A few weeks have passed now, and I'm still finding little reminders of this trip. Setlist stuffed into my jacket pocket. A receipt stuffed into a camera bag. The notes I kept typing into my phone while waiting in airports. Three cities have already started collapsing into one memory, somewhere between delayed flights, gas station dinners, hotel rooms held together by blow-up mattresses, and furniture neatly stacked in the corner.
I landed in Denver for the first show after a broken pilot's chair delayed the flight, wandered through an empty venue while barbecue smoked outside a gutted Airstream green room, then spent the next few days following Racing Mount Pleasant through Des Moines and Minneapolis. Somewhere in between there were soccer balls kicked around parking lots while waiting for load in, Casey's dad telling me he'd read my interview with the band back in January, a kid named Nolan who drove several states with his mom just to say hello before the show, and an entire room rearranged every night so nine people could somehow convince a two-bed hotel room to become home.
The shows themselves almost feel secondary looking back. Smacking my head on a stage beam I'd been explicitly warned about with a piece of neon green gaff tape, Byron laughing through the encore because he suddenly had a guitar in his hands instead of merch. Stopping load out long enough to bury a dead bird in the alley. Sitting alone in another Delta terminal with my legs resting on a Pelican case while my flight home slipped from 10 p.m. to 3 a.m. By the time I finally made it back to New York at five in the morning, the last thing waiting for me was three taxi drivers screaming at each other in the LaGuardia pickup garage. Somehow it felt like the only appropriate ending.