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Megan Marz | Longreads | October 24, 2023 | 4,164 words (15 minutes)

This spring, the literary critic Laura Miller got annoyed with Brandon Taylor’s new novel, The Late Americans. A fan of Taylor’s “brilliant” Substack and “irresistible patter” on Twitter, she found his book disappointingly lugubrious. “Brandon Taylor’s online writing is vibrant, funny, and true,” read the subhead of her review. “Why is his fiction trying so hard to be something else?” The Slate piece subjected the novel to some churlish complaints. But it was the inclusion of “online writing” that attracted minor controversy; writers and critics tweeted in response that to compare an author’s novel to his tweets was to insult the author and embarrass oneself. One respondent wrote, “this may be the worst piece of writing on a book or author I have ever read.” Another said, “it’s gauche to even mention a professional author’s twitter account in a review.”

People have been writing all kinds of things online for decades now. If you count Justin Hall’s links.net as the first blog—and many do, though Hall himself credits Ranjit Bhatnagar—the original form of popular writing on websites will turn 30 in January. Thirty years ago, I was a child; now I’m middle-aged. Writing on the internet remains young. Its literary milestones and genres are too short to ride the roller coaster of critical regard. Online literature is still usually self-published, doesn’t receive major writing prizes, and isn’t reviewed in newspapers or magazines.

The late Robert Silvers, a founding editor of The New York Review of Books, lamented this situation in 2013. “If a novel is published, we have a novel review,” he said in an interview with New York magazine. But the “millions and millions if not billions of words in tweets and blogs” were not getting the critical attention they deserved: 

[I]f one cares about language, if one cares about the sensibility in which language is expressed, and if one cares about the values that underlie our use of language . . . then these media, it would seem to me, should qualify as the subject of criticism. We seem at the edge of a vast, expanding ocean of words, an ocean growing without any critical perspective whatever being brought to bear on it. To me, as an editor, that seems an enormous absence.

Ten years later, that absence is 10 years wider. We have trend pieces about platforms used for writing; posts that aggregate other posts; news stories about things people say and do online; novels, poems, and memoirs that would not exist without having germinated on the internet. But the literary qualities of online writing remain mostly invisible to U.S. literary institutions—even as countless people read it—until the moment it becomes a book. 

And, of course, much of it never does. For 30 years, writers have been using blogs, social media, and email to do things with words that are difficult or impossible to do inside books. They have immersed us in stories still unfolding, created personas that interact with readers, woven their writing into inboxes and feeds, and used code to write at a distance. The public record of literature in the 21st century is full of gaping holes where these things should be. The missing material is right there on our screens, but it slides past with little formal acknowledgement. While it’s become banal to observe that online life is fully enmeshed with the rest of the world, an imaginary curtain separates online writing from the rest of U.S. literature. It’s time to take that curtain down. 

In the 1990s, the literary press became briefly excited about digital literature. Some writers were using Storyspace, a software program introduced in 1987, to compose hypertext. The ability to add links, even before the web, let them write high-concept, choose-your-own-adventure narratives. In one of the first and best known of these stories, the protagonist’s son lives or dies depending on the reader’s selections. Works like these debuted on floppy disk; you can now buy them on USB or find read-throughs on YouTube. More than the most postmodern novel could, they embodied the era’s values of fragmentation and nonlinearity. The New York Times Book Review ran a handful of articles to introduce the new concept: hypertext fiction. The most famous of these articles, published in 1992, was headlined “The End of Books.”

But books were never really threatened by hypertext fiction, which did not attract many writers, let alone readers. Self-styled “electronic literature” settled into an academic niche dominated by conceptual and technical experiments, while “an always-skeptical literary mainstream gleefully rejected the digital outright,” as the scholar Simone Murray wrote. Thanks to the Kindle and other e-readers, the book eventually became the primary unit of even fiction read digitally.

Nonfiction is another story, though—one that has not permeated the literary mainstream or the experimental “e-lit” margins, despite flowing all around both of them. The story is: around the time hypertext fiction was failing to find an audience, hypertext nonfiction was attracting thousands and then millions of people. “I’ll never forget the Monday morning in the mid-90s when I rushed in to work . . . and hurriedly pointed my browser to www.links.net to see if Justin Hall had broken up with his girlfriend over the weekend,” Rob Wittig, one of the few e-lit people to write much about Hall, remembered in 2003. 

Hall was a 19-year-old student at Swarthmore College when he started his site in 1994, soon naming it Justin’s Links from the Underground in homage to Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground, a book he hadn’t read. The word “blog” wouldn’t exist for another few years. At first, Hall collected links he’d found browsing the web, including links to sites about sex and drugs. In those days before search engine ubiquity, this was a popular service. But Hall was also a writer. “I just said, I have this medium, so why don’t I see what my stories look like there,” he said on a podcast in 2021. “And if people are coming for this utility of finding links that they want to traverse, well, maybe they’ll accidentally read a poem. And if they want to read a second poem, well, that’s on them.” 

Eventually Hall published thousands of pages of interlinked poems and stories, a yearslong diary cataloging his life’s events, people, and thinking in explicit detail for his thousands of readers. During the months he spent as an intern at Wired, his site often got more traffic than the magazine’s. A documentary filmed in 1996 described it as an On the Road for the ’90s. When he took a pause in 2005, the San Francisco Chronicle ran a front-page story, estimating that he’d amassed 4,800 pages and wondering if he’d come back. He did; his last post was in 2021.

Hall’s style is evident from what amounts to his About page: 

My mom, dad and step-father were/are lawyers, and very dedicated ones at that. Due to their work ethic, I was raised primarily by a series of nannies. When I was eight, my father, an alcoholic, killed himself; much of my early writing wrestles with this. 

It is funny, matter-of-factly intimate, and granularly self-documentary in a style that would soon spread everywhere. And while early hypertext fiction used links within closed systems, Hall used links to weave his writing into the outside world. He linked to other people’s sites in addition to his own writing on pretty much anything he mentioned. You could read his story in a straight line, but you didn’t have to. Hall is sometimes juvenile, his prose occasionally rough or purple, but that’s a fair price to pay for his co-inventing the 21st century’s most influential literary genre so far.

In November 2000, The New Yorker estimated there had been only 50 blogs on the internet as recently as spring 1999. After Blogger made it easy in summer 1999 to post without writing HTML, blogs proliferated exponentially. By 2007, when their growth started to taper, there were about 70 million. (Today, a commonly cited count is 600 million.) Like the authors of most books before them and most tweets after them, bloggers were largely uninterested in producing literature. They wrote to help themselves or others, to do journalism or scholarship, to evangelize, to get attention, to find community, to make money if they were lucky, and mostly to share their lives. But none of those motivations excludes the possibility of artmaking, and a few bloggers followed Hall in approaching their writing as art, at least implicitly.

Emily Gould was the one I read most frequently. She began posting at emilymagazine.com in 2005, when we were both just out of college. Like a lot of good blogs, hers was full of the improvisational energy that, before the internet, had been the aesthetic province of comedians and jazz musicians. Gould was documenting her life in real time—books she read, thoughts she had, food she ate, daily enthusiasms and frustrations—which meant she was writing it fast. But those of us who read it as it happened read it slowly. People like to say the internet speeds reading up, but a personal blog, read in real time, can slow a story’s pace down to the timescale of life; the thickest book in existence can be read in less calendar time. Not even the author knew when a blog would end, which is what made it feel so alive.

Gould’s eye for detail and sense of pacing contributed to this vitality. I remember learning that she was quitting her publishing job from a post in which she described the office cafeteria’s switch from “marmalade” to “orange jelly”—a semi-lighthearted complaint that doubled as an augury of corporate decline. Marmalade is real, and a beautiful word. One look at that dignified dactyl and you know you’re in for something good. Orange jelly sounds fake and embarrassing. When Gould said it was the reason she was leaving, you knew it was a joke, but there was also something to it. The actual reason was a gossip-blogging job at Gawker, which raised her profile enough that she was assigned a 2008 New York Times Magazine cover story about her life as a blogger. The story includes a moment when her boyfriend at the time demanded she take down something she’d posted about him. On the surface, the post seemed trivial. But his request “felt like being stifled in some essential way.”

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The same thing had happened to Hall. When a former girlfriend asked him to scrub her from his blog, he’d said, or so The New York Times Magazine reported in 2004, ”This is my art. I’ll remove specific things that bother you, but I can’t go through the entire Web site and remove every mention of your name.” When another girlfriend asked him not to blog about her, he agreed, but the inability to write freely led to an emotional breakdown, about which he posted a video. Gould and Hall felt deeply about what they were doing. They commanded large audiences and appeared in mainstream media, becoming national avatars for a new kind of writing. They also repeatedly referenced literary influences. But journalists categorized their efforts as sociocultural rather than aesthetic phenomena. This would happen again and again to writers who tried new things on the internet. Always a curiosity, sometimes a trend, never a work of art.

It was a practical matter, and a matter of tradition. Books are an excellent medium. Book publishers have always been a useful filter for a world in which the quantity of writing is always increasing. They still manage to publish great written art, thanks to fragile and fraying systems built by writers and editors. Doing so has given them a power around which the literary world revolves. Even the least commercial magazines do not tend to review work not currently being marketed by a publisher. And books—whether e-, audio, or print—are important to certain writers’ compensation. (Though few writers make much money publishing literature, and some writers who do make money are turning away from books.)

Then there are the inconvenient questions. While some online writers might welcome critical attention, for others it might be a nightmare with terrible consequences—broken relationships, lost jobs. How should a critic distinguish “published,” in the sense of technically visible, from “published” in the traditional sense of public? At what point in a work’s lifespan should it be written about? And what aesthetic criteria apply? Blogs are to novels as improv is to sketch or song lyrics are to poetry. They can reach and even surpass the standard set by their finer cousin, but they should not necessarily be held to it. 

A great time to answer these questions would have been when books began drawing heavily from the well of online aesthetics. Some of the most celebrated literature of the 2010s recounted daily life in granular detail; incorporated real conversations; was made of plotless fragments; or, even in fiction, used real people’s names. These books were copiously compared to one another under the banners of “autofiction” and “lyric essay.” Names like Sheila Heti, Karl Ove Knausgård, Tao Lin, Maggie Nelson, and Claudia Rankine were difficult to escape if you were the type of person who read book reviews. Critics correctly described their books as successors of everything from Saint Augustine’s Confessions to Chris Kraus’s I Love Dick. But I have yet to read a book review that acknowledges the influence of specific online work not written by the book’s own author. Blogs and social media are described en masse as a social phenomenon to which these authors responded, but rarely as a textual one to which they are indebted. 

The omission is particularly glaring given the number of literary writers whose books grew out of their own online work. While Gould’s novels are pointedly unbloggy, her short-lived e-book startup distributed several examples: Making Scenes (2001), whose author, Adrienne Eisen, claims it was the first “blog-to-book” ever; Meaty (2013), an essay collection inspired by Samantha Irby’s bitchesgottaeat.blogspot.com; and Prostitute Laundry (2015), collected from Charlotte Shane’s email newsletter about her love life and sex work. Blogs lost more in translation than a serialized novel from the 19th century: links, the comments of other people, a cadence determined by the author, a length that could always grow longer. In the words of Bhanu Kapil, whose blog “incubated” her book Ban en Banlieue (2015), “You know that putting Ban in this form is like wearing a three piece suit in the hot springs. I wish I had the courage to let the blog be my book instead.” 

That’s what the writer Megan Boyle was going to do. In 2013, she got the idea to liveblog her entire existence, “everything that I could think of on a relatively constant basis,” as she told an interviewer for The Creative Independent five years later. She began on March 17 and intended to do it forever. “That’s what began to excite me,” she said. “That I’d just do this for my whole life, and that would be the ‘art’ of it.” Timestamped passages moved back and forth between quotidian—”mail the goddamned packages”—and poetic:

4:43PM: louis called. interesting dynamic, these phone calls with louis. we sound slow and happy and surprised to hear each other’s voices. let him in. assembled table and chairs while he assembled bed. NPR was on and I felt sometimes … like i wanted to say ‘the opinions on this radio do not reflect the other person in this room.’

After five-and-a-half months, she stopped. In 2018, Tyrant Books published what she had written as a novel called Liveblog. Like any given blog, hers had been followed by real-time fans but not reviewed. The moment it became a book, however, critics suddenly were able to see and expound upon its literary qualities. It was positively reviewed in The New Yorker and Bookforum, and compared to other serious literature. But this valorization could only happen after the “art” of Boyle’s project—its ongoingness—had been stripped from it, compressed into an object that could be read in a few days or weeks.

In a rare expression of literary bullishness, the novelist Edmundo Paz Soldán had suggested at the blog’s apex in 2007 that it was “threatening to supplant the novel as the great genre in which everything can find its place.” But the blog ended up becoming one more thing that found its place in the novel, which has yet to be surpassed as a tool of literary legitimation.

Boyle was associated with “alt lit,” a group of writers in the late 2000s and 2010s who endeavored to “assimilate to literary art the mutant sensibility of a new mass medium,” as Frank Guan said of Tao Lin, the group’s figurehead. They were also some of the first, and remain some of the only, writers to position their online work as equal to books. The poet Mira Gonzalez copublished her Selected Tweets with Lin in 2015. She told The Creative Independent they had done so to show that “once you take Twitter out of the context of being reliant on this relatively new form of technology, there’s no difference between Twitter and any other kind of literature.” By Twitter, Gonzalez clarified, she meant the internet. Twitter was the stand-in closest at hand because by then, social media had overtaken blogs as the dominant form of online expression, and Twitter was popular with the verbally oriented.

While alt lit writers on Twitter mostly continued the bloggy tradition of documenting real-time experiences, other writers experimented with other genres. Patricia Lockwood did absurdist “sexts.” (“Sext: An iceberg whispers to you, ‘Just the tip.’”) Teju Cole did “small fates,” which compressed news stories into epigrammatic tweets full of ironic humor and social critique. (“In Kubwa a man armed with a toy gun stole a real Camry.”) Ranjit Bhatnagar, the blogger who inspired Justin Hall, created @pentametron, a bot that paired tweets written in iambic pentameter to create rhymed couplets. The couplets were sometimes absurd and sometimes surprisingly sensical. One random user’s “I’m kind of thirsty for a valentine” led into another’s “My volume doesn’t have a minus sign.” With recontextualization alone, they put everyday language in a higher register—suggesting, Shakespeare-style, that the line between poetry and daily speech is invisibly thin, a question of viewpoint. 

Poetry bots were one of Twitter’s most beautiful genres, bringing e-lit experimentation to the masses. But now most of them have stopped working. X, as Twitter is now known, announced earlier this year that it would restrict free access to its API, which bots need to function. The change was one of many points on the graph of X’s decline in users and cachet. But other longtime Twitter/X projects persist, like the internet-deranged persona @dril (“cops tazing wild hogs ultimate compilation”) and Melissa Broder’s serially sad girl persona @sosadtoday (“i’m alive in a dead way”). 

In a New Yorker review of Broder’s So Sad Today, a 2016 essay collection named after the Twitter account, Haley Mlotek wrote that the book’s shortcomings made her appreciate the account’s accomplishments: “It captures how so many of us communicate on social media, crafting a careful persona that hides and reveals.” And yet, even though @sosadtoday was the true literary innovation in the critic’s estimation, it was the book that occasioned a review. I’ve written literary criticism for many publications, and I rarely have trouble placing a book review I want to write. But of the dozen or so pitches I’ve sent about an online work, none have landed. And as a reader of popular literary criticism for two decades now, I’ve only ever come across a single full-length review of an online work in a nonacademic venue: Matt Pearce’s 2011 essay on Cole’s small fates for The New Inquiry. It’s a single example, one that Cole’s status as a newly acclaimed novelist probably helped make possible. But it proves that answering the questions online work raises for mainstream critics is doable, fruitful, and not all that complicated.

In 2013, Lockwood gave a lecture about Twitter at the University of Pennsylvania. Before ending with a reading of sexts, she said:

Innovative literature happens where people have room to play, and it happens where no one is watching. It happens among groups that initially aren’t taken seriously. . . . It happens in darkness. And after a while, people become aware of it. And after an even longer while, it’s called literature. That’s a good thing. That is the way of the world. Mushrooms and literature grow in the shade, but eventually must enter the cold light of day to be eaten by yuppies at $14 a pound.

Calling for tweets or blogs to get reviewed in The New Yorker or become eligible for a Pulitzer is in part to call for their yuppification, which would ruin the fun. Many of the works I’ve discussed play with, and draw aesthetic power from, their lack of professional legitimacy. Having an incentive to get reviewed or win a prize might motivate more people to start writing in certain ways, but it would also change the character of the writing. A @dril looking to get reviewed by The New Yorker would not be @dril, and so the world might be deprived of such classics as: “another day volunteering at the betsy ross museum. everyone keeps asking me if they can fuck the flag. buddy, they wont even let me fuck it.”

But metabolizing the literature of previous generations is necessary to create new literature. And writing on the internet has a way of disappearing, so that it may not be available long enough for enough people to become aware of it, let alone to call it literature. An API might become too expensive, a hosting fee might no longer seem worth it, an author might delete or lock their account after a platform empties out, as X—and social media in general—feels like it’s doing now. In 2017, the Library of Congress decided to stop archiving all public tweets and instead collect only those that are “thematic and event-based, including events such as elections, or themes of ongoing national interest, e.g. public policy.” The Wayback Machine is a good but gappy source of disappeared blogs, and it probably won’t do any better with email newsletters. 

Even if we had a perfect archive, it still wouldn’t tell the whole story. You could find a forgotten novel in a used bookstore and, with some imagination, recreate the experience of reading it around the time of its publication. But a lot of online writing has important temporal and contextual dimensions, and unless someone records the experience of reading at the time or in the context, those dimensions are lost. 

So let me tell you about some work that’s still living: there are new magazines, like the html review, which combine a traditional literary magazine format with a more computer-friendly ethos. Like Twitter bots did, they’re introducing more readers to literature written with both human and coding languages. And then, of course, there are email newsletters, which have been around for years but gathered more steam when Substack launched in 2017, giving writers a built-in way to collect payments. One Substack project that uses the form well is Samantha Irby’s “who’s on judge mathis today?” In more than 250 editions, she has twisted TV recaps into comic stories observed through a personal lens: “shearie says that one day she went over to rhian’s house and discovered a used condom.… rhian calls her ‘inspector gadget’ and i’m so sorry to side with a man but that really made me laugh! i loved that cartoon!!!!!!!!”

My favorite newsletter is Justin Wolfe’s thank you notes, which he started writing in 2015. Wolfe modeled his project on Joe Brainard’s I Remember, an experimental memoir published in 1970 in which every sentence begins with “I remember.” Wolfe chose “I’m thankful” as a refrain. “i’m thankful that even though i had built up going back to work as this horrible huge ominous thing, it’s actually been just fine and, as is almost always the case, the blurry projection i built out of anticipatory anxiety far exceeded reality,” he wrote early on, in a post I discovered in the archive and sometimes return to on Sundays. In well over a thousand editions ranging from hundreds of words to one (“pizza”), Wolfe has given a sharper angle to the practice of real-time life-writing. His constraint, even when broken, lends it more structure; his form, email, more tightly stitches the fabric of his days into the fabric of ours.

It’s still true, as the poet Mira Gonzalez said in her Creative Independent interview, that “there are people who are saying things like . . . ‘Writing on the internet doesn’t matter.’” But the internet is nevertheless, as she added, “the future of humor, of writing, of everything.” On our corporate-throttled web, this sounds like a frightening prospect. All we can do, in literature and in life, is try to make it otherwise.

Megan Marz is a writer in Chicago.

Editor: Cheri Lucas Rowlands
Copyeditor: Krista Stevens
Fact-checker: Julie Schwietert Collazo

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Emily Latimer | Longreads | June 6, 2023 | 4,358 words (15 minutes)

It’s March in Florida, and I’m walking around Hogsmeade village in The Wizarding World of Harry Potter at Universal Orlando. It’s a Christmas card come to life—a picturesque setting with charming storefronts, cobbled streets, and faux snow-capped brick buildings with crooked chimneys. A train conductor dressed in a brown suit greets me in a (probably fake) British accent. Behind him, excited park-goers bustle in and out of a sweet shop, clutching plastic cups of Butterbeer. My friends and I snap pictures of the village’s arched roofs, marveling at this place that attracts millions of visitors each year.

We want to see Hogwarts, so we head to Harry Potter and the Forbidden Journey, a flying adventure through the castle. We pass through the gates and eventually it becomes dark and atmospheric, with cold stone walls and stained glass windows everywhere, but the warm glow of yellow lanterns lights our way. We hear music from the movie, including its iconic leitmotif: first the delicate sounds of an enchanted bell, then the flurry of strings. Talking portraits speak to us as we move deeper into the castle, and we see magical objects scattered about: the Mirror of Erised, a copy of the Daily Prophet newspaper, and the Sorting Hat. Above, we see Professor Dumbledore, who welcomes us to Hogwarts. “You may encounter all manner of things not common to your own world,” he warns. 

It really feels like we’re walking through the halls of a magical place. 

As we approach the end of the queue, Harry, Ron, and Hermione appear and invite us to watch a Quidditch game. A rollercoaster-style car pulls up next to us. It looks like some kind of enchanted bench. Above us, countless candles float in the air, as if they’re all under a spell.

“Huh,” I say to my friend. “I think this is the ride that made me feel sick last time.” We walk onto the moving platform and take our seats. It happens fast, and there’s no time to back out. I pull the ride restraint over my shoulders and it clicks into place.

The bench abruptly moves sideways and I’m lifted into the air, feet dangling. I’m swept up and to the side at the same time, which throws me off balance. 

Instant regret. My heart is beating hard, I’m accumulating spit in my mouth, and after a few seconds, I’m already dizzy and nauseous. I’m hyperaware of my body as it shifts and sways at the mercy of a robotic arm that lurches me, tilts me, turns me. I hold on for dear life. 

I’ve been told that the ride is about four minutes long. But it feels like I’ve entered a portal to another dimension where time loops on and on. I’m reminded of that time I ate an innocent-looking THC-laced peanut butter cup and spent the night in a fetal position. I just pray I make it through alive. Or better yet, maybe I’ll die and the misery will end. 

I suddenly remember the $8 Butterbeer that I chugged right before the ride. Whoops. I close my eyes; I know I’m going to be sick. I can’t escape it, but maybe I can delay it. I take deep but shaky breaths. I brace against the unpredictable movements. And then, I let it happen.

I surrender to the ride’s pre-programmed destiny. Its force is bigger and stronger than mine, and better engineered. I’m flailed around like a ragdoll. I curse Harry Potter and his friends, the ride designers, the thrill seekers who rave about the ride, and most of all, me, for willingly going on it. I hold on as long as I can, but the ride pitches me forward and I open my eyes. I see Harry on screen, flying a broom through a Quidditch field. And then I throw up all over my lap. In my hands. And into the open air.

I love amusement parks. I love rides. Unfortunately, they make me barf. There was the time I emerged green and shaky-legged from The Simpsons Ride, a motion simulator attraction at Universal Studios Hollywood, and another occasion when I nearly blacked out from the g-force on Dueling Dragons, a roller coaster that Universal Orlando retired in 2017. 

It’s not just rides: I once spent six hours in the cabin of a rocking lobster fishing boat, and I often feel disoriented on an especially windy car ride. But I’ve always denied my propensity for motion sickness. Feigning ignorance is the best bet, I thought: So I read in the car, I opted for high-speed ferries, and I went on whatever fun fair rides I felt like. Forget medication—my motion sickness is not that bad. 

That is, until this past winter, when I found myself wandering Universal Orlando’s Islands of Adventure in search of a new pair of shorts, carrying a plastic bag stuffed with my puke-covered clothing. It was then, at age 27, having thrown up at multiple amusement parks in my life, that I realized motion sickness was something I’d have to live with. And that even though I’ve loved going on theme park rides since I was a kid, I’ve never been able to fully experience what they’re built to do: give me a freewheeling, exhilarating thrill. 

