A collection of creative nonfiction essays

I sit at the kitchen table across from my friend from high school. The dishwasher runs quietly as we work and the smell of rice wafts over from the stove. Alex clicks incessantly at his mouse, filling out summer internship applications and annoying me to no end. I think that, if a house is a living breathing entity, the kitchen table is its exact heart. Baby photos line the wall of the room, and sometimes I have trouble telling Alex apart from his younger brother — their pale rosy cheeks and identical buzzcuts. In others, I know it's him. He dons a blue racing uniform and a homemade paper crown that wraps around his head, pushing his ears out until he looks like an elf. He has just one hand on the handlebar of his trike, gleefully. In another, he smiles with all his teeth and his tongue too, wearing bright red and a pair of grey overalls. The biggest photo on the wall is more recent, maybe late middle school. We met just a few years later as sophomores in high school debate class. He brings up high school sometimes, mostly to tell stories that embarrass me, and we talk about the same people, the same breakups, over and over again. I study his face while Alex works on a coding project, trying to match up his features to the photos. To find what has changed and stayed the same. Every time I come back to California, I try to explain to myself exactly what I love about my high school friends. If it has something to do with the youth or the nostalgia of it all. Often, it feels like an exercise in futility to capture something I feel so deeply, but I realize when I look at his face that I feel proud. When I come home for Christmas break we visit our favorite teacher, whose class we met in and who has remained stoic and cool in contrast with the freneticism of our quarter-life crises. That day, I watched Alex talk to him about the classes he has just finished at Stanford, and my heart swelled with something akin to my own accomplishment. After, we sat in the car with our friends and moved to the beat of The Strokes, blasting through his car stereo. I stare at them unabashedly, in awe of the people they have somehow become, without my noticing. I wonder, when we see the faces of people we love as babies in old photos, if we are really seeing them. If we see the potential they once had or what they have used that youth to become. I wonder if we would have been friends as babies, riding on trikes around the park that we now go to late at night to see stars. I wonder if I can actually pick baby Alex out of a crowd, just by the slope of his nose, the way I think I can.

If I were asked to tell a story, to say something true about who I am, I would say that two days after my twentieth birthday, I sat crosslegged on a field and watched a small rabbit die. It was late April, when the clouds had begun to roll in and the sky was always shielded by a layer of haze. Wild bunnies roam freely in the spring, tiny nervous things on impossibly green grass.

When I first walked past it, its haunches were pulled up and ears pinned back. It was some disease, ticks crawling on the soft fuzz of its inner ear, its blood seeping out and staining matted fur. I called the animal hospital, both of them, but in the end what was there to do but sit with it? A rabbit's paw is lucky, you know, even when glimpsed through the brush. If I were asked to tell a story, I would tell them, it did not matter that I would go to class after, that the swarming bugs would move onto something else, that no one else would give it a second look, really. For ten, fifteen minutes, it did not matter. A guy that I saw on a night out once, he walked past and I tilted my head down. There was nowhere to go but home, so I did, and I called and called until someone picked up, until I said that something must be done, that the body must be moved. I sent emails, and left voicemails, and said, I was saddened to see the rabbit move behind a fence, into a bush, instead of being properly disposed of. I chastised softly.

What I really meant is this: there was a moment when I was waiting, holding my breath and whispering quietly, restraining from touch, watching its frantic movements slow, until there were none at all, and there was no one to tell about it. There was a moment, ever so briefly, when I watched a memory, alone. There is nothing but empty fur on the field now, hollow eye sockets that widened gradually, and no one else could tell you why.

The sun is setting, Emily said to me as we drove through the farmlands of central California, hours left until we would return from our trip to her house in Lake Tahoe. I wonder if the sun is setting slower because we're driving west, she said, in the frank, matter-of-fact tone she tends to take when beginning a sentence that will inevitably end with some abstract air.

We spoke quietly as we drove, careful of our friends in the backseat, who had been mildly asleep since we stopped in Sacramento to eat pho. Emily had driven for the first stretch, leaving behind Nevada, the severe tranquility of the lake, and we spent the first hour chasing our friends in another car, always a mile ahead. She drove, with me sat in the passenger seat, playing music until she told me to skip it, which I did dutifully because I had long since realized that Emily had a more refined ear than I did. We drove through treelined bends until we reached the purgatory of land that connected Davis to Vacaville, until I could not tell you where we were except in relation to the bridge that would return us to the place that mattered.

The weekend, already slipping away from me, was easiest remembered in shades of blue: ceruleans and teals. The sky, the water, the mountains, there was a sense that it was all the same immovable, unending backdrop. Even the clouds, rolling in so ominously to neighboring bodies of water, did nothing but muddy the colors, like a blanket thrown over everything, doling out a mild amnesia to all who passed through. Just snapshots, of the dinner we painfully over-salted, of me reading aloud on the beach, of the boys skinny dipping at midnight while we watched for shooting stars and country club security officers. And of Emily, laughing, drink in hand, propped up in the hammock, caught in the motion of an anecdote. Three days where, perhaps I felt spiritual with no real sense of spirituality, listening for the animals in the nighttime, laboring over food in a steaming kitchen, tracing the lines of my collarbone with eyes squeezed shut in the sun. It felt as though everything was stagnant at the lake, despite the pop-up beach tents offering shade and the ambitious pop music blaring from speakers, time stood still at the county line. It felt nearly impossible to remember how deep the water had gone, how I had to catch my breath after leaving, so I drove.

