My sister’s husband has placed an embargo on us giving her candles after she mistakenly confessed her love for them some years ago and now struggles to fit them all on the crowded TV stand in her apartment’s living room. She uses them, and she no doubt appreciates them, but a woman can only burn so many wicks at once.

By contrast, my mother continues to receive them, Yankee and Home Goods and all other sorts. She’s the one who really should have the embargo, but she’d hate to offend the good people imagining their hand-picked (or sometimes hand-made) candle burning bright in another’s home. Whoever gave her the Home for the Holidays Yankee candle some twelve years ago is right to imagine this; it sits in a place of wrought-iron honor on her stove when in use, or her kitchen table otherwise. She does something else with the rest of them. I found a colony of them living large in the back of her cleaning cabinet, but the population was too low to account for everyone and there was no space left at all. Past that, she’s been forced to meticulously regift them to a friend other than the one she got it from. Sometimes that friend is me.

“I can’t handle the smell of this one,” she sighs as she sets it down in front of me. “It’s so strong. Eucalyptus or something. Smells like death to me.” I’ve since learned this is a pretty common phenomenon: people get caught on a smell that takes them back to a specific memory and they abstractly coin the sensation to themselves as “death.” I knew a woman once who was sickened by the scent of lemons for this reason. No allergy or anything, just a sense of overhanging dread associated with an ordinary citrus fruit. Me, I lower my nose straight to the wax and breathe deep, overpowered by an aroma that is pungent and medicinal but distinctly un-deathlike… for me.

It’s become a revealing icebreaker question for me: what smell do you think most evokes death? Eucalyptus and lemons aside, get a lot of people who say gasoline or formaldehyde. One friend of mine, an opera singer, told an anecdote about her house being slowly filled with an unplaceable rotting scent over the course of weeks, only to discover that several animals had died in the chimney: birds, squirrels, and a raccoon for emphasis. The chimney was not practical for her family, and they had it filled in to prevent future incidents. The smell lingered for months.

The question continues to interest me because in addition to elucidating unexpected memories from people, it tends to also pique their investigative senses: what other factors or memories make that scent death-worthy? Is there a way to reframe the scent into something they can better appreciate, or even better understand?

I don’t claim to understand how almost any part of my body works. At the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia, there used to be a drawer in the wall that emitted a pungent odor the adjoining plaque described as “dead rat”. It’s the kind of brain-teaser exhibit the Institute is known for, situated in my mind directly beside a key on a pedestal. The plaque for that one invites you to pick the key up, but when you try to do so, the key is cemented down and it sends several hundred volts of electricity through your body. There is a sign below the plaque warning people with pacemakers not to participate.

My sister works in maintenance, and she has a similar story to my friend. It starts with a set of dead seagulls forgotten in a basement fridge during a power outage and it ends with a crew of maintenance guys having to clean up rotting seagull carcasses on a Monday morning. The smell, as anyone could imagine, was unbearable, and she reported as much. Of course, she wasn’t actually there, but for a scent, secondhand and thirdhand accounts hold more or less the same level of fidelity.

It’s no surprise to me that the two exhibits with threatening and unpleasant sides to them are the two I remember most. From what I can find, this is a consistent psychological phenomenon: we remember bad things so we can prevent them from happening again. But we can’t prevent death. These deathly odors, instead of aiding our memories in recalling similar situations, simply repel us from the already dead, course-correcting us towards the living and the present.

It is one of the greatest treasures of our lives to collect and share memories, re-collecting and re-sharing them as they change us and connect us to others. If it wasn’t clear by now, I encourage you to reflect on the bad as well as the good, but always find a way back to the present. I invite you to share my icebreaker question with new people along the way. But I’ll also warn you in advance: if any of those people happen to be a certain blonde Italian woman or a gaggle of burly janitors, they’ll simply sigh and say “buddy, you just had to be there.”

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“the hardest place to be

is right where you are

in the space between

the finish and the start

it’s the arrow in your heart”

– Arrow by Half-Alive

I’m anesthesia resistant. At least, I have a memory of the doctor telling me I am. The reliability of that memory is itself reliant on the resistance, which you may trust or distrust as you please. I learned later it’s because I’m a ginger. Looking at me, you might not think it— It’s a hotly debated topic in certain circles of mine. Despite others’ doubts, I take this resistance as medical proof that I am ginger enough. I leave the operating room with two fewer teeth than I entered with. You win some, you lose some.