Thrill seekers want an extreme adrenaline rush, but also an emotional journey. Theme parks are designed to deliver both. The fear and ultimate satisfaction we feel from thrill rides is similar to what we seek in a horror movie or a painfully spicy hot sauce. They’re all benign forms of masochism. (Singer Lucy Dacus recently said that flying in airplanes is a “death-flavored experience.” I think the same could be said for amusement park rides.)

There’s an enduring interest in theme parks and their manufactured thrills. In 2019, over half a billion people visited theme parks worldwide, passing through the gates of magical places like Walt Disney World, Legoland, Six Flags, Knott’s Berry Farm, and Universal Studios in Hollywood and Orlando, where I met my fate on that Harry Potter ride. The global theme park industry, valued at almost $55 billion, is built on family fun, shared experiences, and escape. “It’s about getting away from the everyday and disappearing into a different world,” says Sabrina Mittermeier, author of A Cultural History of the Disneyland Theme Parks. There’s no time to think about your silly little problems when your body is flying through the air against all odds. 

A theme park is also an illusion: a fantastical, cloistered space that transports visitors to far-off realms. “It’s all about control,” says Scott A. Lukas, a cultural anthropologist who studies theme parks. “We’re giving you the illusion that you can do whatever you want, yet, we’re controlling everything.” The real trick is making sure park-goers don’t clue into the coordinated efforts happening behind the scenes. The goal? Complete immersion. 

But what happens when a ride that’s meant to excite you or make you feel awe doesn’t strike that perfect balance of fun and fear? What does a shattered mirage look like? 

When I was younger, the arrival of the traveling carnival each spring to our mall parking lot in Sydney, Nova Scotia, was a sign of the end of the school year. It was 2006, and I was nearly 11 years old. For about $15, my best friend Erika and I got bracelets that let us go on any rides we wanted. Black pavement underfoot, we were free. We weaved through the circus grounds with other unsupervised children from our neighborhood, giddy with excitement. Under worn-out tents, carnies slung sickly-sweet cotton candy and invited us to play games of chance. We always blasted past the games and ran straight for the rides: rides with names like Sizzler, Fireball, Tornado, and Round-Up, which spun all around us, a dizzying assault on the senses. There were a few standout attractions—Zipper flipped you upside down, Tilt-a-Whirl spun you in circles, and the Gravitron lifted your legs off the ground as if by magic. We went on all of them.

One day, we waited in line for Star Trooper, which whizzed above us in a blur of purple and aqua. We slid into the umbrella-like seats when it was our turn. We flew through the air, kicking our feet as the ride lifted us higher. Halfway through, it slowed down and reversed. The backward motion reminded me of the Subway sandwich I’d eaten earlier. I got off the ride, sickly pale, and puked in a garbage can. (“The olives stand out to me the most,” Erika says now.) We laughed, the older kids made fun of me, and we continued on like it never happened. Surely the slow-moving Ferris wheel would be fine. But as we reached the very top, I threw up on the riders below me. Again, we laughed. It was just another day at the circus. 

We liked being scared. In our basements, we used Ouija boards to summon spirits. We huddled together in front of the TV as we watched people cut their limbs off in Saw. (I threw up on the carpet after that one.) And we rode all the rides.

Every summer, Erika and I took the ferry to Prince Edward Island for a soccer tournament. We would stay in Cavendish, the beachside town famous for Anne of Green Gables and the classic Sandspit Amusement Park. After soccer games, we visited the fairground and rode the old wooden roller coaster or the bumper boats. It was kind of rinky-dink, but there were more intense rides too. One time, we went on the Rok-n-Rol, a ride on a raised platform that spun us into oblivion. Seated face-to-face, it tipped us upside down, swirled us around in circles. We loved it. Erika begged me to go on again. A little voice told me not to, but I was good at ignoring it in the pursuit of fun. We rode again, and I felt my chicken pesto sandwich come up. I vomited all over both of us. “It was, like, almost normal to me at that point,” Erika says. “It’s weird that we never looked into it.” 

Up to a third of people experience motion sickness. It’s the body’s response to different types of movement that cause disequilibrium—a sensation of unsteadiness, imbalance, and spatial disorientation. Cue the nausea, dizziness, headaches, cold sweats, general unwellness, and, well, barfing. Anyone can get motion sickness, so it’s not considered a disease, nor is it considered a disorder. It’s been described as “a natural response to unnatural conditions,” and somehow, that makes me feel better. Children as young as 2 can experience it, and women are more susceptible than men, as are migraine-sufferers and those with inner ear troubles. Heck, sheer anticipation may bring it on: People who have experienced it in the past may have worse symptoms expecting to feel sick.

Motion sickness can be felt anywhere: land, sea, air, and space. In recent decades, new technology that mimics vehicular travel—like flight simulators, VR headsets, video games, and motion simulator rides — have joined the classic motion sickness provokers: the car, the railcar, the airplane, and the boat. You can’t escape it. 

Since antiquity, thinkers have theorized and written about motion sickness. Aristotle was the first to describe seasickness as an imbalance of fluids in the body. Hippocrates wrote, “Sailing on the sea proves that motion disorders the body.” Charles Darwin was continually seasick on his nearly five-year journey on the HMS Beagle, writing in 1835, “I hate every wave of the ocean, with a fervor, which you, who have only seen the green waters of the shore, can never understand.” Angsty. 

The cause of this condition is simple: motion. There are, however, competing theories about what is happening inside our bodies. Sensory conflict theory says sickness is brought on due to a mismatch between what the eye sees and the information the brain receives from the inner ear balance mechanism (the vestibular system, which detects disorientation in space). So when the eyes tell the brain that a person is sitting still on a boat, for example, but the vestibular system senses head movements from waves rocking against the ship, these mismatched messages are traditionally believed to cause motion sickness.

Too much stimuli can make you sick. These signals can combine and multiply, depending on your environment. John Golding, a professor of applied psychology at the University of Westminster, says motion sickness can take many forms: sea sickness, car sickness, air sickness, space sickness, cinerama sickness, and cyber sickness.

I experienced hybrid sickness on that Harry Potter ride, thanks to the mismatched stimuli  between screens and physical motion. But ride-induced motion sickness is nothing new. In 1893, ride designer Amariah Lake invented an “illusion apparatus” called The Haunted Swing. Victorian-era riders entered a room and took a seat on the swing. Attendants gave it a push, and, as one Australian newspaper described, “The swing seems to whirl completely over … while the occupants shriek convulsively and hug each other.” The ride mechanics deceived riders enough for them to believe they were moving. In reality, they were stationary; it was the room that rotated. People were amazed by the engineering and overwhelmed by the physical experience—sometimes enough to vomit. But the ultimate trick in theme park rides is to perfectly calibrate their ups and downs so people don’t end up sick.

If you ask me, Harry Potter and the Forbidden Journey missed the mark. It’s definitely a feat of engineering—the world’s first passenger-carrying industrial robot. Since its successful debut at Orlando’s Islands of Adventure in 2010, Universal has built the ride at parks in California, Japan, and China. (Before the Hollywood version launched to the public in 2016, TMZ reported that it was making employees barf left and right, and ride engineers couldn’t figure out why.) 

As I encountered that day in March, the ride features a four-seat, roller coaster-style bench, mounted on a robotic arm that drops, spins, twists, and turns. The bench doesn’t go upside down, but at one point, riders are laid flat on their backs, and honestly, what’s the difference? The robotic arm (which seems to have a mind of its own, but actually is programmed) was designed for “a guaranteed thrill factor,” according to KUKA, the German robot manufacturer. 

For me, there’s too much movement: The arm is attached to a track, which moves through a physical set with animated props. Dome-shaped projection screens fill the rider’s entire field of view. (Read: There’s nowhere else to look.) The ride blended the “first-ever combination of live-action, advanced robotic technology and innovative filmmaking,” creating a new, immersive experience. And hey, people really love it: There’s a cult-like following online, with fans calling it a revolutionary ride with insane, state-of-the-art tech that refreshes the indoor “dark ride” genre. 

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But those prone to motion sickness don’t like it very much. Exactly once, more than a decade ago, Steven Golden rode the Forbidden Journey. I contacted Golden after I found him on Reddit, complaining about the ride. He still hasn’t forgotten the feeling of helplessness that set in when the over-the-shoulder restraint eased into place. “I just remember thinking, oh my God, I’ve made a terrible mistake,” Golden says. Within seconds, he remembers being propelled up and jerked around. He tried to look for an exit sign or a stationary object to break the illusion of immersion, but he couldn’t find anything. “There was absolutely no escape.” Over a Zoom call, we laugh and bond over our shared misery. Never again.

New research from Thomas Stoffregen, a professor of kinesiology at the University of Minnesota, says it is unstable movement that makes you sick—full stop. Motion sickness doesn’t start in the inner ear, Stoffregen says, but rather from a disturbance in the body’s system for maintaining posture. You lose your equilibrium first, and then you get motion sick. In an inconsistent environment, the brain can’t modulate the body’s movement like it usually can. 

So on a theme park ride, the relationship between what you’re trying to do with your body and what actually happens to your body is unpredictable and leads to destabilization. Yes, just picture poor me, strapped to a seat and pushed through space. “You’re trying to stabilize the head against these motions that you cannot predict and cannot control,” Stoffregen says. “That’s why you got sick in that device.” 

Theme parks have long been a battleground for motion sickness sufferers, but they’ve continued to lure people over the decades. Thrill seekers want fun, fantastic, never-before-felt experiences. Dreamland, one of the earliest theme parks at Brooklyn’s Coney Island, operated from 1904 to 1911. For just 35 cents admission, visitors, many of whom arrived by ship, could embark on one of the first motion simulator rides: Under and Over the Sea, a simulated submarine ride in the Atlantic Ocean. It looked like a Man-of-War ship, complete with lifeboats, gun turrets, and a deck. Peering through portholes, riders witnessed giant squids and sharks. Other simulators at the time imagined a trip to the moon, or a reproduction of the Galveston flood of 1900. 

These rides were completely new physical experiences for people at the time. In a 1981 article in The Journal of Popular Culture, American historian Russel B. Nye described the public appeal of the amusement park as a “riskless risk, a place where one may take chances that are not really chances.” 

Thrillseekers want their kinesthetic sense disturbed—that’s the whole point. But push the drama too intensely and a person may never come back again. Ride designers must walk that fine line between safety and danger, while balancing the physical stress on the body. The truth is, thrill rides are designed to induce some level of discomfort. But what’s too much? Throwing up? Whiplash? Blacking out due to g-force?

Modern rides that choreograph one-of-a-kind experiences in whimsical worlds and galaxies far, far away—like riding a magical bench through the halls of Hogwarts, soaring on the back of a winged banshee in Pandora, or joining the Resistance in an epic battle against the First Order—are leveraging haptics, olfactory, and VR technology that has become increasingly multi-sensory and immersive. All the while, they need to fine-tune the right amount of fear and fun that doesn’t make riders run for the nearest garbage can. 

Past and present, some rides go too far. The world’s first looping roller coaster, the Flip Flap Railway at Coney Island’s Sea Lion Park, was infamous for knocking people out. (It had a perfectly circular loop, which meant passengers were nailed with serious g-force.) In 1910, Rough Riders, another early Coney Island roller coaster, tossed 16 passengers out of the car, killing four. 

Even if you don’t die, some rides are notorious for making you feel sick—even today. Just read through online reviews for Epcot’s Mission: SPACE, The Simpsons Ride at Universal Studios, or Star Tours at Disney’s Hollywood Studios, and you’ll find lots of people commenting that they nearly puked. After my vomit mishap, I stumbled around Hogsmeade in search of chocolate when a kind shopkeeper advised me to skip the Minions and Transformers rides, just to be safe. Last year, the New York Post wrote that Epcot employees were handing out barf bags at the new Guardians of the Galaxy ride, which rotates 360 degrees and has Disney’s first-ever reverse launch on a roller coaster. (Am I surprised? No.) On message boards, park visitors plot when to take their Dramamine and ask which stomach-turning rides to skip. 

New motion simulator rides, like Star Wars: Rise of the Resistance at Disney’s Hollywood Studios—a combined trackless dark ride, motion simulator, walk-through, and drop ride—have been more successful. In 2020, Theme Park Insider ranked it as the best new attraction: “Disney’s latest masterpiece blends four ride systems with animatronics and live actors to create the most immersive themed experience of the year.” Disney made another winner at its Animal Kingdom park at Walt Disney World. On Avatar Flight of Passage, a 3D flying simulator, riders straddle a mechanical banshee and feel it breathe between their legs. “No other theme park attraction so wonderfully recreates the feeling of flying than Flight of Passage does,” states another Theme Park Insider review. 

In my deep dive into theme park blogs and forums, I found a real appetite for well-done immersive rides that don’t make you expel your overpriced park lunch.

Because here’s the thing: People are getting sick at theme parks all the time. Prone to motion sickness since childhood, Darren Kwong rode that Harry Potter ride a few years ago. He later rated it one star. “I couldn’t enjoy it at all,” he now says. He closed his eyes seconds after the ride started, and took deep breaths to stop from getting sick. He made it through without throwing up on his date, but it was close. 

Another rider, Laurin Jeffrey, went in with a plan. He heard it may be a rough ride, so he preemptively took ginger pills, Gravol, and Pepto-Bismol. Even loaded up on medication, he felt sick because he felt the actions on screen didn’t match up with the movements of the robotic arm. “You’re going sideways while backwards while it tips you as you’re looking at something going forwards,” he says. “If you could design a Vomit-Tron, that would be it.”

One blog post on Penny Arcade resonated with me in particular: “Within the first 5 seconds of Harry Potter I knew I was in trouble. … As vomiting turned from a possibility into certainty I started trying to focus on how best to throw up.” Been there, brother. 

You can try to beat motion sickness, but once it sets in, it’s already too late. The best way to stop motion sickness is to avoid situations that may provoke it. But if you’re like me and absolutely must ride: Look at the horizon. Try Dramamine. Consider acupressure. Don’t eat or drink anything before or after a ride. (Or if you do, make sure it’s bland.) Try not to get annoyed when your friend says, “I didn’t think it was that bad.”

But prevention may not work. One reviewer took Transderm-Scop, a medication that had proved effective on other rides. “That miracle drug allows me to ride everything else in the world … [but] it barely took the edge off,” they wrote. “Without the medication I was undone.” Another reviewer took medication but ended up braving the ride to see if it had kicked in. “It didn’t work at all,” she wrote. “I’m 44 years old and have never thrown up on an attraction.”

When you puke in a land of magic and whimsy, the wonder vanishes. 

The seat was curved, so puke pooled under my butt and legs. Who’s going to clean this? I thought. I stood up, spaced out and doused in vomit, and watched as the bench rolled away. I hurried toward the nearest unmoving wall, squatted, and took deep breaths as my friends surveyed what happened. The cool floor looked like a good place to lie for a while. Then I heard a voice.

“Ma’am, I have a room for you.” 

I glanced up and saw a kind employee looking down at me. From his expression, I could tell he had seen this before and knew exactly what to do. He ushered me to a door marked for employees only and opened it to reveal a hidden space—one dedicated to unfortunate souls like me who couldn’t make it through the ride without getting sick. 

There was a square basin that looked like a toilet filled with water. It was a special puke sink, with a silver flush handle. I hovered over it for a second, but I was all puked out. Two of my friends came in after me, and one of them was inspired to throw up, too. 

The small room had a normal sink and soap and throw-up bags and paper towels. I wiped off my shorts and legs, and removed my T-shirt, which was completely ruined. The attendant knocked on the door and asked if I needed anything. A new shirt. Shorts. Water. He came back with a blue T-shirt, size adult large, with a screen print of the Hogwarts castle. “Visit Enchanting Hogsmeade,” it read. A $27 souvenir, free for the price of vomit. “No shorts,” he said. 

I felt grateful for his help and relieved that this secret room was here to hide my vomit. There was a wooden cabinet with dozens of Gildan T-shirts and flip-flops in different sizes. As I looked at them, I thought of all the people who came before me and puked on their shoes. They got to see inside this secret space, too, which is magical in its own way. 

My friends and I explored, flinging cupboards open and peeking behind curtains to reveal cleaning supplies and garbage bags. As I scrubbed my body and donned my new T-shirt, I accepted the tiniest water bottle I’ve ever seen—another consolation prize.

“Does this happen a lot?” I asked the ride attendant.

“Pretty often,” he said.

I balled up my old T-shirt and my ruined hat and shoved them into a plastic bag. I was still shaky, but I took sips of water and felt ready to leave. 

I wobbled through the busy gift shop toward the bright Florida sunlight, dazed as people dressed in Hogwarts-themed clothing moved around me. I put my clammy hand to my cheek and took a Snapchat selfie with my barf bag. “Bag of shame,” I posted. 

As I cowered in a shady area while my sister hustled around looking for a new pair of shorts for me, I thought about how quickly the illusion can shatter in theme parks: You get stuck upside down on the Flying Cobra. The bright lights come on after Space Mountain malfunctions, exposing the ride’s steel infrastructure. You’re covered in your own vomit, and the spell is broken. 

Emily Latimer is a journalist and fact-checker in Nova Scotia. She’s written for the CBC, Canadian Business, Maclean’s, and elsewhere. You can find her stories at www.emilylatimer.com.

Editor: Cheri Lucas Rowlands
Fact-checker: Tina Knezevic
Copy-editor: Krista Stevens

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Anne P. Beatty | Longreads | June 2023 | 4,667 words (17 minutes)

The street divides us, one group of protesters on one sidewalk, one on the other. Two sets of signs: Masks are child abuse, Masks keep our children safe. No CRT in our schools, Teach our children the truth! You work for us, We support our teachers. A man with a clipboard guards the plate-glass double doors of the building. He knows our numbers and tells us when we’re allowed inside to speak. 

I’m looking at all these signs as I think about what I’ll say, ideas I’ve typed up and folded inside my back pocket. Down the street, I can see the corner of Eugene and Florence where, as an elementary school student, I waited for my bus.

Here in Greensboro, North Carolina, where I grew up, people have been gathering monthly for protests outside school board meetings. Here, as elsewhere, people disagree about banning books, teaching critical race theory, and arming teachers. This is a city where first a high school, then the district, upheld a teacher’s decision to assign Jesmyn Ward’s novel Salvage the Bones after parents challenged it, but this is also a city where, a few months later, a former Marine intentionally drove his car into a woman escorting patients inside our county’s sole abortion clinic. This is a Southern city, where some things bloom, and others are buried. 

Because I want my three kids to know sooner than I did what happens and has happened in our town, I usually make them come to the protests organized by a local anti-racism alliance to which I belong. Sometimes I bribe them: Dum-Dums in their coat pockets, Razzmatazz smoothies from the Juice Shop. Sometimes they surprise me and join in all the chants, especially my eighth grader, the oldest, who yells, Power to the people! and What do we want? The truth. When do we want it? Now! But they aren’t here with me tonight.

Across the street, the other group of protesters have a trifold pasted with the faces of smiling children killed at Sandy Hook, because they believe that if there were more police officers in the school that day, or teachers with guns, those children would still be alive. They are a local chapter of a national movement called Take Back Our Schools, a name that suggests a possessive nostalgia for a mythical past, a territory to defend against invaders. Once I looked up the website for their local school board candidate and found her blog post titled, “Seriously, Who Are These People and How Did They Get in Our Schools?” I’m a high school English teacher, so it was hard not to take this personally.

To speak to the school board, you must email your name and address to the clerk before the meeting, and she will reply to confirm your place in the speaking order. I am number 28. 

One year, after reading George Orwell’s essay “Politics and the English Language,” in which he skewers the intentional obfuscation of political rhetoric, my class discussed the title of a bill proposed by our state legislature that spring. The bill, called the Youth Health Protection Act, targeted trans kids and would require that teachers disclose anything students say about their gender identity to the student’s parents. One of my students snorted, “They should call it the ‘Teachers Are Narcs’ Law.” The bill didn’t pass, but this year a similar bill is before the legislature, and it also includes provisions about what teachers can teach with regard to LGBTQ issues. Its goal is curriculum suppression, a member of the anti-racism alliance pointed out.

Figuring out what to teach and how is getting harder in North Carolina for many reasons. In 2021, our Republican lieutenant governor created a reporting portal called F.A.C.T.S. (Fairness and Accountability in the Classroom for Teachers and Students — a name Orwell would love.) The website offers a space for parents to report, among other things, “examples of students being subjected to indoctrination according to a political agenda or ideology” and “examples of students being exposed to inappropriate content or subject matter in the classroom.” 

When two white mothers mounted a campaign against Ward’s 2011 National Book Award-winning novel, Salvage the Bones, they claimed that it was “trash” and “pornography.” Esch, the narrator, is a pregnant teenager, and there are scenes of coercive sex in the book, which mostly focuses on the love and resilience of Esch’s working-class Black family on the Mississippi Gulf Coast as she and her brothers prepare for Hurricane Katrina. The white mothers questioned whether this family was worthy of reading about, coded language that seemed designed to trigger racial implications without saying the word “race.” My students are good at sniffing out implicit messages. It’s my job to help them get even better.

The Take Back Our Schools folks seized upon this book-banning hearing. Their school board candidate urged supporters to attend and pack the audience. On her blog she wrote wryly, “Apparently, the young 15-year-old finds her strength and her voice through the unfolding tragedies and her sexual trysts.” I want my students to be able to read that sentence and see the lip curl around the word “apparently.” 

At the hearing in the (mostly white) school’s media center, the AP English teacher defended her choice to teach this work of literary merit, claiming, “Silencing this book would be silencing the voice of a young, teenage girl who learned to stick up for herself.” She cautioned, “We cannot pick and choose the parts of our histories and cultures within our comfort zones. Imagine how empty these shelves would be.” I wasn’t there to hear her — I was teaching my own students that morning — but I read her quote and pictured her gesturing to the library walls. It was easy to picture, because five years ago, I taught at that school. I had been the senior AP teacher.

Her students showed up to support her. Some held signs like Banning Books = Hiding the Truth. One Black female student explained to reporters, “Silencing the voice of young African American women won’t silence the experiences they go through.” I admire these students for their political awareness and sense of their own voices as necessary to the conversation. They remind me of my own students a few miles away. 

What is taught has always been policed. Though it’s also true the level of scrutiny depends on your state, your school, and your courses — in other words, it depends on which side of the street you stand on. In my experience, people rarely question what’s being taught in the low-performing school, or in the standard classes at the high-performing school. And sometimes teachers police themselves. When I was hired at that previous school, in that white, mostly affluent community, other teachers described the uproar a few years prior when parents had challenged Mark Mathabane’s Kaffir Boy: The True Story of a Black Youth’s Coming of Age in Apartheid South Africa, allegedly over a passage describing sexual assault. Teachers remembered news vans stationed outside the school, meetings with district officials and administrators, harassment from parents. “Don’t teach it,” they warned, even though the book’s standing in the curriculum had been upheld. Hundreds of copies lined the shelves of the bookroom, hidden, mute. Nothing is more silent than an unread book.

As with my children, I want my students to know what happened here, in our city, our country, our world. I have taught Invisible Man and Their Eyes Were Watching God and The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian and Fences, all of which have been challenged or banned somewhere. Still, some things I have never taught, even though I have lamented their conspicuous absence in my own education, like the Greensboro Massacre of 1979. I’m an English teacher, not a history teacher, I rationalized. It was easy to stay silent, to think that’s not my job.

The massacre began on November 3 as another protest, with people chanting and singing in the streets two miles from where I grew up. Video footage shows posters aloft, children chanting. The political rally had been planned by a multiracial coalition, many of whom were organizing textile workers here, and most of whom were Communist Workers Party members. It was billed as a “Death to the Klan” march — and the Ku Klux Klan and American Nazis showed up. In photographs you can see the Klan members unloading shotguns and rifles from the trunk of a finned Ford Fairlane. The word that comes to mind is brazen: efficient but unhurried. In minutes the Klan members and Nazis had killed four people and wounded 11 others. A fifth victim died the next day. 

