by Noreen Ocampo

Sticky Notes is a column by Noreen Ocampo, who very much wants to say: Hi, welcome back to my channel! While I can’t provide perfectly cinematic color-grading or lofi beats in the background, I’d like to offer you an amalgamation of the happier dust collecting in my notes app. This column is an attempt at practicing gratitude, learning optimism, and formally asking the universe to allow me at least one nice thought to share with you all each month. And since I am a writer (but unfortunately not also a Youtuber), I’m sure there will be some literary discussion along the way. Let’s get started.

+This one is a bit different from previous Sticky Notes, but I hope you enjoy these tiny stories about driving + learning + thankfulness + friends!

PROLOGUE

The white lines on the road don’t make any sense. They’re sun-bleached and peeling away, urging me to hurry up and make the left turn already. A stop sign stares unblinkingly, unhelpfully, and the road test examiner scratches something onto a clipboard. I don’t know what it could be— I’m eighteen and don’t know anything an eighteen-year-old should know. I follow the lines.

“You’re— you’re in the wrong lane,” the examiner tells me, at once.

A panic of movement, and then I’m not. But the front of my parents’ car is also not, I realize, stumbling out of the driver’s seat to see the bumper contorted into a smushed-in blue-gray face no longer capable of expression. There’s a type of truck I’ve never seen before stopped a few yards ahead, tail lights flashing but perfectly intact, despite the collision.

I stand on the side of the street, unable to choke out an apology until the truck driver glares with expectation. I look at what’s left of my parents’ car, the faded white lines on the street. I don’t drive again.

MELODY

We discuss the impossible length of California, a twelve-and-a-half hour drive from north to south. On Google Maps, I find the distance between where she’s headed for her grad program (where she’ll study magical things I don’t understand, like atoms hugging) and where I could be if I follow in one year’s time (to study other hard-to-understand things, like how to be a “poet”). Every distance feels equally impossible: Stanford to UC San Diego, Stanford to USC, Stanford to —— I look up the requirements for prospective students in the English PhD program at Stanford and wince at my undeniable lack of a second foreign language, among other things.

She assures me that she would drive to me regardless— and I believe that she truly feels that way. Despite knowing each other for less than a year and living on opposite coasts, she’s already been driving to me in a way, reducing the distance to nothing but a difference in weather and time zone. She’s shown me how pink the sky gets from her bedroom window, and the three hours between us easily forgot themselves as she sat next to me during my 6am New Year crisis and some of the smaller, quieter ones that followed.

I think about the wind slipping through a cracked car window and wonder what songs she would loop on the way, what unfamiliar familiar places would catch her eye. I imagine being worth that five-and-a-half to seven-hour one-way drive and ask Google what languages are the quickest to learn.

*The view from the backseat— I collected pictures like this throughout high school.*

MARIE

I don’t remember high school fondly because my brain oversimplifies by default, but there is a colorful cluster of memories that will always survive the insistent oversimplification that I am finally starting to outgrow. In each memory, there are three of us. My friends are two feet taller than me, and Marie is always the driver because/even though we can’t return the favor. We have easy, simple fun. My parents give up on enforcing my curfew.

Cut to:

The laughter of a storm. We’re darting from the car and into a Chinese restaurant to order take-out that isn’t even for us. We’re the soggiest we’ve ever been, and I feel bulletproof.
Pulling up to a McDonald’s to share chicken nuggets bought with a gift card. There’s some promotion going on and McFlurries look extra special.
We sit in the parked car and contemplate how to respond to a Tinder boy on Marie’s phone. Of course, we come up with the optimal reply.
We pull off a perfect titration in AP Chem and celebrate with pho and boba, like always.
My then-boyfriend’s hand snakes toward mine from the passenger seat. The gymnastics of it is really quite impressive.
Rolling into a driveway to visit a trio of cats Marie is cat-sitting. It’s almost Christmas.
Pho and boba, but a green and silver graduation tassel dangles off the rearview mirror, glinting in the light. It’ll be a while until we see each other again.