It’s November, 2023. Let’s say it’s my sister’s birthday, because it is. Not fourteen days ago, I was a Resident Assistant behind the desk of my university’s housing checkout, helping hapless freshmen avoid fines and fees by guiding them through their paperwork. But each time I opened my calendar to double-check my flight home or cram in some obscure event before my departure from the city, I saw a huge block dominating a week’s worth of time.

This was the recovery time I allotted for after my wisdom teeth surgery. At the time, I didn’t know what the expected recovery period was supposed to be. I once had a coworker who’d chugged a gallon of pineapple juice the night before her operation, recovered in time to come to work the next day, and told us all about it. More than the procedure itself, I feared the anesthesia. I’d seen all sorts of strange and sickening reactions to the post-op fog, from angry, incoherently rambling patients who spit blood and threw things to patients who passed out for almost 48 entire hours and woke up good as new. I figured, whatever my reaction, a week should be enough time to recover.

I don’t need it. I wake up barely 20 minutes after the procedure ends, fully lucid for the car ride home alongside my mother. Link between mind and body still shaky, I’m sat in the ratty red recliner opposite the TV in the den. My mom asks if I need anything, and I say no. I turn on the show I’ve picked for the occasion of my weakness, a new release this very week: a show called Gen V.

If you haven’t watched Gen V, it’s… pretty alright. It’s not my exact cup of tea, but it entertains me for the eight-ish hours I spend in front of the TV, regenerating whatever part of myself itches for action. It’s the first time I’ve ever watched a season of a TV show in one sitting. And I do mean one sitting! I literally don’t get up from the recliner until the credits roll on the season 1 finale, a feat made possible by Amazon Prime’s auto-play and perhaps the occasional command from a remote control. I eat macaroni and cheese, one of the foods recommended for those with recent oral surgeries. I wake up the next morning. I’m good as new.

Two years later, I like to jokingly bring up that week in November as “the best week of my life,” and not for no reason. It was an entirely unique situation, expecting a week of bloody and swollen reconstruction from an unfamiliar bodily ordeal only to shrug off the drugs and knives like they’re a daily occurrence. The week stretched out in front of me, an open plane of time without interruption or expectation made all the sweeter by the constant knowledge that everything is ahead of schedule, and by doing anything except rotting in bed and drinking broth, I’m doing well.

It doesn’t matter what I did with that week, but I will tell you. I watched more TV, for one. Any other time, I would’ve felt immensely guilty devoting huge swaths of time to entertainment, but I was home alone in the middle of cold November, and besides, I was in recovery. I outlined a novel (a fact I had to double check since I never ended up writing said novel but yes, the outline appears to be quite real). I ate more mac and cheese. I ate other things, but certainly the mac and cheese remains the highlight.

I didn’t know at the time that this would be my last real period of rest before school swept me back up, before my jobs became overlapping, complicated, hungry entities in constant competition with one another, before my time became monopolized by this permanent urge to move forward, without any real clarity as to which direction that was. In retrospect, much of my life feels like swimming in the ocean: I can only move while I cannot see, and I can only see while I cannot move; there is a tide that pulls my vector ever further off-course; there are unknown threats that lurk in the darkness. For the last two years, I was under the water, blasting forwards with masterful abandon. Now, I’m back where I started.

Season 2 of Gen V started on September 17, 2025, and it found me in that same book-filled den, seated and waiting.

Except, by that time I’d graduated college. The ratty red recliner had been traded out for two sturdy secondhand couches in the same serene cyan. The house had flooded and rebuilt after the flood, sturdier but narrower, more careful, more tentative. My isolation made me impatient, and I watched the series week-to-week instead of waiting for the whole thing to be ready. The whole scene echoed my wisdom teeth recovery so exactly, and yet every tiny detail was wrong. I guess I couldn’t expect it to be too similar. Most people only get their wisdom teeth out once.

And I was no exception. My sedentary days around the house were no longer a result of an anesthesia hangover, but rather the result of my own lack of planning. I returned to my parents’ house after college with the idea that I would ‘take some time to figure things out,’ and that time had bloated from one month into three, three into six. Every job listing I looked for seemed to either require I supplant myself with a generative AI or require I perform the impossible quantitative feats of that same AI without actually using it. Entry level positions all appeared to need 3-5 years of experience. Most job listings seemed fake, or obligatory, or deliberately cryptic in a way that obscured either the job or the employer or both. I applied and waited and waited and applied some more, searching for the lifeline that could lift me from my isolation. I began to suspect that even if I could land a job, I still would not have things ‘figured out.’ I transitioned into the present tense.