The Klan members arrived in a slow-cruising caravan as the march was about to start. The caravan included an informant who had told the police department of the plans, yet no police were present when the shooting began. Although a few protesters had guns and fired back, no Klan members were killed. Police arrived shortly after, arresting 12 Klansmen and Nazis in a van, but not apprehending any of the other vehicles. Instead, they arrested protesters. 

In the two criminal trials, all Klan members were acquitted by all-white juries. In the one civil trial, the defendants — the Klan members along with the Greensboro Police Department — were found guilty of a wrongful death charge, but only in the case of the one victim who was not a member of the Communist Workers Party. In 2004, before I’d moved back home, the city began holding Truth and Reconciliation hearings modeled on those of South Africa. Survivors, victims’ widows, community members, and police officers spoke about their understanding of what had happened that day to try to move forward with an increased awareness of why the tragedy had unfolded. Desmond Tutu, the Archbishop of Cape Town, came. These hearings were the first of their kind to be held in this country. People had a sense that we were facing our history in a new way. 

It might be easier to recall that sense of reckoning — optimism, even — during the hearings if the public schools had followed the commission’s eventual recommendation, in 2006, to develop curriculum to teach local students about the massacre. Now, 17 years later, teaching and raising my kids here, I know that students still only learn about the massacre in pockets, from individuals who feel compelled to teach it. Most students still graduate from this district of 70,000 kids knowing nothing about what happened here that day — just as I did.

In eighth-grade social studies — state and local history — I was handed a blank map and told to identify all hundred counties in the state. We practiced so much before the test that I can still see the photocopied map of elongated North Carolina, the outlines growing fuzzier with each duplicate away from the original. I’m sure I aced the test, though I’d be hard-pressed now to name more than 20 counties. I never learned about the massacre, or the bloody white supremacist coup in Wilmington in 1898. 

Such omissions from the history curriculum inspire our protest signs. Our group came up with slogans like Teach our children the truth and Racism divides and True history unites. Scrutinizing these placards in our front yard, though, my husband Adam points out that this language is so ambiguous, so dependent upon one’s assumptions about what “truth” or “teach” means, that either side could claim them. Orwell would agree.

Adam’s observation is corroborated the following month when a friend tells me he wasn’t sure, driving up to the protest, whether to stand with us or against us based on our signs. It was only when he saw we were masked and multiracial that he knew he wanted to be on our side of the street.

Outside the December school board meeting, a rangy white man from the other side crosses the street, past our row of protesters, to the door of the school building. In jeans and boots, with the look of a past-his-prime country singer, he demands that the man with the clipboard let him inside. The man calmly says, “Your name isn’t on the list.” 

“All I know,” yells Angry Man, “is that Tom told me to come down tonight and speak, and I’m here!”

“Sir, you have to sign up to speak, and your name isn’t on the list.”

Angry Man moves in, menacing, and two police officers in the lobby step through the doors to intervene. He screams at them; they are calm but insistent; he eventually goes back across the street, still screaming, to stand beside the sign advocating for a stronger police presence in schools. 

I can’t think of any other time I’ve been so close to such a volatile adult in public. It’s his anger, even more than the cold, that I’m glad has been omitted from my kids’ experience of the protests. Yet I know it is this protective urge that shields our children from the blunt facts of the world.

A woman across the street is shouting into her bullhorn, ostensibly to school board members, “You work for us!” A half-hour later, I see her huddled with another woman around Angry Man’s cell phone, on which he appears to be, if I’m eavesdropping correctly, displaying images of a man’s face he had punched in a bar in some chivalrous act on behalf of a girl. I’m not sure what this bragging — “see those bruises?” — has to do with the Board of Education or the history curriculum or our children or why we’re all standing out in the cold, watching our breath bloom outside our lungs. But I understand that even on these sidewalks we are pushing up against the serrated edge of violence.

At home after one of the protests, my eighth grader and I read some of the tenets for Take Back Our Schools online: 

Teaching students or training educators that they are oppressors or oppressed is wrong. 

You cannot judge a child by their parents [sic] sins and you cannot hold today’s society responsible for the ancestor’s [sic] past. 

Politics DO NOT have a place in our schools. We LOVE America and believe our children should too. 

To read this last proclamation is to be reminded of a line from the transcripts of the Truth and Reconciliation proceedings for the Greensboro Massacre. At one hearing, the KKK’s Grand Wizard in 1979, Virgil Griffin, who had been in the caravan, surprised people by agreeing to come talk about his memories. He claimed the Klan didn’t come to the march looking for violence, but when the protesters began beating on their cars, they got out and unloaded their guns. The Klan came, he said, “to fly the flags and let ’em know we was proud of America.” 

It seems impossible to disentangle this grim patriotism from the policing of schools and teachers, from the desire to dictate what people learn or believe about this country. I care about this problem as a teacher, as a mother, as a citizen. And yet I always have a moment when I don’t want to go to the protests. The kids are on the couch or playing outside with friends, dinner isn’t sorted, an annoying work email has just popped up on my phone that I don’t want to read, much less answer. What are we doing, anyway? Holding a sign, stamping our feet in the cold, waving at the cars that honk in support. It’s not enough, which makes it easy to think it means nothing. It’s harder to believe it might mean something. 

In her speech “The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action,” Audre Lorde warns of the danger of being “mute as bottles.” She tells us, “My silences had not protected me. Your silence will not protect you.” I think a lot about the silences I have been handed, and the silences I hand off, as a parent or teacher. Who or what were these silences meant to protect? 

Most months, I find myself hollering at the kids to find their shoes. I will get the lollipops and the smoothies and keep yanking the signs out of the yard on the second Tuesday of the month, even though every time I replant them, they get more crooked, even though every time I shove the coat-hanger metal back into those maddening holes, each jab threatens to puncture the words “true history.” It’s good to show up, I tell my kids. We get in the car and go.

How do we learn the true history of where we come from, if not in school or at home? I was on the other side of the world when I learned of the Greensboro Massacre. Adam and I, while living in Asia for several years, had flown to Vietnam from Thailand to travel with Adam’s dad, whom I had never met before. Over dinner one night, my future father-in-law said, “So, you’re from Greensboro. What do you know about the Greensboro Massacre?”

His question hung in the air, gelatinous, as I fumbled with my chopsticks. I was 24. I’d never heard of it. He explained what had happened and why he knew about it. One of the victims, Jim Waller, had been a friend who had invited Adam’s parents to the protest. They were living in West Virginia at the time, raising three little boys, and decided not to attend the rally. 

Because the story was told as part of his parents’ history, Adam had already known about the Greensboro Massacre, even though he grew up in Seattle, even though his parents never visited Greensboro before our wedding. The massacre took place a few miles from my house, yet the story was not told as part of my family’s history, or mentioned in my public schools, from kindergarten to university. It was not even publicly memorialized until a historical marker was erected on a street corner in 2015. Doubtless some kids from Greensboro grew up knowing about it, but not me.

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On that trip, too, I finally learned more about the Vietnam War, seeing as my AP U.S. History course didn’t go past WWII. Flying into the country, I knew so little. I knew my dad had been in the war. I knew he was drafted and didn’t want to go. I knew he was in the Judge Advocate General’s Corps because he had already graduated from law school. I knew he went to Bangkok on R&R and bought my grandmother two rings, a star sapphire and a fire opal, both of which I inherited. Even though the rings were from Thailand, they made me think of Vietnam, along with my father’s Army fatigues that I’d appropriated for a jacket in high school. My best friend did the same with her dad’s jacket. We walked the halls with our last names stitched over our hearts. In class, we had memorized something called the Gulf of Tonkin but I could no longer tell you what that was. Like most kids of the ’80s, from movies as much as school, I had a vague sense that the Vietnam War had been a tragic mishap, a blot of shame. 

My vague sense of the war became an acute understanding as we traveled up the country to Hội An and Da Nang. We climbed through the Củ Chi tunnels the Viet Cong had used to move throughout the country. We ate pho on the sidewalk, perched on plastic squat stools, and watched uniformed Vietnamese kids stream past us when school let out. Their backpacks were adorned with Cinderella and Belle and Ariel, a blur of communist Disneyfication. As we toured the country by day and read history by night, in bootleg copies of books we bought at street markets, I kept wondering why I had never known anything more about the war than the bits dribbled down to me by pop culture and family history. The experience of being elsewhere magnified my understanding of here — my home. It was disorienting, like looking at myself from across the street.

This dislocation, a sense of the world as entirely different than I’d previously thought, crystallized at the Vietnam Military History Museum in Hanoi, where I saw the war I’d always referred to as the Vietnam War listed on every plaque as the American War. Twenty years later I will remember this — that who you are and where you’re from dictates what you call something — when I see the campaign posters for the local conservative school board candidate that read Education, not indoctrination. I agree with the slogan, though I know, from reading the woman’s blog, that we don’t mean the same thing. 

Years after my trip, while teaching The Things They Carried, Tim O’Brien’s collection of short stories about the Vietnam War, I would tell my 10th graders about the American War, which doesn’t exist in America, and the Vietnam War, which doesn’t exist in Vietnam. They would be as surprised as I’d been to learn this, and then, a moment later, as bewildered by their own surprise. It’s hard to create the dizzying sense of history’s interconnectedness for students sitting at a desk, staring out the smudged window in Greensboro, even for teachers who want to.

Only once I start going to the protests do I decide I must teach the Greensboro Massacre. I’m 44, and not a history teacher, but whether the district tells me to or not, I will work it into my course on rhetoric. I’m lucky to have a trusting principal and supportive parents, both of which give me a kind of freedom not all teachers here have. Still, it feels risky. When I ask my 52 10th graders how many have heard of the massacre, only three raise their hands. I give my students photographs, newspaper articles, and essays about the event, and ask them to write an argument answering the question adults should be wrestling with: Should the Greensboro Massacre be taught in local schools, and if so, how? 

In their essays, my students all argue that the massacre should be taught. Their opinions vary about when and how and to whom, but none of them advocate for silence. Many draw links between what happened here in 1979 and what happened in Charlottesville in 2017, when a white supremacist drove his car into a crowd of protesters, or what happened on January 6, 2021, when insurrectionists stormed the U.S. Capitol — similarly brazen, confident in their knowledge of who will be punished in this country and who won’t. My students see the patterns: that what happens here happens elsewhere, and what happens elsewhere also happens here.

Good teachers teach students how to find the pattern, and how to find the deviance: how to see that different things are actually the same thing, or, sometimes, that what look like the same things are in fact different. I want my students to know what I hope other people are also teaching my children: that the world is manifold, and that their place in this world is fraught and implicated and full of potential power.

Although the scope and impact of the Greensboro Massacre pales compared to that of the Vietnam War, the two are now forever linked in my mind, in part for reasons that Griffin, the KKK’s Grand Wizard, also saw: What happened here in 1979 was directly connected to the larger political tensions of the time. 

There’s this that he said, in one of his several tirades about communism during the hearings: “And I think every time a Senator or a Congressman walks by the Vietnam Wall, they oughta hang their damn heads in shame for allowing the Communist Party to be in this country. Our boys went over there fightin’ Communism, came back here and got off the planes, and them that they call the CWP was out there spittin’ on ’em, callin’ ’em babykillers, cursin’ ’em. If the city and Congress’d been worth a damn, they would told them soldiers turn your guns on them, we whooped Communists over there, we’ll whoop it in the United States and clean it up here.”

Or there’s the fact that on the funeral march route seven days after the massacre, an enormous sign posted to the back of a parked pickup truck read: Greensboro People Don’t Want You Communist Bastards In Our Town.

But mostly I suspect these events are linked for me because I learned about the Greensboro Massacre in Vietnam, where I also learned, finally, about the Vietnam — the American — War, and both revelations kindled the same feeling of betrayal over not knowing what I should’ve known about the place I call home. 

Number 26 is called. Then number 27. I’m nervous. I’ve never done anything like this before. I am informed I have three minutes to speak. I begin, “I come to you tonight with this message: Our students are stronger and more resilient than we might think. We must teach our children the whole truth about our country’s history of racial injustice. They are strong enough to handle this truth. In fact, they’re hungry for it. And when students realize they have not learned the full truth, they feel betrayed.”

I explain my own sense of betrayal when I learned about historical events only as an adult, and I ask the school board members to trust teachers to facilitate these conversations, to teach students how to think, not what to think. When I walk outside, Angry Man is gone. The woman with the bullhorn is gone. Most protesters on both sides are gone. Leaving, I drive past that corner where I used to wait for the school bus on distant mornings, neighborhood kids jeering, a stick skittering across the road into the gutter. 

Later that night, I will replay in my head Angry Man’s demands to be allowed inside, his boasts about the bruises he inflicted. The more I scroll through the law-and-order comments that Take Back Our Schools sympathizers post under viral Facebook videos of high school fights, and the more I recall the screech of the bullhorn — the woman’s long pink nails clacking against its plastic handle with a magnified roughness — the more I see how that man’s violence and aggression fits a pattern. He was angry way before he got here. This night is just another beat in this country’s long exhalation of anger and fear. 

At the end of her speech, Lorde says, “We can learn to work and speak when we are afraid in the same way we have learned to work and speak when we are tired. For we have been socialized to respect fear more than our own needs for language and definition, and while we wait in silence for that final luxury of fearlessness, the weight of that silence will choke us. … And there are so many silences to be broken.”

Eventually, I’ll go back to speak to the school board again. I’ll be less nervous. The Take Back Our Schools candidate will lose her race, and then the county’s local chapter will disband. This will feel like a victory. But months later, state legislators will propose a bill called Equality in Education to regulate what teachers can and cannot say about race and the American government. The threat of silence remains.

Meanwhile, every weekday morning, the buses will come, and students all over this city will herd onto them and unload into classrooms, where some days they will be handed a blank map and some days they will be mute as bottles. But other days they will learn how to become the wind whistling over the lips of bottles. A teacher demonstrates how a wet mouth over a glass O can make it sing, and then listens as her students carry the sound.

Anne P. Beatty writes and teaches in Greensboro, North Carolina. More of her work can be found at www.annepbeatty.com.

Editor: Cheri Lucas Rowlands
Copy-editor: Carolyn Wells

This story was funded by our members. Join Longreads and help us to support more writers.

Anne Lagamayo | Longreads | May 11, 2023 | 4,252 words (15 minutes)

Don’t drive when it snows.

Okay, that’s not realistic, so it’s really more like: Always check the weather before you go on a four-hour road trip in the dead of winter to see your friend Jen in Bend, Oregon, during the height of the pandemic.

But let’s rewind a bit, since there were other ways to die on this long journey to reach Jen. You first flew across the country from New York to Oregon. You could have died then, too, gambling with your life with that five-hour flight, breathing the same stuffy plane air as everyone else.

Remember when you were advised to stay at least six feet away from people, or else risk getting COVID? Then possibly dying? That four-hour car ride on the final leg of your trip, then, was both a foolish and fitting thing to do.

Because it’s on this drive from the coast of Oregon to Bend that your car slips on the snow and crashes into the highway barrier. You find out later — see, this is why you should always check the weather before you drive — that that day was the first heavy snowfall of the season, and you’re in one of many car accidents around town, just half an hour away from Jen and her husband, who put all their belongings in storage and decided to rent an Airbnb in town indefinitely. (People did that during the pandemic, in that uncertain time between the fear of succumbing to the disease and the boredom of staying at home.) 

You have photos of this carnage and general mayhem and, much later — after all this is more or less over — gleefully show them to people who ask, while watching kind of sadistically as they squirm and wince and gravely tell you they’re glad you’re alive.

Designate someone you trust as an emergency contact. 

Especially if your family is in the Philippines, a few thousand miles away. In this case, your emergency contact is your roommate Miya, who’s back in New York. You’ve never thought about how the police identify people in a car accident, especially if the victim is from out of town, and you’re impressed by the lengths everyone goes through just to call Jen, who’s the only person you know in Bend. 

Here’s how they identify you:

1. Your driver’s license shows that you live in New York City, which is all the way on the opposite side of the country. Other options? Your work ID, which you were luckily too lazy to stuff back into your backpack after it rolled out onto the floor of the car, shows that you work for an international news media company. 
2. They call the Hong Kong bureau of said company. By God, you have no idea why. Is it because you’re Asian?
3. The Hong Kong bureau connects them to HR, who connects them to your boss. Your boss finds your emergency contact. She calls Miya.
4. Miya calls your mom on Facebook. Your mom added her a few years ago, most likely to spy on your life.
5. Your mom, who never puts her phone on silent mode — which usually drives you insane — answers the call at 2 a.m. in Manila.
6. By late morning, your parents tearfully tell both your brothers that you’re in a coma after the accident and might die some thousand miles away from home.
7. Your brother searches for Jen on Facebook and calls her there. 
8. When Jen gets the call, she is a few miles away from you, on top of a black diamond ski slope. Before this, she was confused and a little anxious about why you hadn’t called to say you got into town when you were supposed to arrive last night. Her last message to you reads, ARE YOU ALIVE??? She and her husband talk about waiting a few hours before calling the police. Maybe her phone battery is just dead. Maybe she’s just conked out asleep and forgot to text. Bzzzt, wrong! The quickest way down the mountain, to reach the hospital, is to ski. I’d never seen her ski better, her husband observed.

Remember you’re 32 years old. 

It’s usually hard to forget how many years you’ve been in this world, but after you wake up in the hospital a good week after the accident, you turn to Jen and ask for confirmation. I’m 32, right? 

By this time, your doctor has told you about your traumatic brain injury. Just to be sure you get it, your nurses and all six of your speech, occupational, and physical therapists repeat that you have diffuse axonal injury, or your brain was jiggled so hard inside your head during the crash that a lot of  connecting nerve tissues were torn. You always get stuck on the medical term “jiggle.” 

Some symptoms include: completely forgetting how to upload a video on Instagram. You know how to record one — you’ve filmed yourself six different ways lying in your hospital bed, the TV on but muted in the background, colors reflecting on the planes of your face, while saying in a death-warmed-over voice, Hi everyone, I’m alive but I have a trau-ma-tic brain injury. 

You forget how long you shift from the camera to your photo library to — what’s the app that puts things up on the internet again? — but eventually your brain hurts from the effort (and judging from your energy level in those first few months, you can gamely say it was a solid five minutes), and you give up.

A nurse comes in and asks, Hon, are you okay? after seeing your dejected face, because you’re frustrated and annoyed that uploading a video on the internet is. So. Hard. 

Your parents fly in from Manila, and you remember seeing them walk into the room as you sit in your wheelchair and smile like they just stopped by for brunch. It’s impossible to faze you at this stage, maybe because you are in a state of shock, and, well, you’re a few marbles short of a full set.

Another early symptom: the inability to tell dreams from reality. You dream once that you’re horseback riding on the beach with one of the leggy real estate agents from Selling Sunset, and she invites you to her wedding. You blink, sure that just two minutes ago your horse was waiting for you to mount. You ask a nurse who walks into your room to take your blood pressure: Are we by the beach? No? You sure? Okay.

Listen to your speech therapist. Especially when she says things like: You’ll never go back to work again.

You highly doubt she sounds like a Disney villain — if Disney ever makes a movie about corporate America — but you’re living in your sort of beat-up head at the moment.  Since you told her you produce a science podcast for a living, she makes you read elementary school-level science articles out loud, which goes like this:

You: A normal resting heart rate is 60-100 beats per minute.

Your therapist: How many beats is a normal resting heart rate?

You: Um. 

Your therapist (kindly): That’s okay, read it out loud again.

You: A normal resting heart rate is 60-100 beats per minute.

Your therapist: Now cover that sentence with your hand. What is the normal resting heart rate?

Silence.

With a TBI, you have a hard time retaining facts. Your therapist asks: What is it that you do? You’re a journalist? You may not be able to go back to work again.

It’s possible that your speech therapist says this in a gentle way: There is a small chance, if you don’t fully recover, that you can’t perform the same way you did before. Memory is tricky. And you need that for your work, don’t you?

Maybe it’s like that after all. You’re not entirely sure — you can’t even remember what the normal resting heart rate is. But the takeaway is the same: You’ll never be able to work again. You’re doomed forever to live in your parents’ home, sucking their money and time like a parasite when they’re this close to retirement, all of you sitting in your wheelchairs together in front of the TV in the evenings. 

But it’s not about work at all. You’ve lost something vital. You’re changed forever. The world will never be the same to you again, and you will never be the same to the world. You remember a nurse coming into your room, sitting on your bed and saying, You know what, what even is normal? Who the hell determines what that means? You’re you, and you’re very lucky to be alive.

That day in the hospital is fuzzy. But it remains the only time you’ve wanted to kill yourself. Not actively. Maybe if you just expired like a package of forgotten salmon filets, and someone threw you in the trash. You imagine life seeping out of you, like helium escaping a balloon. The ending of life a non-event as the beginning was pain and drama and blood. 

But that’s the only time. 

Don’t listen to your speech therapist.

You’re deep into mental images of expired salmon when you call your friend Stephanie, a neurosurgeon, on the phone. 

Some TBI patients don’t have the capacity to map out the future or plan in advance, both of which require the part of your brain in charge of executive function. And that is precisely the part of your brain that’s MIA at the moment. In your speech therapy activities, you’re deciding which clothes go on a hanger and which ones you have to fold in the drawers. Future work prospects are part of a college-level course, and your brain is stuck repeating the second grade. Will you go back to the Philippines? Will you give up everything you’ve built in the U.S.? Will you stay home with your parents? These are questions you can’t think about at the moment. But you know enough to be mopey and think of expired salmon. 

Stephanie calls bullshit on speech therapists. They’re looking out for their bottom line. They’re overly cautious, so they will give you the worst-case scenario. They also don’t want to be sued, so their predictions are always conservative. But I’ve seen way worse in my line of work. And I’ve seen people recover. Just read a lot! Practice reading. Read everything. Do all the exercises your speech therapists tell you to do. Work hard. If you want to improve your memory, work on memory exercises. Your brain is always changing — it’ll adapt based on repetition. What you put in is what you get out. Okay? I gotta go. 

Always be exercising.

Your doctors tell you that you have your whole life to recover, but also that you have a window of just six months when your brain is most primed to relearn everything you’ve forgotten. So, no pressure. Your brain can’t regenerate the neurons it’s lost. Use ’em or lose ’em. You had no idea your brain operated like annual dental benefits. 

But the brain is always growing and changing and reorganizing neural pathways, so while you can’t ever get the neurons back, it can make new ones. As long as you keep doing something over and over, like practicing scales on the piano or reciting the multiplication table 10 times over until it becomes as easy as breathing, you too can eventually learn to retain facts and remember what the normal resting heart rate is.

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The six-month period after a TBI is when your brain is at a heightened state of healing, like Superman being blasted with solar power. You throw yourself into your therapy sessions, read all of the magazines in your Airbnb in Bend, borrow books at the local library, hit a 60-day streak in Duolingo, and download an app with different brain exercises to improve your memory, attention, and problem solving. Your speech therapist makes you read an article in The New Yorker while listening to music, to practice dividing your focus and attention between two different things. Your physical therapist helps prepare you for the streets of New York City by designing an obstacle course in the gym with chairs and yoga blocks scattered across the floor, meant to simulate rats on the sidewalk and tourists blocking the road while gawking at the Empire State Building.

Eventually, you make it to the graduate lesson of walking up stairs. Your occupational therapist role-plays how to make small talk with a hair stylist, because your brain isn’t quick enough to respond to normal conversation. (And then when she asks you why you have a walker, what do you say?) 

You once thought all these things were so easy — reading, walking, talking. (You’re a journalist, you talk for a living!) But it turns out that three decades of living is hard to condense into a few months, and you have to start somewhere. 