CASPER

It’s raining, and I’m walking against the wind, angling my red umbrella to obscure my face. I wore shoes other than my typical Superstars with paint-by-number shapes so I’d be less recognizable, but it doesn’t matter because it’s pitch black outside, save for the lampposts lining the loop that my university’s shuttles constantly pass through. There’s a slightly damp boy sitting on a damp bench, a perfect bouquet of flowers on his knee, and he looks around, searching. I wonder if he’ll recognize my shoes. In the end, I’m too excited to see him to remember to ask.

I’ve tried finding the words so many times, and he knows this. Long distance was hard for me. Feeling loved was hard for me. But when I think about it now, still, even as it’s too late, the flights and the Ubers and the shuttle rides he took to close the distance, if even for a little bit— nothing should have been a question. There was a lot of love here, and I know that now, and I’ll always be grateful.

*The shuttle that transported me between Atlanta and Oxford, Georgia for my first two years of college. On this day, it was empty.*

JOSHUA

She doesn’t let me take the shuttle back to Atlanta with her, citing the sleep deprivation we’re both prone to and the two-hour round trip that would delay my impending nap. It’s the first time our schedules have synced enough for her to make the commute to my middle-of-nowhere college campus, and I’ve been a terrible host. Our goodbyes at the shuttle stop feel a tinge bittersweet as I realize we won’t see each other for a while and I filled our day with mundanity:

Lunch at a ramen shop, like last time, like prom, like always. She doesn’t like eggs or vegetables very much, and it’s taken me years to accept that.
A trip to my school’s farm, where there are conveniently no animals and only vegetables. The ground is littered with green and red bell pepper carcasses that crunch underfoot.
Sitting together on my crusty dorm room carpet— or rather, lying on a flimsy blanket thrown over the carpet because of the aforementioned sleep deprivation while she sits more or less normally. She sneaks a picture of me lying on the floor, which I won’t find out about until later.

But as I stand on the curb, watching the blue and white shuttle wheeze into the fog, I know that she’s not really leaving and will never be gone from my life in the way that I tend to fear. There will be a next time, I tell myself, and whether it’ll be in weeks or months, there will always be a next time.

In some alternate universe, I imagine us attending the same college and wreaking in-person havoc for another good handful of years. I smile at the thought of this flawless and unruly timeline as I shuffle back to my dorm, careful not to trip in my socks and slides. As I slip my hands into the pocket of my rumpled hoodie, my phone buzzes, and I know exactly who it is.

VARUNA

After convincing me that her car truly gets excellent gas mileage, we agree to reunite in a park near my family’s house. She drives from her apartment outside our university to see me, and it’s the first time in over a year that I laugh in the same physical space as someone outside of my immediate family. It’s the type of reunion that immediately prompts you to burst into tears, but I find myself starting some haphazard sentence so my mother doesn’t glimpse me crying as she drives away.

We walk around the park together slowly, catching up. We visit the playground with a makeshift post office where I spent many afternoons mailing pretend letters, the lake where I used to feed ducks and/or geese bagged bread, and the empty parking lot where I tried and failed to learn how to parallel park, three years ago. We then walk uphill to my high school, and I wear my glasses like a headband to combat the fog of the mask + glasses + year of extremely sedentary lifestyle combination.

It’s a strange feeling, bringing someone precious from your present into a space so fundamental to a past you’ve tried and failed to disconnect from. I fed ducks and yelled at my parents here. My mother and I fought over parallel parking all the way home. At the end of my first semester of high school, I cried in this parking lot because I wasn’t as smart as I promised I’d be. I said okay when I didn’t mean it. I didn’t defend myself. I let everyone go.

She doesn’t know these versions of me I’ve tucked away, only that we’ve cried sitting outside my old dorm room and we’ve celebrated my college birthdays together and she’s always the first to notice when I start to disappear. But if that’s enough for her to make the drive to see me and for me to be worth the drive, then it’s enough.

My hometown often makes me feel like I’m seeing the wrong person in the mirror, but that day, I felt safe and loved.

for every friend that has driven to me or driven me in one way or another

Driver's License (or the Lack Thereof)