Gen V is a series about a gaggle of superpowered college students trying to endure their dangerous lives while investigating the sinister activity of their school’s benefactor, the very same Vought corporation that gave them their powers to begin with. Vought is essentially all-powerful, and its lackeys are rarely portrayed with anything less than a heartless, consumeristic, domineering lens. The kids, by contrast, are diverse, complicated, emotionally charged, young, idealistic. They’re the good guys who look out for the disadvantaged and disenfranchised. Ironically, the show is made by Amazon MGM Studios.

The real fantasy of Gen V is not a fantasy of power, but rather a fantasy of purpose. From Season 1’s supercharged frat bros and viruses to season 2’s more imminently villainous Cipher, the series is jam-packed with evil and indifferent people wielding power exponentially eclipsing that of our protagonists. There is never any real hope the heroes will win. But the massive, malicious entity that is Vought gives our young protagonists an unmissable target, drawing the lines of good and evil and allowing them to make their final stand, however unsuccessful.

Sitting on my couch, sinuses blaring, pausing the episode intermittently to check on my laundry, I felt no such grand purpose within me. Now, as I write this, sitting in a Cafe in Savannah, GA sipping a drink called a Cold Fashioned*, the best purpose I’ve found is to catalogue this disastrously irresolute period of my life in hopes my insight might guide others more dexterously through theirs. (*The Cold Fashioned consisted of espresso, orange simple syrup, a Luxardo cherry, and ice. I didn’t love it, but found it much more enjoyable with some cream.) I often begin these essays with only the vaguest idea of my destination, praying that in this microcosm I might hone the skill of moving forwards through uncertainty. Sometimes I tell tiny, poetic lies to make things line up better. I am not in the coffee shop right now, nor am I in Georgia. I was there once, and I wrote part of this essay there, but time is a stone that rolls downhill, and now I am somewhere else.

During these periods of life, between the manifestation of the need for a transition and the actual transition itself, it feels impossible to move in a way that creates opportunity. So falsely entrenched between the comfortable (or at least manageable) present and the optimistic future, any new turn feels like an illegal move, the careening of the train off the well-worn track. But this track, too, leads nowhere. It was one of the strangest lessons of my childhood that inaction is also action, that standing still on a moving train does not prevent the train from moving, nor you with it.

I realized at some point while writing this essay that it’s unlikely an external threat will call me forward from my isolation like a warrior of myth or a teen superhero who’s just trying to get through college. I think I knew it before that, but the trick of writing is pulling in the world around you and putting it in front of you where you can see it all at once. I think the trick now is, with the whole world in focus in front of me, I need to let it disperse again, to release it into the island it wants to be. My island. It would be a lie to say I am content in my isolation. But, I am gloriously free to explore the corners of my character and the limits of my ability— and to find, eventually, that my ability has no limits.

There is a song called Interlude by Leith Ross. The song has no lyrics, but rather a series of vocal tones held at various pitches and lengths, increasing in frequency and intensity until they culminate in an angelic wall of sound. In this wall, though, there are cracks. You can hear the voices pausing to breathe.

Maybe this is the life I ought to be content with: the luxury to have a despair far enough away that I may write about it instead of spending my every second fighting it off. Perhaps I should be content to observe the great turning of the tides, the pulsing of a rhythm that is not the grinding of some malevolent machine but rather my invisible spirit, taking in breath to begin the music anew.

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Once, in the lobby of a church, a man who must have been about eighty years old observed aloud to me that everyone, depending on the path of their life, will notice different things. His father had been a barber, he told me, so he looked at everyone's hair first. He had been in construction, and he showed me in the exposed ceiling where the pipes joined and split. It was a very hip church, and this was in the 2010s when the industrial style had a death grip on interior design. Everyone admired the chic look of the ceiling pipes, but this man knew what each one was for. He told me he supposed dentists noticed people's teeth first, and cobblers noticed shoes, and so on. He asked me what I noticed, and told me that, whether I knew it or not, that was who I was.

Alright, record scratch, freeze frame. If you’re reading this, there’s a solid chance you’ve read one of my essays before. But there’s also a solid chance we’ve never properly met. The internet is weird that way: you’ve heard the name or seen a video or two, but it’s rare you have a real understanding of who someone is. The internet has no essential, standardized center of self.

The same thing happens in real life: when a new person appears in your life, you’ll often encounter them a couple of times before you get the chance to be properly introduced. You’ll see them on the sidewalk, or in the hallway of your apartment, or at a cool party you had to work up a week’s worth of social battery to attend, and you’ll file them away as someone who… exists. Most of the people we see mean nothing to us. But as soon as you put a name to someone’s face, you’ll see them everywhere. So if you’ve read some of my work before and thought, ‘this is alright, but I can’t really figure out this guy’s deal,’ consider this essay your formal introduction. Ironically, it’s a lot less formal than most of my writing, but here we go.