I drove even though I had never driven her car before, even though she is quite a bit shorter than me and I had to adjust the seat while merging onto the freeway, even though I was unaware of where I was going and no one was giving me direction, I drove, and when I asked Emily to try her coffee she handed it to me without question. It felt as though it was just the two of us, like we had spent all weekend alone, without the girls in the backseat, the other car full of people we just had a meal with. It was not a new thought, and it felt easy to hold on to, by simply not looking at the backseat, lowering my gaze in the right rear view mirror, so I focused on the dusty purple sky that hung low over the farmland. I looked to my right to see Emily, who now seemed impossibly smaller than she had been, pressed to the wheel, in the driver's seat.

The Fourth of July was the following weekend and we remembered in unison a party she had thrown last year, the bagels we had bought the morning after, how I woke up in her guest bed with all my rings on, to the sound of her knocking softly at the door. We vaguely considered another party, but we knew our friends were mostly out of time, knowing that we had hosted several party-adjacent events with a lackluster list of attendees through the summer, which was nearly halfway over now, and we had no strong desire to continue. Recollection fails, but I can say without a doubt we talked about the same familiar topics that always held our interest that summer, including her boyfriend, who she was contemplating ending things with and would in fact break up with mere days after our drive, and the boy that I was not, at the time, seeing but later that summer might have been. And we talked about the music and books we enjoyed, and the people we know, and music and books they enjoyed, and then it seemed we had driven over that slight hill that opens the horizon to the bridge, and the city was suddenly quite visible in shiny steel pieces ahead. But I was so struck by the blurring taillights of the passing cars that I could not quite clearly make out which part of the city it was, or even which bridge we were taking into it.

Emily began to read a book that I read during the winter, and I spoke carefully to avoid telling her about the parts she hadn't read yet, but somehow, one way or another, I managed to spoil something. I told her about a quote I liked, until she read it to me. About girlhood and suburbia, everything we had mastered through afternoons spent accomplishing nothing, gifting each other lofty dreams.

Our archival collection of videos was half assembled for an ambitious filmmaking project, never to be completed, a discography of a summer in our hometown, though we lived in different zip codes. Scenes in coffee shops, dinner parties with an unchanged guest list, comatose on the couch watching movies, chasing her dog out of the pool in the backyard, the same walk, the same neighborhood. But through this movie, there were no hopes of becoming amateur directors, just some mutual understanding of wanting to make a thing real, to remember that once, we had done nothing, passing time back and forth with hands cupped together.

Emily and I, our friends, the tiny pocket of the world that had no boundaries to us, had begun to nurture what seemed as though it could only be lifelong love of the indulgent pretentiousness of beautiful prose. My adolescent obsession with quintessential Californian and journalist Joan Didion had spread, our recommendations cycling through one another until we could all recite the same lines by heart, until our bookshelves read the same. It was not just Didion's incisive commentary on our beloved shared home state or her prescient observations on the culture of a changing nation that I found captivating, but her ability to make something right. Hemingway, who Didion drew a great deal of influence from, wrote from 1960s Paris that there was a certain unavoidable aim in writing to make something true on the page, to put it rightly and not describe.

To Didion, to us, there was only one place where everything was real, on the page, through the lens. She writes that the hills of the coastal ranges look right to her, the place names have the ring of real places; she is easy in California in a way that she is not easy in other places. No pretending, or posturing, Emily and I had agreed, in our terms of production. Perhaps, we knew, it would be a fruitless endeavor, hours spent creating tape that runs on and on, boring and pedestrian and devoid of any real meaning. But that meant, we told each other, that we would create something so incapable of lying about where we had been that it might convey nothing beyond the literal, no metaphor, no secret language to teach to someone else. And so we pondered as we drove, about what it all meant, and it should not be surprising that we landed on no specific answer. We never captured what it meant to have one final hometown summer on film. Maybe there was some answer to be found, but if there was, we were too young, or perhaps too aware of our own youth, to find it.

There may have been a particular moment, after leaving Sacramento, before the gleaming city could be seen from beyond the horizon line, when the sun set, but it was nearly impossible to place exactly when or where because the hours had blurred together in the same way that the landscapes outside were level and never-changing and monotonously beautiful. I had paid little attention to the sun as it slowly sank other than to look out my window and internally remark at the beauty of a California sunset, something I did often, as it was the first summer I had spent at home since I moved away.

The sun is setting. I wonder if the sun is setting slower because we're driving west.

I paused, because I had never considered that there was a way to drive, some strategic maneuver, that would pause the course of the sun, and because it seemed apt to me that Emily would be the one to consider this. I would have liked to believe it was true, driving with her, even if it was not. Even though it was not. So I told her that it probably did set slower, but imperceptibly so, because we had driven a great deal south and not directly west and we were going rather slow even though we were on the freeway and I took speed limits as a mere suggestion. Really, though, because I found it beautiful, the whole thing, and any time spent with Emily that summer felt like a tiny elongation of something drifting slowly away, and I was happy to believe that she felt the same way, on this drive that was stretching out to become utterly lovely.

Well, Emily had said, after a period of silence. I suppose we can't drive west forever.

A wistful look towards me, her eyes shiny with reflection, with traffic lights. And then she smiled, because you would drive into the ocean, and we laughed and she skipped the song that was playing.

Then, as it tends to do, the sun set, and it was dark and we continued driving although I could not see where we were going anymore, and I had to assume that the lines would stay the same in front of us, full of blind faith in nothing. So we drove, until we reached the bridge, and then suddenly, there were two other people in the car, and we were on a road that I have driven perhaps hundreds of times in my life, and we stopped for gas and for Emily to drive, and she did not drive me home. I remember, someone else drove me home.