The Wandering Albatross

January 23, 2025

Stella Kleinman

The strongest ocean current in the world is the Antarctic Circumpolar Current, coursing through the narrowest chokepoint around the White Continent. Average water flow is 4.77 billion cubic feet, over 600 times the volume of the Amazon River. With 40 foot waves and 50 mph winds, the Drake Passage from Argentina to Antarctica is a uniquely violent journey believed to have caused thousands of shipwrecks. I’m sitting by the window watching the world churn. The boat is pitching—skyrocketing up and plummeting down over wave after wave. If not for the gentle hum of the engine, I wouldn’t know we are moving forward. From the front observation deck, I can feel split seconds of weightlessness, where my throat becomes a vacuum and heart strands get caught between my teeth. Anyone with any sense is in their cabin, hiding from seasickness under ceilings, sheets, and eyelids. A smooth, dark silhouette fills the window, interrupting the vast expanse of otherwise empty sky. At first, I think it’s a spot in my vision– a hallucination from too many nights at sea. How could this stranger, this creature of solitude, find us here? Lifted by long, sleek wings, the massive bird glides across the air as if it’s a solid surface. With dark eyes narrowed ahead, it tilts back and forth on its axis to catch the harsh gusts. The sea falls to its knees at first brush with the bird’s wingtips, a kiss that stops at the lips, suspending itself in the air. Last night, Marten, an expedition leader and ornithologist, presented a PowerPoint about the wandering albatross. We sat on the floor like young children, watching him click through videos breaking down the bird’s flight patterns. The albatross flies in a unique style called dynamic soaring, which involves gracefully swooping through wave troughs on a cyclical path. Carving elegant lines through the sky, it can fly for a thousand miles without flapping its wings. Marten’s eyes glinted as he told us the birds spend the first five to six years of their lives without ever touching land. They can circumnavigate the globe in 46 days, sleeping with half their brain at a time. From behind the window, I watch the white-headed albatross swoop and fall and glide, tracing its flight path with my pointer finger. It is a being of wind and power, one of the elements rather than fauna. In one of my favorite poems, Samuel Coleridge’s lyrical ballad The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, a sailor shoots an innocent albatross for no apparent reason, cursing his voyage. The crew endures storms, spirits, and haunting mist as the dead bird hangs over the captain’s neck, a symbol of curse and punishment. The albatross’s mistreatment at human hands signifies the plight of the poet, violent acts against nature with catastrophic consequences, and individual sacrifice. Compulsory storytelling. The bird’s white head dips forward as it catches a gust and effortlessly outruns the ship along the air. My breath fogs up the window glass. Where are you going? Where have you been? What is it like to live surrounded by nothing but air and water, to fade into the horizon day after day? What do you miss? What can you call your own? The albatross answers with a glittering downward swoop. The first time I step on Antarctic land, I am so far away from home that my body is no longer my own. Blue ice crystals glow around my feet as far as I can see, hanging over themselves and creeping forward as time stands still. Every so often a chunk screeches and splashes into the churning ocean. Snowflakes bundle and roll, speckling the harsh slopes of jagged mountains. I picture a holy-handed giant taking a pocket knife to a block of obsidian, carving away sharp bits. Eating each slice of rock off the knife, one by one, then disappearing into the sky. I wade through water so clear and smooth I would try to mold it like clay if I didn’t know any better. I try to survey it all, but my gaze keeps snagging on rock piles and tumbling into snowbanks and slipping down the sides of icebergs into the silent ocean. I feel like I could melt into my feet, or catch a draft of wind and plummet upwards to the tips of the black mountains. I wonder if the sun still sets somewhere, if the streetlamps in my neighborhood still flicker, if the world is still spinning the same way, if I have ever been anywhere else, if I am still my mother’s daughter. If someone