I’m in the car, passing hills, suffocating bits of dry grass, and flush trees. I’m in vague Northern California. Grape vines spill over vineyards. The air is dry. The sky is indecisive gray and it smells like rain. I’m trying to capture something tangible—a place I was raised in, but never called home.

It’s hard to reconcile my pride at being disabled with the reality of how many walls I punched like a teenage boy losing a video game because I can’t express how loud and how quiet everything is at the exact same time.

I left college. I liked the classes but hated the town. I got tired of being unhappy and knowing it but not doing anything about it. I applied to a different university and got in but then decided not to go. I realized that it was okay to change my mind a lot. It didn’t mean that I was lost or unreliable.

As I drove away from my Arizona college town and through the desert towards California and home and familiar haunts and high school friends I fought hard to feel like I wasn’t moving backwards.

A brief journey of self-acceptance on an isolated sand dune.

On being taught as a kid that astrology and tarot were at best, fantastical pastimes, and at worst, dangerous and blasphemous.

The pandemic has trapped me in an interminable mush. For over a year, I’ve been waist-deep in it, tossing day after day into the blender, chained to my bedroom and my hometown; cycling through similar walks, similar distractions; not sinking, but not moving forward.

Is it possible to avoid creating fictional versions of ourselves for our social media accounts? Or will “honesty” always feel dishonest?

I couldn’t get my mind off the fact that there is so much out there in the world to be experienced, and I was stuck in my room re-watching nature films for the fifth time.

The final stretch was sand, so we walked it. From the parking lot, we’d taken dirt trails to a paved, well-established road called Monument; that road had split apart and turned back to dirt, the dirt to gravel, and now, the gravel to sand.

Gen Z doesn’t need to be confined to the mentality surrounding work that our parents and grandparents have had, because the current world we are living in is entirely unlike the one they entered during their adolescence.

What’s behind our bittersweet attachments to classic Studio Ghibli movies? Perhaps the allure of a world without everyday anxieties — one that’s impossible, yet always seemingly in reach.

If you are looking to step up your music game, expand your library, or make a playlist for someone special, here are my 10 steps to creating the perfect playlist.

Sometimes pretending you’re in the places want to be can help you love where you are.

Online live performances are everything a young musician could ask for — but is constant access to greatness a double-edged sword?

Who could have guessed how life would be turned upside down in the year 2020?

It is completely okay if you did not get around to everything that you wanted to get to in 2020, because none of us did. This year brought along incredible challenges and unprecedented issues, and staying alive and staying happy is always more than enough.

When we finally decided to call it quits, we were camped out in the back of my Toyota Sequoia with our legs pulled up to our chests.