Perhaps I should start with Idaho and how I wanted to leave it. Or I could start in Boston, which is where I went after I was successful in parting ways with the Gem State, and how I thought it was cold, its people and its weather, and I started thinking about places in terms of color. Grey for Boston. Idaho, yellow. Boise, always blue and not for its football field but because of the hills at a certain time of night, when the sidewalks turned periwinkle and every gradient could be found on the back of a coyote. How I left Boston and returned to Idaho. I could start with the first time I drank or the last time, or how I returned to Boston two years ago because I needed to go back in time before any of these things were a problem, back to when an important writing mentor told me to read Richard Hugo and to keep writing poems about driving through the West with my dad, implying that maybe I should abandon the poor Plath imitations about Nauset. I was never going to be an East Coast intellectual, which was something I would have to figure out for myself. That you are not a certain kind of person is something you learn over and over again, and ideally in your 20s, and lord knows I will not start there.
I’m going to start with the online world because it is the place where I have lived for far too long, and for the last two years, at least, the place I wish desperately to leave.
This is, I suppose, a blog of sorts, although I somehow missed out on the height of early blogging, and so I can’t say what it is or will be. I missed out on AIM but caught the tail end of Myspace and the heyday of Facebook. I think many of us are collectively nostalgic for the early days of social media when our audience was really just our closest friends or some group whose tastes and proclivities overlapped neatly with our own. Back when you shared quotidian happenings, outfits, inside jokes, your lunch under a cloudy filter. I tread gently through the internet now. I don’t really have anything new or interesting to say about these online platforms, but they make me anxious. There’s a sense that you are always (and rightly so) being watched. I am tired of the virtue signaling and lack of nuance. We all know how social media has affected our national and global politics, so I won’t go there. To be fair, I want to say that I have learned a lot from some brilliant thinkers and writers on platforms like Twitter. I’m grateful for that.
Except for the part in which it meant nothing to me, I am not so much nostalgic for the early days of social media. For twenty years, give or take, I wrote emails back and forth with my neighbor. In our teens, we did this almost every day—writing down thoughts or scenes from the day, journaling in its most basic form but with a single reader in mind. It was never really a correspondence, just a talking at each other, knowing that someone was listening. We talked at each other in real life, too, two separate conversations happening simultaneously. I read over those old emails the way other people pore over photographs or scrapbooks. I can trace the patterns and obsessions of our lives. How we were lonely, our need need for love, the accidental narrative poems that emerged when we broke down Boise and its resplendent metaphors into line breaks.
I keep thinking about the end of the known world, the sixth extinction, and what it means to create art at this current moment. Over the summer, I was with my family in Switzerland, and you could hear the most violent cracking echoing through the mountains as the glacial sheets snapped and fell away. I don’t know what stories can do for us now, or if I really expect for them, need for them, to do anything. Art is not policy. When I encounter art, I only want to feel something. I only want to write my way through the world in order to better understand it, and I hope this little corner of the internet helps me get back to that one essential thing. I want to spend less time staring at a screen and more time out in the world. Soon, I will abandon traditional social media. I’m writing emails now to you, here now, from the West.