“Some thoughts I noted while standing above a slow-moving river” is now live at Gulf Stream.

I was with my sister the first time I jumped from the trestle. We were too young to drive, but she was pretty enough to have a boyfriend with a dented orange truck that smelled of vinyl and wintergreen chewing tobacco. It had a Confederate flag sticker in the corner of the back window. My dad had lectured the boy about the sticker on multiple occasions, because it was racist, first of all, not to mention utterly incongruous with 1990s Seattle. The boy pretended to take my father seriously, but he never removed the sticker. I was sitting across from Ty in the truck’s backseat, counting the stars on the flag and registering the boom of the speakers beneath me as we rattled down the gravel road toward the river. When we parked, my sister’s boyfriend told us to go on ahead. He and my sister were going to hang out in the truck for a bit. Ty smiled at me because we both knew what that meant. Then he caught himself and shrugged apologetically, because he was my best friend and the girl in question was my sister. Continue here.