midway between here and there
by Sarah Kowalski
Sarah Kowalski, Attempts, gouache, wax, ink, and pigments on found text, approximately 9x12 inches, 2024. Courtesy of the artist.
midway between
here and there
Sarah Kowalski | JUly 2025 | Issue 47
Tree shadows splay across the gray pavement, flickering patterns of dark and light overlapping. Windows up, already hot at 9 a.m., AC on, a thin breeze against your wrist. The first few notes of Heroin on the car stereo,
PLING din-din-din-din-din-din-din
PLING din-din-din-din-din-din-din
and the familiar flash of hearing it for the first time, 15 years old at a house party in the 90s in a midwestern college town, polyester thrift store shirt newly acquired, aware the song was soundtracking your own life changing, and on its heels today, his face. The friend who died of an overdose last year. His oval close-cropped head, his grinning spectacled joy, long limbs, the way he’d dance up to you at parties, shimmy at you, make you looser just by existing. The video his widow texted the other day, their son dancing at daycamp, those same goofy moves busting through.
It’s clearly genetic, you texted back. The broken-heart emoji not really a proper expression of the depth of ache but fuck if you didn’t include it. How do you say it? A whole life lost. The life force that continues in our children. The echoey guitar of this familiar song about addiction, which used to feel abstract and arty, threaded now with waves of complex sorrow. Not just him. Everyone you’ve lost.
The older you get, the more all your joy is warp and weft, a fabric woven more than half of grief.
You think about fabric. How light shows through it, when you hold it up to the sky.
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The rules of four-way-stop intersections are always a little fluid, in Philly. Not just who got there first but who’s feeling boldest, who’s a little gracious. Don’t trust the ones with blacked-out windshields, they’ll always jump the stop and roll through while you’re doing a proper brake. You’re lazy this morning, wave someone on even though it might not be their turn. Feels nicer to be low-key generous than stressed out about getting home fastest.
Curving lines of tar wend through the road like black river deltas. A stray cat trots, low-slung belly wagging, fast, across the street in the block ahead, disappears between parked cars.
I’m gonna try to nullify my life, Lou Reed sings.
It’s the calmest you ever feel, driving, alone, with music. Something about being in motion. No such thing as arrival or ought-to-be when you’re driving, with music, midway between here and there. Nothing else you’re supposed to be doing, nowhere else it’s possible, in this moment, to be. The thoughts can eddy then, tadpoles at a shallow riverbend, but they don’t get stuck too long because the scenery changes and Lou’s voice sounds like the air going cool in the moment before a thunderstorm, sounds like everyone you’ve ever loved rolled into one.
All this pavement, all these streets. The ones you can’t see from here but can see in your mind’s eye. A grid from above, zoomed out. The way things keep existing even when they’re far away.
The lush jungle Philly wants to be is pushing up through every crevice, climate thankfully still wet enough that everything’s interlaced with green among the brick and concrete. You’re thinking about the strange way humans have shaped the world in service of the automobile, about Buckminster Fuller’s line You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.
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You want the new model to hurry up and get here, whatever it is. So clear this old one is failing. Make this shit obsolete already. You’re driving a janky beat-up Prius, which 20 years ago felt forward-thinking, but it’s still fossil fuel, and the heat outside thickens and the depressing memes are surely right, it’s probably the coolest summer of the rest of your life. High of 99 degrees today, heat advisory in effect.
That’s one away from one hundred! your daughter’s classmate said at the sprayground yesterday, scrolling the weather app on his mom’s phone. Red towel around his waist, skinny 12-year-old long limbs perched on his mom’s lap. Moments later, the drops fell, the parents shouldered tote bags and toddlers, everyone racing to their cars as the sky opened. Wipers full-speed, streets turned to rapids, the kind of summer thunderstorm that makes every storm drain into a temporary vortex.
Remember all those headlines in the 80s tabloids about the Bermuda Triangle? The particular poignant poetry of the question they all seemed to be asking:
Is it possible that some things actually disappear?
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You remember reading about sargassum seaweed, how when it’s ripped from the coasts of the West Indies, it drifts for nearly half a year, in and out of currents, toward the Sargasso Sea. Snails and sea slugs and small fishes and crabs cling to the weed’s golden fronds, adrift and stranded. Born to live in the shallows at the ocean’s edges, if these creatures let go now, they’d tumble into the open ocean.
Oh God, is this another metaphor? Are you a sea slug, stuck hanging on to your little life raft, terrified of falling into the abyss?
Where the currents meet, the separate strands gather into larger bodies. Vast tangles of sargassum weave themselves together into rippling fabric of yellow ochre, blanketing a deep and endless blue.
Maybe nothing ever really ends. You’re still 18 years old in a midwestern living room sometimes, alone in the dark in that big camel-colored armchair, the night you find out your ex-boyfriend is dead. You’re still buying strawberries from that roadside stand in Damariscotta, shiny red in a teal cardboard carton, toddler in the backseat, back when the marriage was unquestioned.
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Sometimes you tell yourself to stop listening to all this music from the past. Make more room for the new songs. The new self. The one you’re so desperately trying to turn into.
In the yoga sutras, awakening is compared to a ripening fruit. When the fruit and tree are both ready, there’s just: release. It’s painless by then, because the fruit has ripened. The practice has prepared you.
So like, maybe you’re not ripe yet. Or is that another excuse? You’re still clinging to the Velvet Underground this morning, to the way this song wraps itself around you like an old blanket, strums the old pain.
Maybe someday, though. Sunlight slides across the dashboard. You keep breathing. In the future, will we know where it all ended up? Everything we lost, I mean?
You’re still driving, but you’re getting closer to home. The dread starts creeping in.
Then suddenly you realize: you’re mistaking arrival for an ending. But even when you cut the engine, even when the song goes silent, something will always be continuing.
Sarah Kowalski spends a lot of her life wondering who she even is, and writes and makes art as a means of discovering. She teaches yoga and workshops on the creative process both online and in Northwest Philadelphia.