Today was supposed to be tomorrow—or I guess today could have been yesterday—or rather yesterday could have been today. I wake up at five thirty AM. The house is quiet. Two housemates, also grad students, are gone for winter break. The other, a high school math teacher, whose room is across the hall from mine, is already awake. Sometimes he leaves for work at six thirty, other times closer to eight. I don’t understand his schedule. 

 

Today I’m driving home. Yesterday instead of driving home I drove to the cliffs overlooking the sea. The night before that I had walked three or four miles of the same coastline, going slow enough to, I thought, maybe lower my heart rate. The quarter is over. Eleven weeks of coursework and TA’ing, reading midterm and midterm and final after final touched-up by AI, eleven weeks of leading two weekly sections at eight-thirty in the morning, online, my face on Zoom always smiling, always asking my students how they’ve been, how this poem makes them feel, what builds up inside them as they encounter image after image, what their body knows how to make, what is beautiful even if it is not easy to endure, even if it is an upset—what is human. Nobody has shown up to my office hours all quarter. Actually, there was one. She had wanted to know if she was answering the prompt for their first assignment. That was back in week two. I’m writing this down now because I can no longer afford to take anything for granted. 

 

Today I’m gathering a few groceries from the refrigerator, from my cabinets, I’m loading up the trunk of my car. A suitcase my best friend’s mom gave to me and which I had thought I wouldn’t need, full of clothes and shoes. A Trader Joe’s canvas tote full to the brim with books. A Lover’s Discourse peeks out the top at me as I close the trunk. I’ve decided to disagree with Barthes about a couple things. I watch the trunk’s shadow swallow up the early morning light touching the cover, his name, the bag holding it, the tangerine that fell out of my shopping bag weeks ago and which I’ve left to dehydrate in the dark. 

 

OK I’m going to have a nervous breakdown bc I realized a 4th person prob used ai … I think I’m gonna go insane 

 

I read my fellow TA’s texts as I put my snacks for the road in the passenger seat, buckle up my backpack which my car often mistakes for a person and cries at me is unbelted until I reach over and pull the belt over its nylon belly. Inside it are my laptop, letter-writing stationery, some pencils I haven’t even sharpened yet but which it feels like I might need during my two and a half weeks away. I forget my sketchbook in its bin under my bed. I don’t figure this out until I get home and want to use it. 

 

What is there to say? What can I say? Don’t lose your mind, don’t have a breakdown? Don’t let what your students do affect you, don’t worry about an entire generation of young minds who are being subliminally convinced that their own ideas and manners of expression are worth less than the tox’d up averaged language slop spat out by LLMs? A human brain can hallucinate just as good as ChatGPT’s can. I can’t answer my friend, my cohort-mate and fellow TA for this online poetry course. I’ve already spent two days and nights crying, going to the sea because it feels like that might help me. A week or so ago, I watched a seagull chase an otter across the sun-dappled water, and wanted to believe they were friends, even though I saw the seagull pecking up the crumbs that the otter left in its wake. 

 

The drive from Santa Cruz to my hometown takes around seven and a half hours. I take it alone, and I drive my light-blue VW Beetle, from inside of which, I’ve been told, you can barely see my head above the steering wheel if you look at me straight through the windshield. I think I’m going to look like a teenager until I go into menopause. Only a couple more decades until then. Maybe only one. 

 

To prepare for the trip, which I take for winter and summer breaks, I usually set up a queue of podcasts and playlists I’ve put together specifically for the drive. This time I don’t do that. On the night of the fifteenth, the night before I was originally planning to head out, when I could have been thinking about what I’d be listening to the next morning, I couldn’t fall asleep. I wasn’t listening to anything. My mind was loud. Exposure to constant sound, even at sub-perceptual frequencies, can lead to anxiety, fatigue, headaches, sleep disorders, high blood pressure, impaired cognitive function. Every day I take the world into me like an unending pulse of sound. It sits inside me, a relentless, amorphous irritation slathered like an expired balm across a grief deeper than I can—or am willing to—understand. 

 

To touch that grief would be to unravel. To cease to be what I have been made to be. And it would be to become, to live as, to exist as what I am—an animal. An animal of this earth, for this earth, by this earth, in every form I have ever been and in every form I will ever be. To touch that grief would be to feel a wound I cannot ever recover from, a wound we are all carrying, a wound that is working itself into our genetic code, to sit alongside microplastics, disrupted hormones, the tumors biting into our flesh, the fattened up cholesterol globules clogging our veins, the ulcer’d stomachs, the barren wombs. 

 

My car runs on gas. I’m not going to do any math, but I’m aware of what driving up and down the coast twice or more a year does, I’m aware of what it costs us all for my family to visit me during the school year, I know what I’m doing when, on early weekend mornings, I have to drive myself a few miles up highway one, to the log by the side of the road overlooking a gorge full of trees, then the ocean. I know the ocean is a part of this, that the water is polluted, that sea animals are dying, that the only life that will survive us is that that remains at depths we can never ever reach, despite our artificial intelligence, despite what the stars predict about the advances in technology that are still to come over the next twenty years. By the time I go into menopause and finally look like an adult woman, what good will this body be? 

