In another life, I never moved away from Illinois. I spend summers laying out picnic blankets in the fenceless backyard that we share with eight of our neighbors. We drink iced tea out of plastic cups and run after fireflies, watching the yellow lights weave through our fingers. 

Maybe I’d have stayed best friends with P, gone on lunch runs and midnight drives together, texted under the desks in AP Biology. Maybe G could have been my first kiss, with eyes the color of sky before storm, long blonde curls I’d thread my hands through in the back seat after prom. I’d be adept on my old bike. I’d finally learn to fish off of that bridge.

I don’t think I would have come to Brown, in that life. I wouldn’t have attended the California summer program in high school that sparked my love for writing. Instead I might have studied civil engineering, or music composition, or bioinformatics. I’d have other friends. My laugh would ring differently. I wouldn’t be me anymore, or at all. I wouldn’t be writing this now.

I spend a lot of time in this life thinking about other ones. I imagine all my possible futures trailing off like splitting branches on an old oak tree, every leaf a different shade of red. Things were slower when I was a kid, when adult responsibilities didn’t loom on the horizon. Now, life is about doing the most, the best, the fastest—social life, internships, classes, extracurriculars, everything that constitutes college and beyond. I clamber up the tree toward a thousand formless futures, clawing for the best one, the right one. I spend my days racing someone whose name I don’t know. She looks a lot like me.

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March 22, 2025

10:38 a.m.

Train 87 is currently experiencing a delay in Route 128 due to issues with the engine. Our crew and mechanical team are currently troubleshooting the issue at hand.

12:13 p.m.

Due to ongoing issues with the current engine, a replacement engine has been sourced and is currently en route to Train 87's location.

1:56 p.m.

Train 87 has been DELAYED. Departure estimates are subject to change. Don't want to wait around? You can review your options and rebook travel by clicking…

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My friends like to tease me that I am transportation cursed. In the past two years, I’ve experienced four train delays of over an hour, five airplane delays of the same length, two complete flight cancellations, one Zipcar catastrophe involving a combination lock and a $100 loss from my bank account (the story has to be told in person; it’s a doozy), and a truly immeasurable number of RIPTA fiascos. 

I don’t say this to curry any kind of sympathy. I only ever bring it up to make my friends laugh. But the pattern has continued for so long and at such a consistent pace that, against my better wishes, I’m starting to believe there may be a kernel of truth to the “curse” after all. Is there really some higher power out there conspiring against me every time I decide to cross state lines? Is this the universe’s way of telling me to give up and settle, before I’ve even hit two decades of living?

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May 16, 2025

2:07 p.m.

SWA Flight 4124 on May 16 from BNA is canceled and we are working to rebook you.

2:11 p.m.

You've been rebooked to LAX on SWA Flight 3239 departing May 16 from BNA at 6:50 p.m., connecting to SWA Flight 2353 departing PHX at 10:05 p.m. on May 16.

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At the conclusion of my first year, I’m meant to fly home, from T.F. Green to Nashville to LA. Instead, I check my phone once I land in Tennessee to see that the second leg of my trip has been unceremoniously cancelled. I flurry to rebook my flight—I’m well-practiced at this point—and I’m not sure if it’s me or the Southwest system that succeeds first, but one of us does. I’ve added an extra stop in Phoenix to my journey, but at least I’m going home.

At least I’m going home. I repeat this to myself for the first hour, and in the beginning, it’s easy to stay energetic. I walk the terminal from end to end. I peruse cheesy romance books and cheesier tourist gear. I listen through an Omar Apollo album.

Then I get antsy, so I sit on the floor by my gate and try to do work. I’m getting too tired to think. I walk the terminal again in search of food, but honestly I just want In-N-Out. I miss home. Then I think of Brown. I already miss my Brown friends too. That doesn’t seem fair. It’s only been half a day.

I wait out the rest of my layover in increasing discomfort; I fidget and pace for what feels like a decade but is really under three hours. Every seat I find is too scratchy, every corner too loud, too dirty. I want to be on the move, to be doing something, en route to home or elsewhere, anywhere but here. 

The journey from Providence to California was supposed to take 10 hours. In the end, it takes 16, and to top it all off, I get my period on the way to Phoenix and bleed through my underwear. When I finally land at LAX, my last checked bag doesn’t show up at baggage claim. Southwest representatives tell me that it wound up in Louisiana, that they’ll mail it back when they track it down. My dad drives me home with only half of my closet. My curse is just showing off now.

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“Through the oculus of the bus terminal at Boston’s South Station, light falls

for a hundred feet. A shock, a god, a pillar of light, like that of the Pantheon

if the Pantheon had a McDonald’s, a Dunkin’ Donuts, surly young workers

at the Greyhound desk, & an escalator rising to its height—

just like it, that light. A patent for an early escalator called it an improvement

in stairs. An improvement, surely, how I’m standing still & still, somehow,

going up & up & up.”

– Mairead Small Staid, “An Improvement in Stairs”

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In another life, everything would be exactly the same as this one, except every single mode of transportation I planned on would be perfectly on time. The RIPTA would never sail past me three minutes early while I waved my hands ineffectually at the bus stop. The trains to Boston and New York would always leave as scheduled. The planes would take off on time.

This dimension would surely be far from the very best one, but my life would be easier, in some small but concrete ways. I wouldn’t balk at the idea of traveling, or feel my heart rate rise with anxiety at every extra minute of delay. I read somewhere that some species of sharks have to be swimming constantly, or else they drown. I could be a shark. I could never slow down.

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June 14, 2025

Phone call to Mom – 8 minutes (ended)

12:14 p.m.

He’s calling Triple A

He doesn’t have his insurance with him

I got his license

I’m sorry ?