reached out and touched me right now, would their hand pass straight through me? I am stuck in time but nowhere in space, existing only elsewhere. I wonder if the wandering albatross leaves a piece of itself on every wind it catches, drawing lines around the globe. Ancient mythology refers to the albatross as the Prince of the Wave, a mystical spirit of lost sailors possessing healing powers and prophesizing divine fortune. By observing these birds, sailors adjusted their course to avoid harsh weather. To hurt an albatross, as demonstrated by Coleridge, was to unleash the wrath of the sea. When I was younger, I couldn’t fall asleep without first finding the North star out my window, or guessing where it was on cloudy nights. In a place where the sun does not set, what do you center your world around? What is it like to be as untethered and alone as the albatross, beak careening forward through empty space? On the seventh night, we leave the ship, hauling packs twice our size. Anthonie and Kai trek in heavy red coats, testing snow and whispering hastily in Dutch. Finally, they decide on a somewhat flat plot of snow as far as possible from seals and avalanche risks. They hand out shovels like goodie bags at a child’s birthday party, if candy and toys could protect from 20 mile per hour winds. Antarctic gusts are in the rare category of things you can only burrow under, never climb over or stand against. When it’s finally my turn with the shovel, I feel like I am digging my own grave. I lay down to mark the size hole I need, then hack into the snow. Fine powder scatters to the breeze every time the spade goes over my shoulder. I am cutting into the Earth’s southern crown, making room for myself in a place unlike anywhere I have ever been. Once I’ve dug a three-foot deep coffin, I gently arrange my two sleeping bags and tuck myself in facing the still-bright sky. Sharp gusts tumble over me, and I welcome the cool air as it buries itself in my lungs. As the temperature drops, snow crystals begin to freeze around me, molding an imprint of my body. In my mind, I am here to stay. I will crawl into this shoveled-out cove each night, watching the animals around me to know when it’s time to sleep. I will live off of mackerel icefish and Antarctic cod and melted snow. Each morning I will make it a little bit farther up the mountain and carve words into the rock, and then retreat. After a while, I will stop thinking about what I am writing. I could really do it. I lay on my back with my eyes open, breathing in the southern sky. A wispy cloud rolls down toward me, obscuring the mountaintop. Every so often, little gentoo penguins splash in and out of the water, always in groups—unlike the albatross, with its commanding wings and daunting spirit. For the first time since meeting it, I feel a dull ache for this mystical creature with no dwelling, this lonely flier. I pull my blankets tighter around me and sink into the earth’s embrace. I don’t know if I managed to sleep tonight, but I know I woke up. The crushing melody of Anthonie’s boots on the snow’s brittle surface invites me back to my mind. It’s four a.m., and we have a long passage to the next island. Once my eyes adjust to the light and I remember where and who I am, I grab a shovel from my neighbor and begin refilling my bedroom with snow. I pack it in and pat it gently, evening the surface so that there is no trace of my stay. I kneel silently atop my handiwork until my knees are soaked and it’s time to go. Back on the ship, I find my body in the same seat on the observation deck. The waves are gentler closer to the shore, and we are rolling side to side rather than pitching. I’m not sure how long I sit hugging my shins before I see it. Another albatross, beak open, dancing up and down along drafts. This time, I don’t question its solitary trajectory or spiritual meaning or how and why it can only chase or flee. I watch the polar breeze wrap itself around the bird’s wingtips and think about interlacing my fingers with my best friend. I watch the sea meet its feathered underbelly as it swoops downward and remember every time I fell asleep in the car as a child and my parents carried me to my bed, every leaf pile my brothers and I jumped into during the early Autumns of growing up, and every pendant a friend has fastened around my neck for me. I think of the way the spirit of the ocean protects the albatross, and let it glide out of my sight.