Hello there! My name’s Nevin, and I’m a screenwriter, poet, journalist, and bird enthusiast currently writing from my home state of Pennsylvania.

In screenwriting, what I just said is the first half of a ‘one-liner’ or a ‘personal logline.’ The second half would be a one-sentence summary of what I write and what I aim to accomplish with it. It’s one of the most soul-crushing things about the screenwriting space for me: the expectation that you’ll summarize yourself in a single sentence.

Even during the times in my life when I’ve met a lot of people in a short period of time, they haven’t bothered with personal loglines because when you say them out loud it makes you sound like a reanimated corpse inhabited by an AI trained on LinkedIn posts with zero likes. When real humans talk to each other, it’s in groups that form and break and reform, social connective tissue writhing between them like desperate eels.

I have a hard time staying in a single conversation if I’m in a large group of people. I’ll hear one of the keywords my brain is tuned to detect, like ‘Gilgamesh,’ or ‘Talking Heads,’ or ‘Cardinal,’ and I’ll politely disengage my current conversational partner in search of a new friend. Luckily, I’ve met some of my best friends this way. I met documentarian Lena Faeskorn when I overheard her discussing a film I’d worked on in the stands of an amateur soccer match. (Though, at the time, we were in France, so I suppose it was football.)

Even introducing yourself this way has all kinds of flaws. Namely, the fact that I’m from the United States, and therefore most of the people I meet are my fellow Americans, means that our conversations inevitably devolve into talking about work. Artists are perhaps doubly guilty of this because the things most people consider ‘entertainment’ and therefore safe to talk about at parties— movies, music, and so on— are actually the things they spend hours thinking about every day and struggling to make money from. So when you can’t talk about work because it’s boring and you can’t talk about entertainment because that’s ALSO work… what is there to talk about?

While peering around the proverbial corners of the Instagram app one day, I discovered a video of a woman challenging her followers to leave comments introducing themselves without mentioning certain things like their job or sexuality. Her stated motivation was to try and form a deeper connection with her following, and I think there’s something to be said for that, but I was also fascinated by another angle of it. Scrolling through the comments on that video gave me a very clear snapshot of the words people were comfortable using to describe themselves– words that, at some point, were probably given to them by other people and internalized.

Things like, “I’m an intuitive, sensitive soul whose deepest purpose is to center others in their own interiority and empower them to create shields against doubt.” It’s a fake example, and one that sort of circles without saying much, but many of them look something like this: big adjectives, verbs with dual meanings, and nouns that often refer to concepts rather than tangible things.

I know it can feel a little over-the-top, but what’s left once you’ve taken all the small stuff off the table? As I read the comments, I found myself recoiling at many of them, upset with how certainly and how positively these people described themselves. Then again, why shouldn’t they have positive opinions of themselves? I don’t know them. When did the default become suspicion? What other observer could they go to for a second opinion? Or me, for that matter? Who really knows who we are?

I think to many people, starting with the big stuff can feel really unnatural. It feels like mold growing through food from the inside out, or a game of Don’t Talk About the Pancakes. But I also think that once you know these big things about people, you don’t sweat the small stuff so much.

While writing (and, let’s be honest, re-writing) this essay, I watched a lot of Ask Hank Anything on Complexly. It’s a show predicated on Hank Green’s idea that you learn more about people by the questions they ask than the answers they give. Hank brings different internet personalities on and has them ask him questions he’s had the chance to research in advance, and a merry discussion is had by all.

It’s a thrilling dynamic, but for obvious reasons it doesn’t translate to a lot of real-world scenarios. When is your date going to furnish you with a list of questions in advance? More importantly, what are those questions about if not each other? How could you, upon meeting a person, immediately concoct an ecstatic third thing to discuss while you absorb each other’s subtler attributes without wading through the swamp of circular small talk?

The answer is social signposting. For example, band T-shirts. I have a rule that I won’t wear clothing with text on it, but I occasionally make an exception for my King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard shirt because I saw them live in concert (Phantom Island Tour ft. Sarah Hicks, if you were curious) and found the experience seriously transformative. I get the occasional gawking in public just because of the way I look and move, but I’ve gotten more actual questions about my KGLW shirt in the past months than almost anything else I’ve worn or done.