 

What is there to say? It’s okay, we’re in it together, we’re all losing our minds we’re all having nervous breakdowns we’re all going insane our students hurt all of our feelings we’re all so worried none of us can sleep without medication and during the day we’re taking drugs invented by the CIA just for a little break from it, a little dream. 

 

Today the roads are clear for most of the drive. The central valley amasses its notorious tule fog during this time of year, though I’ve heard through the online forums visited in a state of anxiousness as I consider the road ahead of me that the way the fog is now is nothing like it was twenty years ago. That’s not too bad for me, as I hurtle across miles and miles of central valley farmland, through pumpjack copses, headed to James Dean’s last stop in Lost Hills. I guess twenty years ago it would have been mere feet of visibility instead of the quarter mile I have now. 

 

When I get to James Dean’s last stop, his gigantic cut out flops lightly in the cold wind that cuts across the flat fields of Lost Hills. Trembling doesn’t stop him from simpering down at me. I look back up at him, one moody queer staring down another across the decades, across the big seam. I feel sorry for his ending. Hi, I say to him. I see ya. 

 

I learned how to drive in Southern California. I’m not sure why I’ve returned to the earth to live here in this time, but I am still a product of the environment of this life, by which I mean to say that I can be an impatient driver. After getting a speeding ticket on the toll roads during my MFA, on my way to a brunch party with a vegan quiche sitting in my passenger seat—the cop said, leaning down over the quiche’s window, did you even see me?—I experienced a couple years of what I might call road-specific compunction, but it’s difficult to survive more than a few 400 mile drives without reverting to my original self, who likes to drive fast. My car has a turbo-charged engine. So, knowing all this, imagine me on a road winding through some brown foothills whose names I don’t know through a thick fog, not as thick as it used to be, but still thick, with perhaps, as I’ve mentioned, a quarter-mile of visibility. Speed limit is sixty, car in front of me, an SUV driven, I assume, by an old person—no offence—is going about forty-five. 

 

I’m allowed to pass on this road. Obviously there are dangers that I understand: I can only see a quarter mile ahead of me which is shortened by the distance between my car and the car in front of me, and however fast the invisible cars coming from the other direction are going shortens the distance I have to gas it up and get around this slow poke parade of one. I get it. But I’m going to do it. When I do it, I pull out to the left, and the car in front of me, for a second or two, proceeds in its groggy peace, then, I think, the driver sees me, or the top of my head above the steering wheel in the drivers seat of a Volkswagen Beetle, which is as everyone knows the car Barbie drives and the coveted vehicle of teenage girls everywhere, and so because he sees me—I can see now it’s an older man—he speeds up. Of course now I’m seeing headlights directly in front of me, headed toward me more quickly than I had expected. 

 

I stomp on the gas, I put on my blinker so the cars headed toward me will slow down. I zip out in front of the Barbie-hater and I keep going. Zip away and out of sight. That’s the thing about my girly little car. Doesn’t think twice about ninety, can make it to a hundred without breaking 2500 rpm. I’m not going to diagnose anybody with anything, but things like this happen every time I’m on the road. Except for in Santa Cruz where everybody for some reason is a friendly and polite driver, probably because that’s a local adaptation that allows for survival in the chaotic social moods that animate that little city. But I get on any highway and cars can’t wait to cut me off, block me from switching lanes, speeding up and around me if I pull in front of them in their lane. My car is small enough that I can’t see in front of the car in front of me on most roads. If I’m following the car in front of me too closely because I’m relying on them to understand the flow of traffic and all of a sudden they stand on their brake, they like to brake check me. One old man recently wagged his finger at me in outrage from his passenger’s side mirror. (I almost felt bad for my reflexive laughter.) If I won’t move out of someone’s way in the left lane because I’m already going eighty five and they want to go ninety five, they cut me off, brake check me. 

 

Here’s how I keep myself sane: I think to myself, look at what I am doing for this world. I’m giving misogynists a free pass, a way to live out their woman-triggered aggression without ruining anybody’s life. Maybe if they can cut me off, maybe if they can teach me a lesson, maybe if they can put me and my little car in our place, they won’t go out into the world and rape or kill anybody. 

 

I can hardly think of a cis-female or FAB or queer friend who hasn’t been sexually assaulted. A few come to mind. But just that. A few. 

 

I survive this gramp’s irritation, and I live the rest of the way to my hometown to tell the tale. I survive everyone’s irritation, sometimes I even enjoy knowing that I’m the pea under the mattress. I’ve survived the irritation of every man who has ever hurt me, or wanted to. 