Inheritance

Deeya Prakash

April 1, 2025

Whenever someone compliments my nose, I flick the tip of it with my thumb and smile, not so much because of their kindness but because my nose looks just like my mothers— sharp, defined, just the right size for my face. I think about her mother and her mother and the mother before that, passing down flared nostrils and bony bridges until they merged and became the central feature of my face. I think about how humans have the beautiful ability to resemble. Animals certainly have their own version of such a thing, shark pups blossoming into identical copies of parents they will never see again and baby parrots lining their feathers with their father’s streaks. But the human ability to inherit like beads on a string is another sort of wonder. For how wonderful to see your eyebrows on your daughter, your knuckles on your son? How incredible it must be to watch your grandmother pass down what you thought was a scar? The biology of our nature is nothing if not incessant, and yet it passes me by like the morning news. One day I am flipping through old albums and I catch a glimpse of my mother, wrapped in a sari and kissing my father on the cheek. I’m struck by her beauty– the arch of her cheek, the swell of her chin. I look in the mirror and pause, fingers on my face as I trace her features on my skin. How wonderful, to sit here and worry about the future when there is assurance that I will live on. *** My mother loves flowers. She points out the hydrangeas and the chrysanthemums and those little yellow ones that bark like dogs, picking them off the stem and placing them in my palms. When I am young, she pulls them apart and shows me their parts, running her fingers over their pistils, their ovaries, the style. We both marvel that something so small can do exactly the same things that we can: make themselves all over again. My mother may love flowers but the mother before her lived for them, sketching them in her leather bound notebook with a magnifying glass in her pocket and charcoal on the pads of her thumbs. My grandmother pressed daisies and grew alstroemeria, raising her daughters with petals in their hair and pollen in their lungs. She taught botany at the school down the street and I bet she was good at it too, her wallshouse always displaying her meticulous drawings of the begonia and the marigold and smelling of the rosewater in her tea. As such, my mother’s DNA spun with daffodils and marigolds, and she inherited the love for botany like it was the crease in her brow. I listen to her tell us about my grandmother and the notebook and the carnations, and how they last the longest when cut and bloom bright in a vase. We walk on the trails of Cincinnati, Ohio, and she plucks the leaves of the borages and stuffs them in her mouth, telling me that if I wanted to, I could too. I do not know much about plants, despite the women in my life who grew alongside them, and there is a certain sadness associated with the idea that I cannot inherit everything from the wonders that came before me. My mother worships the Icelandic poppies like my grandmother would with fresh jasmine, and instead I walk to the local corner store, buying my mother discounted carnations for her birthday and hoping I’ve remembered right. I pray my daughter likes flowers, or maybe her daughter after that. *** The first time that biology stops me in my tracks is when I read about DNA replication. Sitting at the dining table and splaying out my work, there's a picture in my textbook that catches my eye, wildly colorful and speckled in shine. Forty minutes later I have learned all there is to know about the complex procedure happening millions of times per minute within nearly every cell in my body. I am aghast as my eyes fly across the page, conceptualizing the DNA Helicase that takes me apart and the Ligase that puts me back together, all before dinnertime. I stare, transfixed, focusing my eyes to my hands on the pages as if I could somehow watch this play out in front of me. The nucleotides rush together in a swarm and hold hands like old friends and it is then I realize that my mother is snapping her fingers in front of my face like I’ve just gone off and not told her where. The movement of her fingers transfixes me, because I think they are the same ones that were just I’ve seen those before, placed uponon my textbook and tracing the words on the page. My DNA may be replicating, but half of it is hers, reflecting in the veins of her hands and the lines on her palm. There is DNA that just passes maternally; within the mitochondria lies genetic material, exclusively passed through kisses on foreheads, tuck-ins at night. I like to think that all the best of me is from those swirls of traits, nestled between harsh advice and that face she makes when I’m wearing something far too casual for the occasion. When I learn about this, I want to split myself open and see the evidence oflook at how much she has truly given me. I’d imagine I’d see my grandmother there, too, and the mother before that and the one before that, curled up at the center of my chest and breathing me whole. *** It’s the night of my senior prom and I walk into my parent’s bedroom, giving my mother a little spin. She takes one look at me and breaks into a grin, the kind of grin that we know to mean that I’ve done something right. She places her palm on my shoulder and it goes up to my cheek. I lean into her, and she tells me I look beautiful. I smile, gesturing to the last piece of my getup: her diamond pendant. She unclasps it from her throat and drapes it across my collarbone, the two of us watching it glimmer. I tell her I’m glad I have a piece of her tonight. She strokes my cheek and says I always do, right here. *** There are flowers blooming on the green today and I wish I could tell you what they were. They curl in the breeze and splay in the sun and I’m reminded of my grandmother, her scrawl peppered over the drawings in my bedroom and outlining the anatomy of the purple iris she drew for me all those years ago. I wonder where she got it from, this reverence. I think of how she used to pray not just for my mother and me, but also for the trees in our lawn and the plants on the sill. I think of the carnations on our dining room table and the soft smile of my mother that means that she’s happy. There are fields of women who have been growing a secret garden in my veins and as I smell the flowers on the green, I cut my nose on a thorn. My mother’s nose, or maybe the mother before that, or maybe her mother or the one that came first. I bleed red with their love.