When it all gets to be too much, close your eyes, transport yourself away from whatever godforsaken place you’re in at the moment, and visualize the beach. Or someplace nice and similarly clichéd. 

Your speech therapist — you’re making it seem like your speech therapist has 10 different personalities but really, you’ve had five of them so for the sake of not introducing a new character every few sentences, you’re just going to call all of them “your speech therapist” in the form of a benevolent amalgamated clay monster — anyway, your speech therapist, whose iteration this time is a hokey, crystal ball-gazing, maple-granola-from-scratch-making hippie (you’re in the Pacific Northwest after all), tells you that your brain is powerful. If you tell it that you’re in a peaceful place, it will tell the rest of your body that you’re okay. Even if you’re really not. 

Your peaceful place is on the Oregon coast a week before the accident, before the drive to Bend. You were in Lincoln City, which was cold and rugged and devoid of people, with the predictability of the crashing waves. When you’re there it’s just you at the end of the world, and life — with all of its everyday concerns — fades away with the tide.

You think about this place a lot because you’re in pretty beat-up shape for a human being. Like, you’d avert your eyes and dole out platitudes if you see you in the hospital, while slowly backing away in search of the nearest fire exit. You’re not bleeding from any orifices, and you didn’t break any bones or tear skin, but you have a granny walker to help you get around because you’re a walking hazard to society and yourself. Your brain controls balance and coordination, and your TBI makes you teeter whenever you stand (you have a hospital bracelet that labels you a fall risk, and humiliatingly, nurses have to watch you shower and go to the bathroom). 

Your muscles are weak, and you have to relearn how to walk — your physical therapist (also an amalgamated clay monster because you have seven of them) has a metronome to remind you that this is when you put one foot out in front of the other, this is how fast you should be going. You live in New York City, you remind him, so this is the pace that grandmothers or tourists walk, and you’ve wanted to push both in front of oncoming traffic a few times.

Hopefully other New Yorkers will be understanding, he says cluelessly.

You also have really bad double vision. Your neuro-optometrist says, This will all go away in two months. Or you’ll be like this forever. Honestly either option is possible.

A nurse tells you to get an eyepatch to make it easier to focus on one image. On paper, this sounds insanely cool because you have visions of yourself as a badass war reporter like Marie Colvin or a drunk pirate like Jack Sparrow. But you also have glasses, so the nurse just tapes the right side of your frames with medical tape and you look so much like a bullied fifth grader that you feel the urge to stuff yourself in a locker.

You can’t cut your nails yourself because you might have survived a car accident only to succumb to death by accidental nail cutter stabbing, seeing two toenails and misjudging which is the real one, so you ask your mom to cut your nails for you like a sad little toddler. She does such a poor job because she’s afraid of hurting you (you want your nails very short — if you’re not this close to bleeding then why even bother).

Sure, it’s humiliating, infantilizing, and pretty bleak, but all that doesn’t matter right now — you’re on the Oregon coast at sunset, bundled up in a warm sweater as you huddle along a sand dune with a Thermos of coffee, the icy waves crashing in, then going back out to sea. 

It’s perfectly normal to see death everywhere, so no, you don’t need to get your eyes checked.

A few months after the accident, you and your parents fly to Ohio, where you can continue your therapy at your uncle’s place. The Airbnb in Bend was getting expensive, and you don’t really have the cash to live there indefinitely. You’ve been on countless plane rides before, but the one from Oregon to Ohio is unique in that it almost kills you. 

Okay, you’re being overdramatic. After the accident, you think there must have been a mistake when you survived, that you cheated death and sooner or later God or Allah or Buddha or the grim reaper would come waving a pink slip saying, Whoops, my bad, there was an error in accounting and we should’ve taken you ages ago!

Death is a hovering specter you can’t shake. It’s in the promise of ominous things, like your Airbnb’s too-quiet location, beside a hill with no street lamps, that feels like the perfect backdrop for a serial killer’s next crime. But also in seemingly harmless ones, like crossing the street or your dad hitting the car brakes too abruptly or banging your arm in the shower, which has become a deadly place to you ever since your occupational therapists warned you that your balance issues could make you slip and crack your head open like an egg. 

During the turbulent plane ride to Ohio, you’re sure that the plane will crash. You used to love turbulence like a weirdo, delighting in its stomach-churning ebbs and flows. Now every sudden jolt, every bump and violent shift is a sign that the plane is plunging into the water, and you’re sure that it’ll happen in the next moment. No, the next one. But it’s okay, it’s just the universe balancing its assets and liabilities.

You read later that this is all a normal PTSD response, your body still on guard and constantly bracing itself to protect you. Over time, you develop a zen attitude toward death, ready to look it right in the face the next time you see it out of the corner of your eye.

It’s a rule of life and storytelling that once you hit rock bottom, things can only go up, so be sure not to miss the signs.

The first sign that you’re getting better is when you finish Kazuo Ishiguro’s Klara and the Sun. Do you remember it? Not entirely. The novel took you two months to read, and the protagonist is a robot so it reads like a sixth grader wrote it, but goddammit it’s the first book you finish.

Your vision gets better. You’ve exercised your eyes for months, following the movements of a ball on a string like an eager cat. (This sounds simple, but try doing it when you see two balls on two strings.) 

In Ohio, you start to walk a little bit faster. Maybe not New York City fast yet, but you outpace a 10-year-old and take it as a victory. 

But the real sign that you’re getting better is when the small town in Ohio starts to suffocate you. You’ve always joked that you have agoraphobia — the fear of wide, open spaces — but really, whenever you find yourself in a suburb with houses that have washers and dryers or yards or acres and acres of corn fields or a gigantic Walmart, you start to feel a gnawing helplessness in your chest, like an alien is about to rip itself out of you. 

It’s the height of summer now, the point in the pandemic when there’s finally a vaccine, and most people decide to move on and restart their lives. You start picking fights with your parents, and you’re deliriously happy the first time you’re able to think on your feet to defend yourself and volley some arguments back. (For months, you only sat there dumbly, your brain not coherent enough to form a counterargument.) 

New York, they say, is not the best place for a brain-damaged person; you still walk with a cane, and your parents have all these paranoid fantasies that someone will push you in front of a subway train because you’re so slow. Maybe, a friend suggests, we can get you, like, a cane sword? 

But there are other things too. Things you never expected, good things, like the brunch scene in Columbus, Ohio, which you claim is much better than New York’s. (You have a brain injury, so a second opinion is required.) You celebrate Mother’s Day with your mom in person for the first time in nearly a decade, and when your dad turns 60 you throw him a small party. You hadn’t been home for any of your family’s birthday dinners in years. 

These are signs that you don’t want to miss. So you hold them close to you and feel hopeful you might be okay after all, hoarding them the way your mom hoards old makeup bottles and used shopping bags. I never know when I might need all of this, okay? 

You don’t actually get a free pass for almost dying, so don’t think that life gets easier from now on.

It kind of sucks because you think life is a meritocracy or something. Not that almost dying has actual merit — it’s the “almost” part that kind of makes you seem like a failure. You almost made it to Hollywood. You almost finished your novel. You almost died.

When you finally return to New York, the air is chilly again and the wind has a menacing bite. But you feel invincible. You were turned inside out and unplugged without being properly shut down, but you lived, and there is nothing in this city that can possibly do any worse to you, not even its giant rats or ridiculous apartment rentals. 

But less than a year of transitioning back to work after disability leave, you get laid off. You never fully recover from the nerve pain and your lower back is constantly aggravated. You’re always in pain. You can’t run, not even after a 7 train that’s about to leave the platform. Your right hand also never completely recovers, so your handwriting looks like a very gifted six-year-old’s at best. Your balance is forever shot, so after one glass of wine, it takes you 50 times the effort to walk straight. And even your hormonal acne has come back in full force, for fuck’s sake. Your dermatologist warned you to cut back on dairy and sugar, and honestly, why did you survive in the first place if not for chocolate and cheesecake, or even better, a chocolate cheesecake? 

You can’t believe you still have to deal with this shit. Haven’t you paid your debt to society 10 times over? Doesn’t the world owe you some peace, to live out the rest of your life with cute puppies that never grow up and only shit rainbows? You had been prepared for an ending and had so accepted death that life itself was the surprise. 

Your friends all get married in the same year — some have babies, some lose them, others buy a house. They get new hair, new jobs. And you? You move into your first solo apartment. You travel across Europe on your own, and then later go home to Asia and travel more with friends and family. Your physical therapist is both supportive and horrified at the mangling of your body with all that intense walking and, at one point, an eight-hour motorbike ride that causes you so much pain that you feel you may be back at the scene of the accident. But hey, you rode a motorbike across the Vietnamese countryside.

You are so incandescently happy to be alive one moment, and miserable and alone and aimless the next. You no longer coast along the outskirts of life but deep within it, plunged headfirst without a life jacket. To be completely honest, sometimes you miss being excused from the business of living. Other times, you can’t imagine life any other way.

You’re trying not to compare everything to the one year you were barely alive, but you suspect it’ll be a long time before that happens. Until then, you’re cutting your own nails. Keeping up your streak in Duolingo. And not driving in the snow.

Anne Lagamayo is a documentary and podcast producer by day. By night, she is something else entirely. You can find her work at annelagamayo.com.

Editor: Cheri Lucas Rowlands
Copy-editor: Krista Stevens

This story was funded by our members. Join Longreads and help us to support more writers.

Dan Musgrave | Longreads | May 4, 2023 | 21 minutes (6,022 words)

I had been volunteering at the ape house for four months before I was invited to meet Nathan. It was December and I’d just spent my first Christmas with the apes. Everyone but the director and I had left for the day. The night sky spilled over the glass-ceilinged, central atrium we called the greenhouse. Despite the snow outside, the greenhouse air was warm and ample. Moving toward the padlocked cage door, I felt light, as if I was about to float up into that dotted black expanse above me, rather than enter a room I’d cleaned feces and orange peels out of hours earlier.

I juggled my keys and the offering I’d brought with me — a tub of yogurt, a couple of bananas, Gatorade, and some blankets. With the two padlocks removed, I entered, sat, and arranged the gifts in an arc around me. Even though I was planted firmly on the glazed concrete floor, I swayed.

In the adjacent room, watching everything I did through the glass portion of a mechanical sliding door, was Nathan. Five years old to my 21. He was stout, wide-shouldered, with thick muscled arms, but almost twiggy legs. Nathan was, simply put, a cool little dude. We studied one another as we waited for my supervisor to turn the key and remove the barrier between us. His eyes were as big and soft as three-quarter moons, always holding a question. Though, more often than not, that question was really a dare.

Sitting in the greenhouse, everything in the world was in alignment. It was right that Nathan would be the first ape I ever truly met. While the adult males still made crashing displays of warning at me, and the adult females mostly ignored me or found me to be a mildly useful, but mostly superfluous, component of the building, Nathan had always welcomed me warmly. I was a new playmate, willing to run back and forth along his enclosure in games of chase, over-eager to please.

A racking ka-chunk filled the greenhouse as the mechanical door separating us was activated. It rocked and then jerked to the side in its steel track. The doors had been created for use in prisons, originally, and they were always jamming on us. The third or fourth time we called a repairman out, he’d said we needed to take it easier on them — they hadn’t been designed to open so often.

My breath stilled. I saw Nathan behind the door, then I saw the night sky. Nothing in between. I was on my back like some upturned turtle, my legs still crossed but now pointed at the stars. He was a heat-seeking missile. The impressions of both his feet were on my chest; the last breath I’d taken in a Homo-centric world evicted from my lungs. When I levered my body upright, I saw him waiting, peering at me from a foot or so away, head cocked. The air that rushed back into me was sweeter, lighter, than what had been there before.

“Hi,” I said, grinning.

I guess I passed the test. He plopped himself in the bowl of my still-crossed legs, plucked the lid from the yogurt, and began to pour the thickness down his throat. He peeped contentedly and put his spare hand around the back of my neck. Where everything had been so fast that I couldn’t take it in seconds before, now time was suspended. He smelled so clean, like construction paper and newly fallen leaves. We sat there, me running my fingers through the hair of his back, he slurping yogurt. Eventually, he pulled the blankets into a corner to construct his night nest. The director told me that meant it was bedtime. I told Nathan goodnight and we parted for the evening. 

I’d initially applied to the ape house because I believed in their stated scientific mission: to communicate across the species boundary and illuminate the nonhuman and human mind. I had been one of those children at the zoo that try to make the right sound to get the animals to speak back. Now I was that kind of adult.

Not long after meeting and warming to the eight bonobos who were essentially my bosses, the science became much more personal. I was having trouble at college. My small rural campus felt like my cage. Though the school marketed itself as a home for outcasts looking for their place, I never felt entirely welcome there. I was shy and anxious to the level of needing therapy and medication (not receiving either), but I looked like a jock. When I did venture beyond my dorm room on weekends, I usually drank until I could approach and socialize with others (read: too much). 

In the ape house, amongst the bonobos, I found the refuge my alma mater had promised to be. There, nothing rested on my ability to wrench words from my throat in front of my peers. In fact, my trend toward quiet was an asset while my athleticism was less intimidating than it was an invitation to play. For the first month, I tentatively hoped that the apes would have me. But after that month, had the humans offered me a room in one of the unused enclosures, I would have abandoned my degree and moved in with relief.

In my first weeks there, I asked my supervisor for tips on how to interact with them. “Just treat them like you treat me,” she said. “Speak to them, not about them. Assume they’re listening and can understand. They are and they can. These are people in nonhuman bodies and they know it.” I could handle that. I was familiar with the fallacy that bodies accurately matched the selves they contained.

Likewise, it was comforting to be a part of a project that sought the person in the ape, to whatever degree it was present, rather than force the transformation. My research into the field showed that other ape language experiments had not been so accepting or accommodating. In the majority, the test subjects were taken from their mothers as infants and placed in human homes or labs. This was considered scientific. Rigorous. Rearing was the independent variable. To allow these subjects to remain with their birth families would be a confound.

While that December evening was my first time crossing the divide between Pan and Homo, Nathan had already been doing it for years. He was the third generation and fourth individual entrant into this ape language experiment. His upbringing was unusually casual for an experimental subject, and he spent nearly equal time with both his ape and human family. On a cultural spectrum from wild-caught bonobo (his grandmother and father), to human-reared language apes (his mother and brother), to human experimenter, Nathan sat exactly at the midpoint. He was the fulcrum upon which worlds balanced. The hope for him was that, under the direct tutelage of his mother, and with frequent but unstructured interactions with humans, he would show just how self-sustaining ape symbol use could be across generations. The avoidance of structure was the scientific methodology.

As poetic as I found it that Nathan was my point of first contact, he was simply the logical choice. He was small enough to handle — even if he was already stronger than me — and young enough that it was unlikely he’d attack should I misstep. Culturally, he was also optimally situated to understand my inexperience. He was an interpreter, an emissary. He was my bridge into the ape world.

I got no more training for being with Nathan than that first night. For every meeting thereafter, the only suggestion the director gave me was that I should always use the symbols — easily quantified, discrete images. One per word. There were nouns, verbs, and even references to abstract concepts like time and feelings. The director thought maybe Nathan would help me learn them faster.

It seemed, at the time, that the only complication in Nathan’s life was his big brother, Star, who was so perfect it was offensive. Star was irritatingly handsome, with a smile that smoothed over any and every slight. He spit on me daily but blew kisses to all the female staff. Like many beautiful people, he was given credit for being smarter than he actually was and better behaved than he ever cared to be. Star’s shadow was long and hard to escape. So, if Star showed an interest or proclivity for anything, Nathan either dismissed the activity outright or tried to do it harder/faster/better/stronger than anyone had ever done it before. The symbols were one of these things.

Nathan used the symbols like my father uses text messages, infrequently, out of the blue, and with suspicious competency. I often caught Nathan in the corner of a room, his back to the door, symbol board in his lap. He’d be touching it, talking to himself. Thinking out loud, as it were. Other times, he’d saddle up before one of the touch-screen computer stations containing digital versions of the symbol board and rattle off a string of 20 or 30 symbols so fast the computer got bogged down in its processing and lagged in displaying them. I suspected he always meant exactly what he said, though I had no way of scientifically confirming this.

We ended up with a routine. I pretended that we were part of the experiment, doing important research, and he pretended not to understand what I was saying. A normal conversation between us using the symbols would look something like this:

Me: NATHAN YOU WANT FOOD, QUESTION?

Nathan somersaults into my lap, right over the symbol board.

Me (after extracting the board from under him): WANT FOOD, QUESTION?

Nathan pushes the board away. Hops up and runs away after biting me on my forearm. Playfully, but not without pain.

Me: I GET APPLES, QUESTION? GET CELERY, QUESTION? GET MILK, QUESTION? 

Nathan approaches, holds my gaze from under his robust brow. I put the symbol board on the floor between us. He gestures, finger crooked, knuckle between his teeth. [Bite.]

Me: “Nathan, can you use the keyboard please?” 

Nathan, hand snapping out: CHASE.

He springs away at full speed, a single fart helping propel him away down the hallway. 

Me, following: “Okay, but no fair using rocket boosters.”

I wasn’t as diligent with the keyboard as I could have been, in part because I never had difficulty simply talking to him. In terms of receptive, rather than productive, competence, Nathan could handle it all. The rub was that he only listened when he felt like it. I often talked to him as I would any other person, except I was more honest and open. I started, genuinely, to consider Nathan one of my best friends.

He helped me work with the other apes, too. I would lay out maneuvers for shifting the apes between rooms and he would facilitate. He’d lead his family, including his grandmother, Worry, and his half-brother, Momo, through the door I’d indicated, then slip back through at the last moment, separating them in the new room while he and I got space to interact. 

Me: “Okay, here’s the plan. Nathan, I want Worry and Momo to go to the greenhouse, but I want you to stay here so we can see each other and tickle and chase. Can you help me get them to move and you can stay here?”

Nathan peeps excitedly, and Worry and Momo echo him.

Me: “They will have really good blueberries and lettuce and Gatorade in the greenhouse. We can have some surprises over here. Ready to help me move them? Okay, here we go.”

Nathan sits by the door to the greenhouse, enthusiastic. He peeps to get the others interested. I operate the door and the others follow him into the transfer space between rooms. I start to close the door. At the last moment, Nathan slides through and sits alone in the room.

Me: “Nathan you did it. Great work, man.”

Nathan runs to the mesh for a tummy tickle.

This went both ways, as the other apes used his skills, too. It was hell on data collection. I can’t even count the number of times he ruined an experimental session because the non-language bonobos would drag him to the computer by the hand and wait while he performed their sets. He’d tap at the screen while they sat at the reward dispenser eating fruit chunk after fruit chunk produced for his correct answers.

One afternoon, after we had become full partners in crime, Nathan and I lounged in a pocket of space between the roof of the walk-in fridge and the kitchen ceiling. Sunlight floated lazily through the kitchen windows, warming the stainless steel of the countertops and cabinets, making the room toasty and our eyelids heavy. It was late spring, months since we’d first met, though it felt longer. Something about being with the apes made time less distinct.

When it was me and Nathan together, I could forget I was an employee and Nathan essentially my work. Our relationship had grown through months of one-on-one encounters. With each visit, we gained new privileges until there was hardly an inch of the building not available to us, so long as it wasn’t occupied. It could just be me and my friend. He, a boy, and me, his cool but slightly irresponsible guardian. Gone were my problems at college. Gone were the impenetrable complexities of human relationships. My anxiety around humans was inversely proportional to my comfort in the cage with the bonobos. Apes made so much more sense to me, Nathan most of all. It eventually got to the point where I stopped going to school, seven credits short of a degree, to work with the apes full-time.

Between us in our nest atop the fridge was a pile of empty Diet Coke bottles, Go-GURT tubes, and half a bag of plump, red grapes. There were plenty of vegetables in the fridge under us, but they held little appeal. When Nathan and I went to the kitchen, we were raiders. We descended like locusts and went straight for the good stuff.

The kitchen was our favorite place to go. It held not just food, but choice. There, Nathan could eat whatever he wanted, not what was brought to him by a caretaker. However, the kitchen was, ultimately, a human place, and as a result, I wasn’t able to fully relax. There were all these reminders of how human spaces were not made to accommodate us. Blenders with stainless steel blades, kitchen knives, toxic cleaning agents, gas stove burners. Dangers everywhere.

Nathan dropped the last Diet Coke bottle between us and burped. I retrieved a paper board with the symbols on it. “Nathan,” I asked, pointing to symbols to accompany my words.

WANT MORE COKE? WANT APPLE? 

He pushed the board away, then pulled me in for a hug and tickle. If anything, Nathan taught me how impossible the science of ape language was to perform. His whole body was an instrument of expression. He manipulated the space between us like prose, varying the pressure of his teeth on my skin to change the tone of a message, his every touch held its own grammar as questions and statements. Nathan didn’t perform language in a way that would be easy to parse and study, he embodied it. He performed it in the way of a dancer. He lived it.

Nathan preferred gestures. Words filled him up and he had to expel their captive energy through his limbs in a way the symbols couldn’t facilitate. Crooked index finger between his teeth: Bite me. Point at keys hanging from my belt loop on a carabiner: [Keys/Open]. Crooked middle finger twisting at a door: [Open/Unlock]. Hand raised to his neck, motioning as if to let steam out of an Oxford shirt: [Collar].

If he gestured for a collar, I’d ask, “You want to go outside?” Or “You want to go to the kitchen?” He would vocalize in response, then sit with his chin raised to expedite the process. I didn’t really like the collar, but whenever I could, I looped the thick nylon strap around his neck and locked the full-sized padlock that secured it. The heavy pendant hung between the ends of his collarbones. He inspected it with his fingers, adjusting to its heft. The thing was incongruous with this person, this child. 

He asked for it every day I saw him. Often repeatedly. Switching between that gesture and the one asking for my keys. He wanted, more than just about anything else, to traverse the boundaries between ape and human space. For every step I took into his world, he was equally desperate — more so, even — to take one into mine. Every time I successfully begged, cajoled, and (sometimes) argued with humans for the opportunity to enter his world, he would greet me by asking for me to take him back to where I’d come from. Get me out of this place, he seemed to say.

So, I traded my discomfort with the collar for the chance to make him happy. He traded the cage he lived in for the one he wore around his neck. The easiest days were the ones when I didn’t have to say “no” to him. When he asked for keys or a collar and I could say “Of course” and we would go gorge ourselves and loiter on top of the walk-in fridge. 

I lived for those days of forgetting. The times when we found the right balance between the demands of our worlds and our own desires, but I was lucky if there was enough staff to accommodate us having half the building once every few weeks or so.

Though Nathan had been raised to be both bonobo and human, his was a secondary type of personhood. Not like that of a human child. He could enter the kitchen, but only on a leash. He was taught, but could not go to school. He had the language to ask to go outside, but he could never venture beyond the walls of the facility. I kept trying to find ways to make up for that disconnect, but, as a frustratingly junior member of staff, I couldn’t.

One day we lazed on top of the fridge until Nathan stirred and descended. My thoughts came slow in the sun-warmed room. I thought he wanted a different kind of snack until he moved toward the sink. His head disappeared as he ducked under with his leash dragging behind him.

“Nathan, c’mon man,” I said. “Nothing good down there.”

I scrambled down, imagining a montage of him ingesting jugs of cleaning solvents or blinding his eyes with toxic sprays. I approached but before I could reach him, Nathan hung from the sink lip, reared back, and kicked the garbage disposal with all his considerable muscle. He planted several rocking blows to it before I got him turned around. 

The spell he cast that made me forget the human world dissipated with the thuds of his feet against metal. I was a human and, worse, an employee. He was an ape then. It hurt to be reminded of that.

I didn’t want to get in trouble. I couldn’t afford to replace the garbage disposal. Worse, I couldn’t afford to have my time with Nathan revoked or reduced to less than it already was. But even more than that, I wanted to prove that we had something. That our connection was real and tangible. I knew he was special, but I wanted us to be special too.

