Dear Yapchat

Dear Yapchat,

I remember this one night, a year and a half before we met. It was during that time of the year when one often forgets what the sun looks like because Pleasant Valley High School is a windowless, rotting cinder block, and by the time you are released from its hollowed inside, the sun would be about ready to clock out for the night.

There were academically-inclined patches of mold taking classes through the holes in the ceiling tiles, probably sitting next to someone’s old vape and a mechanical pencil that was thrown up generations before. During this time of year, these nerdy fungi could degenerate the tiles into a fine powder that would snow onto a recycling bin moved to the center of the classroom for fear of a leak. After enough time, maybe the sky would start to peek through the hole next to the mold, but the sun would not peek. It does not rest high enough to show up with them. 

It was mid-November at 7:30 p.m., and even the moon was too scared to venture into the darkness alone. With the moon gone, the rain — desperate, impatient and angry — seized the night in her grasp and did what she had not been able to do for weeks. She released it all. She shed her old skin aggressively and puked out the dry stresses that lived like worms in her stomach. She released it all, and she did so on my car. She pounded her body against the glass and steel with a sound so loud even Taylor Swift felt drowned through the car speakers. I turned on the windshield wipers and watched the car’s panicked arms try desperately to brush off the never-ending streams of water. With my chest to the steering wheel, my fingers glued around its rubber linings, I almost panicked, driving 10 mph on Valley Drive at 7:30 p.m. on a Friday on my way to pep band during a deafening downpour. 

But something in me wanted to floor it. Right there in the section of the street between the donkey farm and the run-down house with a Confederate flag hanging from the second-floor window. My practical senses told me to stay at 10, and I complied. I did, however, glide my fingers across the steering wheel and press the volume button once. Then again. And again. And again and again and again until the sound of the rain blended with the baseline, and I could hear nothing, think nothing, feel nothing but music. I considered rolling the windows down to feel it even more. 

There is a universe out there where the often shirtless man with the Confederate flag woke up the next morning to some caution tape on his lawn and a newspaper with a headline about a kid who crashed his car on his way to marching band. Maybe the car flipped over, crashing into the fences of the donkey farm and impaling the poor kid with a wooden pole through the window.That universe was not this one. In this one, I lived with Taylor Swift, a Chevrolet and a downpour.

I remember another night — July 15, 2021, during that time of the year when the sun won’t leave you alone. I only know the specific date because I remember it was the night Clairo released her second album, “Sling.” And though my memory tends to confusingly remember and forget itself, I seem to remember falling asleep shortly after “Zinnias” and waking up half an inch above my bed. The light was so bright, for a split second I confused it for sunlight. That was until I realized Zeus had cracked his whip on my house — or at least close enough that the sound made my house shake and my body jump from the sheets. Afterwards, I heard the subtle sound of everyone’s bodies falling back on their beds — my father, my mother, my sisters and my brother right next to me. I went back to sleep dreaming about a period film about a girl with a cat on an island off the coast of Maine and wrote about her the next morning.

When they sent us home for the first time, it was 7:30 p.m. again. The sun was hiding just like it was on that night driving through Valley Drive, which was strange for an evening in June. The rain was not as distressed this time around, although I had to shield my Mac and my tote beneath my shirt as I walked to my car, lest rain’s wet grip take them from me. The sirens chased me — harmonizing with an equally forceful Michelle Zauner singing through my speakers — as I drove through glimmering streetlights, their red reflections on every droplet flowing down the windshield. I relaxed a little once I crossed the bridge, thinking there was no way it would turn to a waterspout and cross state lines just to reach me. So, I drove back through Valley Drive, this time going in the opposite direction, feeling everything dystopian about the storm but somehow no longer lonely. When I think of that moment now, I remember texting Yapchat to tell you I was safe and ask whether you were too. In the basement of my house, Erik Maitland mumbled something about pressure in McCausland or Eldrige or Geneseo, something formed over the field between our house and Hopewell Avenue, my little sister whimpered something about the windows and I wrote something about love.

The second time we found ourselves packed in the basement floor of the Rock Island Public Library with sirens over our heads (Were there sirens that day? I can’t remember), I noticed that it did not matter how many of us were sprawled across that floor, it still smelled the same. It smelled of poetry and queerness and maybe an old woman or two. We all kept working as the lights flickered and the rain groaned, and when I took Prerna home, we stopped to get pictures of the lightning behind the church and then again by the bridge with the neon lights and then again on the now golden fields behind her house. We talked about college and her senior year and wondered what it would be like when she’s rewarded with an acceptance letter. 

I took some time to drive around for a while before texting Yapchat for a check-in. Gliding on slick roads, I began imagining weather and climate on other planets, imagining characters and machines, imagining love, imagining the novel I want to write and the movie that would follow. Whoever directs these storm scenes is my muse: the sound engineer that blended the thunder and the music those nights in my car and the one that designed the tornado sirens and the colorist who painted the sky as the clouds relaxed and let the sun break out one last time before it settled into the night. I would scout them for myself, and it would be filmed just like this. 

I do not want to sound like a deprived suburban boy with an obsession with “the thrill of the storm” who romanticizes the brink of destruction — it is not about that. It is about living and being reminded that our human lives have no power against the forces of nature. It is a reminder that we build a life within nature that we often forget is not reliant on ourselves but the forces around us — the rain, the moon, the sun, the storms, the Yapchat and the Rock Island Public Library. There is something about these storms that makes these lives visible outside of ourselves, and to live is to live in that moment when the perspective changes to third person.

To live is to smell the queerness of the Rock Island Public Library ibrary mixed with summer humidity. To live is to flee to the basement after my mother yelled at me for staying in my room. To live is to feel connected to the racist shirtless white man for a split second while going 10 miles an hour on Valley Drive. To live was to be packed with you in the library on those moments in June.

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