Motorcycles I've Loved by Lily Brooks-Dalton

that illustrates the simple but irrefutable fact that in nature, order tends toward disorder and never the opposite. Concentrated energy disperses, chemical bonds erode, heat cools, cold warms. Entropy must either increase or stay constant, which is why it is sometimes referred to as
time’s arrow
—by discovering how much entropy, or disorder, is present, one can make inferences about the timeline of events. This isn’t a scientific quirk, or a complex formula. This is fundamental, intrinsic to how we interpret what we see.
    Imagine, for a moment: a motorcycle is on its side, debris everywhere, a car splayed sideways across the road and white steam curling from beneath the hood. There are sirens, and shouting, and the smell of spilt gasoline and burnt rubber.
    Now look again: double yellow line, smooth pavement, and a motorcyclist whizzing down the road, her passenger’s head turned to admire the view—a car in the distance, a deer poised in the brush.
    And again: a motorcyclist and her passenger on an otherwise empty road, no one ahead, no one behind, just fresh black asphalt and warm afternoon light.
    It doesn’t take a scientist to know which snapshot comes when, and it doesn’t take a scientist to know that the opposite sequence, the motorcycle spontaneously rising from its side, regaining its fallen passenger and rider, unbending its handlebars, and restarting its engine—is impossible. Entropy is a one-way street; this knowledge is innate. No one needs to explain why spilled milk stays spilled, or why milk tends to spill in the first place, it’s only whether one cries about it or not that warrants an aphorism.
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    W HEN P HINEAS HEADED WEST I was about to begin my first year of high school. I had always been very concerned that I would somehow be trapped in the small suction cup of a town where I grew up, as if I might put down roots by accident, and so I became intent on the idea of boarding school. As I was always impatient to be moving forward, growing up and getting on with being an adult, it seemed like the thing to do. I was adamant about this, impatient to expand my horizons. My parents never had a hope of convincing me otherwise. I imagined finding kindred spirits at boarding school, learning amazing new things, becoming cool, attractive, edgy. I was terrified of venturing into the unknown, but also thrilled and so, so ready—this was it, I remember thinking, the beginning of growing up, the end of being a child, what a thrill. My mother gave me the enormous steamer trunk she had taken to college in the sixties, and I painted the inside of it a bright, robin’s-egg blue. I was so pleased when I finished. Brush in hand, I stepped back to admire my handiwork in the flickering fluorescence of my father’s woodshop, newspapers under the edges and painter’s tape around the lip, imagining it in my dorm room. I still have the trunk, but I keep it mostly shut—the blue seems too bright, too obvious. It is an overly optimistic shade.
    I had already begun to sense a little darkness in my thoughts, depths that hadn’t been there before. Eighth grade fluttered by on gray wings, but that particular period of apathy was easy to dismiss as a symptom of my location. I’d begun to despise life in my small town and at my even smaller school. It wasn’t so much the smallness itself that made me cringe, it was the small-mindedness, the insularity of the people around me. I was sure there had to be somewhere better, but I had yet to understand that the bleak and hopeless wasteland I was entering wasn’t the landscape of my surroundings. It was within.
    Discovering this inexplicable sadness was like flipping over a mossy rock in the woods and seeing the fat grubs and centipedes unearthed, writhing as the light touches them, or discovering a false bottom in my soul, a dark and foreboding extension of who I had believed