2021
I turn the knob on the stereo while my Chevy Malibu’s wheels turn against the road beneath me. Hayley Williams sings over a bubblegum, Carly Rae Jepsen-type beat on “Hard Times” bellowing through the speakers.
The song, like the rest of its album, is full, lush in its poppy production all while maintaining the lyrical angst from Paramore’s pop-punk days.
The music erases the noise from the road and the wind. I scream the lyrics to keep myself awake and alert while I drive along the Raton Pass.
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Lake Avernus sits on the other side of the world outside of Scalandrone, Naples. It is a small lake, sitting only one meter above sea level and 900 from the Tyrrhenian Sea. Ancient Romans believed it to be the entrance to Hades, a transitional place. Despite the portal, the Romans settled on its beaches, grew crops on its shores, washed their feet in its water.
2022
I am erasing myself from this space—packing moving boxes with amenities and things collected over the years, readying myself for a move across the country. I remove the photos from the wall last.
The frames are dusty, neglected by the dirt of Denver sucked into the apartment from the window fan. They all hold proof of people in my life—the parents, the grandparents, the near and far friends. Only one holds me—a photobooth set of three people in three stills: Craig, Renée, and myself against a red brick background, the bar’s name—POUR BROTHERS—stamped on the bottom. The photo was taken six years ago, when we three occupied the same place, our physicality tying ourselves to each other.
I place the photo in the Home Depot box at my feet and fold the lid together before looking back at the wall where it hung. The paint is lighter, untouched by the grit coating the frame and surrounding wall. When I pull the nail, the paint splits.
2015
Fort Collins in the summertime is bright and green, colored with the sounds of birds and people on bicycles. Fresh grads lug their belongings into U-Hauls lining the neighborhood streets while other students daydrink, lounging on park grass or wandering in small groups from bar to bar.
On the Colorado State University campus, the quad shimmers in the midday sun. I ride my bike toward two people throwing a frisbee back and forth: Craig, my college roommate and friend of eight years—since our early teens—and Renée, another friend from high school who moved with her family across the country after only two semesters. We had lost contact almost immediately but she stayed close with Craig and made the trip from Texas to Colorado to see him.
The frisbee wobbles haphazardly and drops dead when they both turn to greet me. As I get closer, Craig shouts a warm “Hey!” while Renée raises her hand in a wave—or maybe to block the sun.
2020
Craig, Renée and I are walking down Mississippi Avenue in the Denver snow toward Renée’s and my apartment, smoking the last bit of a joint as we head back from Wash Park. We’re goofy but lucid, smoking just enough to silly the senses.
While Craig lives just down the road from Renée and I, we have invited him into our pandemic-pod, the threat of COVID boxing us into a singular space. We try to be careful, distance ourselves from our loved ones for their safety and ours, but our bond demands proximity.
Still giggly, we cross the threshold and the humidity hits us, fogging Craig’s glasses. Renée kicks off her boots while I put on the kettle for hot chocolate and pull a bottle of Baileys from the fridge.
Staring at the spines of my record collection, Craig asks if he can put something on and chooses IGOR by Tyler, the Creator before I can tell him yes. He places the heavy black wax on the turntable and rests its pink sleeve against the bookshelf before joining Renée and I sitting on opposite ends of our tiny couch.
When he plops himself between us, the cushions lift like levers and we tumble toward him, colliding in laughter while the needle sputters against the record and fills the room with music that feels not quite warm against the skin.
2021
I am traveling north toward Trinidad with Texas behind me. 18-wheelers line the shoulders of the frigid Raton Pass, felled by the harsh December winds.
My fingers grasp the wheel tighter as the gusts rock the body of my car. While I have only been driving for three hours today, I had spent nine hauling myself from Austin to Amarillo yesterday, stopping for the night at the sketchy Texas Inn where the bedsheets had the consistency of Bible paper and I could hear the neighbors fucking through the walls.
Spotify shuffles the pop of Paramore into the post-black metal of “Dream House” by Deafheaven and its overwhelming wall of sound. It’s a harsh switch sonically but the playlist, which I’ve titled “PINK,” was not built with a cohesive sound in mind, rather, it was constructed to help occupy a space, something to listen to when I am alone in a car or an emptying apartment, a collection of songs to keep me company in an otherwise isolated environment. And also because all of its albums have pink artwork.
