L.

08 October 2017, Lyft.

It’s dark, and I don’t notice what kind of car she drives. I think it’s silver, and I know it’s some kind of four door sedan. As always, I’m entranced by the weird little bulbous LED screen that Lyft provides its drivers. The tail end of my friend’s name scrolls across and I inform her that I’m not Eric, although I am the person who will be taking the ride. In the dark, I spot a flash of a tattoo on her arm; it’s the triforce from the Legend of Zelda games.

Driving through the greater Boston metro area at night is one of my favorite experiences. I say I’m trying to catch the last train to Providence, because I have work the next morning. She asks me what I do and I explain that it’s a part time gig working in a bookstore. I’m looking for work, I tell her. What do you hope to do? I studied journalism, I say.

I assume she doesn’t drive for Lyft full time and ask what she does outside of this work. She corrects me, kindly, and I apologize. It’s good money, she says.

I ask her what she would be doing if she could do anything, and she tells me she studied to be a jeweler. She had an agreement to take on an apprenticeship, but it fell through, because the jeweler she would have been apprentice to is moving into the holiday season and doesn’t have time to take her on.

I tell her I’m also hoping to get experience before moving into a more freelance position. We’re both newly graduated, although we both seem like non-traditional graduates. She tells me that she’s completed all her classes and walked in the spring, but that she couldn’t pay for the last two classes, so her degree is being held hostage by the university.

Without a degree, she can’t find work. The car is dark, and we’re both facing forward, and under the passing street lights we take confession. We share our fears about moving to a big city, without a job, merely because we know that’s where the jobs are. Even entry level positions require 3 years experience, she says. In the dark, I nod. As we’re getting on the freeway, Fall Out Boy’s Just One Yesterday starts playing on her radio, and I think about the time I spent away from school.

Making rent in Boston is scary, she tells me. I tell her that I think I’m going to have to find work in Idaho. Maybe it’s time to do things that scare me, she says. Maybe so, I think.

Her degree was more theoretical, than practical. Though she studied jewelry, her program had no prerequisites, and so she would find herself in advanced classes with a bunch of beginner students, which would stymie her opportunity to learn more technical aspects. She spent her education making fashion jewelry, the showy, and sometimes cumbersome, pieces that we’re might be familiar with from the runway, or in galleries. It’s not the sort of thing one would wear in a regular situation.

She had hoped to start her apprenticeship while still in school. But at the time she was working part time, going to school, and driving for Lyft, which was already difficult to manage, adding the apprenticeship would have been impossible.

If she can’t get an apprenticeship, there’s a school in San Francisco she is interested in. Without the apprenticeship, she can’t get a job. If she can’t get the apprenticeship, more school will have to do.

When we pull up to south station, we wish each other luck.