Maybe this is how we find each other: we construct symbols to signal to other people that we’re safe, or we’re interesting, or we listen to Australian psych-rock. But these symbols lose their meaning over time and have to be constantly adapted. Every day another thing becomes controversial, shifting the landscape of who its signal can call. Charities are exposed, shows decline in quality, bands go from underground to mainstream. And that’s assuming the signal worked to begin with. In the end, all we have is our questions. Our notice.

So I guess the mystery man in the church was right. It shouldn’t be a huge surprise. Anais Nin famously said, “we do not see things as they are. We see them as we are.” Savannah Brown said, “You do not need to notice interesting things. Your notice makes things interesting.”

I don’t always feel like my notice makes things interesting. I love writing, but it’s hard for me to imagine that any number of essays could give you a true idea of who I am. I’m improbably tall. Is this the detail you’ve been needing to complete your picture of me? I have shoulder-length hair that could be accurately described as both ‘ginger’ and ‘not ginger.’ I have a long nose. A crooked smile. A tic where I have to tap silverware against something before I’m satisfied it’s clean, as if I can feel the filth in the vibration.

I want to reach through the computer screen and shake your hand, or hug you, or pour you a glass of something I’ve saved for the occasion. I’m only me when I’m there in the room with you, telling a story. If you must think of me as someone, please think of me as this person. The one who arrives on time, and laughs at your jokes, and knows when the night is over.

At the time, I didn’t have the skills to interpret a straightforward meaning from what the mystery man said. I wonder if he had heard that Anais Nin quote before. I know I certainly hadn’t, but I’ll forgive myself for that. I was twelve. Savannah Brown’s quote hadn’t even been said yet. If he had heard the Nin quote, was he trying to explain it to me? Did he realize that, in doing so, he, a man who did not introduce himself, was still telling me who he was?

A couple of years later, while taking an IQ test in that very same church lobby, I was asked by the proctor, a friend of a friend training for her psychology degree, to describe myself using only one word. I said, “why?”

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It’s not every day you see broken glass. In fact, I think most young people could probably count the number of times they’ve seen broken glass on their fingers. It’s one of those things that’s completely finite, and theoretically so... knowable, but in the moment, it’s so normal that you’d never think to keep track.

For me, the ultimate broken glass memory is this: I was walking down Broughton Street in Savannah Georgia with a few friends of mine. It was my first year of college, I was in my first screenwriting class, and I was a little behind on my assignments. I didn’t drink coffee, but I knew on some level that coffee shops were the place you were supposed to go to write. They’re charged with a vibrant focal quality that even a faker or an oblivious teen can tap into and drift away into absolute productivity. On that day, we were headed to a coffee shop called Blends.

When we arrived, though, Blends was surrounded by police cruisers, onlookers, and of course— broken glass. A lone and apparently unsettled man sat on a bench opposite the storefront, overshadowed by a police officer who clearly wouldn’t allow him to leave. My group collectively shrugged, turned around, and ducked into the nearest coffee shop not currently under police occupation.

The place we ended up was called the Coffee Fox, and it was busier than I had ever seen it, perhaps because their biggest competitor was out of commission. The reason Blends was out of commission— the story came out later— was that a man had entered the store to announce his intention to throw a brick through their window, only to be ignored… and then arrested when he did exactly what he said he was going to do. Say what you want about his actions, but his technique gets no notes from me. It also came out later that this event was the culmination of an unstable time for Blends, and that they’d be closing their doors and leaving Broughton Street for good.

As I write this, that corner of Broughton and Drayton is home to… the third Savannah location for the Byrd Cookie Company. Rest in peace, Blends. Sometimes the community remembers you fondly, and sometimes they build a cookie store on your grave.

If you've ever been to Savannah, Georgia, you've almost certainly been to Broughton Street. It's nestled in the north historic district of the city, right between the courthouse and the river. Both sides of the street are lined with upscale dessert restaurants and boutiques, dotted with everything from a Banana Republic to a papered-over arcade even the regulars can’t tell you the name of. A matrix of high-strung bulbs criss-crosses above the road, flickering on each night to remind you you're somewhere important, and to beckon you further down the path. At the end of the path, you'll find SCAD's library and movie theaters, along with the main location for Leopold's ice cream (and its perennial 1-hour line).

The bizarre thing about Broughton is that, even including what I've just described, nearly everything about the street is constantly shifting. Businesses come and go, the street itself underwent major renovations in the early 2020s, and one building lost an entire floor to Hurricane Helene. The clubs have closed due to scandals and changing tastes, new bistros have come and gone. It is an ecosystem of conquest and collapse. Still, when tourists go to Savannah, they go there. Broughton is not a street that happens to contain some historic monument or Hollywood photo-op. Broughton is a street that's just famous because it is.