Eyes heavy from my fitful sleep, I turn the music up even louder, enough so I can feel the bass rumbling my bones along with the bumps in the road.
2022
I am lying in my bed—one of the few things in the apartment not packed into a box—scrolling through Instagram when I see a post from @subwayhands, an account dedicated to close-up videos and photos of peoples’ hands as they transit through New York. Some spread the spine of a book between their fingers, others hold a phone playing a game or watching sport highlights. I find the photos affectionate in a way I cannot quite put to words.
Today’s post displays two different sets of hands sizing each other up. The smaller of the two guides the larger’s hands with their fingers, shaping them into gestures that they then mirror. The larger’s are skittish and timid, as if worried, while the smaller’s are sure and smooth in their movement. After fumbling fingertips into fingernails for a few seconds, their hands rest within each other and settle in the space between their owners’ laps.
The video loops and I tap the screen twice.
2021
The room is cold, AC combatting the harsh Austin heat, present even in December.
Renée and I lie on an air mattress in her mother’s living room, packed from wall to wall with furniture, plants, pictures, posters and books. Renée’s mother is a master of the maximalist space, leaving no corner unoccupied while somehow avoiding the presence of clutter. The living room feels intimate and inviting even as Renée and I fill ourselves with distance.
We are curled together and tired, having spent a good chunk of the day crying to each other as we bring our six-and-a-half year relationship—which survived moves to and from Fort Collins and Denver and Austin—to an end. Now—on this air mattress, with chaotic bookshelves and antique lamps towering over us—her new apartment is only a few miles south. She’s left Colorado for Texas to start her graduate degree while I chose to stay in Denver tied to a job in a city I wasn’t ready to stop loving.
Because I head back in the morning and because we know we will never share a space like this again, we talk like we did when we first met, with excitement fortifying each syllable. She tells me of the mermaid statues littering her new town, how some of their sequinned tails glimmer in the heat. I tell her about an essay I’ve been trying to write about a handful of albums from different artists that changed the trajectory of the bands’ careers, each hanging like a sunset on the horizon of their discography farewelling an old sound and entering a new era, the artists reinventing a sound, style or approach to genre into something unique and explosive, each album adorned in a bright, pink cover.
2022
The nail holes watch me as I lift boxes onto each other, tetrising them into the corner of my apartment before I have to load them into a U-Haul in the coming days. There is a sense of discomfort that washes over me whenever I look at the pile of cardboard, as if my body rejects that I could fit so much of myself into such a small part of my space.
When I am sweaty and exhausted, I sit on the boxes and stare back at the bloated absence on the wall, at all the nothing it has cupped in its palm.
////
The word pink, originally a verb, was first used in the 14th century to indicate the act of decorating something with a perforated pattern. The color is rare in nature, thus the flowers known as Dianthus plumarius—faint rouge with frilled edges—were named “pinks” in the 17th century. The word later came to signify the soft, rosy color of the flower, transforming verb to adjective in our human attempt to understand the tender points between white’s transition into red.
2017
Renée, Craig, and I are standing among a crowd at the outdoor stage of the Mohawk, a small concert venue in Austin. We’ve road-tripped down to visit Renée’s family and to see PUP, a band we all fell into at the same time because of their bombastic energy and funny but sincere lyrics. While the band is still relatively unknown—yet to release Morbid Stuff, their third album that would receive rave reviews and skyrocket the band to a level of success unknown by many punk outfits—the venue is crowded and claustrophobic, everyone sweaty in the humid summer heat.
As PUP enters the stage and Stefan Babcock belts the opening lines to “If This Tour Doesn’t Kill You Then I Will” into the microphone, the crowd erupts in excitement. Sweaty strangers, pumping their fists in the air and jumping up and down, bump their moist bodies into mine. I feel uncomfortable in the fullness of the venue, by the unfamiliarity that surrounds me, but when Craig throws his arm around my shoulders and starts singing along, I melt into the noise.
2015
Renée and I are leaning drunk against the wall of my apartment in Fort Collins. All of our friends are with us: Craig is nodding off in a recliner; Laura and Casey and Elle play Never Have I Ever, waving their fingers and fists in the air; Nigel and Wess throw playing cards back and forth, one of them grunting in frustration.
