#I go onto my dashboard and all I see is complaints about the season | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

galaxythreads · 6 months

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I've seen so many posts talking about all the bad things about s2 of Loki, so things that ARE good about season 2 so far:

The mystery of episode 1 was, once you got into it, really compelling and sucked you into it

the pacing is much better in s2 than it was in s1

We're at the midway point and thus far Sylvie has barely had 5 minutes of screen time. She's not taking over the story. She's barely in the story. And though I do want to see her story come to a satisfying conclusion, it's been nice to not have her overpower the narrative

What wasn't working with Mobius and Loki in s1 IS working in s2. In s1 I couldn't believe they were friends if you forced me to, in S2 it is clear that they actually care about each other

The TVA is a lot more gray than it was in s1. In season 1 they tried really hard to make it Secretly We're the Victims, but in s2 they're adding a lot more nuance to what's going on

The cinematography has been amazing

The soundtrack of s2 is really good as well

Loki has been much more in character of OG loki than he was in s1. He doesn't fidget as much, he's not dismissive of things, he seems a lot more assure of himself in s2 than he did in s1. Like he's not constantly trying to prove something to Mobius. And this is because he and Mobius are actually friends in s2, so Loki feels secure in his presence and it's easy to show

Mobius has respect for Loki's abilties in s2. He lets Loki use magic and actually frequently encourages him to. Mobius doesn't see him as a stupid little "pussy cat" he actually sees Loki as a threat and lets him be a threat

Loki's use of magic feels a lot more like it's something he's been doing his entire life and less like a OH YEAH! HE HAS MAGIC QUICK USE THAT TO SHOW OFF FOR A MOMENT!! :DD like no. Loki braces for fights with magic. It's just really nice to see.

Loki hunting down Brad (?) in the opening of s2 and completely owning him. I have nothing else to say. That scene was THE scene to me.

Mobius and Loki are actually trying to take care of each other

Mobius has a lot more depth in this season because of how dark the TVA is

Ravonna's speech about how the TVA was held together by the skin of her teeth and how the moment she left it all fell apart. It was a really powerful moment that showcased how much depth there is the Ravonna.

Ravonna and Victor's sorta romance. I didn't love it, but it actually worked really well in the context of epi 3, and I love that they subverted your expectations by having it be Miss Minutes who was actually the insane lover

I didn't love most of episode 3, but I did think it was an interesting direction to take the series, adding in Victor. He's more sympathetic than HWR was so we feel more for him.

Loki vs Brad.

Episode 2

Have I mentioned that I love episode 2?

No push toward a sylki agenda. No push toward Lokius. Loki's relationships with everyone is purely platonic and it's clearly written as platonic and it's nice that Loki is just getting support from his friends, not being shoved into a romance box. While they've talked about Sylki, there has been exactly 0 moves to make it canon again. They're kind of ignoring it happened, which is probably for the best.

#I go onto my dashboard and all I see is complaints about the season #and it makes me sad because I do think there's a lot of good that's happening too #I am enjoying s2 a lot more than I did s1 #loki season 2 #loki season 2 spoilers #loki series #loki

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sfb123 · 1 year

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Hands Down - Prologue

Pairing: Liam x Riley

All characters belong to Pixelberry

Summary: Can Liam and Riley still find their way to each other despite Riley turning down Maxwell's invitation to Cordonia?

Rating: G

Word Count: 1,945

Song Inspiration: Hands Down - Dashboard Confessional

A/N: I am participating in @kingliamappreciationweek Day 5 (Friendships/Relationships/AU, all of which apply to this prologue), as well as @choicesflashfics Week 29, "That's all we/they are now. A memory. A faded picture. A failed potential." It will appear in bold below.

A/N 2: It's been a minute since I've posted anything, let alone started a new series. I've had bits and pieces of this story forever, but could never figure out how to put it all together. Then my aunt died (IYKYK), and I've been working on this ever since.

A/N 3: Thank you to those of you that I have been bombarding with ideas, snippets, and complaints. They're still going to be coming, probably now more than ever. But I appreciate you listening and humoring me. Especially @txemrn for looking over this prologue and making sure it was okay.