Little North View

Coco Kanders

April 1, 2025

Little northview, who are you? When I was younger you were love. You lived in the hallway leading up to my parents’ bedroom for a long time. I remember my socks skating along the wooden aisle in anticipation of steady, familial embrace, quick glimpse of you, quick warm sensation, quick crash into a shut door. I remember tiptoeing through the night and shamefully passing you in my failed attempt at sleep, you practically held their door open for me. You felt like an ode to the mother and child, to my mother. Were you a portrait of her pregnant with me? I often wonder. Nevertheless, through you, I felt her. Your image reminded me of my safety as I dove into a duvet of armed forces; you guarded the door. You were probably my second pair of boobs, after my mother's of course. Boobs and vaginas were everywhere growing up— interestingly, not many penis’. There are giant companion paintings that stand proudly in my mom’s bathroom: splotchy black and white strokes to form some semblance of a lady bent over (they don't hold a candle to you). When I was ten, while rummaging through my mom’s hair products on a playdate, my friend Merel Kanter asked if my parents were really into sex art. I didn't see anything volatile or inappropriate in the images throughout my house; I thought they were quite beautiful. I thought my parents were cool. I am inclined to believe that something about you should have made me slightly uncomfortable at some point in my life. Your full breasts and belly so on display, so perfect. There is something sexy about you. If I were inside you, logically, I should think you would reek of cigarettes and bad perfume that would suffocate my nostrils and lungs to a degree the smoke could never. The air would be sticky, your bodies would be sticky; I would feel claustrophobic for your child. There would be something sickly about the scene. Surely. But I don't believe this. Your hues are warm, red, and orange; you are warm. I think you would smell like the light from the window, it would be the perfect temperature, and everything would be a soft material that I would want to cocoon in. I, too, would strip my clothes and then lie my head on your belly. And close my eyes, maybe forever. I wanted to look like you. I wanted to feel like you— how you made me feel and the subjectivity of how you made others feel. I still do. I don't know if I will ever stop trying to. You are womanhood to me in a lot of ways. Then you disappeared. I don't know when you disappeared; maybe I disappeared. As I withered away, I forgot about you. I was sixteen, and my relationship with my mother turned from warm hues to cold ones—no more reds and oranges, but blacks and whites. There was no room for you to exist when I was intolerant of your symbolism. I began to try to become you in all the wrong ways, in the exploitative ones. In my defense, you were moved to the living room. I never went to the living room; I didn't feel welcome. Maybe things would have been better if you never moved. You were now the protector of my family's shared space, and I didn't feel deserving of your protection. Night after night, I would isolate, my bubblegum pink ceiling turning my juvenile room into a cozy haven