Renée looks up at me and smiles, I look down and do the same. We’re both happy to be here, surrounded by a group of people we love and are loved by. The pessimistic parts of us know that most of these people will deteriorate to just voices on the other end of a phone call, smiles on Instagram, ethereal bodies in a story, but we ignore the eventual disbandment and choose instead to stay where we are, no matter how briefly.
The playlist ends and loops back to its beginning over the bluetooth speakers, reshuffling its order. Some friends leave with a wave, others crack open another drink. Against the wall, Renée’s hand finds its way to mine and our fingers wrap around each other like a promise.
2022
The U-Haul idles outside of my apartment in Denver, blocking three and half of the other tenets’ parking spaces. As Casey and Laura and Wess pick the boxes labeled “BOOKS” and “VINYL” from the floor, they complain about their weight, asking why I need all of these things if I have a Kindle and a Spotify subscription.
I shrug and tell them that I’ll do some cleansing once I’ve moved and settled, but the truth is that I enjoy the physicality of the media, the way book and record spines fill shelves like photographs framed and hung on the wall, how, in order to read or listen, I must first pull it from the shelf and hold it in my hand.
2011
Craig and I are sitting on a small pocket of sand by a creek just half a mile from our high school in the suburbs of Denver. We found the spot early on in our friendship and dubbed it “The Beach,” our landlocked adolescence begging for water’s proximity.
We dip our bare feet in the trickling creek and share each other’s space. In a few days, Craig will drive 70 miles north to begin his undergraduate degree in Fort Collins while I stay back and begin my senior year of high school. It isn’t a goodbye, but we talk like it is.
We talk about change and growth, the transition of ourselves away from the suburban home we both cherish and loathe.
We talk about the bands we love like the Hold Steady or Bomb the Music Industry! or the Gaslight Anthem and how we hope they never change even though we can already see their reshaping.
We talk about the places the roads will take us to, the adventures and stories we’ll hold and share with whomever we choose to fill our futures with.
When we end the night, he hugs me and holds on as if we won’t soon live together or as if he won’t reintroduce me to my future partner who will hold me through half of my twenties or as if we will not continue to explore and grow and be together.
As I slide into my car, tears still fresh in my eyes, I plug an auxiliary cord into my iPod and sit in the soft noise of Silver Jews until my hands are calm enough to crank the car into drive and guide me back home.
///
Pink is a place—if you can call a threshold a place. It is a frilled doorway into a new world. It is transitory, light as if dispersing in water, a calming current that laps at the feet on its shores. I imagine the ancient Romans rinsing their clothes in the blue water of Lake Avernus watching the small capillary waves breathe against the shore, the way they darken the sand, the way it dries as it returns to its pale blush. Perhaps, standing on its eastern edge, they would watch the sun set on the other side of the lake, its dying light mirroring a bridge across the rippling surface, thinking about how vibrant the transition from day to night is, how abundantly bold.
They would have called the color rosa—they would have named it a rose.
2021
The endlessness of the Raton Pass is broken when I enter Colorado. As I drive further north, hills rise from the ground, the landscape shifting from flat desert to tall, green mountains as I approach Trinidad.
The sun is setting as “BLACKOUT” by Turnstile shuffles into the space. Being this close to the mountains makes the transition into night quicker though I know the sun is not moving any faster. As I continue to drive, green signs for Trinidad glimmering in the new headlights, the color of the sky shifts into a warm orange against blue and the clouds are rimmed in an obscene pink.
2022
I am filling my space, removing myself from the boxes I so tidily kept myself in, flooding the new apartment with vinyl and books and photographs.
On the blank wall, I begin to measure, mark and hammer nails to hang photos. There are fewer now—those that once held Renée buried in a box and left in my parents’ basement—but the apartment is smaller than the one I had in Denver, making the canvas of the wall easier to fill.
When I am finished, I take a step back to look on my work. Each framed portal stares back at me and offers a guiding hand to my scattered story, a vehicle for memory.
Where I am doesn’t matter yet—the space of this new chapter yet to imprint itself onto my nostalgia, the people I will meet here, still unknown and mysterious. I know in time a community will bud but for now I have my photos to sing my history, to remind me of how I arrived here.
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