Tagging my usuals, if you'd like to be added or removed just let me know!

Liam was in a daze as he returned to his hotel suite, still thinking about her. They had only spent a couple of hours together, but it was all Liam needed to know that he was destined for so much more with Riley Brooks.

He fell back onto the couch and pulled out his phone, texting Maxwell to see if he was still up, and if he would join Liam in his room. He was, and he would.

While he had his phone in his hand, he opened his camera roll and looked fondly at the picture that they had taken together. Liam told her that it was because he wanted to remember his trip to the Statue of Liberty, but more than that, it was because he wanted to remember her. Not that she wasn’t permanently imprinted on his mind the second they locked eyes, but he wanted to have a photo of her, to have tangible proof that she wasn’t a dream.

A knock at the door pulled Liam’s attention away from his screen. He stood, returning his phone to his pocket as he answered to find Maxwell grinning on the other side.

“Well well well. Have fun, your highness?” His friends crossed his arms over his chest and leaned against the doorframe.

Liam chuckled, he couldn’t help it. “More than you know. Please, come in.” He moved aside and motioned toward the sitting area.

“Soooooo… tell me everything. You seemed pretty smitten, I’ve never seen you like that before!”

“Maxwell, I’ve never felt like that before. She’s incredible. I’ve never felt more carefree, more happy.” Liam sighed at the memories of his evening. “That’s why I need your help.”

Maxwell’s head tilted in confusion. “Me? What can I do?”

“Ramsford doesn’t have a sponsor for the social season, correct?” Maxwell nodded slowly, still not sure where this was going. “I want you to sponsor Riley, to bring her to Cordonia.”

“Liam… are you sure? I mean we’re not prepared for that. We weren’t expecting to sponsor anyone.” Maxwell hesitated. He wanted his friend to be happy, but he also knew his family’s financial state, and he wasn’t sure they would be able to support a sponsee.

“Maxwell, I know your house has been having some… difficulties financially since your father took ill. I would be more than happy to pay for anything she needs. Discreetly, of course.”

Maxwell studied Liam’s expression, he had never seen his friend like this before. The textbook definition of stoicism, the young prince was never one to show his emotions so openly. But now? He could see the desperation, the need clear as day on his friends face.

“You really have it bad for her, don’t you?”

“More than I ever thought possible.” Liam answered.

“I’ll find her tomorrow morning before I head back.” He patted his friend on the shoulder.

***

Liam stood in the receiving line greeting the suitors one by one. It was the first night of his social season, but all he could think about was her. She was all he had been able to think about since the night before.

I hope she had a safe trip.

She’s going to look so beautiful.

I wonder if she’s been thinking of me the way I’ve been thinking of her.

I need to move through this line faster. She’s in it somewhere, I need to see her again.

Before long, the final suitor dipped into a courtesy and made her way back to the party. Liam looked around the room. Perhaps she had just gotten caught up in something and didn’t make it to the receiving line in time.

“Liam? Is everything alright?”

He turned around, to respond. “Yes father, I was just taking everything in.”

Constantine chuckled. “Well, enjoy it son. This is all for you. It’s the beginning of a whole new chapter.”

Liam nodded, looking past his father to the bar where Maxwell was ordering a drink. “Father, if you’ll excuse me for a moment.” He didn’t wait for a response before stepping away.

“Maxwell.” Liam greeted his friend as he stood next to him at the bar.

“Oh, Liam. Hey!” Maxwell shifted uncomfortably on his feet. “Happy social season!” He held up his drink, smiling awkwardly.

“Where is she?” Liam asked, anxious to see her again.

“Riley?” Maxwell asked, trying to buy as much time as he could. Dreading having to deliver the news. “She… well, she’s not here.”

“Why not? It’s the first event of the season, is she running late?” Liam began rambling, a knot forming in the pit of his stomach. “Was there an issue getting her a gown? I could…”

“Liam,” Maxwell interrupted. “She’s not here as in, she’s not in Cordonia. She didn’t come.”

“What… why?”

That Morning

“Riley!” Maxwell jogged up to the familiar figure as she unlocked the door of the bar.