in the warm light of my lamp and rose-scented candles. My stomach would grumble; I would cry. My mom would cry; my door stayed shut. Knocks after knocks, I retreat. I take hour-long baths, I watch confessionals on YouTube (sad girls mostly, coming clean), watch Mukbangs, read and reread Play It as It Lays, fold stripe socks, lose my period, and now I could never look like you. I needed my mother. I needed the love I felt sliding down the hall at maximum speed as I flew into her aching, oozing embrace. I yearned for the safety you reminded me of, which only she could tangibly provide. She tried, but I resisted. They all tried, but I kept resisting. You didn't exist. In removing myself from my family, I lost you. In breaking my family, I lost you. I didn't deserve you. Two years went by, and they had finally had enough, and I was moved too. Clementine, despite the name, was starchy, bright yellow, and smelled like kitty litter. The thick Miami heat only heightened the temperature drop upon walking inside the center; it was cold like naked weigh-ins, ventilated hospital gowns revealing my skeletal frame. Within the first hour, there was a pound of fettuccine Alfredo in front of me. My heart sank; this was so bizarre. I reckoned with my freakishness. What kind of person is punished with Alfredo? I was mute, fixed myself daily with a new book in the corner crevice of the couch, incrementally scribbling in my notepad horrible things about the other “clients”— they were anorexics, we all were. I only spoke to wail on the phone to my mom as I peeled their hideous yellow wallpaper from its already cracked disposition around the corners of the landline. I would think about The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman and how I read it when I toured my new high school at fourteen. Frustrated with my concession to the archetypal hysterical women, I roll my eyes, a lot. My mom would wail back to me on the phone; eventually, she stopped picking up. The unborn baby inside you, created out of maternal warmth, learns to feel herself uncomfortable in the world, unlike you. She tries to shrink, to disappear, but you can't help her; you try. You try, you try. Eventually, she picked me up. My mom and I bake. We make hot chocolate with whipped cream and marshmallows everyday for snack. My mom threw out my levis while I was away. My mom brushes my hair and draws me bathes. I return to the capacity of a child. I return to the living room. I doe my eyes in acknowledgment at you. I feel it again. The empty aching in my heart slowly starts to hum with the contentedness maternity bares. Maybe I concede again. You protect me too now. The love that was concealed in dark wooden walls and hallowed winter trees starts to creep out of hibernation. I spend less time in my room, I spend more time around you. I never recover— I heal. I locate better senses of my womanhood, you bare light and hope. You endeavor to strip back fetishism and delight in the female gaze. You are my mother in many ways. You have the same tones, the same confidence, the same beauty, the same unbothered effervescence, and the same love. Both fierce and temperamental, polarizing. I hope to become you, I hope I am on my way, I hope you meet my daughter one day.

