Around the time television sets became a staple of every American household, “serious writing” cut playwriting and its progeny out of the will. English curriculums at the university level ceded playwriting courses to the theater department. The emerging disciplines of film and television studies were claimed by the communications department without opposition, leaving aspiring auteurs to form alliances not with their bookish peers, but with the more pragmatic students aiming for careers in public relations, marketing, and human resources.

I remember climbing onto our parents’ roof Christmas Eve Day to smoke a cigar and watch the trees. We could do that again, after the pandemic. Not to re-create a moment—just knowing we could. The being able to. We’ll see each other again for Christmas, I’m sure.

The day I left, I could have sat in your back yard for an hour with beer and the spring wind and your roommates. We could have talked about other long drives, ones we’ve done together, like our twelve-hour sprint back from Mt. Shasta just in time for Mother’s Day, reeking of mountain sweat and damp wool. I could have said goodbye.

I didn’t mind Donald Trump so much three and a half years ago, on that day my friend’s dad went to the hospital with a strep infection in his heart, while over in Seattle, my friend and I sat in front of the television and watched the map turn red. My friend’s dad was already hooked up to a monitor when he had the heart attack.

Michigan went for Trump. Wisconsin, Trump. Pennsylvania, Trump.

We didn’t know if my friend’s dad would survive the night, so we watched the news and refreshed 538, The New York Times, and Politico, and that evening, because my friend’s dad might have been about to die, the election made me feel better about things.

In this collection of essays, forty-four Calvin University graduates under thirty years old share the most interesting and intimate parts of their twenty-first-century lives. Co-editing, book design, and typesetting by Josh deLacy.

After a few pregnancy scares earlier in life, I got a handle on birth control. I don’t have much skin in the abortion game these days.

I still care about it, of course. It’s living and dying, or at least living. I’m not sure where life begins. The science surpasses my long-forgotten high school classes and my single, lab-less BIO 123, and that’s what so much of this comes down to, isn’t it? Are we killing people?

Spent shotgun shells lie in the dirt like Oil Age arrowheads. The top halves have sun-bleached to pink, while the bottoms have stayed as red as the shells in my own gun. Their plastic casing hasn’t cracked yet; the brass has just begun to rust. I shake out the dirt, drop them into my pocket, and perk up. Someone shot at a bird here.

Assembled entirely from two weeks of subject lines found in the spam folder of info@stlukesrenton.org.

You can be her loving demon, able to satisfy all her dirty wishes for hours.
Want to thump her wild?
Get ready and poke your lady until sun rises!
You can show your girl who’s the best driller on Earth!

Do you know how to turn a girl on?

Thunder in your bed, solidity in your bone-ons!
Better stiffness – better satisfaction!
Set your libido level to maximum!

“There are more upstairs,” she said. “The line might be shorter,” so I abandoned the ten-person backlog only to find an even bigger wait on the second floor, but it was too late to go back. Bladder-bloated conference-goers kept flowing out of the arena. I claimed a spot at the end of what looked like the shortest line, where one man and a dozen or so women waited ahead of me.

The university’s dusty scarlet signs had proclaimed the downstairs bathrooms to be admit-one, any-gender-any-time affairs. But the bathrooms on this floor, which handled the blackwater of thousands of spectators at any given event, required the efficiency of stalls. Relief en masse; pee, flush, repeat. Men and Women plaques normally regulated entry up here, but the conference organizers had covered them with paper printouts: ALL GENDER BATHROOM.

Here in the fermata. Sitting on the couch and watching television. Here in the fermata of our last days, eating microwaved mac and cheese and homemade spinach and strawberry salad, like the two halves of our life for the past five years.

The days ran on like measures, down and up the scales of depression and peacefulness, anxieties and success. We’ve cycled through three houses, twice as many jobs, twice as many girlfriends. Always returning. I don’t know what home means without you.

I don’t think much about pack weight, other than how heavy mine is next to Ben’s. We’re more or less the same size, same fitness, same grit, so he takes the tent and I take the stove, rope, first aid. Not much first aid. I leave the splint and tourniquet and stock up on ibuprofen and caffeine instead. Seventeen miles in, seventeen miles out, with an alpine start somewhere along the way. Quick trip. Light packs. We take the window covers down around 8 a.m. and let the sunlight get us moving. Full parking lot. One car rolling in, like we would have done if we had left Seattle before dawn instead of driving through the night. I don’t mind an early morning, but I wanted to start this one fresh.

Ben takes a caffeine pill, I hang our permit from the rearview mirror, and we grab a few leftover cookies from the driver’s seat. We wake up five miles later when the trail turns uphill.