She turned to face him as the door opened. “Oh hey, Maxwell, right? Did you forget something last night?”

“No, I actually had a proposition for you.” Riley furrowed her brows. “Do you have a minute to talk?”

“Sure, come in. We don’t open for another hour, so I can spare a few.” She walked into the building, and he followed behind.

As she approached the bar, she pulled down one of the stools and signaled for him to sit. He took a seat and she stepped behind the bar, grabbing an apron and tying it around her waist.

“So, you and Liam seemed to hit it off last night.” Maxwell said, wanting to gauge Riley’s take on the evening. He wanted to make sure Liam didn’t misinterpret, or misunderstand her side of the outing.

A slow smile spread across Riley’s face, the same one Liam had on his the night before. That’s when he knew the feeling was very mutual.

“We did. I’ve never met anyone like him before. Hell, I didn’t think guys like him existed in real life. I hope whoever wins that social season realizes how lucky they are.” She said wistfully.

Maxwell grinned, this was going better than he had hoped. “What if you were the one to win it?”

“Ha-ha, yeah right.” She replied, shaking her head and turning to empty the dishwasher.

“No, I’m serious.” He assured her. “Each noble house sponsors a suitor. Since we don’t have any sisters we can pick whoever we want. And I pick you!”

Riley froze and turned back around looking at Maxwell with a shocked expression. “You,” she pointed at him. “Want me,” she turned her finger to point at herself. “To come with you to a county I only just found out about like twelve hours ago, to join some fancy royal version of The Bachelor to try to marry a prince?”

“I wasn’t going to word it quite like that, but more or less.” He shrugged.

“But… why me?”

“Riley, Liam couldn’t stop talking about you. He was so happy last night. Happier than I’ve ever seen him, and we’ve known each other forever. His life is full of meetings, and stuffy dinners, and boring things he does because it’s his duty. He gets to break away and have fun sometimes, but those times are getting less and less now that he’s ramping up to become King. He’s such a good person, he puts everyone else ahead of himself. He deserves to be the kind of happy you make him all the time.”

Riley was silent, examining Maxwell’s expression. He seemed to be sincere. “Maxwell, that’s really sweet of you. Liam’s lucky to have a friend like you looking out for him.” She started. “But be realistic, even if I came with you, I’d have to quit both of my jobs and put school on hold. Basically quit my life to travel halfway across the world for the chance to be with Liam. It wouldn’t even be a guarantee.”

“He asked me to sponsor you!” Maxwell blurted out.

Riley’s breath caught in her throat, she hadn’t been expecting that. “But why? He doesn’t even know me.”

“He knows enough to believe that there could be something between you two.”

She blinked back the tears that had started to rise. She felt it too, but it was a major risk. Riley Brooks didn’t take risks. “Yeah, but even if I did come with you, that doesn’t mean anything. He told me about the social season, it’s not like he’s going to be able to just send the other girls home the second he sees me. Everyone gets a say, and I'm a nobody from America. I know nothing about your country. I don’t know about your customs. Hell, I don’t even like fancy foods, I’d probably make a fool of myself and be laughed out of the country at the first dinner.”

“But Riley…”

“Maxwell,” She reached across the bar, placing her hand over his. “You’re such a good friend to come here for him. But my answer is no. Maybe if we were in a different time, or a different place, but we’re here. These are the cards we were dealt, our lives are just too different for it to work.” She swallowed over the lump in her throat. “I need to get things set up to open. Have a safe trip back.” She turned and walked to the back, leaving Maxwell alone.

“I’m so sorry Liam. I tried, I really did.” Maxwell said sympathetically. He could see the pain in his friend’s eyes, despite his attempts to remain composed. “I don’t know if it helps or hurts, but she had the same dreamy look on her face when she talked about you that you had when you talked about her. Everything you felt last night, she felt it too.”

Liam cleared his throat, “Thank you Maxwell. It was a longshot, but I’m very grateful to you for trying. If you’ll excuse me.” He nodded solemnly to his friend before walking away, moving to the double doors that lead to the balcony.

He stepped outside and breathed a sigh of relief that he was alone. He approached the balustrade, leaning his forearms against it as he gazed out to the garden maze. He thought about Riley, what she was doing right now, if she missed him as much as he missed her.

