Ohio

Life itself has become the final disposable, exploitable resource. We will do anything. Level whole mountains, erase whole species, relocate mighty rivers, burn forests to the ground, change the pH of the water, blanket ourselves in toxic chemistry. It took two million years for our species just to stand up and only five hundred to do the rest. Our culture is one of abundance, of entitlement, and basically little else. We've put our birthright at risk because we don't know how to control ourselves. Our lust.

When he began to see the way the world is, not the way the corporate media presented it, not the way his teacher and parents told it, not the way he wished it was, so he wouldn't have to feel guilt. Once he saw the way the world is, in it's most gritty, tactile, overwhelming sadness and injustice, well he could never unsee it.

The history had already been written. What is history but an adjudication of memory. And what is memory but a faithless rendering of all sex, death, justice, murder, prayer, greed, hope, mercy, and love. Memory was as molten as the soul.

How to explain that we all show up to this party with no invite and no apparent host, and we can depart from it at any moment for no reason?

No matter where you went or how novel it seemed when you first pulled into town, it always turned into the same bars, same food, same women, same politics, same liquor, same drugs, same troubles.

Thirteen years old, he walked around for weeks thinking of those words, feeling the way you do when you're outside with your friends and it starts to rain, but you're too far from home to run for it. So you just get soaked and marvel at why you don't do such a thing all the time.

I tell you this story only to try to explain to you that the world you see today and the world you will see at the upper span of your long lifetimes—well—it will amaze you. The changes you will experience, the chances you will have to shape those changes—I just cannot stress how astonishing and astounding and joyful an opportunity it will be.

It's hard to say where any of this ends or how it ever began, because what you eventually learn is that there is no such thing as linear. There is only this wild, fucked-up flamethrower of a collective dream in which we were all born and traveled and died.

Allow the troubled, complex world to collapse into identifiable points of easily rendered resentment. Cling to a satisfying fire and use it to hold one’s demons at bay.

What an important lesson for every young person to learn: If you defy the collective psychosis of nationalism, of imperial war, you will pay for it. And the people in your community, your home, who you thought knew and loves you, will be the ones to collect the debt.

Thinking about this cage he lived in, this prison where it felt like he'd spend the entirety of his life, cradle to grave, measuring the distance between his most modest hopes and all the cheap regret he actually ended up living. You passed your time in the cage, he figured, by clinging pointlessly and desperately to an endless series of unfinished sorrows.

It doesn't matter where you come from. Neither does it really matter where you go. It's all the sex and sandwiches in between.

It was how she made him laugh as a thirteen-year-old. It’s why he dreaded the moment when they’d have to get off the bus at Rainrock Road and part ways—because he knew there was a finite number of those bus rides in this one precious life.

The house sat at the end of the street, forlorn, the lawn browning, a testament to how the world never works out the way you think it will, let alone the way you want it to.

How quickly contempt can dissipate when faced with the pathetic humanness of another person. You see inside them for even the briefest moment and suddenly empathy blows through. A dark sky cleared by a hard rain.

The natural world existed for her, as it did for most of the Global North, only as another theme park, a Disneyland. One of the luxuries of modernity was never having to consider how the asphalt from a parking lot could crush soil, disrupt a delicate system, banish a pocket of insects, birds, or small mammals to ruin. Or that this parking lot was merely a microcosm of something far larger and darker: a war on the living biosphere.

With all that had passed between him and Rick, the friendship felt constantly volatile in his hands, like unstable explosive. Yet even with Kaylyn standing there in the water, looking as gorgeous and iridescent as a dragonfly, he felt a surge of love and regret unlike anything he’d experienced before. Because they were just kids, and that day they drank and they danced and they laughed at the sky-blue heavens, and it really felt like anything could be fixed and anything could be forgiven.

Yet his friend was in no way standard. He was freewheeling, mule-stubborn, and cunning as a coyote trickster. He had whole oceans inside of him, the wilds of the country, fierce ghosts, and a couple hundred million stars.

Dad slugged back the Rolling Rock. He used to only drink Budweiser until those commercials with the frogs came out. He’d said, “Welp. Can’t drink moron beer,” finished the rest of his Budweiser that night and, as far as Dan knew, had yet to touch another

Beyond the urge to drink and get the vomit taste out of his mouth was the urge for something harder. And beyond the urge for something harder was the urge to remember—the worst addiction of all.

Home is a roving sensation, not a place,

I mean we are no longer cataloguing life with art, which is perhaps why art is failing. Life itself has become the final disposable, exploitable resource. We will do anything. Level whole mountains, erase whole species, relocate mighty rivers, burn forests to the ground, change the pH of the water, blanket ourselves in toxic chemistry. It took two million years for our species just to stand up and only five hundred generations to do the rest. Our culture is one of abundance, of entitlement, and basically little else. We’ve put our birthright at risk because we don’t know how to control ourselves. Our lust.

but there comes a point when a man can no longer spend all his waking hours looking at the stupid cruelty people regularly visit upon one another.

A contour of starlight put her profile in repose. He wasn’t sure how old you have to be before you know what you feel is not infatuation, that you are not merely dreaming up an idyllic thing; you understand the world differently because of this other consciousness bound to yours. He’d mourned her every moment he’d known her.

tell you this story only to try to explain to you that the world you see today and the world you will see at the upper span of your long lifetimes—well—it will amaze you. The changes you will experience, the chances you will have to shape those changes—I just cannot stress how astonishing and astounding and joyful an opportunity it will be.” Thirteen years old, he walked around for weeks thinking of those words, feeling the way you do when you’re outside with your friends and it starts to rain, but you’re too far from home to run for it. So you just get soaked and marvel at why you don’t do such a thing all the time.

You know.” He twisted his coaster. “My father once told me that it’s on other people to let go of their fear and prejudice. And this was a man who had his shop burned to the ground because he tried opening in a white neighborhood in Cincinnati. It’s their problem, he said, and that’s on them. But he also told me that it’s on you to give people a chance to change.

No eighteen-year-old is equipped to understand how love can inspire so much shame, so much self-loathing.

Where does a girl who’s lost her religion go to find meaning? What replaces the hole that faith, cast off, leaves behind? Until her conversation with Hilde, Stacey had had no conception of how deep and aching this chasm inside herself was. Before that strange confluence of Hilde and Gaia she’d never really considered herself as part of any ecological system, and this came to astonish her later. How people walk through their lives nearly in a coma, unaware of the physical substrate that surrounds them.

She forgave him his ravings because she knew how they likely helped: focus your rage, your disappointment, your sorrow onto anything else. Allow the troubled, complex world to collapse into identifiable points of easily rendered resentment. Cling to a satisfying fire and use it to hold one’s demons at bay.

Sure, he’d left some stuff out, but he figured narrators were always conveniently forgetting essential shit. In the last decade everyone had learned to be a truth masseuse.