I pulled him away from the sink, my ears hot. He’d never been so blatantly destructive around me before. 

“What’s wrong with you?” I used the voice I give to my dogs when they misbehave. “No!”

Nathan didn’t meet my eyes. He squirmed away only to plant another rocking blow on the disposal. I pulled him back into position with firm hands on his shoulders.

“No, Nathan. No! That’s bad.” I was near to shouting.

Nathan’s eyes were hard at the corners. He tested my hold once more, paused, then opened his mouth and screamed. He wailed long strings of ear-splitting EEEs. The whole ape house heard him. They barked, sharp, in response. He screamed so hard and so much that within minutes all his skin had broken out in half-dollar-sized hives. I unhanded him and he left my side to go sulk in a corner, screaming all the while.

The director, who’d heard the commotion, joined us after a few minutes. Nathan sprang into her arms and hugged her close, looking at me the whole time. Using his proximity to her and distance from me to express his displeasure. She soothed him and I explained the situation. Before she returned him to his ape family with a dose of liquid grape children’s Benadryl in him, I apologized. I gave him some M&M’s and a special juice box and, after a pause, he offered his back for a tickle. He would accept my offering, but he wanted me to be sorry for longer.

“Disagreements,” the director said after returning him, “are part of having language.”

The hives were no surprise to her. Nathan often got so worked up that his body rebelled. As if his emotions, same as his words, were too strong for their little container and pushed against his skin to escape.

They were the main reason why we didn’t notice when he got actually sick.

The study of ape language is a field of broken promises. Its history is littered with the allegedly well-meaning intentions of seemingly caring people and the tragic, too early passings of their charges. Their failures are made all the more devastating in that, despite what they call the apes — subjects, participants, entrants — they are the failures of parents toward their children.

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Ape language research, at its heart, seeks to investigate the age-old question of nature versus nurture. Since raising human infants in a context removed from all human influence is ethically impossible, they performed the inverse: raising apes in entirely human environments. That has historically not met the same ethical barriers, despite infants being involved in each case.

Take Gua, adopted by a pair of psychologists, the Kelloggs, who had recently given birth to their first child, Donald. The Kelloggs stressed that for any co-rearing experiment to work, the ape must be treated as human in all regards, to avoid bias. As such, Gua lived in the Kelloggs’ house, ate at the table, and generally did everything with Donald. They were inseparable, like twins, and they developed at almost identical rates in everything but their speech. 

Winthrop Kellogg’s original hypothesis, that Gua would develop aspects of human behavior, proved true. What he did not anticipate, however, was that this cultural blending would be a two-way exchange; the spectrum between Pan and Homo traversed in both directions. While Gua grew more human, Donald also took on some of Gua’s apeness, such as extensive biting. The two children met in the middle, the primary contributor to the end of the experiment.

In each ape language study, there is one overriding and unspoken promise — we will give you a new family if you become sufficiently like us (but not if our children become like you). Unlike Gua and others, Nathan kept his ape family. Still, the promise of his life was the same, if the terms slightly altered. It all boiled down to this: We will make you one of us.

No study has yet been able to make good on that promise. No matter what the shape, be it a collar, a mesh enclosure, or a house, there is always a cage around the apes involved. They are never truly welcomed into human society. The humans, meanwhile, get to go home at the end of the day. 

Of the approximately 100 years of other ape language studies, hardly any of the apes had Nathan’s freedom. These apes were almost all taken from their mothers as infants, some as young as 2 days old, and placed in human homes or labs. Nearly all lived short, tragic lives compared to the potential 60-70 years available to them naturally. As if a stark contrast between the mental and physical self invariably tempts tragedy. Kellogg’s Gua was returned to a research center after nine months in their home (pneumonia, 3); Ladygina-Kohts’ Joni ate paint from the walls of her home (lead poisoning, 3); Hayes’ Viki fell sick during the study period (viral meningitis, 7); Temerlin’s Lucy was released back into the wild after living in a human home in Oklahoma for years (suspected poaching, 23); and Nim Chimpsky was “retired” to a research lab, which sold him into biomedical research, from which he was rescued by an animal sanctuary to live as their sole chimpanzee (heart attack, 26). So many either didn’t survive their studies or barely did. The handful of language apes, like Washoe, Koko, and Kanzi who have lived into and beyond their third decade are rare exceptions.

Several months after the garbage disposal disagreement, factors outside our control interrupted our time together. In the human half of the building, new leadership took over, stiffening the rules about contact with apes. Months passed. Then, just as we were about to renew our one-on-ones, Nathan got sick. I saw him daily during this time but it was always through the mesh of the cage. I pushed so far through it to touch and tickle him that it hurt the web of skin between my fingers.

It came out of nowhere. One day his face just swelled up. His eyes shrank to crescents between his puffy brow and cheeks. No one had any answers for it, not even the vet. Every morning I came in, Nathan looked like he had been in a boxing match the night before. We gave him Benadryl and Claritin over and over. It made him groggy, but it didn’t seem to help his swelling. Nothing seemed to help. We eliminated potential allergens. Changed cleaning solutions, avoided wheat gluten, and banned food with certain dyes. All to no effect.

As the sickness swept through him, he maintained a front of normalcy. When he chose to talk using symbols, it still came out in torrents. When he wanted to chase, he ran as fast as he could, even if the run was more of a tumble and the game didn’t last as long as usual. The vet, whose practice focused primarily on Iowa farm animals, visited often. She did her best, but Nathan was a boy, not a horse.

It didn’t go away. I asked that he see a different doctor, a human one. But in this, he was not human enough. There were ape-specific risks of a more thorough workup and, it was assumed, they outweighed the benefits given his symptoms. A full workup would require sedation and transportation and more. Nathan’s father had died two years earlier from complications with anesthesia for an elective procedure and his loss was still fresh in everyone’s heart. 

Over the course of half a year, Nathan’s swelling receded as mysteriously as it had arisen. By the time spring rolled around, he was almost normal, though his hair was a little wirier and his arms had lost some of their beef. His eyes also drooped at the outside, making him look eternally tired. But he was nearly his old self, if more subdued.

By May, with the fields outside bursting with purple, orange, and yellow wildflowers, I finally got the supervisor’s approval to go in again with Nathan. I’d been requesting it for months. Just after I got the green light, however, Nathan stopped eating and our reunion was put on hold. It didn’t matter the meal, he took a couple of bites and set it aside. Then his breathing became labored. He wheezed and coughed so loud I could hear it throughout the building. His energy gone, he spent most of his time napping. I knew I had to see him, so I did.

Nathan was dozing when I entered his room for the first time in over a year. It was late morning. I didn’t ask permission, I simply told the other caretakers that I would need that half of the building.

“Hi, Nathan,” I said as I entered. He was lying on a pile of blankets. He didn’t move at the sound of the door, but as I spoke, he lifted himself and approached. The slump of his shoulders told me just how uncomfortable he was. His swagger was gone. I didn’t think anything could take the strut out of his walk. Now, he was deflated. He hadn’t eaten more than a couple of bites in days.

And yet, he didn’t miss a beat. He hugged me about the legs, slapped my thighs, and sprung away awkwardly. Just like we normally greeted one another, only in slow motion. Now his sprint was more of a lope. I shuffled so I didn’t overtake him. We did one round of this before he led me back to his bed, laid down, and asked me to tickle him. As my fingers probed his ribs, he grunted a laugh that became wheezing and quickly turned into a racking cough. It passed, and he looked at me with his mouth hanging slightly agape as if all the strength required to close it was concentrated at the corners of his wincing eyes. I began to tickle him again, this time softly, but he brushed my hands away.

I shouldn’t have let so much time go by, I thought as we sat there, my back to one wall and Nathan inert across my thighs. It used to take hours before he’d slow down enough that we could relax like this. Today it took barely a minute.

My fingers tentatively massaged him. They met bone much easier than before. The curving mounds of his muscles were reduced, his skin slack. During the worst of his sickness, when the swelling and itching were at their highest, he’d pulled most of his arm hair out. The baldness highlighted his new angularity. I ran my fingers over his bare forehead. His sideburns were plucked clean and what hair was left was brittle stubble, bending and snapping like sun-bleached grass.

Someone brought a scale to get Nathan’s weight for the vet. He didn’t want to move and threatened to bite me when I suggested it. I waited a minute for him to doze off again, then picked him up and carried him to the scale. He’d lost over 20 pounds in under three months.

We spent the remainder of the day resting. With me running my hand over his skin, and him in a near-constant adjustment of his position. Intermittently, I’d leave to get him a popsicle or some juice. I took one of his bare feet in my hand and nibbled on his toes. He huffed one laugh as if to humor me, but nothing more. I brought him M&M’s, but these were too hard for him to eat and he set them aside.

That night, I entered his cage with fresh blankets and a bowl of yogurt, an echo of our first meeting. He tried a bit of yogurt, then put the bowl down next to his bed. I’d been asked to get a blood oxygen reading for the vet with a clip that went on the end of Nathan’s finger. I moved to his side while he slipped in and out of an uneasy sleep and took his hand in mine. A coworker threaded the sensor through the mesh. Before I could clamp the device on his index finger, he woke, lunging and snapping at me. He didn’t get me, but the anger in his movements stung as much as a bite would have. 

I felt like I was betraying him, putting human obligations above his very clear refusal. He let me hold his hand again. This time I just held it. When he seemed to be fully asleep, I tried again. Once it got a reading, I unclamped it quickly, whispered good night, and slunk out of his room.

Eight hours later, he was carried out of the building on a blanket, finally breaking free of its walls, to get a full medical workup. During the night he had briefly gone into respiratory arrest. The risks of getting him checked out were now outweighed by the seriousness of his condition. They carried him by me, sleeping, but with his hands curled and ready, thumbs against the ends of his drawn index and middle fingers. I saw the potential in them. They were poised as if ready to ask for his Collar or my Keys at the very instant he woke.

In the years since I have often wondered what we accomplished in the ape house. What exactly was it that I was a part of? Did those in charge really believe all that they were saying? I thought we were doing it better, in knowing no one ever needed to tear infant apes from their mothers to learn about the limits of language. The other ape language studies had got the question wrong, I thought. They all asked whether an ape could talk if we made them sufficiently in our image. I thought we were asking if we could understand each other as equals. The true test not being in the apes’ ability to speak but in our capacity to listen.

I thought we were different. Better. But, we were not, our bonobos no more equal than the charges of any other study. Our cages and facilities were simply nicer; our methods softer.

So much of my understanding of language, and its limits, came from Nathan. His silences especially. Language is messy and incomplete and variable and profound and decidedly unscientific. There is no single, controllable, independent variable. After all, there are so many things that are beyond the ability of words to express. So much meaning outside that which is merely spoken.  

For example: There was no symbol for CANCER on the symbol keyboard. No one had ever needed to say LYMPHOMA. The lexicon was limited, but HURT was there, and I had never once seen Nathan use it. It wasn’t that he didn’t understand, it was that he would never admit such a thing. He had too big a chip on his shoulder.

For example: The way my coworker’s voice caught on the phone, starting several utterances until “He didn’t make it” could escape, and I had already known what he had to tell me. And the way I made the same stutter stop code of not-quite-shock and not-yet-loss before managing “I’m on my way” in response,  and he had already known that as well.

For example: How the people I passed as I walked through the ape house, hood over my head, made soft, unintelligible noises at me. Emitting contributions to the pall over the building. I kept moving, unsure of whether a response was expected. Unable to make one if it was. I just continued walking toward the van that had taken him to the hospital and back, parked at the other end of the facility.

For example: In the van — the gray — the interior gray — sky gray — world gray — the cold of his hand — he — splayed — the coolness of his forehead — kissing the stubble of his forehead — kissing and muttering — same three syllables — waiting for warmth to return.

For example: The stillness of the building as he was carried in and laid before the glass of the greenhouse where his family waited, pressed against the window, shoulders one against another, crowding together. The silence as deep and absolute as the understanding in his mother’s eyes.

Dan Musgrave was raised by animals in rural Kansas. He is a writer and photographer with a particular interest in the intersections of the human and animal world. For nearly seven years, he did linguistic, cognitive, and behavioral research with captive bonobos while they trained him in the art of being a better person.

Editor: Carolyn Wells

Copy editor: Cheri Lucas Rowlands

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Susannah Felts | Longreads | April 27, 2023 | 16 minutes (4,248 words)

1.

On a November night in 2018,  I went to a show at the Ryman Auditorium in Nashville, the kind of show that fans like me enjoy telling other fans they were there for, years after the fact. Three songwriters in their 20s — Lucy Dacus, Phoebe Bridgers, and Julien Baker — performed on one bill. It was the first date of their tour together, and the first time any of them had played that historic venue; it was also the debut of a collab — a girl group — that they’d come to call, with clever irony, boygenius. I like to think the three women remember that night as some kind of watershed; after all, who wouldn’t file their first Ryman gig away with reverence? 

I was there, by myself, a little thunderstruck on a pew in the balcony stage right, in my solitude. I can’t quite own this night as an origin story of my own late-coming catapult to creative heights, art begetting art, Fuck yeah! But I did feel brighter inside that night — my own heart, own mind, reflected in the songs I heard performed. Such a long, strange time it’d been, full of becoming-a-mother, since I’d gone to a show alone. I was 45 and, for the first time in a long time, face to face again with my old self — a girl who went to rock shows alone and loved it. 

Yet when I thought about the show, and how it made me think about my own attempts at art, there lurked the old sidekick of negative comparison, the voice of deeply received ideas about professional trajectory and age: What were you doing in your 20s? You sure weren’t followed by fans, touring the world, selling art made from your sadness. (Never mind that I don’t play music. Art and commerce is art and commerce.) 

Too late, too late, the haint muttered. 

Three years later, I’m sitting across from my daughter at a coffee shop. I look up from  work emails to see her with her earbuds in, squinting at her laptop. I ask her what she’s up to. 

“Listening to music, and researching the music I’m listening to.” I ask her what she’s listening to, and she speaks in a rush. “Phoebe Bridgers. I’m listening to Punisher all the way through because I’ve actually never done that although I know all the songs. I have an idea. I’ll tell you about it later. This would be a good day for a walk. Look outside.”

I follow her gaze. The sky is a soft white-gray, the kind of sky she and I both like, not too much heat. We prefer it cloudy. Too much bright sunlight hurts her green eyes, while for me it can trigger despair for the burning world she’ll inherit. She’s right, it’s a good day for a walk. We toss our latte cups and head out. 

She and I talk about all kinds of things on our walks; often, we talk about music. She writes songs, plays guitar and piano. Has, at 13, a journal full of songs. Wants to start a band, says her favorite instrument is her voice. I enjoy the soft anticipation of what she might create next and how she will create differently, year to year, as she grows. What and who will influence her next? Who will she leave behind, pick up, come back to? Who and what will stay with her the rest of her life? We amble around the neighborhood, and she asks for permission to paint Phoebe Bridgers’ lyrics on her bedroom door. I think about it for a minute, say sure. 

Then I remind her that I played “Motion Sickness” for her back in ’18. Shortly after I went to that show at the Ryman. I remember cueing up Stranger in the Alps in the car and saying, Check this out, I think you might like it. Her prompt rebuttal: She was only 10 back then. And I know she’s won this one. It’s true she had to find her own way, just as I did so many times. Neil Young, say. His records lined up in my parents’ cabinet, played on their turntable on Sunday mornings, decades before I went to college and met a guy who turned me on to Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere. 

So yeah, I won’t harp on being first to the Phoebe party. But just a playful reminder or two seems within my rights as a Cool Mom — which is a thing some friends have called me on occasion, and while it’s a thing I don’t exactly feel (I mean, is there a person on earth who has actually felt cool?), that hasn’t stopped me from wagging this status in front of my kid from time to time. Which is itself a very uncool thing to do, and makes me feel evermore like Just Plain Mom, aggressively so. Not that I mind. It’s a role I can step into when inside, on balance, I don’t feel very Momish at all.

Much of the time, I feel like a girl. A curious girl of 48 who, today, is walking the neighborhood streets with a girl of 13, and listening to what this girl has to say. She happens to be my kid, this person I made, a living being that gave my life a whole new significance. She will grow up and leave me and yet never leave me; she will be mine forever, a being I shaped. 

2.

I wore headphones everywhere I went. I was in my 20s and constantly soundtracked my life. Long before I met my husband, before we became a family, going to shows and listening to music was what I did for fun more than anything else, the way some people devour movies or sports. It was hard for me to get close to people back then, which was maybe a function of the anxiety I didn’t know how to name. I didn’t have a lot of girlfriends, and the ones I had didn’t love the bands I loved. Was that why I had so few? The music, the art that spoke to me, was too important. And that art, often, made feeling alienated seem like a calling, a stance I could happily take. The pilot light of my identity, not a problem to be solved. So I went to shows by myself, alone in a crowd of people feeding off the same vibes from the players onstage. 

Where was I? The Empty Bottle. The Cat’s Cradle. The Masquerade. The Mercy Lounge. The Local 506. Some of these clubs no longer exist. It was Chicago’s Lounge Ax, RIP, where I saw Cat Power on her Moon Pix tour, which to me will always feel like a form of strange currency, but if you don’t know or care who Cat Power is or what Lounge Ax was, what matters is that it was just me and the music in a tight crowd, standing room only, me with my coat folded over my arm and a beer in my hand, watching Chan Marshall at the piano, backed by the guys from the Dirty Three on violin and guitar and drums. Those songs were the apex of mood and shadow and longing, each instrument wandering, searching in the dark, doing their own thing and somehow staying in reach of each other. The songs felt loose, improvised, messy, perfect. Marshall’s voice so smoky and resolute, occasionally desperate. I went home and listened to “Metal Heart” again and again while outside the window, above my street, the El trundled past on the Blue Line, throwing sparks from the tracks. 

So many shows. I don’t have many memories of the countless bands I watched perform. Lately I’ve been wondering if I was happy going to all those shows alone, or if I’d just done a bang-up job of convincing myself that I was. But I never felt lonely, and to this day I think of my taste for solitude as a strength. Did I not understand, back then, the forms that loneliness can take? You can convince yourself of so much; it is a superpower most of us share. 

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The shows have mostly drifted away, leaving not a whole lot washed up. I don’t have a killer T-shirt collection or a box of ticket stubs. There were hardly ever tickets for the kind of shows I went to back then, just a stamp or a black mark Sharpied on your hand, like the big black X the door guy drew on both of my daughter’s hands, marking her underage, when I took her to see Lucy Dacus on tour for Home Video. It made me happy to see a club still doing that — marking hands with Xs that linger the next day and the next. 

I’d taken T to a few shows before, but it was her first time in a bona fide rock club, the kind of place that’s standing room only, and she looked around with fresh eyes, admiring the way the mirror balls cast dreamy dots over everything, the dim room crisscrossed by beams of purple light. I wondered if she would leave at the end of the night more fiercely determined to make music. 

I bought a Coke for her and a beer for me and asked the bartender to snap our picture. We found a space in the growing crowd and, while we waited for Dacus to come out, watched images from her childhood flash on a screen above the stage. The images formed a narrative loop we watched five or six times. Singer as baby, as toddler, as singing and dancing kid. Family members and friends with her here and there. The singer as young adult in a yellow beanie, beside a van. The singer with a guitar, on stage. 

When the singer appeared in the flesh at last, in a blue off-the-shoulder gown, she began the show with the track “First Time,” just as T predicted she would. In that song and others from the album, she looks back with preternaturally measured sight at the formative experiences of youth, lifted up to us in a serene alto. 

The songs she shared that night, and on her records, channel adolescence in a way that makes them accessible, if meaningful in different ways, to listeners across the generational spectrum — say, a Gen X mom and her Gen Z kid. Dacus, single and in her 20s, seems as preoccupied with the bewildering effects of the passage of time as I am in the throes of middle-age parenting. In her songs she meets the people of her present and the ghosts of her past with steel draped in silk, a red lip, and a metal riff. She gives teenage experience prominence in a way that feels fresh, never stooping to mock or dismiss or caricature. She observes, with tenderness and acceptance, the mistakes and fumbles of young people learning how to be in the world.

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I particularly love the song “Going Going Gone,” where we meet a boy named Daniel, the narrator’s high school crush. They sit together on a bench, “watching the day end hand in hand”; ten years later he’s “grabbing asses, spilling beers.” Then Dacus comes in for the killer. Ten years more and he’ll have a daughter; “she’ll grow up and he can’t stop her.”  

She’ll grow up and he can’t stop her. My breath catches when I hear that line. Sometimes my eyes well up. I want to high-five Dacus for this genius turn, for her ability to go in one verse from Daniel’s youthful swagger and misdeeds to Daniel’s helplessness in the face of what parenthood will do to a person. I want to high-five her most of all for recognizing Daniel’s imaginary daughter as the free, empowered one, the one who can’t be stopped. 

Until, perhaps, she has a daughter of her own? In some ways, Dacus sights a specifically father-daughter relationship, or even a male-female relationship born of the patriarchy: the stinging vulnerability that comes with not being able to control a woman, maybe one who is your flesh and blood. In another way, it’s any parent’s fate. 

T and I have been listening to these songs over and over, and other ones. Young women artists, mostly. Lorde’s Solar Power has gotten a workout, and while I’ll never be the Swiftie T is, folklore and evermore easily won my affection. After we watched Miss Americana I found a new hero in Taylor, felt a whole new surge of rage for the way smart, ambitious young women have long gotten the shaft — been diminished, declawed, branded as bitches if they don’t act the part of nice girls. 

Then there’s Phoebe, my daughter’s other main songwriter crush of 2021. Her weary, wink-wink humor suits me, too. The narrator of “Kyoto,” on tour far from home, thinks of her estranged dad and half-forgives him for being — to borrow a phrase from Dacus — a dumpster dad. But she’s also thinking about other dudes who’ve let her down. She sees the destructive behavior of the men in her life and raises it with an upbeat, poppy melody that is the very sound of her growing up and chasing her dreams despite it all. “I want to kill you / if you don’t beat me to it,” she sings — a painfully familiar feeling for anyone who’s fallen in with a certain breed of sad, self-destructive young men. But it’s not all about the breakups and the bad behavior for her, either. Dacus and Bridgers both sing of the sanctity of their inner selves, about protecting what’s theirs and theirs alone. Lorde, too, refuses to pick up the phone if it’s the label, would rather lose herself in nature as long as she needs to. 

The young women T and I fill our ears with these days are also willing to express doubt and indecision, a blankness, a numbness, that is often the body’s response to a world that feels overwhelming, a world that asks too much and offers too much and too little at the same time. I can hardly feel anything I hardly feel anything at all, Bridgers sings in “Motion Sickness,” off 2017’s Stranger in the Alps. In a song on Punisher, she writes, I feel something when I see you now, suggesting a passage into a healthier relationship. Dacus ends several songs on Home Video in a lilt that suggests a non-ending, as if the song could go on but she’s unsure whether to let it or not, but is comfortable enough in that unsureness — it is right for the terrain the lyrics mine. The future is a benevolent black hole are the last words of “Cartwheel.” There’s Dacus’ low-key optimism nudging up against an absolute lack of faith in anything but the truth that there’s so much we cannot know, and that bad things are going to keep happening, but maybe-just-maybe we’ll be all right. 

Maybe it’s not strange at all that my 13-year-old and I are listening to the same artists, having the same, or at least similar, emotional responses. But I did not experience anything like this with my mother; nor did I know how to play guitar or to think of myself, possibly, as a singer, too. And the songs themselves seem a far, far cry from the ones on the airwaves and CDs of my youth, which were largely about wanting someone romantically, or about despairing that they didn’t want you back, or about an angry aversion to being wanted at all. Or else they got super abstract and weird. Or they took on the world with an air of disdain and disaffected irony. In the ’80s and ’90s, if young women were singing about not being sure of anything, I didn’t hear their words over and over and over in my ears, I didn’t write their words on my bedroom door. I was not imagining a future for myself onstage. I was deeply attracted to a few female artists for their dark energy, their moody ferocity — PJ Harvey singing “You’re not rid of me,” Kirstin Hersh singing “I hate my way,” Courtney Love singing “I made my bed I’ll die in it” — but I couldn’t see myself clearly in them or their words; even when angry or sad, they bore a certainty, a fuck-all confidence I did not possess. I don’t recall them singing anything that sounded like I don’t know or I don’t know what I feel or I feel nothing because I’m scared to let myself feel at all.