Perhaps he had just gotten caught up in the magic of the evening, he had overromanticized their connection. He took his phone out of his pocket and pulled up their picture. He examined their faces, they both looked so happy. He placed his thumb and index finger on the screen, dragging them apart to zoom in on her face. He was trained to read people, and everything about her, both in that moment, and in the photo, told him that she had been feeling exactly what he had been. Even Maxwell had noticed it the next day when he went to talk to her.

It just hadn’t been enough.

“That's all we are now. A memory. A faded picture. A failed potential.” He lamented as he continued to stare down at the picture, remembering their night together.

“Liam.” His father’s short tone startled him so much that he nearly dropped his phone off of the balcony.

“Father,” he turned, discreetly returning his device to his pocket.

“What are you doing out here by yourself? You should be in there spending time with your suitors. The season is going to go by quickly, you need to take every opportunity to get to know your potential brides.”

“Yes father.” Liam closed his eyes and took a deep breath, trying to get Riley out of his mind.

**********

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trident · 5 years

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Would you do anything differently if you were given the chance to re-do Legion’s final season?

A lot of things.

But let me start out by saying that I don’t actually hate the third season. I don’t hate everything that happened. It happened, and I’m not going to shove it away. I would honestly go with it all, if it had been handled better, fleshed out better, and if certain things were focused on that needed to be focused on instead of leaving it up to the show to just… tell us that this is how it’s going to go.

My main complaint with I think the entire season is that they dropped so many things that were so important to the first two seasons, that made the show what it was, that got us so interested in the show, that it didn’t feel like a necessarily satisfying ending. I’m speaking for myself on this, as well as a few friends who feel the same way. I know some people also really like the ending, and that’s valid! You can feel that way! I’m certainly partial to parts of the finale season that other people might not be partial to. But I personally think it could have been done better.

Not demonising mental illness, first of all. If you were here to see my embarrassing breakdown during the finale of the second season, you might know some of my feelings on this. In the first season, I think they handled relatively well the circumstances surrounding mental illness, the struggles the people (David) go through when they have a mental illness. It felt sort of abandoned during the latter half of the second season and the whole third season. Like the issue had turned itself on its head. Because now, we see David, the character who so many saw on screen relate to them in their struggles, turned into this awful person, hellbent on getting what he wants, without seeing the error in any of his ways.

Showing that literally every single one of his alters was in agreement with him when it came to wiping Syd’s consciousness and jumping their father didn’t do D.I.D. any better. Alters have their own opinions, they don’t all just think the same thing. Honestly, I just don’t think they showed enough of it in general, being that it’s such a huge part of his comics counterpart and didn’t even come up till 2x11 but that’s a conversation for another time.

And this mental illness talk goes hand-in-hand with the way the show seemed to highlight that David, who was abused by Farouk for 33 years, turned tail after people started blaming him, and became… just like Farouk. Just like his abuser. Using other people for his own personal gain, without a care as to what he was doing to them. See: Switch. See: all the people he killed to get her back so that he could use her again. See: the way he didn’t care that his best friend Lenny was drinking herself into a stupor because she lost her child and her wife in the span of a few minutes, and pushing her to the point where she commits suicide.

Making Farouk’s change of heart actually believable. Like, what was up with that? I get that it was ~foreshadowed~. But did we see enough of it? No. 3x01, Farouk hears that Syd shoots David in the back and we see him try and stop Syd from going on the mission. There’s obviously something up.

Farouk says, to Charles, that “I saw what he saw, I felt what he felt, I thought what he thought. And over time, what was once a prison became a person. It’s hard to hate someone you understand. I love the boy, Charles.” BUT DOES ANY OF HIS MAKE SENSE WITH WHAT HAPPENED IN THE PREVIOUS TWO SEASONS? NO.

This post by @katrinacass just floated onto my dashboard which gives some great examples of how Farouk’s redemption arc doesn’t work with what the first season showed us.

And don’t even get me started on the second season. Farouk killed Amy, the person who he knew David loved the most. He made everyone turn on David. If we’re truly supposed to believe that Farouk had come to care for David “like a son,” we didn’t see any of it actually happen.

