Attempted essay — Wednesday, February 11th, 2026
1.4.24
I felt the beat of The Shins’ “Simple Song” in my bending and stretching legs, shaking out the post-1600m lactic acid and swallowing away the taste of blood. Coach talked to us like we were his friends. I felt the soft ends of my ponytail brush my shoulders as I turned only halfway to start a conversation. Self-conscious; I could see myself then, as I do looking back now, in the third person, uneven skin on the back of my shoulders and two little braids tied with silver and red ribbons at the crown of my head.
5.3.24
I’d listened to “Kiss Me” by Sixpence None the Richer enough times to hear, even before they began, the sweet opening strums under the blue spring sky as I opened the rounded door of his sun-warmed gray 4Runner. My dark green running shorts slid across weathered fabric seats to fit two backpacks on my lap.
9.25.24
Ironically, it was the morning Bob Dylan sang me “Don’t Think Twice, It’s Alright” on the way to school. That night, pilling long blue sleeves and blood dripping, sitting on the plush stool in my sister’s bathroom that probably wasn’t meant to hold my weight. Sharp inhales of the peppermint oil she brought back from her work retreat. It’s supposed to soothe.
12.30.24
The sun was turning the pavement blue and the bare gray trees a glowing pink as it set so early in the day, as it always seemed to do, over winter-yellow backroad fields. There’s a picture of me watching it with long hair twisting in the wind, navy blue converse (muddied already) straddling the yellow center lines. Noah Kahan’s “Maine” played on the way home.
6.26.25
My deliriousness kept me from realizing that the purple-pink clouds mesmerizing me through the ovoid double window were colored by a dimming filter to let passengers sleep. Lizzy McAlpine’s tired voice and soothing swells tried to further that goal, “Like It Tends To Do” wired into my ears, but I couldn’t close my eyes until I finished arguing with myself.
Why was I missing winter’s sadness? Why did I want to go back to the month of wet hair and warm tears, streaming as relentlessly as “The Day After Tomorrow”, when I wanted to go back to hearing “Sad Beautiful Tragic” and its sinusoidal lull as gray morning light woke me up that August, wishing it was February so I could hear “Real Love Baby” and smell coconut in my hair?
Between my exhaustion, physically and mentally, and the lyrical poignancy pouring into my brain in that atmospheric twilight, this thought occurred to me: all those times you heard that every day you are alive means something, it was the truth. But what’s missing from that statement is that a lot of those days wouldn’t feel like they mattered until many months later. Periods of depression will feel like flying over the ocean, moving against time. It will be easy to get lost in nostalgia and mourn the death of a golden age that never really was. My psychology professor said, though, on the first day, that the most intuitive learning strategies are often not the most effective – and maybe the same principle applies here. Maybe feeling the weight of what we’ve lost doesn’t equate to drowning in memories whose emotion is too thick to swim through to the surface. The truth is, I am always going to miss things that meant little to me when they happened, and I am always going to feel a little sick when I remember the worst times, the hardest times to survive. But it’s impossible to use the strength gained from hardships without disentangling from the wreckage of what was and placing your first footsteps on the freshly fallen snow of a new place, a new idea, and a new belief. By the time you do, it’s likely that everything will have changed, like it tends to do. Change, like clotting blood and the setting sun, is inevitable. It soothes.
So in the midst of pain, I search not for meaning, nor memoriam, but the strength to close my eyes and push through the clouds until I reach a day where the sky is clearer and the ground feels level beneath my feet.
The Dilemma Of It All 