The world may be on fire in so many ways. And I may shudder to imagine the future T will navigate as she grows up. But right this minute I’ll take what I can get, which is that we’re living in a golden age of young women speaking their truths through song. Pop stars being badasses, as ever, but expressing doubt, and doing it without the flagellating self-destruction that might have come with an early iteration. They are unafraid, well-versed in looking boldly at the men around them, not only as objects of attraction or the cause of personal pain. They stare back, determined to control or reframe the narrative. And they’re funny. I swear I’m not angry / that’s just my face, Bridgers sings, which I suppose sounds as sweet to a 13-year-old of the present as it does to a girl of the ’80s and ’90s who was constantly told by men to smile. Every time I hear her sing that, I actually want to smile. 

A benevolent black hole — has there ever been a better phrase to capture the anxiety felt by a young person who nevertheless knows she is loved? I recently asked T what she thought Dacus meant by that phrase. “The future will bring good things,” she said in response, “but it’s going to suck you up without your permission.” 

3.

Another coffee shop afternoon, more chai lattes and work emails and headphones. I’m observing T again. I am scared — of feeling like she’s everything, of losing myself in her, and of losing her, of not holding her close enough. Women like me, who feel the art monsters forever kicking in their bellies, we’re always trying so hard not to let this happen, not to lose ourselves in our children. It is (invisible) work to find the balance. And it is work, for me, to not dwell on what I haven’t done, to lose what time I have left in regret over time squandered. Why wasn’t I making more art back then, in all the solitude of my 20s, not just going to shows? Why didn’t the urge burn more brightly? Why do the flames leap when I am otherwise committed, trying to savor each moment of my constantly evolving relationship with my child? 

She looks up at me. “What?”

“What?”

“You’re looking at me.”

“And?”

She is looking into her phone again. The camera, this time. “I have the best eyebrows,” she says. “Look at them.”

The inner strength with which she navigates our bewildering world — is it real? Will it persist? “I feel like I’m the best version of myself right now,” she tells me one night as we’re sitting at the dinner table, candles lit; me with my journal, her finishing her math homework. The confidence she presents often startles me, and even though I know what she shows is never the whole picture, I allow myself to swell with wonder. There might be a lesson for me here. She gets frustrated when I’m self-critical, and I try hard not to be, although sometimes I give into the urge, just to see how she’ll react. 

This move feels, in fact, like a reckless teenage impulse: to do the thing you know will set someone off. The girl I was, alive and kicking. And rocking out. I never stopped. I don’t know what to make of the fact that I can hear a verse or a line and think, Yes! Yes that’s so sharp, that’s the exquisite truth, and later T will quote that same verse to me as an example of a lyric that is hitting her just right. It may simply be that I am perpetually a girl, but also that girls possess more wisdom than anyone wants to give them credit for. 

One morning on the way to school, T points to her mask and said, We’ll be wearing these forever. I say no and she says yes. We talk about climate-change anxiety. It’s a totally normal mental state for Gen Z kids like her, she said, matter-of-factly. I think about the Phoebe Bridgers concert I’d taken her to just a few weeks earlier. Music festival Bonnaroo, where Bridgers had been scheduled to perform, was dealt a blow by Hurricane Ida’s downpour — the festival site badly flooded — and Bridgers, along with two other ’Roo artists, ended up playing a venue in town instead. I snapped up two tickets as soon as I heard. In other words, Bonnaroo’s climate-change-fueled loss was our gain. 

Will that concert go down as a highlight of T’s youth, of her life in music — or is it me who will harbor the most acute memories? I wonder what details will stick for her, many years from now. Will she remember that Bridgers closed the show, as she predicted, with the apocalypse anthem “I Know the End,” which I tend to refer to as “The End Is Near,” which drives T nuts, and which in turn cracks me up? Or that we showed our vax cards to get in? That the merch included a T-shirt that read Phoebe& / Phoebe& / Phoebe& / Phoebe, in a cheeky twist on the Beatles tee motif? That Bridgers and her bandmates all wore skeleton suits? That there was no encore, but we were okay with that, because it was late and we had to walk back across the river, through downtown, where there were drunks on the streets and in the pedal taverns, and the constant roar of the tourist throng was downright spooky? That during the show the air smelled sweetly of pot, and that, all around us, young women were singing along? 

4. 

A year and a half whooshes by. T is almost 15, I’m almost 50, all of it feels like an impossible dream, far too fast. In the same week that Nashville becomes the site of the latest mass shooting in the United States, boygenius triumphantly returns — not to the Ryman, but with the drop of their first full-length record, titled the record. On the album, its title a wink-wink nod to the many questions these artists have fielded about when such a project might see the light of day, Baker and Bridgers and Dacus share songwriting credits equally on all 12 songs; they celebrate their friendship and the stories they’ve created together. The record is full of “the kind of rhapsodic romanticism that flows out of the early days of close female friendship, when you are not sure if you are in love with the other person or just in love with the fact that you finally have someone to talk to,” Rachel Syme writes in The New Yorker. “To listen to their music is to partake, vicariously, in the joy of their impassioned entanglement. …That their future is unwritten … is part of what makes the band feel so thrilling and, for the moment at least, so urgent.”

T and I buy the record the day it comes out, as soon as she gets home from school. We listen together, obsessively, for weeks; we sing along, loud, in the car. We speculate on the inspiration for songs, we squeal at the artists’ Instagram feeds, we echo our favorite lines and debate the meaning of cryptic ones. Both of us are in love with the chant-like repetition and shifting harmonies on “Not Strong Enough.” Both of us think it’s funny how “Satanist” sounds like a Weezer jam. We listen to Lucy sing, “When you don’t know who you are, you fuck around and find out.” Time and time again, we sing along with Phoebe: “I don’t know why I am / the way I am,” and I think, Yes, that’s the truth. 

We listen on the morning drive to school, looking forward already to the summer day, a little over a month from now, when boygenius will return to Nashville and play a show in Centennial Park. The two of us are there. We can’t wait, we can’t wait. What song will they open with? What will be the encore? I don’t have any other girlfriends who are into boygenius the way I am — that’s the truth. But I do have this music-loving kid of mine. 

She gets out of the car, says I love you, and I feel confident she’ll walk in the building and have a decent day. Just normal, boring school. No lockdown drills, no tornado ripping up the building’s roof like one did in middle school, no firearms found on campus. Just high school with its dramas and dreams in chrysalis. And when I pick her up from school she will be smiling and carefree, or she will be irritable and tired, with her whole life ahead of her. And I am glad to see her either way, and still my heart sings a sharp note, another infinitesimal splinter. 

Susannah Felts is cofounder and codirector of The Porch, a nonprofit literary arts organization founded in 2014 and based in Nashville, Tennessee. She is a columnist for BookPage and writes the Substack newsletter FIELD TRIP, and her work has appeared in The Best American Science and Nature Writing, Guernica, Literary Hub, Joyland, StorySouth, Oxford American, and elsewhere.

Editor: Peter Rubin

Copy editor: Cheri Lucas Rowlands

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Susanna Forrest | Longreads | March 23, 2023 | 3,474 words (12 minutes)

Twelve years ago, I lived alone in Berlin and the crows knew me. My particular murder kept watch in the park nearest my flat, a long green strip marking the course of the demolished Wall. The neighborhood was part of the former East, and at the weekends the park filled with locals and tourists browsing the flea market for GDR cookware, furniture, and ratty old fur coats. I once found an entire stuffed dog there, lying rigidly over a pile of the flotsam and jetsam of 20th-century German domestic life — porcelain sugar bins with gingham prints, brass tea warmers, and musty albums of abandoned family photographs. The Wall had fallen years before I moved there in 2006, and Berlin had not yet hatched its Silicon Allee of slick startups. When I first arrived the air still reeked of coal stoves in the winter, and a friend lived in a dingy unrenovated apartment that had heavy velvet curtains over the doors and dusty black coal pucks piled in the corridor. You reached it via the ruin of another apartment with ’80s posters still hanging. 

For a long time, I told myself that I moved to Berlin in my late 20s on an unusually long-lasting whim after visiting a friend and picturing myself writing books in a spacious old tenement building. I was part of the cheap-flights generation of casual British EU migrants who sampled new cities and countries without thinking too hard. We didn’t need to. Our path was greased by budget airlines, a strong pound, low rent, and the internet, which let us work on our laptops in cafés that still served milchkaffee, iced Ovaltine, and rhubarb schorle rather than the later hipster homogeneities of avocado toast and flat whites. Earlier waves had immersed themselves in the city like a baptism, learning German, living in shared apartments with terrifying hippie rules, and getting jobs doing anything from teaching English to cleaning kebab grills. I and my fellow travelers hovered at the edge of the city, gazing at our screens. Many didn’t last long.

But five years on, in my crow-courting period, I was still there, and it was becoming less clear why. I had made an uncharacteristically bold move and left behind a functional if eccentric career in London because that trajectory of escalating job responsibilities, a mortgage, and a daily rattle on the Tube was suddenly not what I wanted. It had never seemed exactly real in any case — a fluke of luck, not something you could turn into a life. I was now writing books, which is what I did want to do, but there was no particular reason why I had to do that in Berlin. I still lived alone and worked from home alone and stuck to a handful of neighborhoods. I had hazily wanted an expanded life — living in different places, learning new languages — but that life turned out to require more of me than I could give. 

I gradually learned enough German for my work and writing, but froze and stumbled when I was spoken to (or at). The state-run language courses were not designed to launch you into a German social life. Instead, we new migrants  — from Bulgaria, America, Sweden, Italy, Turkey, and North Korea — gathered three nights a week and chewed over the language, which was presented to us in a series of “realistic scenarios” we might experience, such as traveling or trying to get a job like a good immigrant. Germans appeared in textbooks as Johanns and Marias driving their cars, eating bockwurst, and going to the cinema, rather than as three-dimensional people whom we could approach. The books told us about the German way of doing things, and German beliefs about citizenship and private lives, contrasted wordlessly against a great missing Other — us.   

We had the outsiders’ shorthand mythology for these creatures, a mashup of quaint archetypes and international urban wisdoms passed from one to another: “Germans aren’t efficient, they are thorough.” “Germans don’t like to use credit cards.” “Germans eat cake and buy flowers on Sundays.” There was also a submythology for Berliners, who were said to be blisteringly sarcastic — one account advised trying to imagine Cockneys who’d gone through the German 20th century. Berliners, and especially East Berliners, who had gone through even more of that century, let you know exactly what they thought of you. If you couldn’t understand their Schnauze or “Snout” dialect (a mashup of German and linguistic pickings from the city’s history, including French and Yiddish), then it was maybe for the best. When an elderly lady shouted at me for standing on the pavement and looking up at a flat I was viewing, the submythology told me to take it as a rite of passage. Berlin says “Du Alta!” and fuck off.  

Instead I met new friends via our blog RSS feeds and took to internet dating, but the connections I made were mostly with fellow migrants or people who lived elsewhere but wanted to imagine they could live in Berlin. I made a few German friends, although they often had one foot out of the city too. Largely I was alone. When the dates lasted more than one meeting, I chose men who were pulling the same avoidant trick as me. We flew in the same direction an impeccable distance apart, like birds in a murmuration. Hypothetically, each relationship came with a future Berlin life together, and I dipped mentally into these as though they were outfits I might try on without buying. It was safe to do this, because of course, none of these relationships went anywhere or required any kind of commitment to a life that was fixed. I hadn’t yet realized that this was my choice. I thought maybe I was bad at reading signs, but actually, I was very good at reading them. The problem was that I felt safer alone.

I staged this repetitive personal drama carelessly on the cracking, rumbling crust of a city trying to absorb a surfeit of history while sunk in its own recession. Unemployment was high, and public housing was being hurled overboard, thousands of units at a time. I read my British and American news online and ripped up the free local papers I found in my mailbox and stuffed the shreds in my wet shoes. I was waiting for something, aware that the city was changing underneath my own holding pattern. 

Gentrification had been underway when I got there. What had been crammed tenements in the early 20th century and then crumbling, war-damaged flats under the GDR were now saniert and interspersed with independent latte outlets. The shoddy, shrapnel-chipped brickwork within the circling Ringbahn was covered with fresh plaster and paint and nobody had to pee in a closet toilet on the staircase anymore. The old tiled stoves were ripped out and replaced with central heating; the smell of coal smoke retreated further from the center. Once I found myself in an expensively renovated living room where the new architects had preserved the old bullet holes under glass as a conversation point. It was just across the road from my friend’s former flat with the velvet curtains, now a building site for new luxury apartments.

At weekends I walked the same neighborhoods for hours and thought in suffocating spirals about the avoidant men and whether I should go home and get a proper job. I let the city spool by unheeded in the background. The crows’ park was just five minutes away, so I was there often. It was a lung of sorts, but not an escape.

I started feeding the crows because I’d read that they could recognize individual human faces, and I thought it would be an interesting experiment to see if I could train them to know me by sight. I bought bags of peanuts in the shell and began distributing them in the park. I always took the same messenger bag, which had a print of crow silhouettes on it. The crows could make this out from quite some distance. I didn’t think about why I wanted these creatures, so busy in their own very different but overlapping Berlin, to acknowledge me. 

They were not inky carrion crows but hooded or “fog” crows with powdery gray bodies, black heads, bibs, wings, and tail tips and the same elegant butcher beak as their cousins. Some were pied with white feathers, which were either a genetic quirk or a result of malnutrition — I tried to make sure that these birds got extra nuts. When I got close, I could see a fine lacy pattern where their bodies met their tails, an unexpected refinement. If I looked up at one in a tree, I found the same pattern on the underside of their stern. (I only had to have my coat dry-cleaned once.) In the spring they were glossy. They were always beady. They were the native Berliners with whom I interacted most.

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At first, I went every weekday morning, because at weekends the park filled up with the flea market, outdoor karaoke, and tourists who distracted the crows, but then I went on an irregular basis, once a week at most, and they all knew me. We had a routine of sorts, and soon it was unclear who was training whom. I kept buying peanuts. I kept going back. I kept responding to their cues. When I walked into the park a pair who were picking at beer-bottle tops in the grass would spot me and run and hop over like a couple of chickens, eyes bright and feathers ruffled by the wind, looking at my face and at my bag and back again. They would stop a few feet away and wait for me to reach under the flap of the bag and produce the goods. 

Sometimes a few outlier crows found me as I was halfway down the road to the park and swooped down to perch near me on the barriers by the roadworks or waited overhead on the tram wires. I learned to recognize the sound of a crow’s feet landing on the metal top of a GDR-era streetlamp. Sometimes I was in the park before they clocked me. Once I found a row of crows and young rooks waiting on the fence of the dog run for me to pass. They seemed both readable and unfathomable to me, just like my experience of the city as I trudged along its pavements, but they were also company, and glad to see me without asking more of me than the peanuts.

A new wall had been erected at the top of a man-made hill in the park for graffiti artists to attack, and the air was often thick with aerosol and paint particles. Some days I could climb to the top of the hill before I heard the birds calling all over, and watched as they appeared — black specks in the distance over the blocky West German flats half a kilometer away, turning to black and gray bird shapes who circled me and landed in the poplars or skimmed up the slope to my feet, their bellies inches clear of the balding grass. Windy days were best: The currents of air made it hard for them to get close, but they soared like small, sooty eagles, their pinions spread. Once they arrived, the crow ethnography began.

They operated in pairs but also as a larger flock that seemed to my human eyes to have a strict hierarchy: I saw a crow leave a peanut right in front of its feet so that a senior bird could have it. I also once saw a large crow attack and roll over a young bird and pin it on its back, its chest exposed, and five or six other crows raced over and stood in a circle around them, cawing what sounded like disapproval. The large crow released its prisoner. One evening at twilight I discovered that they roosted en masse on the floodlights of the football stadium, putting in a performance of looping aerobatics and abrupt plunges before they turned in for the night. 

In some ways, the crows and I were similar. They changed only when disrupted. I thought I should change my life but let inertia cradle me. But while they lived in a murder that was tight-knit and full of drama, my lack of connection had not led to some kind of fluid and expansive lifestyle, but instead, stagnation and solitude. Some friends peeled away from the city, returning home for careers and family. My own roost was starting to feel precarious as the gentrification around my flat intensified and cobblers and cafés were replaced with boutiques selling designer pastel-gray baby bowls and Scandinavian cookware. I had an old rental contract that remained low but all around me the housing market was contracting and my building was growing scruffier, edging us closer to another renovation that would turf me out. I didn’t really want to think about whether I loved my Berlin existence enough to live “beyond the ring,” as people put it, as though the neighborhoods outside the Ringbahn were cold rocks of planets that rarely glimpsed the sun. This was not a hypothetical future I had tried out. If I did live there, away from my friends, what would the rest of my life look like? What would change? 

I was heading home one Monday when I heard a great squawking behind me and turned to see a kestrel flying low, a vole dangling from its beak and three hooded crows on its tail, angling and twisting like TIE fighters. They all vanished into the trees. Shortly after that a woman walking her dog came up to me and asked if I fed the crows. I was surrounded by a dozen crows at the time. I said no. “You should not feed them,” she said, not fooled, “because there are many of them and the kestrel is all alone.” I saw her point. For a beat we stood facing each other off, crazy crow lady meets crazy kestrel lady.

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After the birds had found me at the foot of the graffiti wall, we would go on a 10-minute walk around the park, with them following me. At first to overtake me and keep up they flew arcs to either side of me. Then they realized that they could take a shortcut and fly over my head. One afternoon I was walking down the steps cut into the hill when I bent over to pick up a stray peanut, and a crow flew so low over my back that had I stood up suddenly it would have crashed into me. Then they flew so close that my hair lifted in the draft of their wings.

In spring they were nesting, and crammed peanut after peanut down their bulging throats to regurgitate later. The pair at the park entrance collected a nut each from me and then swiftly buried them before coming back for more. In the summer the barbecuers returned to the park and there were leftover chicken wings abandoned on disposable grills, congealing pizza slices on the benches, and bratwurst ends in the bins — fat times for corvids. In the winter they were a little too intense and we started to get all Hitchcock.

I once saw one — which looked a little embarrassed — picking at a heap of sick on the pavement, and it occurred to me that it was right that crows should thrive in Berlin. Their coloring was camouflage for a place of gray skies and ingrained coal dust. The city’s emblem is a bear, and back then there was still a mumbly old brown bear in an actual pit in the city center. But it seemed to me that the fog crows were the city’s real objective correlatives: tough, savvy, garrulous, snouty, and cynical — an urban species that thrived on cold currywurst, vomit, and warm football-stadium lights. They might have no concept of Berlin but were inseparable from it, hanging over the buildings and streets and memorials, making their own territories and marking the seasons.

My own territories were still fixed, but something was shifting. I felt I had made the wrong choices, that I should have wanted something more conventional, more easily understood, more boxes ticked. My life had little structure and few limits, and, unlike the crows, I was not thriving on the surface of Berlin. When I walked home alone in the dark the city seemed to expand overwhelmingly into the night. The ends of side streets faded into soft but profound darkness. Apartment windows were lit with red-shaded lamps that barely disturbed the black. Familiar neighborhoods gave way to unfathomable streets and then to suburbs, extending infinitely away from my feet on the pavement. The longer I lived alone, the nearer the fading point came to the edge of my world.

One bright morning I walked down the park in a cloud of 20 crows. A wild-eyed man, still unraveling from a heavy night in some club, came running up to me to say that what I was doing was incredible, and I stammered that it was only peanuts. Shortly after that, a young crow misjudged things and flew into the back of my head. I scaled back my activities.

I can’t remember the date when I stopped the performance altogether — or broke whatever mesmerism they had me under. I had tried feeding crows from my balcony too, watching them carry off the peanuts to bury in my neighbors’ window boxes. Then they learned how to untie the mass of knots I’d used to attach the metal bird feeder to the railing and dropped it into the courtyard, three stories down, so I gave up before they injured someone. I thought they had the same callous intelligence as orcas. I had not formed some kind of magical connection with these Berliners; I had just bought a lot of peanuts.

The real end, though, was when I paused halfway up one of those shady, yellow-painted Berlin stairwells and saw a crow on a branch outside slowly and methodically breaking a pigeon’s neck peck by peck.

I left Berlin two years ago. I don’t have a neat turning point for you — there was no self-help book or revelation or moment when the crows made me understand I had been doing everything wrong. I simply met someone and, for once, it felt safer to be together than alone, and when I took that leap toward connection, my life started to change rapidly and concretely. I left my old flat as my landlord finally tried to raise the rent and I moved in with the new boyfriend; I got pregnant; I happily moved to another country for his new job — still a migratory bird after all. I landed somewhere between convention and that expansive, restless life I had hoped for.

Meanwhile, the door to Berlin shut behind us. The housing market was finally in crisis, and it felt as though Berliners had gone to ground in the pandemic, clinging and retreating into their dingy, L-shaped living rooms like hermit crabs as rents rose and the queues outside apartment viewings stretched into the thousands. 

You cannot skim the surface of a place and expect to belong to it. You cannot skim the surface of your life and inhabit it fully. To stay in Berlin alone I would have needed to strike out into that darkness at the ends of the streets and grasp what it meant to take root, grow old, and die in a place. The crows were not little harbingers of this mortality; they were just busy being corvids — my uncanny Berliners, my unfamiliar familiars. They stayed in place and lived according to the seasons, but it was the murder that animated their lives. 

A year after that moment on the Berlin staircase, I walked to the park with the crow bag without thinking. One lithe, smallish crow found me and followed me. I walked up the hill and along the foot of the graffiti wall, inhaling the spray paint that taggers were busily dispersing into the atmosphere. The crow came with me. I walked down the steps to the pavement that ran where the Berlin Wall used to stand. It hopped over the flagstones. I walked down the scarred grass toward the exit, and the crow kept me company. I crossed the road and it winged over and landed on a power box next to me with a metallic click of talons. I apologized to it and went into the nearest shop to buy peanuts. 

It was still waiting when I came out.

Susanna Forrest is the author of The Age of the Horse (Grove Atlantic, 2017) and If Wishes Were Horses (Atlantic Books, 2012). She writes a Substack newsletter called Amazons of Paris about women who were stars of the 19th-century circus and lives with her family in Sweden, where there are rooks instead of fog crows. 

Editor: Cheri Lucas Rowlands

Copy-editor: Krista Stevens

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Kira Homsher | Longreads | March 14, 2023 | 3,308 words (12 minutes)

My childhood best friend broke, and still holds, the Guinness World Record for fastest text written on a QWERTY mobile phone. Though I never came close to matching her speed, it was only natural that I should absorb her enthusiasm for messaging. She was also one of the most private people I knew, with an uncanny ability to create and compartmentalize disparate personas to charm all sorts of people, and much of her social life took place on strange websites I’d never heard of. Even after she moved to a new school district, I found myself emulating her volatile affect: vibrant, expressive, flirtatious, and reserved all at once. I learned that it was possible to try on new versions of myself through conversations with strangers, and that the internet was the best imaginable venue for these slippery charades.

I was 12 years old when she moved, too old to play pretend, not yet old enough to resist the impulse. The internet provided a fertile new stage for my proclivity for make-believe. Online, I could be whatever age I wanted. I could be an avatar, a playlist, a chain of speech bubbles. I was pure invention. 