Clean Hair, Dirty Laptop

Mayrav Estrin

March 4, 2025

I let out a couple of lame huffs and watch my hot breath briefly condensate on my laptop screen. As I wipe my screen down with the tank top that I wore last night to sleep that was still on my bed, I notice today’s date at the top of the screen. November 3, 2024. That means it’s two days until the election, and it’s been exactly a month since National Boyfriend Day, which occurs on October 3; it’s sort of like February 14, but a little more on the nose. I remember my friend called me crying that day. It made me sad, and I wished I could have given her a boyfriend to make her feel better. My screen doesn’t look cleaner after I rub it with the tank top. It actually looks worse. I have a thing about cleaning my laptop—nothing deep; I just hate doing it. It looks so bad that often people tell me I should clean it. I always laugh and say, “I know.” I secretly wish that one of those people who cared enough to comment on it would just clean it for me. It’s kind of weird because my room is very clean, and showering is one of my favorite parts of the day. I don’t need someone to clean my bedroom or tell me to do it; I find vacuuming the floor and wiping the surfaces down with my grapefruit-scented multi-purpose cleaner satisfying. I also don’t need someone to tell me to clean myself. I love my shower routine consisting of lavender soap and body scrubs with a scent I imagine they’d have in a resort in Cancun. I notice I go through my shower products faster than my three roommates. I think I clean my room more and do more laundry than they do as well. They are not messy people, I just like clean things more than them, I guess. It makes me feel good. Put-together. Something like that. But I don’t want to clean my laptop. I am hyper-aware of other people’s computers, and I know (against my will but also completely by free will because I’m nosy) that they are always cleaner than mine. Always. Which means I really need to stop my little cleaning superiority complex. It’s cringe. And it makes no sense. A week ago in this one class I despise, a girl told me to clean my laptop and I was especially embarrassed because she saw me actively not taking notes in the lecture. One of my best friends taught me that “embarrassment is a choice.” Which is accurate, but truthfully, I was kind of embarrassed. This wasn’t someone I knew well. I thought to myself, “Well, she doesn’t even know how meticulous I am about changing my pillowcases and taking off my nail polish when it’s chipped.” As though her telling me to clean my laptop screen, which I do believe was a comment that had my best interest at heart, meant I was gross and dirty. I was reading an article about how you can get mercury poisoning from eating farmed salmon. I quietly laughed and smiled at her, “I know.” I said as I took mental notes about how I was never going to eat farmed salmon and that she should keep her eyes to herself. I chewed my gum a little faster. But it’s not like the remark made me want to change my ways. Does that mean I’m not a sheep or just stubborn? I still didn’t clean the screen. I could have, though. I remember later that day buying purple shampoo for my hair, which I dyed blonde with tin foil, at CVS. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw the canned laptop cleaner people inhale like drugs. But I didn’t need to buy it, it wasn’t an emergency. My hair looking brassy was more important. I didn’t want to go into the aisle with phone chargers and extension cords anyway, I felt far more at home in the hair care aisle. I like the feeling of being surrounded by colorful bottles arranged by brand. I even like the fluorescent lighting and grey carpeting. I compared and contrasted the shampoos, even whipping out my phone to see if the ones I picked out had good reviews on Reddit. When I was leaving the store, I saw the laptop cleaner again. The receipt clutched in my hand evidence of what I truly cared about. Maybe I didn’t care about technological cleansing because it wasn’t a part of my physical. Was I that shallow? On my walk home, I tried to justify it. I mean, who cares if my screen is dirty? But greasy, brassy hair? Forget about it. I wondered if my hair was super greasy and brassy and if other people would comment on it the way they did my computer. I bet they wouldn’t. It takes a rare person to actually say that to you. Most people are scared to say something critical about how you look to your face. No one wants to get canceled nowadays. I’m not really any better, though. I mean, I probably wouldn’t tell someone their hair looked greasy and brassy to their face. And I also probably wouldn’t tell someone their computer screen was dirty, because I literally don’t care about that at all. A minute away from my apartment, I wondered if I ever will. I also wondered if I was a bad person for laughing after seeing a photo on Instagram of a girl who bullied me in middle school who got fat. But no one knows that, so I guess I’m safe. It’s hypocritical to be phobic of greasy hair but unafraid of a dirty laptop screen, right? It’s technically not, but something about it is just really stupid and superficial. My inner monologue about clean hair vs. a clean computer makes me feel like it was time to come to terms with who I truly am: a massive hypocrite. I can be a hypocritical person. That’s just my truth. What I like doing and don’t like doing doesn’t always make logical sense, even to me. Sometimes, I think about the choices I’ve made throughout my life, big and small, and I confuse myself. It doesn’t quite all add up. I feel like I’m always surprising myself a little bit, but does that actually make me unapologetically myself? Maybe that’s just what it means to be a human. Maybe it’s good that I can’t always predict my choices because other people can’t, either. It’s not like anyone has ever said that life is predictable. So, should I be predictable to myself? I do predict, though, that one day, my frontal lobe will fully develop, and I will start cleaning my technological products. And caring less about brassy hair. And less about what people think. And that a clean computer will make me feel good and put together. Something like that.

