miles, forty miles… signs for getting out of trouble when you get in trouble for weed. Texas flags. Don’t mess with Texas...
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American Bus Ride, Part 1: A Horse With No Name

  On trail crew, we began every morning with a stretch circle and a question of the day. One July morning, someone posed the question to the group: “What are three things that are on your bucket list?” This required some thought for me. I didn’t have a bucket list in any formal sense, and I seemed to rarely think about long-term aspirations. Making a bucket list always seemed like the first item on a bucket list I hadn’t yet gotten to. I remembered the idea I had had on a recent bus ride from Boston to Springfield. Something about the thought that seemed to pop up when getting close to your stop— what if I just stayed on and kept going? —or at big stations with screens with far-off names— what if I just got on any one of these buses or trains? Like jumping into an unknown river and seeing where the tide would take you, like closing your eyes for a while to discover later where you will have floated. I had been struck by Wanderlust at the ripe age of twenty-one, before that, having ...
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A December Love Story

Mountains, las montañas, 山, in all the languages I know and hope to, with the longing of a mortal to understand something older than anything we know. They were the first thing I noticed when the plane landed. My seatmate was asleep when we began to descend, and had shut the plane window, wasting his luck, as if dropping thousands of feet in the air was as routine an event as any.  (My own words now remind me now of Janet—the time she asked what I had bought at the grocery store, and I had muttered, “just fruit.” “Just fruit?” she had repeated, “Just? Isn’t it amazing that we can walk into a grocery store and have our own Garden of Eden?” I hope that she is still as amazed by life as when I met her.) I peered across the aisle to try to catch glimpses from the open window on the far side. When the plane tilted, the mountains disappeared from view, the small window revealing only bare sky.  I was staying with a couple—Audrey and Brian—and their two sons. When Audrey picked me up...
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I'm starting a blog.

A few weeks ago, I wrote a much wordier version of this: GOALS: -To avoid shame and embarrassment as much as possible. (To be "authentic," though authenticity is one of those words that's hard to use authentically) -To try to share bigger thoughts with a smaller audience -To have another place to document my life, because that is so much of what my life means to me -To have a place where I can share things I have written  -To try, relentlessly, to escape the scrolling machine that is designed to keep us in its capture Following the death of a friend, I told myself I would stop messing around and stop wasting time and get to all the things I wanted to get to and be brave. The things you tell yourself to reorient yourself within the world, or maybe as a workaround for grief, or maybe when that person lived so intentionally and beautifully and you wanted to live in their honor. I wanted to spend less time on social media. My sister had been seeing a guy a little while ago, d...
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