My first-ever email address was emilygr83@gmail.com. In assembling a family tree for a sixth-grade project, I’d discovered that I had a great-great-great-grandmother named Emily. Back then, we were advised not to use our real names on the internet, so I borrowed hers. It was so easy to assume a new name and still feel like myself. 

A boy from my class emailed “Emily” to ask if she’d be his girlfriend. I wrote back, telling him that if he came up with a good list of reasons why he liked me, I’d date him for one week and no longer. In his list, he cited the fact that, even though I was a girl, I played cool games like Minecraft and RuneScape, a massively multiplayer fantasy role-playing game set in medieval times. He also mentioned the two freckles above my top lip, something I’d never noticed about myself. I let him come over after school for pizza but didn’t let him kiss me. We broke up at the end of the week, but continued meeting on RuneScape to exchange armor, roam the wilderness, and slay giant rats. I preferred interacting with him online, where we could stay up all night flirting without any material expectations or consequences. When I saw him in school, I largely ignored him.

Toward the end of my middle school years, I discovered Meebo, an instant messaging application that supported multiple services such as AIM, Yahoo!, MSN, and Facebook Chat. Users could also join Meebo Rooms, public chatrooms searchable by topic and content. You could search almost anything and find a corresponding chatroom full of like-minded people. In 2008, I used Meebo to message IRL friends, but mostly to collect strangers. My AIM username was sexisince1901 — I was a rabid fan of the Twilight series and aligned myself with “Team Edward,” a faction of the fandom that preferred Edward Cullen, a vampire born in 1901, to Jacob Black, a teenage werewolf with 8-pack abs. 

The Twilight series comprises five fantasy films based on four novels by Stephenie Meyer, a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, which, according to Wikipedia, Meyer has named as her greatest influence. Her novels center around a romance between Bella Swan, a brooding high school misanthrope, and Edward Cullen (aforementioned vampire, 87 years her senior). Like many girls my age, most of my preposterous romantic expectations and desires had their roots in this series.

On Meebo, I discovered a chatroom dedicated to Twilight roleplaying. By the time I joined, all the most popular characters had already been claimed, so I modestly chose a secondary character I knew no one else would have taken (Tanya from the Denali coven). Within a week, I had a small community of online friends, who I knew only by their role-play names, and an online boyfriend named Jared. An online boyfriend is someone who may or may not be a boy and may or may not be the age he says he is. An online boyfriend doesn’t have to know your real name. An online boyfriend is a viable and dispensable source of attention.

Jared and I started meeting in a private chatroom instead of the old public one. He PM’ed me photos he claimed were of himself, but which I quickly traced back to the second page of results for “emo boys” on Google Images. He sent me messages with actions encased in asterisks, like *slits my wrists n licks ze blood* and *kisses u on ur forehead* and I answered with kk or *kisses u back* or mew ^_^. He threatened to kill himself more than once and, each time this happened, I would rush into the kitchen or the living room to tell my mom that “my online boyfriend is cutting himself again!” She thought it was sweet how earnestly I involved myself with adult matters that had nothing to do with me.

I quickly found other boyfriends — and girlfriends — on sites like DeviantArt, IMVU, and VampireFreaks.com, which was sort of like Myspace for goths. I spent hours dressing and designing my avatars and almost always made them look a bit like myself, which was, in retrospect, a sign of relatively high self-esteem. A friend taught me that if I put things like XxX in my usernames, more people would want to add me, gift me free items, and/or be my boyfriend. I especially liked to create usernames using words like elf, fairy, tiny, and dark. The language of fantasy made sense on the internet, which was itself a make-believe place I could visit by passing through a glass screen. I became accustomed to receiving virtual gifts and favors from my e-suitors. Online, people are more generous with their time and less precious about their romantic and emotional entanglements. Just refresh: There will always be someone new.

It wasn’t long before I ended up on Omegle, a website that randomly and anonymously pairs users in one-on-one chat sessions or video calls. Conversations were between you in blue text and stranger in red and, more often than not, began with the acronym asl, meaning age, sex, location. It was a question without a mark. Other times, people simply opened by stating their age and gender (f for female, m for male). There were more self-proclaimed 18-year-old females than could possibly have been looking to chat with strangers. Most of the strangers I was paired with just wanted to talk about sex or redirect our chat to another platform where we could send pix. Others were naked, lonely souls seeking an audience, and I was more than happy to accommodate them. I wanted to soak it all in. 

Chatrooms taught me everything I needed to know about what real people were like before I had to grow up and become one of them. I never stopped collecting strangers; I couldn’t kick the habit. By the time I went to college, all the former mystique of the internet had been subsumed into the tedious landscape of social media. Anonymity was no longer the selling point — it was all about developing an online brand, a persona other people would find desirable, entertaining, original, or infectious. A hook. On Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, with my name and face publicly displayed, I felt more like an avatar than ever, role-playing some prettier, wittier version of myself. 

I was never the sort of person to scroll through an app believing everyone to be as beautiful, happy, and fortunate as they appeared. I’d grown up online and knew all the tricks. I have several vices, but envy is not one of them. If social media mangled my character in some way, it had little impact on my self-confidence.

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If anything, the rise of social media made me quicker to judge and discard other people, as if they were advertisements meant to be scrolled past and scoffed at. My early internet encounters made apps like Tinder, with its efficient model of swiping on first impressions, a veritable playground. I was used to being paired with strangers, but Tinder took it several steps further; I got to attach my conversations to real names and faces, and the attraction was no longer just simulated. Or rather, it felt less simulated. 

My taste in strangers did not change much. I always sought out people who seemed alienated, people I suspected were looking for things other than sex — or at least were using sex to look for other things than sex. And no, I don’t mean love. I wasn’t lonely, but I was only interested in talking to people who were. 

The first boy I met on Tinder was Gavin, a redhead whose bio read: sjshshsgdjskid djdjdjjdjdjdjd djdjdjjdjd. That was it exactly. I still have the screenshot of his profile in my photos from 2016. We texted for a day and a half before I drunkenly caught a 2 a.m. train to Center City and followed Google Maps to his dingy art gallery loft, where I remained for almost an entire week, wearing his clothes, sharing burnt toast on the floor, and gamely wiping with paper towels after he ran out of toilet paper. 

Gavin was skittish and contagiously charming. He hinted at relationships that didn’t work out due to his difficulties with intimacy and told me that, a year prior, he had cut himself off from all his old friends. He texted me things like, Gonna hug u hard it’ll feel like sex and sorry i was so drunk last night but seeing U was so cool n good and waking up with U was unreal. He disliked music and claimed that he’d never once gotten a melody stuck in his head. If I played a song on my phone, he’d practically beg me to turn it off. I watched him flit in and out of his apartment like a neurotic poltergeist and let myself believe I could be the exception to his rules about closeness. 

As soon as Gavin and I did our first load of laundry together, it was over. We washed our brief history out of his sheets and something in him turned away from me, back toward the seclusion that had initially drawn me to him. I returned to my apartment and we never saw each other again. I felt an odd mixture of heartbreak and relief: Gavin had logged out, which meant I was free to refresh.

Hungry for more stories, I kept on swiping and adding to my collection: Zooey from Brooklyn, Ali from LA, Darian from Belgium, Mateo from Copenhagen, Ryo from Tokyo. Cara, Izzy, Chris, Yui, Sam, Laura, Goretti, Jun. Sometimes I slept with them, sometimes I didn’t. I preferred to date people who, like me, were just passing through. I admired Omegle’s model of allowing users to disconnect from an interaction — from another living soul — at a whim, and unabashedly applied it to real life. It got so that I almost couldn’t remember what it was like to feel candid attraction to another person without first examining them through the mediating layers of a profile, with its carefully curated photos, idiosyncratic bio, and abridged display of “favorite songs” powered by Spotify.

I found Ali two weeks before I left to study abroad in Japan my junior year of college. My thumb froze over his picture and my brain snapped back into focus. His pictures were so beautiful I thought he was a catfish. He had cherry black hair and big white glow-in-the-dark teeth. Also, incredibly, his bio wasn’t stupid. My heart skipped a beat when we matched. We exchanged numbers and went on texting for another six months without meeting or even FaceTiming. He was attending an art school in Baltimore, and I was studying film on a scholarship in Tokyo, where I binge-drank nightly and blacked out weekly. We treated each other like therapists, messaging at our worst to ask for no-strings love and affirmation from someone who cared, someone beautiful and unreal. Shortly after I flew back home to Philly, Ali took a bus down to spend the weekend with me. Before he arrived, we confessed to being in love with each other over text. We agreed that we would make really cute, really smart babies. 

It wasn’t the same in person. Of course it wasn’t. We’d broken the spell. He was just as pretty, but his beauty didn’t translate the same without the separation of the screen. We weren’t sure what to do with each other. He had a nervous laugh and carried his anxious energy in his shoulders. He was vulnerable and alive to the world, and I didn’t know how to be around that. By then, I’d become far more comfortable dating cynical, unreadable people. Earnest displays of emotion seemed ill-suited to 21st-century romance; I wanted only to spend time with people I could not hurt and who could not hurt me. People who were like pictures, folded in a mental scrapbook of short-lived enchantments.

After we had sex, Ali told me that he couldn’t get the email address of his father’s friend out of his head; it was like an intrusive thought. Curled up naked against my body, he chanted: “Greggreen315@yahoo, greggreen315@yahoo, greggreen315. Greg-green-three-fif-teen.” 

He was perfect, really, a glowingly good lunatic and everything I could have wanted if only I still knew how to want. We did love each other, but not in the way we’d hoped.

Eventually, you collect so many strangers that the fascination dissipates. The stories start to melt together into an unending tapestry of quirks and anecdotes too close-knit to parse. You forget who had the heart-shaped mole, who had the cute butt, who had joy from the cookbook The Joy of Cooking tattooed above his left knee. Your strangers become one amorphous lover, one long story you grow bored of telling yourself. A low hum, unstrange. 

I’d convinced myself that, in my frantic cycling through new people, I was wielding my youth to its fullest potential, perpetually carving myself anew. In opening myself up to so many people — and in exercising the self-restraint to close myself off again — I would become larger than myself, someone who could weather the capriciousness of the world and reflect it back unscathed. Instead, I became callous and compulsive, a thrill-seeker with no real agenda. My days took on a filmic quality, something watched rather than lived.

I had grown tired of watching. I wanted to feel something small, and feel it wholly. I wanted to be like a child on a swing. 

I went on Omegle tonight for the first time in years, both to remind myself of what it was like and because I missed the fantasy of anonymity. After swiping through an endless procession of horny robots, I ended up chatting with a gloomy 19-year-old undergrad named Elijah, who only revealed his name and age at the very end of our conversation. Elijah used a lot of ellipses and was extremely anxious — in a sweet, facile way — about a wide array of subjects: his friends, the government, the amount of time he spent playing games on his PC, the pacing of his messages, and whether I was getting bored with the conversation. He told me he was hanging out with a group of friends, but that everyone was stoned and on their phones. He said, Theirs just a lot of insecurities I have right now and it might be making me feel like I don’t fit in with anyone or nobody gets me.. Anxiety probably.

I could tell he enjoyed being asked questions about himself, so I kept thinking of things I wanted to know. He told me he wanted to pursue his talent for chess but lacked the motivation. He apologized for the one-sided nature of the conversation, and I said I didn’t mind. He said, Oh really? and continued not asking me questions. I truly didn’t mind. I had no secrets to share, no disaffection to unpack. He kept saying sorry, thank you, and if that makes sense and if I stopped asking questions, his tone would grow hesitant and insecure. It was obvious Elijah thought, and wanted me to think, that his depression was an interesting quality, something worth dwelling upon. I thought this, too, when I was 19. Like Elijah, whenever I spoke to a new stranger I was quick to offer up my own shiny instability as a conversation piece, a token of faceless vulnerability. I told him I admired his authenticity, though really I was beginning to find it grating. He wanted to be reassured about everything he said. Talking to him, I felt my language becoming trite and consolatory. 

I told Elijah I was interested in how people’s early online habits had shaped their communication styles, which was why I was on Omegle. He asked if I was writing an essay for school. Sort of, I said. Am I helping you at all? he asked. I ignored the question, then asked if his classes were online or in-person, and he said in-person. I asked what that was like, and he said, We all wear masks now. I said, I know. 

I ended the conversation around 3 a.m. and he asked, very politely, if I’d feel comfortable exchanging social media. I told him I was a very private person, which was a lie. I told him to have a nice life, which I meant sincerely. We disconnected. 

A few years ago, I would have agreed without hesitation, regardless of my disinterest in speaking again. Every single person I connected with was a treasure to me, a lesson, something to tuck away inside a chest for safekeeping. Not anymore. The chest is full, and it rarely begs opening these days. I’ve been cured of my curiosity through sheer saturation. There is so little I want to know about other people. 

Click to find strangers with common interests. Click to turn on video. You are now chatting with a random stranger. Click esc to stop. You have disconnected. 

I’ve largely forgotten how to curate the allure that once came naturally to me on social media. I still post, but my posts no longer contain hidden messages or existential appeals to the unknown, nothing that invites speculation. My photos are mostly of my dog and my partner of five years, the final stranger in my collection. And yes, I found him on Tinder. 

I look at my online self and think, this is me. At least it feels like me, naked as it is of the artifice that once came second nature. Still, I sometimes wonder if I’m mediating without even knowing it. I wonder if true candor can exist without the fantasy of anonymity, without the arbitrary landscape where things like age, sex, and location can be effaced and improvised. Many of my closest friends are real people who first came to me as blurry photos and blocks of text. Half of my life was lived on the internet. Is that half unreal?

We all wear masks now. As if this wasn’t already the case. A mask conceals, but it can also expose a great deal about what is hidden beneath it. An avatar is a choice. The way you decide to disguise yourself online reveals something in its negative space. You can fall in love with a text message, a blinking ellipsis, a persistent buzz in your pocket. You can fall in love with your own reflection, poreless and perfected. You can give and give and give and take and take and take. And then log out and vanish altogether.

Kira K. Homsher is a writer from Philadelphia, currently living in Los Angeles. She is the winner of phoebe’s 2020 nonfiction contest and a Pushcart nominee. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Kenyon Review Online, Indiana Review, Passages North, The Offing, and others. You can find her at kirahomsher.com.

Editor: Peter Rubin

Copy editor: Cheri Lucas Rowlands

This story was funded by our members. Join Longreads and help us to support more writers.

Maria Zorn | Longreads | March 7, 2023 | 3,373 words (12 minutes)

In middle school, I would hide behind a giant oleander bush when it was time for the bus to leave for track and field meets and then, once it left without me, I’d walk to Panda Express and eat chow mein in blissful peace. This was also my strategy for grieving you. I thought I could, like a rapacious vole, burrow myself into the branches of the quotidian and the bus of mourning would pass me by altogether. 

This is not to say that I didn’t ever experience a sense of loss. It was always there, a constant drip. Sometimes I’d think about the scene Mom came upon when the locksmith finally got your apartment door open and feel as though my kneecaps were going to crumble into ash beneath me. I wondered if there were claw marks on the floor from where you tried to stay as you felt your heart stop beating, or if you slid easily away like a clump of lint and dog hair into a Roomba. In these moments I wished to be vacuumed whole. 

Sophie works at the post office in Saanichton, British Columbia.* She is tall and sinewy with thin, bony shoulders. Her body could be drawn using only straight lines, just like yours. Her hair is jet black and always pulled back into a low ponytail that nestles into the nape of her neck. She appears to be more at ease when she is behind the counter than when she is in front of it, exposed. Her voice is low and quiet and when she gets flustered she holds her elbows close to her rib cage and her hands near her shoulders like an adorable T. rex. Her mannerisms are what initially drew Mom to her, what first reminded her of you. But then she saw her protruding clavicle and her thick top lip and her round doe eyes and she couldn’t unsee the physical resemblance. She wants me to help her think of a way to befriend Sophie that doesn’t begin with: You remind me of my dead son and I would do anything to spend time with you. I just don’t know what to tell her.

Perhaps the better metaphor is that my grief for you stalked me like those ghosts in Ms. Pac-Man. I was chasing dots with my mouth wide open, trying to outrun you. The dots were moments I still felt some semblance of myself in a world without you in it, they were anyone and anything that could drain me of all of my energy and attention, they were being able to feel light enough to giggle, they were attempting to Irish dance while waiting for my tea kettle to whistle. The ghosts were you, at 8, declining to go on a playdate because you were afraid I wouldn’t have anyone to play with; you, at 16, threatening to hit the boy who broke my heart with your car; you, at 22, telling me we were soulmates with tears in your eyes at the Molly Wee pub; the ghosts were you, you, you, you with pastel sheets over your head, cutouts for your big Bambi eyes. 

Mom gets butterflies in her stomach before she goes to the post office. She’s glad for once that she has a P.O. box, that the mail carrier doesn’t come to her mossy, rural strip of the Saanich Peninsula. She blow-dries her light blonde hair until it falls in cascading curls around her face and blinks on mascara. She pulls on her stylish brown leather boots and steals one last look at herself in the mirror. She takes a deep inhale that tickles the pain in her chest. Mom wants to be more than friends with Sophie, but not in the traditional sense of the phrase. I loved you like a soulmate, but not in the traditional sense of the phrase. These loves are fluid, these loves are nonbinary. 

The dots I chased were Chris, because every emotion I felt with him was neon.* We slept glued together like spider monkeys, and when I woke up before him I would be completely still and study him worshipfully — his toffee-colored skin that was softer than a kitten’s ear, his charcoal ringlets. We watched videos of Thom Yorke dancing for hours at a time, we did a special little jig when we bought a bottle of puttanesca sauce. When I was sad, he’d get out a Japanese sword that was left at the bar where he worked and throw watermelons in the air for me to slice like a fruit ninja. He could make anything fun, could make anything a game — but he was always the team captain. I was never certain whether it was our 14-year age gap or simply his personality, but he felt as much like a coach as he did a boyfriend. I thought he shut me down when I disagreed with him and I knew he blew his nose in our dirty laundry, and these things both made me furious. Two years passed and we morphed into ever uglier versions of ourselves. We yelled at each other outside of Joe’s Pizza by the Slice, he was a gargoyle and I was a swamp lizard and then we were two terribly sad people who didn’t talk anymore. For months after we broke up, I lay in bed every night, crusty with dried tears and snot, and my ribs felt loose. I imagined Chris playing Radiohead songs on them like they were piano keys while I tried and failed to fall asleep. I was convinced that if I concentrated hard enough on my heartache for him that I would not notice how hollow I felt from your goneness. 

You wore six-inch platform creepers and voluptuous shaggy Mongolian lamb coats, Rick Owens pencil skirts and black leather fingerless gloves. You ordered a floor-length sheer dressing gown with sleeves trimmed in feathers. When Mom said she liked it but it looked like something one would wear over a négligée, you earnestly replied: But I don’t have a négligée yet! Before I moved to New York with you, I came to visit and had to use my tube top as a pillowcase since you owned only one. I cleaned your apartment while you scoured town for a fake ID for me, an even trade. After sweeping the 600-square-foot space I had a chinchilla-sized pile of dust and boa fragments and sequins and dirt and I felt like Cruella de Vil’s housekeeper. You made a fool of the words “feminine” and “masculine” — you were neither, you were both. You called yourself an alien frequently, and even got one tattooed on your right arm. You felt like you were so different from other humans that you were extraterrestrial. No one we knew used they/them pronouns, no one we knew used terms like “nonbinary,” like “gender-fluid.” You knew you didn’t identify with other men, but you also knew you didn’t feel like other women. I wonder if you would have felt like such an alien if you knew you didn’t have to choose. I wonder if you would have tried snorting heroin that night if you didn’t feel like such an alien.

My dots were my budding career at a tech startup that I thought was so much more impressive than it actually was. I worked from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. then came home, ate noodles, propped my laptop on the pudge of my lower belly, and kept working in bed until I fell asleep. I tried dating during this phase, but I got more pleasure from telling men I was busy and then later breaking things off than I did from going to dinner with them.

My eyes began to tolerate all of the computer work I was doing less and less until it felt like all that occupied my sockets were two purple bruises covered in fire ants. After trips to six different ophthalmologists, I was diagnosed with non-length dependent small fiber polyneuropathy and ocular rosacea and told that a career that involved “excessive screen time” was probably not in the cards for me. The doctor looked at me with a very serious expression that was made less serious by a small piece of avocado that clung to his mustache. I was such a people pleaser that in this moment all I could think of was making this a smooth experience for him so that he didn’t go look in the mirror after our conversation and feel like an idiot for having a dirty ’stache. This was a time in my life when if someone gave me a ride, I’d offer them a kidney. I jammed the shock and anguish I felt into the depths of my pockets alongside pennies and crescent-shaped nail fragments, I arranged my face into an awkward smile and said: No worries!

I quit my job and the online college courses I was taking and returned to bartending with the enthusiasm of a wet tube sock. An overly cheerful woman with a hair growing from the mole on her chin asked me to surprise her with a drink and I poured well rum and apple juice into a pint glass with no ice then charged her $13 for it. I didn’t talk to my friends who were graduating and starting careers, I stopped dating. I closed in on myself and got smaller and smaller until, like a Shrinky Dink, I could be pierced and worn on a string as a hideous pendant. 

I had moved back home to Arizona after you died because I couldn’t stay in New York City without you. The ghosts were too speedy there, but the dots were too far apart in Phoenix. I needed to get out. I applied for a sales position in Denver that promised not to involve the computer, packed my belongings into my beat-up red hatchback and took myself to Colorado. Driving through mountain passes, I felt an indelible sense of hope that this change of scenery would make me better, whatever that meant.

I watched the video you recorded six months before you died yesterday, the one where you’re drinking Veuve with your friend Michelle and explaining what you want done with your ashes if anything ever happens to you. You throw your head back to cackle between your outlandish requests and I stare at your pale throat. Some ashes stored in a Ming vase, some made into diamonds, some shot out of a cannon with glitter. Mom and I looked into the cannon, but all we could find was some silly handheld thing called the “Loved One Launcher” that appeared to be used primarily at memorial services held next to creeks and swamps, judging from their marketing material. It definitely wasn’t the right fit. 

We didn’t know how to “memorialize” someone who felt as essential as a limb. In our indecision, we landed on taking a trip someplace beautiful every year on the anniversary of your death. We’ve been to Cabo San Lucas, Aspen, Copenhagen, Sooke. We split a bottle of rosé and hold hands and your absence is outlined in chalk on the picnic blanket we sit on. Once, we hiked 13 miles to a beautiful alpine lake to scatter some of your ashes and I carried them on my back. I had only your remains and a bottle of wine in my pack but the straps dug into my shoulders until they were pink as salmon. We sang “He Ain’t Heavy, He’s My Brother” by the Hollies and laughed and cried at the same time. When we dumped your ashes in the water they shimmered in the sun like the glitter you wore on your eyelids and cheeks during your teen raver years. I wanted so badly to look up at the sky that was the same blue as your eyes and feel unadulterated solace, but instead I felt nothing at all. 

This year on May 30, I think Mom is going to take me to the post office. 

My dots were jobs, jobs, new jobs every few months. I worked as a kiosk wench for HelloFresh, a sales manager for StretchLab, a preschool teacher at a country day school, a fitness instructor at Life Time, at a physical therapy clinic, at a Pilates studio. I went back to school to become an art teacher, then quit that and took a yearlong nutrition course, then decided I never actually want to talk to anyone about what they eat. I remembered once hearing the phrase “throwing spaghetti at the wall and seeing what sticks” and I imagined myself doing parkour off the furniture at each of my jobs, shooting noodles and marinara out of my fingertips and watching the pasta bounce off of the reformers, the little children, the clinic walls like rubber. I had eaten all of the dots in the maze and was left aimlessly bumping into its corners with a jaw ache, desperately trying to avoid a ghost pileup. 