What Might Have He Wrought

Mizuki Kai

March 4, 2025

1. I often dream of running away. It involves a frantic chase and my aerial escape where my feet become metal wings that wearily push me to the sky. I struggle in the atmosphere, kicking air until, like Icarus, I fall to the ground and suddenly I am awake, lying face down on my bed in New York City on a July 25th. The day is starting anew. This world moves fast, and only with this free fall can I catch up to what eludes me. I insist that this is liberation; some may call it “letting go.” I try to outrun my thoughts because thinking too hard is my ultimate demise. I put on my black slacks and black blazer, slip on my black kitten heels and catwalk my way to the Union Square station. The humidity is viscous enough to hold my weight if I were to fly. Instead, I sink deeper into the underground, shuffling my way onto the 6. It’s a scene of loud anonymity. I could shout my name and no one would know it. I wonder if it’s all make-believe, and if everyone is only pretending that they don’t care. And I wonder if this indifference is freeing or lonely. I arrive at the office a fifteen minute ride of passive silence later. I toil away with a plastic smile until my fingers melt into the keyboard and my upper and lower jaw clench into one. The human body can do miraculous things, including sitting twenty hours a day in a Herman Miller chair. Dozy-eyed, I start dreaming of a vacation in Stockholm. I spend ten weeks at a desk in Manhattan that feels like an entire decade because Einstein said that time moves slower the faster you move. I’m not chasing meaning—just gasping for air, struggling not to drown in the density of it all. All I have left by August is the same indifference that I’ve now decided is more lonely than freeing. 2. And did you know that things fall apart? They fall apart like a crack that turns into a crumble, like an I’m holding up that can no longer be. I wake up one morning for my summer in New York to end faster than the elevator’s rise to the forty-second floor. And because my bed in the East Village is mine no more, I escape to the opposite end of the horizon on a direct flight from JFK to Tokyo, where for three nights and four mornings, I am alone. The Shinjuku station is a labyrinth, and as long as it stretches, I wander. To walk in this maze gives me faux purpose; to walk amongst crowds gives me faux company. But as I learned in New York, there’s so much pretending one can do. So with neither purpose nor company, my mind darts around like a loose ping pong ball, with nowhere to go. I am absent, dissociating, empty. I am a crier, but I cannot cry. In Tokyo, I learn that the end of the horizon is a dead end. So tell me, where do I go now? Even multicursal mazes have finitely many paths, and I’m terribly aware I’ve exhausted my last attempts. Every flutter-open of my eyes in the morning is the beginning of a pursuit with no pursuer. I exist, vacuum-sealed in my plastic world. . 3. In Japan, they call dragonflies “winner bugs” because they cannot move backwards. But what I saw from the window of my grandparents’ living room is that they can also hover mid-air. In swarms, they pause in the sky: a creature destined to surge forward can also hold time in its wings before it falls into the current. 4. And before the waves can swallow me, I’m paddling to the shore on a surfboard in Rhode Island—I refuse to exist in a lull. The water is cold but its sharpness brings me back to the present. I’m back in Providence for my final year, and I am now the pursuer, craving the purpose and calm that’s eluded me. But I’m again lost; the shiny things I thought would make me happy didn’t. In my exhaustion, I want to let go, but I’m scared to surrender. On a whim, I return to yoga, an old hobby, at the studio five minutes away. The instructor encourages me to find purpose in the stillness of my body. I’m finally given permission to stop. The white noise in my head clears, and I can focus purely on the flow of oxygen into my lungs. The practice of ujjayi pranayama allows me to tighten my throat and find the sounds of the cold ocean in my body. In Providence, I learn to breathe again. 5. In her memoir, Alison Bechdel asked what would have happened to Icarus if he didn’t fall. “What might have he wrought?” I’ve decided to stick around for an answer. I am no Daedalus, but I am here to make wings that let me fly.

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