Phone call to Mom – 6 minutes (ended)

12:22 p.m.

Michelle, get pictures of his car too

Front and back

Don’t forget get the paper from the drawer in the car. Sophie’s permit is there

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In mid-June, I am driving to Ventura with my best friend sitting shotgun in the family Honda Civic. Our windows are down to let in the breeze, and I am off the GPS route, sailing down a side road past the backed-up freeway. I am cruising—and then.

And then the scream of metal on metal. The sound of glass shattering. I’ve never heard that before, I think dimly. Then the lurch of motion across the other lane, four tires squealing across asphalt. My friend screaming. I’ve never heard that before.

When we skid to a rest in the sand on the other side of the road, my hands are white-knuckled around the wheel. I haven’t let go. We’ve been rear-ended; I step out into billowing dust to find both back lights smashed, the trunk door caved in so that you can see last week’s grocery bags inside, the bumper hanging off the right side entirely, dragging limp into the dirt. The back doors won’t open. The windshield is pulverized. I hadn’t even let go.

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“Every creature on earth has approximately two billion heartbeats to spend in a lifetime. You can spend them slowly, like a tortoise and live to be two hundred years old, or you can spend them fast, like a hummingbird, and live to be two years old.”

— Brian Doyle, “Joyas Voladoras”

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I think the thing that scares me most—more than intimacy, more than loneliness—is stagnancy. A loss of agency. For me, those come hand in hand: To question yourself is to still. To be still is to have lost your way. Being stranded in the airport, pacing like a caged wildcat, stuck in limbo and uncertainty, powerless. Being 19 and climbing the tree, racing for the right decisions, the only right decision. 

I watch my futures slip between my fingertips. All my other lives play out in blinding color when I close my eyes. And what if I make the wrong choices? What if I waste the only thing that has ever truly belonged to me?

❯❯❯❯

In another life, maybe another car was driving down that side road at the same time that my car was spinning spinning spinning into the other lane, and their hood thundered into my door; or maybe I was rear-ended just a little bit harder, faster—all of which is to say that in another life, I am no longer alive.

I think a lot about what that would be like. Surely, I wouldn’t have the swish of my feet through the scarlet leaves littering the Main Green, or the sensation of cold rain trickling into my shirt, down each of my ribs like a xylophone. Surely I wouldn’t have the laughs of my friends, all piled onto the same twin XL bed, each with their own key and melody.

I wonder who’d miss me. I wonder who wouldn’t. Mostly though, I wonder if I’d be capable of missing anything—if some nebulous part of my spirit would return to the breaking seafoam on the beach, or the rangy coyotes that lope through the chaparral of my hometown. If I’d get to watch my friends graduate and my sister grow up, peering from a second realm folded between the wrinkles in ours like origami. If I’d see every timeline drop golden from that old gnarling oak. If I’d finally know it all.

Or maybe whatever constitutes myself would have been snuffed out entirely instead. I’d be here and then gone. Nineteen years vanished in the flash of a blinker. Something about almost dying. Something that makes you want to cling tight to this life again.

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A few days after I get home for the summer, my missing suitcase turns up on my doorstep, a tag that reads “NEW ORLEANS AIRPORT” hanging from its handle. Everything I lost is accounted for inside.

I spend my break in California with a gnawing worry deep in my stomach—that my hometown no longer fits inside me the way that it used to. The teal walls of my bedroom are plastered with pictures of people I don’t know anymore, calendars with “Senior Week!” circled in yellow highlighter, the gaping holes in between indicating the posters that I deemed adult enough to move with me to college. When I curl up on my queen-size mattress, I feel like a little kid. When I walk to the library or my friends’ houses, I feel indescribably old, the streetlamps flickering around my head, the roads all at once unfamiliar and choking.

But what I am learning is that my 19-year-old self is growing around the 18-year-old one, just as she did around the 17-year-old, and all the way back to the little girl who dangled fishing rods taller than her into the river and scrambled after fireflies, in the same way that rings on a tree grow around themselves. There is always time to live slow and soft, to make the wrong choices. California and Rhode Island and the past and the futures are contained within me. Everything I have ever lost is still accounted for.

❯❯❯❯

“I count my time in dog years

Swimming in sevens, slow dancing in seconds

Oh, and I'm the one that loves you

Oh, and I'm the one that loves you”

— Maggie Rogers, “Dog Years”

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Before the windshield exploding, before the Nashville airport, even before I swear off Zipcar, there is Montréal—or more accurately, the drive home from it.

My mom has spent the entire week leading up to spring break fretting about the forecasted blizzards. She is concerned about me and my friends’ driving abilities—she is a mother, after all. What if the road gets too icy? she asks me, her voice tinny on the phone. What if you get caught in the storm?

We’ll be fine, I laugh.

And truly, her worries don’t sound real until I find myself on the third driving shift back from Canada, following a one-lane mountain road through somewhere in Vermont. The clouds that have spent hours gathering at the horizon have burst. Snow falls thickly in a blanket over the road, as soft and gentle as heartbreak. I cannot see more than three feet in front me.

Initially I want to panic. I have no indication of where I am going beside my friend’s GPS, blinking from the dashboard, but he’s sound asleep in the passenger seat and I know he needs the rest. I have never driven in conditions worse than light-to-medium rain. We are caught in the storm.

I adjust the rearview mirror to see my other three friends also asleep in the backseat, their heads nestled against each other’s shoulders and collarbones. The sight relaxes my hands, unclenching from the steering wheel, and I realize that they trust me to bring all of us back in one piece. More importantly, I find that I trust myself too, now—not completely, but at least a little more, and that will have to do.

So I slow the car to a crawl. In the end it is very simple—I know there is a path home; I know I can find the way there. I flick the high beams on.