​​I had a dream that I was walking around a city map, but the map wasn’t made of paper — it was a black iPhone, the glass so shattered it looked like it was filled with streets and boulevards. All the roads filled with white powder until I couldn’t move my legs anymore. The phone was yours, and it sat next to a full pour of wine, murky reddish-black like blood. You died sitting up — bony ass on the floor, back against the side of your bed, pale slim fingers wrapped around your glass. How did you manage not to spill one drop? Why did you think heroin was a suitable nightcap after cocaine, Adderall, alcohol?

I remember sitting on the back porch of Mom’s house with you every night one summer, talking and smoking hookah for hours until the metal patio chairs branded the back of our sweaty legs with checkers. Even at 10 p.m. it was over 100 degrees in Phoenix. I’d feel droplets of sweat crawl from my armpits down my sides and settle into the waistband of my boxer shorts. We’d put a splash of milk in the water pipe because you were convinced that would make the smoke cloudier, more fun to blow O rings with. You confessed one of these nights to smoking black tar heroin once during your sophomore year of high school, when you were a self-proclaimed “mall goth.” I whapped you with the wooden hookah mouthpiece, hard, right in the solar plexus. I thought about the time we gobbled up so many of Dad’s prescription drugs and drank so much prosecco that we blacked out an entire journey from Amsterdam to Phoenix, including a three-hour layover that was apparently in Detroit, judging from the translucent blue lighter we bought that said Motown City and the greasy Little Caesar’s receipt that sat cross-legged in the bottom of my purse. I was not prudish about getting fucked up, but with this anecdote you crossed a threshold into territory that scared me. You took a sharp inhale and raised your dark eyebrows, fighting back a laugh. You said: Obviously that was dumb and I’ll never try it again. I made you promise with a pinkie, even though you were 19 and I was 17. Your recklessness with your life produced in me a worry that sat like a small, hard stone in my belly.

You’d hate the way dying from a heroin overdose sounds. You’d have me let everyone know that you were “trying to buy opium.” That you were supposed to go to a wedding in Greece in two months, New York Fashion Week in three. That you didn’t mean for it to happen this way.

The dots were gone, but I became so adroit at ghost evasion I no longer needed them — I was eating strawberries, oranges, bananas, cherries. I found a drug that makes my eye condition more tolerable, a job I like well enough, a dog who constantly wants to shake my hand. I found a partner with Reptar green and caramel eyes who gives me grace like a daily train ticket, who calls you Tomm, not “your brother,” whose calm demeanor lowers my blood pressure and provides a certitude that life is allowed to feel good. I thought Jack’s love was a fuzzy sweater I could don and become whole. I saw no portents of a more substantial ghost, one that could swallow me entirely. I fell into the mouth of a ghost as though it was a shoddy manhole cover; it took me by surprise and then devoured me until I was wholly in its maw and could not see a single shred of light through its incisors. My grief developed its own physical presence, its own pulse. I feared that it was going to burst through my bones like the Kool-Aid man at any moment and take me over completely. My first instinct was to wrestle it to the ground, to mash my teeth into its ears and give it a noogie, since I was always the brute of the family. I knew you’d try to reason with it, to write it a letter using your shiniest vocabulary like the ones you’d send to Mom and Dad to convince them to raise our allowance, to get a pet sugar glider, to let you get your ears pierced, to legally change the “Jr.” that follows your name to the more sophisticated and chic “II.” You’d arrange all of your best arguments like toy soldiers followed by rebuttals of anticipated counter-arguments, then sign: Please don’t be mad at me. As a card-carrying atheist I didn’t know who to write a letter to. The universe? You?

My therapist recommended I try ketamine for treatment-resistant depression and I had my first session this week. I thought of you because the first time I heard the word “ketamine” was when you snorted it in ninth grade and then came out to Mom, and the first time I heard the term “treatment-resistant depression” was after I talked about you to my therapist, seven years after you died. I filled out a questionnaire that tests for suicidality and it was only then that I realized my sadness had become life-threatening. I had a primordial urge to go wherever it is that you are. I’d sign my note to Mom and Jack: Please don’t be mad at me.

The nurse anesthetist injected the drug into my shoulder and it felt like a gentle bee sting. There were colors and textures and sounds that I can’t explain, but what I remember most of all was you. Your hair was dyed platinum blonde and a thin white shirt hugged your angular frame. You were resplendent. You were laughing and reaching out for my hand, and I chased you across tiles that lit up under our feet as we stepped on them. We knew you were not alive but we also knew that you were not gone. Looking at you, for the first time in seven years, didn’t feel like gazing directly into a car’s headlights at night; you didn’t singe my delicate eyes with your brightness. You hugged me the way you always did, so tightly that your upper ribs jabbed into my torso with a titty-puncturing ferocity, like you were holding on for dear life, and I felt an ineffable sense of something inside me being cauterized. Later I’d recall a mathematical concept from high school in which two lines get very, very close together but never actually end up touching and wonder if, for me, this would be the closest I’d ever get to feeling peace about your death. As I began to regain consciousness, your face became pixelated and the crinkles around your eyes started to smoothen and fade. The first part of my body that woke up was my mouth, and I could feel my chapped lips pressing together with alacrity to form a small smile. Before you disappeared completely, you said: What if it’s all true at once? You held those words up like a trophy and I unzipped my chest and put them inside. 

Maria Zorn is a writer and visual artist currently living in Denver, Colorado.

Editor: Cheri Lucas Rowlands

Copy-editor: Krista Stevens

This story was funded by our members. Join Longreads and help us to support more writers.

Cassidy Randall | Longreads | February 16, 2023 | 4,141 words (15 minutes)

Ben carries a Pulaski ax filched from the cabin’s woodshed as we walk the trail along the Canadian border. Half a mile back, we stepped over a mountain lion’s broad track imprinted fresh on the damp banks of the river, her cub’s pocket-sized paw laid just behind it. Claw marks score the aspens at heights above my head, tufts of fur from the enormous bears who left them snagged by the peeling bark. Yesterday we heard a wolf howl far off in the forest. 

The ax is less for protection from these predators — Ben couldn’t bear to kill any of them, even hoping the cabin’s resident pack rat outsmarts the trap he half-heartedly set for it — and more to intimidate any poachers we might come across in this remote corner of Glacier National Park. He’s been coming to the old ranger station here every fall for 20 years in solitary soul-searching rituals, under the pretext of performing this antiquated patrol for illegal hunters. He’s never brought anyone else in for such a long stint. And never someone so important to him, he says. It makes him more fearful of everything that can go wrong in the deep wild out here. Another reason he carries the ax. 

It still boggles my mind that I could be important like that to someone.

To the north of this border trail lies Revelstoke, British Columbia: the mountain mecca that’s now my home. To the east and south rises the jagged expanse of the rest of Glacier, where Ben and I first met so many years ago — back when I called Montana home, when I wrote him off as another failed relationship in a lifelong string of them. Back when I hitched my self-worth and happiness to being loved by a man. 

To the west, my Montana-bought truck with its British Columbia license plates sits in the sagebrush waiting for our return. For me to decide which direction to drive it: Back to Canada, where I’ve chosen me, and the mountains, over men. Or south into Montana with Ben, and everything I’ve already left behind. 

The truck didn’t come until later. The little sedan that carried me to Montana came first. 

In 2005, I piloted that gold Ford Focus from Los Angeles up to Missoula one November, looking to spend the winter there during my off-season from teaching outdoor education in my native California. A child of salt water and dusty ponderosa forests, I’d never “spent a winter” anywhere with actual winter. I was looking for a novel three or four months before going back to teaching. 

If I’m honest with myself, I was really looking for something else. 

Inside my head then, I was still the awkward, nerdy girl of my youth. Growing up, I was unaware I was a nerd. I was proud of my intelligence. I rushed to shoot my hand up first in class. I thought it was cool to bury my nose in Lord of the Rings books during free time, and when someone interrupted me, cry out, “Hold on! I’m in the middle of a battle scene!” I was both chubby and the tallest girl in the class, looming in both directions over most of the boys. I had crooked teeth and bad eyes, necessitating glasses and braces, although not, thanks to my parents’ foresight on this, at the same time. 

High school brought no transformative hero(ine)’s arc, the type in the ’90s movies of my youth where the mousy loner girl ends up being gorgeous under those glasses, saved from the hell of social rejection by the coolest, hottest guy on campus. I recall vividly when the neighbor boy called to tell me my friends, with whom I’d been inseparable for years, didn’t want to hang out with me anymore. The following day, I stood horrifically alone on the quad at lunch hour, everyone witness to my fresh status as a total loser. Only one or two boys asked me out over those years. I went to my senior prom stag, trailing a group of, by then, painstakingly won girlfriends and their dates. 

So driving north to Missoula at 24, I couldn’t shake the idea that if I hadn’t had a real boyfriend by then, something was wrong with me. I know there were good times in high school, but we are so hardwired for negativity that underlined in bold in my mind was the conviction that I wasn’t attractive enough, fun enough, athletic enough, thin enough, good enough for a man to love me back. 

But in Montana, virtually no one knew me. It would be a clean slate. When I drove my little sedan on the tail of a fierce wind into Missoula, what I was really looking for was salvation. In the form of a Prince Charming mountain man. 

The little ski hill outside town, I heard, was the best place to meet guys. Plus, learning to ski would be something to do in the long, dark cold season. Despite the fact that I grew up at the foot of the San Bernardino Mountains, home to the gritty ski resorts of Snow Summit and Big Bear, winter was not in my family’s wheelhouse. In junior high, when I heard people start telling stories about learning to ski and snowboard, I cornered my father. 

“Dad, why don’t we ever go skiing?” 

A lifelong product of orange groves and waves himself, he replied, only half joking, “You can stand in a cold shower and rip up $20 bills for the same effect.”

I figured skiing, then, would be a trial, a task that must be accomplished toward an end goal. But, shockingly, I turned out to be good at it. Learning what my body could do in harmony with a certain angle of slope or a particular pattern of snow-robed pine trees made me forget for a while about that uncoordinated little girl. I’d been praying to winter to offer up a romance, was ready to make sacrifices to this new god if it asked for them. And perhaps it did, and I delivered unknowingly and without question, as snow edged out the desert heat from my bones. It fell in my dreams and in drifts behind my eyes. I didn’t find any princes there. But I did find my own power awakening. 

Spring came, the outdoor education season started in California, and my little sedan stayed parked in Montana. 

The landscape seeded in my skin. Creeks and rivers rearranged and settled into my blood vessels, trail dust tattooed my ankles. The landscape blurred something, too: the primary geographical feature of my college years. That three-story sorority house in West L.A., packed with 50 young women and full-length mirrors on every landing and at the end of every hallway, mercilessly insisted on what my body was supposed to look like, how the right clothes were supposed to hang on my breasts, which weren’t big enough, and my stomach, which wasn’t flat enough. Surely if I could fit the right mold then I would be worthy of love and the men would flock. I ran the perimeter of campus every other day. I counted calories. The energy it took exhausted me. And I wasn’t the only one in that house. All those bodies that held staggering intelligence and ambition and promise reduced to the pursuit of an unattainable image at the bid of West L.A.

But here. Here my body began to transmute into what it could do, not what it looked like, rinsing away what Los Angeles had taught me about image and self-worth and the dubious merit of a thin pair of thighs. It was in the midst of that transcendence that romance finally materialized. 

At 25 years old, I was saved. For a few years, I was part of something. As in, partner. As in, love, reciprocal. As in, half of a whole. With him, I was whole. I don’t believe I ever told him he was my first boyfriend. I never wanted him to think of me as flawed, to be repulsed by my past incapacity for inspiring attraction. And I did love him, but perhaps it was secondary to finally achieving what so much of Western culture had taught my generation of girls, insidiously and thoroughly, about what “complete” means.

Then he left for me another woman. One “more capable outdoors,” “more spiritually connected to the woods,” more enough of basically everything that I wasn’t. I walked the trails and swam the rivers in an attempt to wash away the pronouncement of my lacking, asked the gilded sun that kaleidoscoped through the cottonwoods and larch to evaporate it from my skin into the wide Montana sky.

I never stopped to think whether he had ever been enough for me. 

Some years after, I drove through the long light of a July night to West Glacier. Headed for a date. By then I’d been on many. Some stuck, and I’d be madly in love for a few months until my switch inexplicably flipped and I’d wonder what the hell I’d been thinking. But most hadn’t stuck, and second dates were a rarity. I always figured it was my fault. 

This one was an epic blind date. A mutual friend had introduced me to a man named Ben, who was stationed in Glacier doing trail work. He invited me to summit a peak in the park, if I didn’t mind staying the night on his couch for an early start in the morning. It was a spectacular act of faith for a first date. But I knew about faith. It was one of the things my friends said they liked best about me: how I put my heart on the chopping block again and again.

I recall certain scenes, particular details, of those 24 hours. Him walking down the steps of his little cabin with a beer in each hand before I even turned off the ignition, a couple tattoos snaking up his arms to disappear under rolled-up sleeves. How I couldn’t decide if his eyes were hazel or green. Pulling a scratchy blanket up to my chin on the too-small couch. The dark before dawn when he made us gigantic sandwiches of bacon and runny eggs.

I remember, perhaps because it was embarrassing, that as we passed the long stretch of Lake McDonald on the way up Going-to-the-Sun Road, I said without thinking: “Do you know that one of my favorite things in the whole world is jumping naked into a lake after a long hike?” 

I hadn’t meant it flirtatiously. It was just a fact about myself, like, “I am not a morning person,” or, “Actually, runny eggs really gross me out.” 

He grinned knowingly. “Well then. We’ll have to see if we can find any spots for you later.” 

I also recall that at the trailhead, he took off nearly at a sprint. I kicked into gear to keep up, my attempt to carry on a conversation punctuated by gasping even as he pulled farther ahead. I remember thinking he was just another mountain man like all the others who demonstrated clearly that I possessed neither the speed nor strength required for their adventure pursuits, which were more important than me, who was perhaps just a hindrance out here, on second thought, so why don’t we just meet up for a beer and a shag later?

“Is this a test?” I said to his back. If I wasn’t tough enough or whatever this guy was looking for, I wanted to know it now. If I’d learned anything over the years, it was that I could cut off the hoping and go straight to the rejection and save myself some torture.

“What?” He slowed, turning to look at me over his shoulder. “No! I’m just used to trail work, and the faster you hike, the faster you get things done and get back to camp for dinner. We can slow down, for sure. I’m sorry.” 

I was unused to apologies or the outside-the-self awareness required to issue them. I don’t remember whether the conversation was awkward or easy after that. I know that the summit was windy and we took a single photo, his dimple showing through strands of my hurricane hair. And that he got us miserably lost on the return after claiming he knew the trails in the park like his own bones. I handled it badly, we drove past Lake McDonald in the late afternoon without a word, and I folded myself into my Focus after a curt goodbye. And I remember the thought, as I drove back south: Another one bites the dust.

I left Montana shortly after. I dreamed of bigger mountains, deeper forests, and people to explore them with, as all my friends got married, had children, and insulated themselves. But the biggest reason was that I dreamed of falling in love for good. Montana had delivered only drought and dust and failure in that department.

I sold the sedan. I bought the truck — which fit who I had become, and would fit this next leg of the journey so much better. I drove, trying on landscapes where it took me. East, south, west. Eventually I drove north, clear through the border, extending the route I’d began when I left Los Angeles all those years ago. I finally turned off the engine in a tiny mountain town in British Columbia.

Revelstoke’s bladed ridgelines repeated themselves to the Yukon. These mountains were religion with prophets and fanatics and martyrs. The light through thick stands of hemlock and behemoth ancient cedar was harder to obtain, more gratifying to subsume because of it. This landscape was sharp, nearly impenetrable, and it would never even fit inside my body. 

I began, if not to turn away from the mythical notion of a man to “complete” me, to accept that there was no love out there for me. I chose mountains instead.

One late October afternoon, I knelt in front of my truck with a screwdriver to loosen my Montana license plates. I’d been here long enough that it was time. The Revelstoke air chilled with the sharp northern tilt of the earth and I thought, fleetingly, of math equation word problems about narrowing angles of light between the southern California desert and a Canadian ski town: “X equals how far she has come, measured in angles and distance.” Up here, I’d discovered the depth of my own capabilities. I’d expanded my limits in adventure sports, blossomed into a writer, surrounded myself with a community that lifted me up in those things. I’d traveled so far from that nerdy, chubby, awkward girl and her erroneous convictions. But internal growth is mostly unquantifiable with simple equations.

I twisted the tool on a corner of the Montana plate. The aluminum was bent from where I’d hit a deer some years before. She ran impossibly away and out of sight, trailing blood from wounds from which I knew she couldn’t recover. The blood was long gone from the plate, but her imprint remained. I pulled off the worn rectangle and affixed the shiny panel of my new British Columbia plate. It hung straight on my bent bumper. I ran my hand over its clean white slate, satisfied.

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A few months later, a notification popped up on Facebook. It was Ben’s birthday. On a trip back down to Montana some years back to grab my things from storage, I’d bumped into him in an old watering hole in Missoula where he had relocated for graduate school, and my brain did an about-face. It forgot about the bad parts of that first date and focused clearly, instead, on the topography of his body perfectly fitting mine when he stood to hug me. On a whim, I wrote Happy birthday on his profile. He replied immediately on Messenger. 

I want to apologize, again, for getting us lost on our hike all those years ago. I’ve felt bad about it ever since. 

The chat window held the archived thread of our first communication, timestamped five years ago. Scrolling back I saw the past iteration of myself: a girl less confident, still so careful to present herself so as to be liked. I saw him: striding assuredly into the wild whether or not he knew where he was going. 

The following month, at Ben’s invitation, I stopped in Whitefish, just south of the Canadian border where he lived now, to see him on my way to Missoula. My stomach dropped as I pulled into town, waking up butterflies that tickled my insides. I couldn’t figure out why the butterflies were having a party in there. I already knew Ben. 

He sat on the porch steps of an antique two-story house on the corner, sleeves rolled up to reveal those tattoos, elbows on his knees, scanning the street. He rose when he saw my car and smiled. The dimple. 

“How was the drive?” he asked. So many ways to respond. Instructive, I could say. Delivering. Redeeming. But he, asking only about this short leg of my long road to discovery, would be confused. I replied simply, “Good.” 

His tiny living room smelled of incense and woodsmoke and aging paper from the books overflowing a shelf. I turned to sit on an ugly plaid loveseat by the door, and stopped to examine an enormous map above it, with penned lines drawn all over it.

“Is this Glacier?” I asked him. 

He’d shut the door behind him, and was trying to find an innocuous place to stand in the small room with me in it. He settled for leaning against the wall. “Yeah. Those are all the trails I’ve hiked.” 

I leaned toward it, peering at an inked spider web in the northwest corner, right on the Canadian border. It was nowhere I’d ever heard of.

“That’s Kishenehn,” he said. “An old ranger station. I stay there every fall to patrol for poachers. It’s not on any maps anymore, but park officials still like to have a presence there during hunting season.” He paused. “It’s a pretty special place.”

That afternoon, something between us flicked on like a light. I could close my eyes and point to where he stood in a crowded room. As we hiked up a local mountain to ski down it, he looked at me and smiled with that dimple deepening and a premonition struck me to my core with a singular clarity: This will be big.

Some months later, we sat on my tailgate sipping my favorite Montana beer that Ben had brought up to Revelstoke, watching the August sun sink below the mountains across from where my truck sat on the river bank. A lovely moment. 

We argued through it. 

“I don’t want to keep going like this, with two weeks or more between seeing you,” he said. “It’s hard to be away from you so much. I can’t wait until we live in the same town.”

“But what will that even look like?” I downed the rest of my beer. “You’ve said you don’t want to move up here, which I get. It’s hard to get residency, or even a work permit. Trust me, I know, I’ve been through it.”

“It would be easier for you to move back down there. Don’t you want to be back in Montana eventually? With all your best friends? And me?”

I went to work peeling the label off the bottle in my hands to keep them busy while I figured out how to articulate what I needed to say. We’d met in his place, in mine. I fed him my northern landscape, the big newness of it all, the dark rainforest with ancient trees and the snowblind ridges unfurling to the Arctic. He fanned the dying embers of cottonwood light in me. But the drive back north after my visits to Montana always felt more … right.

“I don’t reach my full potential in Montana,” I said. “This is where I reach my full potential. It’s where I expand. And I’ve worked so hard to be here.”

I had finally become enough for myself — in fact, more than I ever thought I could be — and my hyper-independent, jaded heart was perhaps incapable of opening itself to the offer of big, complicated love. Real love, not that movie shit. And so then I said what I couldn’t take back: “I’m not ready to sacrifice everything for this.” 

Hurt pooled in his eyes, reflecting a skyline so foreign to him where the sun had just been.

Later we lay wrapped around each other in my bed, surrendering to sleep in our last night together before we separated ourselves by hundreds of miles, again, when he whispered in my ear, “Will you come with me to Kishenehn this fall?”

His sacred place. He’d told me how that specific corner had mapped itself inside his young and unsure skin and grown into the man lying beside me. I knew about places like that.  

At the center of a treed clearing, hidden from the wondrous skylines that defined Glacier, Kishenehn Ranger Station sat shrouded in seclusion. Elk and moose antlers hung over the cabin’s timber-frame porch. Ben toured me around the grounds, the few outbuildings that surrounded the cabin like satellites. At the old fire crew bunkhouse, Ben motioned me around a corner.

“See these depressions along the perimeter?” he said, pointing to the ground at a line of blurry craters the size of my head. “These are century tracks, where bears have walked in the same footsteps for generations. And these,” he gestured to a series of scores in the exterior log wall at chest height and higher, “are claw marks. We’ll probably find some fur around too — yep, here.” He picked a few light brown hairs off the wood and handed them to me. Then he adjusted the bear spray on the chest strap of his pack and led us toward the creek. 

He pointed out every track, explained every sound, inhaled the sky, and breathed it into me. He was so in his element here that he appeared the most solid he’d ever looked. And I understood, as I followed him along these trails that had shaped him the way my long road north had shaped me, that he didn’t need me to complete him, either.

We woke the next morning to 10 degrees and frost on the grass. A good morning for lingering over coffee by the woodstove. We read by the windows to catch their light. Ben put down his book often to watch the fringe of trees outside, which is why he was the one who saw the doe as she edged into the clearing. He called me over softly. Two fawns emerged from the trees, keeping close to the doe as the little family made its way through the wide meadow and disappeared into the light on the other side. 

Ben smiled and pulled me down into his lap to lay his head against my chest. 

“What are we going to do?” I asked into the quiet.

“About what?” 

“About us. Where are we going to live?”

He raised his eyebrows. “I thought you weren’t ready to have that conversation.”

Before I could think too much about it, I said:

“I think you’re the love of my life.”

His eyes were green, then. “I know you’re the love of mine.” 

Days later, with the temperature plunging, we trekked back to my truck in the sagebrush. The journey to a more fully formed iteration of the self looks like lines on a road atlas — or, for some, a wilderness trail map. Sometimes we must continually move forward to arrive. Sometimes, having charted the edges of ourselves, we are drawn to loop back, changed, to places we’ve already passed through, carrying acquired knowledge that lights up the landscape from new angles. 

I had made no decisions about which direction to drive. But I had arrived at this: My full potential did not lie in a particular place. My worth did not reside in another person. And I finally realized, then, that enough had never been the right concept to attach to love. Complement, growth, faith, and yes, even independence, so hard-won for me — these fit better, but were still too simplistic to encompass the reality of what this love could be in all its layered complications. If I were willing to let it. 

I opened my tailgate and shrugged off my heavy pack. Ben set his down next to it and pulled me into the landscape of his body that fit mine so well. “Thank you for coming with me,” he said. 

We got into my truck and drove. 

Cassidy Randall is a freelance writer telling stories on adventure, environment, and people expanding human potential. Her work has appeared in TIME, The New York Times, National Geographic, and Rolling Stone, and her first book, The Hard Parts with Oksana Masters, is out February 2023.

Editor: Cheri Lucas Rowlands

Copy-editor: Krista Stevens