Introspection
The Word: Yard
My family had recently moved to the United States. We lived in a beige condominium in Bergen County, the most mundanely bourgeois county in New Jersey. It was surrounded by nothing but stretches of concrete. My parents, not too familiar with English themselves, wondered how they were supposed to immerse me in the English language.
Hang the DJ
When was the last time you danced? Like, really danced—none of that timid head-bobbing or casual side-stepping that people do these days. That shit reeks of non-commitment. I know it can be hard to put yourself out there when everyone’s playing it cool, trying to look composed in front of the cute girl with the done-up hair. But there’s something electric about a humming dance floor packed just tightly enough with bodies, human limbs let fully loose, motions dictated purely by the pulsating vibrations of the music.
Write Yourself Out of this Box
“You can write yourself out of anything,” I tell myself as a sort of mantra while I struggle to type up a simple, short lab report for my graduation-requirement science class, one that’s clearly designed for humanities majors but still manages to leave me with a backpack full of returned tests covered in inky red X’s.
The End of the Arc
“Yes, good. But what are you going to do with your life?” My grandfather, my Dada, leans forward and smiles at me from across the low coffee table that he bought almost 40 years ago.
Coordinates: Huntsville, Al.
The drive from Huntsville to Atlanta takes somewhere between three and a half and four hours, depending on how backed up I-75 is, and how scenic you’re looking to get.
Editing Ourselves and Looking Ahead
There were times when I didn’t love The Crimson, but they are dispersed thinly among moments when 14 Plympton was great to me and so many others.
On the Trail
I was miserable, the thought wheezed, I should go home. And it never quite left. Two months later, when my dog’s cancer was close to consuming him, I called it quits and got on the next flight to Boston.
Short Stories
Like every morning since sometime in seventh grade, I woke up that morning five feet, one-and-three-quarters inches tall, and I will likely continue to do so for the rest of my life.
Endpaper: Fireflies
Over the phone, my mother’s voice sounds the same as mine. Same cadence, same pitch, same laugh that bubbles from nowhere. We walk through the mall, and she criss-cross links our arms. A hat vendor asks us if we are sisters.
Coordinates: Lunar Eclipse
Lunar eclipses are traditionally harbingers of some kind, great signals in the sky warning of the wrath of the gods or the terrifying impermanence of the things we hold constant.
Modern Love: Breathing that Whole Time
“Do you ever”—I broke eye contact for a second—“Do you ever run out of breath?”
Party Like It's c. 2003
After weeks of begging my editor to let me write this story, she acquiesced. I gave up my phone and Facebook account to my roommate. The terms of this experiment were laughably soft. I figured that this week probably best mirrored the conditions for a student in the early 2000s: access to email but not to phones or social media platforms.
Gender Gap
Virginia Woolf sat in the library at Oxford imagining the books that Shakespeare’s sister didn’t publish. Sometimes when I walk deep in Widener’s belly, I feel the incredible pressure of the books that are not there.
Paris, I Love You, But You're Bringing Me Down
I went to Paris wearing a red peacoat, convinced that the city’s monochromatic madames et monsieurs were an overblown American myth. I rubied my lips for good measure. My delineated Cupid’s bow awed a grand total of two people: myself (easily impressed) and the one creepy guy who dubbed me a bitchy bouche rouge when I didn’t flash a smile at him as I passed him on the street (easily dismissed).
Spring Break Postcard: Orbs in Cancun
I landed in Cancun ready to embrace a cliché. There were no plans except to set aside the haughty, critical coldness of Cambridge and indulge in that undergraduate tropical escape narrative that is Mexico for Spring Break.
Spring Break Postcard: Met-Cute
Perhaps If I had grown up in Michigan I would have fallen in love with the New York City skyline, the tops of buildings glimpsed in small square segments from a plane. But I lived commuting-distance from Manhattan, in a suburb where the stone walls of colonial pastures lined the road to the train station. And so I met the city from the ground up: the smooth blue of the Hudson to the raised tracks over Harlem, only then to the skyscrapers in the distance.
A Survivor is Born
In the face of terror, it is essential to remind yourself of your ability, whether what scares you is writing a conclusion to your thesis or cauterizing an abdominal wound on the fly. Sitting under the fluorescent lights of my dorm room as I fumbled through Tomb Raider, I heard Lara’s words and I felt their importance.
Spring Break Postcard: Food in Ma Belly
My roommate decided to visit me at home in Philadelphia. It was frigid, and every day we ate sandwiches. My goal: that he would leave with a fuller stomach, significantly closer to heart disease, his face slick with oil.
Spring Break Postcard: New York, N.Y.
Born to New Yorker parents and raised in Connecticut, I am not inspired by New York City to breathless wonder unlike the millions of tourists who visit every year.
Weather
In January, my skin turns to snow. I leave my dorm in the morning, hair shower-wet, mousse-sprayed to my neck, snowflakes crystallized in my curls. I wear black tights and salt stains bloom on my thighs; I wear black boots and white lines cross my ankles in waves. The spaces between my fingers grow cold.
Madame Mademoiselle
In those lazy summers of five or six years ago, when every morning we awoke together ready to take on the backyard, we favored one in particular. I wrote a description of that game, Madame Mademoiselle, in my college application essay. My sister watched me compose the first draft.
Why I Keep Up with the Kardashians
I am fascinated by celebrities and the pop cultural sphere that they inhabit. I spend my free time combing through Twitter to read the musings of my favorite stars and devouring every word of entertainment news articles to learn about the goings-on of B-list actors. No tweet is too inane to spark my curiosity (I’m looking at you, Jaden Smith). No article is too obscure to merit my interest (seriously, I just read an article about the fashion ambitions of Sadie Robertson of “Duck Dynasty”).
This Might Get Cheesy
A Culver’s in its natural environment, though, is always found in Wisconsin. On the side of any highway, framed by scrubby trees, you’re bound to spot the navy blue oval of a Culver’s sign, that beacon leading to squeaky cheese with a crispy, hot outer crust and served with cups of shamelessly fatty frozen custard.
Smashing, Baby
Smash has always been around: In elementary and middle school, I played, but in high school I stopped. In hindsight I notice the unsettling correlation between the exit of Smash from my life, and the entrance of the thesis statement into it. Life became a bit realer, a bit less fantastical. I couldn’t cite Wikipedia anymore.