And instead of believing that Farouk had a change of heart, I instead was sat there, listening to the talk between Charles and Farouk, tense, just waiting for him to go back on his word like he had every single other time. Don’t get me wrong, I would love to have believed him. I think it could have worked. In fact, I like that that happened, that Farouk realised he was in the wrong and he needed to help fix things and that he helped. But the problem was that they just told the audience that he changed, rather than showing that he changed. We went through the whole final season still thinking he was the bad guy, instead of seeing any actions that proved that he was capable of this sudden heel-turn in the finale of the final season. It was extremely important that it happened in the finale. But the way it came up just was not satisfying and didn’t make sense.

David actually repenting of what he did. See: raping Syd. He didn’t even apologise for any of it, except for a half-assed “sorry” in the very last scene over baby David’s cradle. We, as an audience, never saw him take proper responsibility for it. One could argue that he did take responsibility: that he did something about it by wiping out the timeline. But honestly? That’s a crappy way of handling the aftermath of rape. “Oh, I’m just going to rewind time so that this never happened, instead of actually feeling bad about it and trying to show the woman that I raped that I feel sorry and I truly understand that what I did was wrong.”

I don’t feel like that’s a very good way to handle that. At all. Sorry. If you want to include that in your show, when it wasn’t even needed in the first place (David could have very well just wiped Syd’s memories, and that would have been enough to warrant her feeling that betrayal), and you want us to still feel for the character who made the decision to do that, then you need to have it called out (check) and also show that the character who committed the action knows the gravity of his actions and actually feels remorseful about it (no check).

Not putting all the responsibility of David’s actions on the women. David needed love, right? That was the central breaking point. But it was shown to be on Syd first, who decided she didn’t love him after he raped her, and on Gabrielle, who ~wasn’t there for him~ because she gave him away. Sure, some of it rested on Charles’ shoulders too, but honestly…

And you know what? In that same vein, they totally forgot David’s adoptive family. Are we supposed to believe that he wasn’t loved in his life, when he had his adoptive mother, adoptive father, and Amy there?

I can’t help but think the show was trying to follow X-Men Legacy: V.2, in that David has been basically ignored by Charles his entire life, put into an induced coma for a decade. He had a severe lack of love in the comics, and he ended up wiping the timeline. But it doesn’t work in the show, where he had an adoptive family. Just saying.

….

Sigh. These are the main things that come to mind right now. I love the show, I really do. So, so much. I will never find a show I love more than this one. I just think there was a lot of potential to it, but it wasn’t executed correctly.

Shameless plug: good news is, I’ll be writing an entirely new life for David post-third season as a fic, which I’m already working on. I’m excited about that. Gonna be dealing with some things the way I wish they had been dealt with, even if they won’t be the same sort of scenarios and all that. :)

#anon .#answered #legion fx #suicide //#rape //#legion spoilers //

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how2to18 · 6 years

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LAST AUGUST, upon getting a new job at a small university in Wisconsin, I started a daily hour-long commute. Every morning I jet out of Madison’s east side, meandering down I-90, and halfway to Chicago, I exit onto a network of county roads that wend through cornfields and prairie, a landscape whose only saliences are the oxidized rectitude of grain silos or the pylons for the town’s electricity. Most of the other vehicles out here are semi-trucks or SUVs towing fishing boats with names like SEADUCTION and GROUPER THERAPY.

In some sense, a commute is an ontological problem. Confined to one’s car or the seat of a train, there is only so much you can do. It is a prickly non-hour during which you are unaccountable to your family or friends and are thus unburdened from the onuses of home or the tug of productivity. Of course, some of us push back against this inertia. So conditioned are we to “maximize our time,” we view the bus or train as a makeshift office and convert our business calls into public soliloquies. From my college days in Chicago I can still recall voyages during which neatly barbered executives held onto the train car railing and shouted into their cell phones things like, “Jesus Christ, Marty: not today, Monday!” or, “Just send me the goddamned spreadsheets!” One wonders why anyone buys theater tickets when, on public transport, you can see Death of a Salesman for free as a daily matinee.