Even though it's gone now, I would like to tell you about the Broughton Street that will always be famous to me. Unfortunately, this is a portrait pieced together from more than three years of life, one that would be impossible to recreate. It is a photograph that you can shake and shake, but it will not develop, will not clarify. Fortunately, it is a photograph that I took with my mind, so I can inhabit it whenever I choose. And today, I’m choosing to take you with me.

One of the vanished businesses was a soap shop I never properly knew the name of, but Yelp tells me is called simply ‘Soapery.’ When Soapery was open, they'd mount a bubble machine to their storefront and let the bubbles drift down the street, leading you back to their door. In case you've never unexpectedly encountered bubbles in your everyday life before, you should know that it's on the extremely fortunate side of unplanned occurrences that can punctuate your day. For me, the bubbles were something that always inspired impromptu exercises in gratitude. I remember remarking to a friend while walking past the bubble machine that the entire world exists only so that the Soapery can operate its bubble machine on this street in this city. When I one day rounded the corner from Martin Luther King Boulevard to find the Soapery shuttered and the bubble machine gone, the world lost its purpose entirely. In case you've never unexpectedly lost the purpose of the entire world before, you should know that it's on the extremely unfortunate side of unplanned occurrences that can punctuate your day. Rest in peace, Soapery. I hope whoever replaces you puts up a bubble machine.

I think it’s important in life to have little games you play with and for yourself. One of mine is called First Date, Last Date. The game is simple: when you see a couple in a restaurant, either through the window or across the way from your table or while you’re waiting for your takeout, you ask yourself this question: are they on their first date or their last date? Chances are, it’s neither, so you can expand it to this: are they closer to their first date or their last date? The scenarios this game has created in my mind could warrant an essay of their own, but my favorite place to play it was always Flying Monk Noodle Bar on Broughton Street. It’s one of the places in this essay that’s still open, as far as I know, so I’ll speak of it in the present tense. Flying Monk has a circular logo depicting its initials, FM, which taken out of context makes it look like a radio station. Beneath the huge logo sign is a full glass wall facing the street that you can look through at all hours of the day to speculate about the romances within.

I didn’t actually eat at the Flying Monk Noodle Bar until mere months before I graduated. My mom went there without me once when she came to visit, (thanks Mom) but I always felt wasteful eating out anywhere since I had a prepaid meal plan through my university. But one day, on my third year of eating dining hall food, time and meal credits dwindling, my good friend Luke and I decided to patronize Flying Monk before a screening of the A24 movie ‘Friendship.’

We were seated in the middle of the restaurant, me with my back to the big glass wall. There are a lot of reasons why I don’t like my back to face the door. It’s one of my most irrational, most pervasive anxieties. But I felt comfortable enough for the forty or so minutes we were there, and the pad Thai was phenomenal. It becomes relevant at this point that Luke and I are comedy writers, evocative performers, and the best of friends. We gesture broadly and laugh together without shame or reservation because we both understand the world belongs to everyone. With my back to the window, I couldn’t tell you if anyone gave us so much as a second glance that day. But towards the end of our dinner, I leaned in to Luke and explained my suspicion that a passing somebody, somebody very much like me— might have mistakenly thought we were on a very good first date.

One day, while waiting for the crosswalk sign across Martin Luther King Boulevard to change, a friend and I saw an Apple Maps mapping car turning onto Broughton. So, we waved furiously, hoping to be immortalized in some obscure data packet that floats through the cloud and becomes Apple’s simulated Savannah. The car proceeded, indifferent to us. The driver— I’m assuming those cars still have drivers— had surely seen it a hundred times before.

After all, this was the intersection where everything happened, the street where everything happened. This was where I almost got flattened by a red jeep running a red light ten miles per hour over the speed limit. This was where I broke into a sprint in the pouring rain to try and get to the senior film showcase on time. This was where I had witnessed a man throw a brick through a window, then brushed it off and got my coffee somewhere else.

It was there at the second coffee shop– The Coffee Fox– that I said goodbye to my friends, one or two at a time, between my graduation and my departure from Savannah.

I now realize that, when I met each of them over the course of my college journey, some part of me knew this moment would come. Even stranger, I knew some of my closest friends were those I had met at the last second, or had incredible difficulty actually arranging to see. We met on so precious few occasions, and I didn’t know how many, but standing on that corner, it didn’t feel like enough. It’s one of those things that’s completely finite, and theoretically so... knowable, but in the moment, it’s so normal that you’d never think to keep track.