 

On the road I’m unable to listen to podcasts, so I put music on instead. My mind drifts in and out of attention. Where does it go? I’m not sure. Over the past quarter, the fall quarter of my second year of this creative/critical PhD program, I’ve had a personal renaissance of a sort. I’ve been crocheting, which is an art form I’ve inherited from my mother and before that, her mother, who was born in a part of the world where women don’t learn to weave just for fun, still make a lot of their living working in textile factories. It was almost silly how easy it was to see my progression, over the course of the projects I took up for my studio course, from something I was thinking about to something that lives inside of me and wants form desperately. Absence. Loss. Grief. Interruption. I crocheted strings of guts, abstractions of wombs, a baby blanket that will never be used. 

 

I guess my mind is going somewhere I don’t yet know how to reach. 

 

Brown fields studded with the plush bodies of cows who flick their ears toward a sound I can only imagine, away from my engine of my car. The low-slung bodies of oaks tortured by the wind. Miles of blue road gasping ahead of me toward the edge of all vision, toward the clouds darkening the horizon, the sunlight that punctures them. A slow crawl like bugs up the arm of the world into the Tejon Pass, where clear blue lakes flash between rocks and scrub brush, the roads turn white and catch my tires in long shaking grooves. It’s like holding my breath up so high in the sun. Like I can breathe twisting into the 710, the mountains here flush with evergreens, the sky a blue so soft it’s like it knows that after so many miles my eyes are beginning to hurt. A few miles through Pasadena, of being tailgated by Escalades through postcard perfect neighborhoods at the edge of the city advertised to white protestant Midwesterners in the early twentieth century as the Aryan City of the Sun, whose major roadways were laid by prisoner slaves. Onto the 110, the cracked freeway where we can only drive fifty miles per hour, and back to the five, where the road swells and populates with hundreds of cars, golden Cadillacs with chrome wheels, mid-nineties Toyota pickups with peeling red paint, so many Teslas, which go jerky in bumper-to-bumper, like they were invented from inside the dream of the wild west. Make it out of the city, the roads go smoother, blacker, the lane dividers clearer, the Teslas aren’t allowed in the carpool lane anymore so they stay out here with the rest of us, into Irvine, where I last went to school, its dry hills that smell like straw in the summer and vibrate with the weight of ten thousand insects moving in the dirt. Then there is the sea, the smell of it, the marine layer’s cool fog, white and dense and sweet, and beyond it there is the oceanside where I spent my childhood summers swimming and swimming and swimming in the soft swells, then up the hill there is home, inside smells like Dad’s shampoo, and incense, and has a pantry in its kitchen that has been left half empty for me to fill. 

 

what a time to be breathing

air comes with a cost

what a sight to be seeing 

vision taken for granted 

 

When I make it home in the early afternoon, after a whole morning of driving, I crawl onto the air mattress my dad has set up in his spare room. I wait to feel sleepy. But I don’t sleep. 

 

To know that writing compensates for nothing, sublimates nothing, that it is precisely there where you are not—this is the beginning of writing. 

 

Perhaps no making I can do is there where I am. I have my body, the text has its own, the things I’ve crocheted are certainly not me. And yet I think that they are. That the other I write to is myself, the parts of myself that do not express themselves in my animal, the parts I’ve been tasked with, for whatever reason, making up for myself. Barthes writes this famous declaration in the context of love, but isn’t it all love? My pain and my fear and my grief. The irritation that disguises itself as anxiety, the desolation that sometimes takes my breath away, the unending sadness I can only punctuate with distraction, sometimes a sense of purpose. What I write and what I make may not cause me to be loved by the other, but I love the other, I love the other with every breath I breathe, every stitch I work, every key I press, every word I think and imagine and read. I love the other, my mother the earth, my sisters of every gender all of you, I love the other without needing to know why or needing the other to love me back, it’s okay if you hurt my feelings and brake check me in your gigantic obnoxious car it’s okay if you break into my body uninvited because you are broken inside, okay because I survive because my torn flesh heals okay because I can be another way of living because I can refuse to violate because I can choose to feel anger and love at the same time because I can be wronged by you and tell you that you’re wrong and still want you not to hurt so you never do it again I want you to heal because I can feel fear and grief and powerlessness and still believe what I believe and I can still ask my students to believe in themselves believe in the human because I can show you if you’re watching that there’s another way of living and it’s soft and yes it can be bruised because it loves in a way that is animal despite pain and despite suffering, and still I love you, and my love makes you a part of me, and because I survive even in nervous breakdown even in going insane I am going to love you for the rest of my life and I will come back to love you again in my next, and in the next, and the next, until our animal is extinguished by the wound we force upon ourselves. 

 

How could I tell you this if not in writing? 

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Lily Grimes is a creative/critical literature PhD student at the University of California, Santa Cruz, where she studies the body’s role as narrator in non-linear and associative prose writing, trauma’s impact on storytelling, and phenomenology re: humor, love, and desire. She is at work on a variety of creative nonfiction pieces about the theater and cartoons, a short novel about female rage and revenge, and bits and bobs of other hybrid/experimental forms.