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I’m in Love By Benjamin Olsen 1 What do you call that sensation of trees passing? In college, some of my friends and I made a student film called, “Six Tribal Men Stuck in a Downtown Elevator.” It was about six tribal men stuck in a downtown elevator. It was a fun idea with nowhere to go, and no budget to film us climbing out of the elevator, scaling the caged walls to freedom. I can’t help but feel I may already be telling the wrong story. So many stories contribute to news like this. I’m in love. I know enough to know I needed to tell you something, but how do you decide which details are important? Everything led to this. Sometimes only the anecdotes seem relevant, not story, or character, or setting, although there’s gotta be a little of that here too, I’m sure. Excuse my urgency but I’ve never said anything
before; more so, I’ve never been heard. I want to make sure our embrace, our literary hug, as author and reader, happens, somehow, before life sweeps either of us off again, another set of moments mapping a path, without any full exchange ever taking place between us. I’ll tell you a bit about the road trip. To my left, I could see Sam still had his eyes open behind his shut eyelids, just watching the ether, (the dance of the sandy particle-light of darkness as his cone cells switched to rod cells and back with a cadence spiraling off into clouds of dark color, replacing one another, like watching a high-speed video of a stalactite forming in reverse). Riding in the backseat, I let my thoughts collide. Everyone in the car was silent, and with the windows down I couldn’t hear the music in the front seat. I returned to my carefree highway hypnosis, triggering waves of memory, and planned to make some sense of the last few months.
The trees reminded me of being twelve and going into the woods at camp and eating the mints at night. I remember watching everyone’s mouths spark up next to fireflies as we crunched. That must’ve been strange for the fireflies. When I was twelve and thirteen I covered most of one wall in my bedroom with ink-soaked computer-printed Hubble photos of the cosmos. Now at twenty-four I’m obsessed with neuroscience and microphotographs of neurons. Prior to traveling, the four of us went to the same university. We shared that exploring with all the cracks of whatifs and all the spackling of onward. We’d fallen over in piles of each other’s drunken bodies, laughing. When I think of these friends I think of the physical feeling of feeling someone else laughing. I think of a world where everything is great and nothing is cool.
None of us were raised on the west coast. Leaving your area can feel like stepping outside of your own storyline. We molded our own new stories, deciding that people are not cool. Cool is dead. Together, laughing, exploring, through many nights and into mornings, I’d discovered the night is never so late for ghosts to appear, for the hours simply aren’t long enough. Back on the road trip, we pulled into a coastal town at dusk. I could see foam on the sand by the water’s edge: the bleeding lime of these eccentric seas. Michael and I weren’t driving that night so we sparked a spliff. I felt as if someone had poured glitter all over my head. Old stone, hard-quiet in the alleyways. Wet. Cool whistles past my slacks and shirt as I walk. Some wind whistles from a field I knew, (a grassy field before I ever saw the city). This is relaxation without representation. Smoking, you forget, you
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