I've graduated now. I don't live in Savannah. I don't regularly walk under the hanging bulbs of the world's most famous-for-nothing street. But I do think about my time in Savannah almost every day. I text my friends and remember the time we spent in the City of Hospitality and beyond. At the same time, I’ve accepted that my life lies elsewhere. I’ve moved on.

But. If the absence ever becomes too much for me, or if I ever want to visit, I can open Apple Maps, and watch my past self stand with an old friend, faces blurred as we wave furiously at a speeding car. At the time, we were waving hello. Now, I think we’re waving goodbye.

Rest in peace, Broughton street. You’re not dead, you’re just changing. Like me.

[An audio edition of this essay will be available soon. Thanks for reading!]

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In the summer of 2024, I found myself in Lacoste, France. It was a small mountain village full of amiable natives and seasonal tourists, but controlled— almost completely, in one way or another— by a satellite campus of the Savannah College of Art and Design. It was this university that brought me there. A rising senior with little left to do and yet much left to worry about, I tasked myself that summer with the ultimate form of escape. I left the country for the first time and flew the ten hours to France alone. Once there, I was surrounded by a hundred and thirty or so students from my same school, very few of whom I had ever met.

I was instantly endeared by the town. It seemed to my American eyes to be the perfect picture of European life: tight social groups, walkable activities, good conversation, and even better food. There was a purpose to life there, and that purpose was life. No more than forty-eight hours into my time in Lacoste did I catch on to the fact that while the French rose late and kept their days laden with deliberate silence, their nights were loud and bright. The root of this revelry soon became clear: as much as the people of Lacoste loved good food, they loved good drinks twice as much.

I don’t say that to primitivize another culture, only to tell it from my perspective: that of a young American who’d never touched alcohol in his life. This was, of course, due to my traditional Christian parents. Neither of them ever drank, not even at weddings. I suppose at some point they each reflected on their family lines— my mother’s plagued by addiction and my father’s by poor health— and decided their joint family was better off without the elixir that famously brought both. The French, though, seemed more at peace with the dangerous edges of life. They were able to see plainly the myth that was control.

It was this craving for unburdened existence that drew me, along with two of my colleagues, one from Puerto Rico and one from India, to the only bar in town on that second night. The problem arose immediately: I had no idea what I wanted. Something local, sure. But something good. For all I knew, my bloodline had developed intolerance and the first sip would kill me flat out. It was there and then, sitting in an ancient, cavernous bar, reviewing a menu of beverages I’d never tasted, written in a language I didn’t know, that I became aware of the truth behind a technique I’d been using my entire life. I went after my friends, told the bartender I’d have what they were having, and sat down, aglow with realization: maybe I never had to decide.

I hated the drink. It was a local Rosé, cheap and rich but practically flavorless to the uninitiated. I drank the whole glass. My friends chastised my distaste, but even in the face of displeasure I felt connected. All three of us came from different places, different languages, and were set loose in a land that belonged to none of us. One flavor, three mouths, three different reactions. Maybe we toasted, ‘you are what you eat,’ and maybe, in that moment, we were the same.

Enlightened by its ease and invigorated by its surprise, I continued using my ordering technique to great success. With friends, with family, with dates or potential dates— whoever I found myself with, I drank the same thing they did. A’s Rosé, F’s mojito, B’s whiskey-coke, O’s Aperol spritz, L’s hot chocolate, H’s peppermint latte, E’s hot mocha latte. I kept it up for months and months undeterred. Each time, I learned. Something about the person, sure. What they like in a drink, of course. But also, their reactions to my ordering the same thing, the tiniest tilt of their head at my implicit endorsement of something they may well have picked at random. It began to feel journalistic in nature, but also paradoxically intimate. Two people at a table somewhere, drinking the same drink, thinking their separate thoughts, and only I know it’s a game. These people were my unwitting guides through the realms of alcohol and coffee, the clueless sages assisting with my most childish vice: indecision.

Childish isn’t the word for it. Children aren’t indecisive. They move with perfect self-assurance, absolute conviction. They have a sense of inherent justice only deterred by ‘corrections’ rained down on them by their parents, teachers, older siblings. They’re creative precisely because they don’t know how the world fits together and they have all the energy in the world to get it wrong time and time again. But there is another side to them. Beyond the relentlessness of youth is the deep-set knowledge of becoming. They know on some level that they exist transitively, and that even if— especially if— they do everything right, they will be thrust into a life they are naturally unprepared for. And so, they look to those who already live this life. And they pretend.

