Aria Ines is a Graphic Design major at MiraCosta College. She began attending MiraCosta in Fall 2020, deciding that it was a better fit for her during the pandemic than San Diego State University.
In addition to graphic design, Aria is interested in music and writing. She said she won a poetry slam in middle school and she has taken up poetry and writing again while at MiraCosta College. “It’s something I’m really discovering,” she said.
Aria, a 21-year-old San Marcos resident, has an internship at Surfdog Records, where she is writing social media content. Her poem was selected for the Community Leaders Breakfast with the writing prompt of “the future.” She said her poem is “about moving forward and navigating the insanity.”
Time has a funny way of doing the same things over and over again, but nothing twice.
Look, it says. Here it goes, and here it goes, and here it stops. I promise, I’ll give you more of the same, and then never again.
It feels sensible to be confused and overwhelmed by the endless, forward nature of everything, exhausted and apprehensive by the unyielding Onward! And Onward we go into the unknown - and then we’re lost, unsure, foreigners, trying to speak a language we don’t know. And we cry out “stop! Put me down! I wanna go home!”
But here we are, and we’re already on the ride. We’re going up the hill. There’s going to be another drop. And you can choose: will I be afraid, or will I be excited?
And no, it’s not ever so simple. The before period. The sweaty hands, the panic. The survival instincts.
No, they tell you, it’s not safe. Back to the known, back to the known.
And it never does feel safe- and it never completely is. There is always risk, and terror, and chaos.
But it would be ridiculous to always believe you’re the final rider. Yes, this time it’s different, and it is, but also, we’ve been through this. Everyone gets scared. Everyone is convinced things are ending, and that this time, this thing will be not just “an end”, but The End.
And it never is. Things are not quite like they were, and things continue. Casually.
And yet despite a track record of an ever-evolving reality, we anticipate simple narratives.
We can’t help but look for the formula, the quick fix, the tell-all. We want a fairy godmother, a leader, an ideology, a Map to follow, a written word. We want divine whispers telling us a straight path to arrival. Certainty is sold to us in a thousand forms, and we keep purchasing it, ignoring everything.
But that is not the affair of an earthling. We do not specialize in permanence and static. We specialize in adapting to the insanity."
repurposing bitterness as medicine and finding joy, in spite of and in resonance with the strange.
We all will find ourselves, inevitably, in the period before a jump. Fighting the survival instincts, just to realize there is only one way, and the way is forward. The way is onward.
But before we go - we throw a fit.
Oh God. This is the end. Meteors. Aliens. Telephones. War. Overpopulation. This new Generation. That old generation. Computers. Current president. Future World Leader. The Mayan calendar. Your Land. My Land. Artificial intelligence.
And then - next - if we are so privileged to be one generation more of the billions of non-final riders - we will strategize, recalibrate, leap - and then land, miraculously, just like everyone else.
So onward we go, gently, dramatically, slowly, all at once, and never the same thing twice, over and over again.