Even those of us who drive still attempt to escape our limitations. We outfit our bodies with a couture of electronic gadgets with the hope of transcending time and space. With our bluetooths (blueteeth?) and smartwatches, we return phone calls and eschew idleness, striving to stay one step ahead of the competition. My cousin, a financial advisor, tells me that during his commute he often video-chats with customers through a small dashboard camera. Occasionally they’ll remark upon the whine of a proximate car horn or the image of cattle ranch framed in his rearview window.

From this vantage, the commute seems to reify a basic American covenant: the promise of social mobility. With nothing more than your pluck and intuition, you’re free to hoist up those bootstraps and bloodhound around for your share of the pie. I have the sensation almost every morning that to join the puttering multitude is to bolster the ranks of Americans who still believe in the Horatio Alger myth, who think we can transcend our disappointments through hustle and toil, who believe the trajectory of our fate is commensurate to our willingness to stay on the move. Very often on the highway I hear in my inner ear two pop songs from the 1980s, “Working for the Weekend” by Loverboy and “Workin’ for a Livin’” by Huey Lewis & The News: songs whose carbonated optimism makes it easy for me to imagine myself as Michael J. Fox in The Secret of My Success, a fair-haired golden boy who can climb the professional ladder with nothing more than winks and roguish charm.

Which is to say that a commute is an occasion for self-delusion. It is an hour of preening and exhortation during which we psych ourselves up for the day’s demands. When I was in my early 20s, during the first decade of the century, I lived in a dingy apartment on the north side of Chicago and interned for a certain big-eared senator who harbored presidential ambitions. Three days a week, I spent an hour on the El, jouncing toward the Loop, wearing a suit that didn’t fit me and an ill-advised goatee. I had grown up in small-town Wisconsin and pegged myself as a wide-eyed Huckleberry unfit for national politics. During my commute, I tried to compensate by watching, on my laptop, episodes from Aaron Sorkin’s The West Wing, modeling my persona on the role of Josh Lyman, the deputy chief of staff who blustered and quipped his way across the Capitol, deactivating political foes with unction and blandishment. Within the span of an hour, Lyman’s serrated wit gave me a stencil for my workday sensibility, even though my own tasks in the senator’s office never went beyond typing correspondence or fielding constituents’ complaints.

Of course, a commute is a circular journey, a coming and going, so whatever varnish we apply to our psyches in the morning invariably wears off by the hour of return. At no time is this more apparent than on evening buses and trains, when the despair of fellow passengers can so thoroughly darken your mood that you find yourself getting off several stops before your exit. The apparition of these faces in a crowd, Ezra Pound wrote of a subway station in 1913, petals on a wet, black bough.

Back in Chicago, my boss was forecasting a season of hope and change, but it was not uncommon for my commute to wear the symptoms of the prevailing anomie: barefoot transients muttering preachments to no one or teens in billowing parkas toking joints with impunity. I remember once, on the Red Line toward Evanston, a cohort of drunken students from Northwestern bellowing Disney songs from their youth: “A Whole New World” and “I Just Can’t Wait to Be King.” That these tunes were so roaringly incongruous to the train’s interior — that they operated as a callow taunt to our less fortunate fellow travelers — seemed never to have occurred to them. Instead, the students held fast to the talismanic powers of a commute, a vessel hurtling toward their own enchanted destinies.

Such optimism seems more prevalent among the young. For those of us who are now on the cusp of middle age, a commute isn’t so much a journey of progress as a footpath around regrets and deferred ambitions. By the time they were my age, Emily Brontë had penned Wuthering Heights and the Buddha had renounced all worldly possessions, but all I have to my name are a handful of publications and one year toward tenure at a small Midwestern university. Whereas a commute was once a screen upon which I could project a montage of future achievements — a widely feted novel, the label of wunderkind, a house in the country — it now functions as a yawning chasm of time in which, if I’m not careful, I can lose myself to ruefulness and dispassion.

I suppose this is why, wherever I grumble about my commute, my friends are quick to offer a menu of dubious advice. Adamantly they suggest the downloading of audiobooks or podcasts, anything to lure the mind away from the jaws of self-critique. In order to lessen the burdens of the journey, they seem to suggest, you must forget where you are and why you’re there. You must take up the avenues of self-erasure.