Imitation is not a sacred art because it resolves indecisive panic in the café line or even because it brings a greater degree of connection between participants. It is a sacred art because it is integral to our personhood. To live fully is to acknowledge those who have lived and those who live alongside you and to place yourself in their context. In the early stages, this looks like duplication: children take on the values of their parents, artists take on the styles of their mentors. Systems persist. And this is understood to be a good thing. ‘Imitation is the highest form of flattery.’ But with time comes the awakening of one’s presence in the routine of social replication, and the desire to leave that routine behind.

Young people rebel against their parents, leave home, find communities elsewhere. We choose ‘role models’ worthy of imitation and consider all non-deliberate similarities at best incidental and at worst problematic. The fiction tells us we are not the fruits of our circumstances, that we are hydroponic humans, grown out of oblivion. Many people, especially Americans, spend the entirety of their youth in a shouting match against the world to be acknowledged as distinct. To these people, the worst outcome they can imagine is being lumped in with a group— they prize their persona, their independence, their ‘brand.’ They believe that somehow this recognition will staunch the bleeding from the wound where they severed themselves from the world. They forget that they, too, are born from duplication— one cell at a time.

‘Do as I say, not as I do’ is a common rebuke of children who deftly mimic their parents. It is a simple and catchy nod to the gulf between the actions a child is capable of and the actions they can understand the motivations of. It is also an attempt by parents to sculpt the places and times in which their children will become them. It’s only natural for a parent to want better for their child. To recognize their mistakes and caution the next generation against them is among the most basic instincts of humanity. But some patterns seem bound to repeat. Sometimes we have to aim higher than ourselves.

My household, helmed by my aforementioned traditional Christian parents, strove not for personal imitation but for individualism, corralled by the biblical calling towards being ‘Christlike.’ Rather than endorse any interpersonal replication, my parents pointed us towards a set of ideals outlined in an ancient text. Unsurprisingly, it was effective. And the Bible gives indicators that this will be the case: God maintains divine ‘fatherhood’ over his followers, seen as his ‘children.’ These children, canonically ‘made in his image,’ are naturally inclined to seek God because long ago they lived alongside him until they incurred his wrath through mortal error. When framed this way, it seems there is no easier task: the imitation of Christ is a task we are not only called to do but designed to do, crafted by the same hand who crafted Christ himself. But, as the Bible— and anyone who’s earnestly attempted to follow it— will tell you, it’s not just hard. It’s impossible.

This is another crux of imitation as an art: it is impossible. No restored painting will have the improvisational chaos of the original because the restorer already knows what they’re ‘supposed to’ paint. No student will ever replicate their mentor’s style because their mentor has years of experience the student lacks. No son will ever become his father because half of him is his mother. And those two medium hot mocha lattes, poured within minutes of each other and carried carefully to the lawn chairs where we sat and talked for hours— despite being in identical cups, made with identical ingredients, and costing identical amounts— were not the same. And as her green eyes met mine, we understood this is never an error. It is a blessing.

Our understood failures, our inherent flaws, are the gravitational pull that forces us out of the prison of assimilation to the past. Our personalities, constructed or discovered, are the lenses through which our every venture is refracted. Everything we attempt will land somewhere between who we want to be and who we are. Those who want to be great artists imitate great artists, and their inescapable humanity marries this pursuit to mold them into who they will become. Imperfect imitation is what separates men from mirrors. Life is the game of choosing the right paragon to mimic. It is the game of knowing when to start, when to keep going, and how. It is the game of knowing when to stop.

By the end of my eight weeks in Lacoste, I had sampled no shortage of drinks, keeping careful track of which one ‘belonged’ to which of my companions. I never developed much in the way of taste, but I had a few data points to work with, and before I left I was ordering for myself… albeit still in English. Returning to my home in the United States, where the drinking age is 21, I suddenly found myself underage again, unable to utilize my newfound knowledge. This product of imitation sat dormant within me, unique and studied. It was a ticking reminder of the joy I felt during my escape abroad, a particular joy now inaccessible to me for myriad reasons. It might have been easy to watch this experience catalyze into memory and despair. But I knew the space it occupied within me, and the shape that its absence would leave. I knew my joy was unbound by the particulars of the experiment I had performed with my friends— and most of all, I knew how to perform it again.

It feels worth mentioning to my more curious readers that in the midst of all this sampling I did develop preferences: for coffee, I like what my local café calls the Mexican Mocha: a dark chocolate whole milk mocha latte with cinnamon and habanero mixed in. For spirits, I like straight Captain Morgan Original Spiced Rum, one polite shot at a time. Thanks, O.