Such recommendations seem of a piece with the most popular injunctions of our time. Constantly we are told to stay busy, to dodge overthinking, lest we court long jags of depression and the arrival of bad moods. Under the banner of self-care, we are exhorted to go ahead and binge-watch that TV show, to scarf that chocolate cake, to delight in the unbridled consumption of the widely practiced “cheat day.” Steeped in the nonthought of yoga, we fold our bodies into the postures of infants and corpses, aiming for a kind of self-obliteration, paying drop-in rates for mental fatality. This points out another etymological declension of commuting: before the word came to connote soul-crippling drives to the workplace, to “commute” was to lessen the severity of a punishment, as when a judge offers a guilty party the balm of a lesser sentence.

And yet part of the sadness I feel during my commute stems from the realization that I have spent too much time absenting myself from my life, that I haven’t appreciated each moment as it came. Throughout my 20s, I believed my days were following the logic of a sitcom, with new characters wandering across the set and interacting with the central players, but the plot was strung loosely together, never building toward some overarching narrative, never orchestrating some final theme. When I was in grad school, I would spend barren hours drinking on the union patio, smoking cigarettes with friends in the seventh year of writing their dissertations, and it never dawned on me that this tipsy chatter would be on the record, that this was time I’d never get back.

That I suffered from this delusion becomes most obvious to me when I finally arrive at school and teach my classes. These college students are nearly 15 years my junior, and yet lately they’ve entered the lecture hall in the apparel of my childhood. In particular, the Massimo hats and Tommy Hilfiger hoodies, which were so popular in the 1990s, now have the power to summon Proustian levels of nostalgia in me. It is a strange mirror. Last week, during office hours, one boy told me how desperately he wanted to tell his story, how badly he wants to be a writer, how badly he wanted this, he said, throwing an arm into the air, as though the cramped precinct of my office were some sort of holy relic, the site of all creation. I would have found his earnestness charming if it weren’t such faithful reflection of my own college-aged hungers. Which is why I found myself fighting back tears. To grow old is to encounter on a daily basis an interminable parade of previous selves, miniature incarnations of your delusions, your wild hopes, your mistakes.

In these habits of mind, I seem to share a bloodline with Leopold Bloom and Clarissa Dalloway, those sullen nostalgists for whom a routine errand — a trip to the florist, a jaunt to the post — became a juncture to reflect upon the errancies of one’s life: a squandered dalliance, a neglected son, the aftereffects of a ravaging addiction. No wonder we bristle at the idle hours of our commute. For it is then that we see how choosing Chicago over Berkeley kept us from a life of sunshine, how a graduate degree in fiction ruled out a job in the West Wing, how our moneyless lifestyle as aspiring novelists prevented us from having children.

These days, during the hour of my commute, I am trying to sit more easily with my disappointments, trying to remember more fondly the places I have been. For that is what we risk losing amid all those dissected evenings in thrall to self-abstention, all those slack-jawed hours with TV shows and podcasts. We are distancing ourselves from the fact of our inevitable transformation: that we are always getting older, that things are no longer as they once had been. In this sense, we are always in commute, always traveling inexorably between those “two eternities of darkness,” as Nabokov called them, the one toward which we are heading and the one from which we came.

“I thought it would last, my time,” writes Philip Larkin, that bard of resignation. “The sense that, beyond the town, there would always be fields and farms.” On my journey home, the road is long, and out across the gathering dusk, a hem of leafless trees stands frayed against the mauvish horizon. For half an hour, I drive through swaths of undulant prairie, unaccompanied by fellow travelers, and every so often the fecal reek of soil pervades the window, a vestige of the forgotten summer. Atop a faraway hill, two cows graze in lazy contention, and even in the twilight, I can see that they’re breathing steam. For a while, I lose myself to the hum of the interstate, but when I come out of the fog, it seems, impossibly, that I’m already near my exit. Always, it comes quicker than we expect.

Barrett Swanson was the 2016–2017 Halls Emerging Artist Fellow at the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing.

Banner image by Alan Light.

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