Goodbye

May 21, 2025

August/ September 2015 Although the nervous sweat evaporated from my skin in the high August afternoon, the driving sting of my salty fear still remained. The heat burnt me like it did the bitter grass in the fields—rusting under the merciless, almighty sun. On the eve of September, the rattling sighs of crickets hiding in the fields welcomed me; the crickets sang about death so beautifully. Amongst the fields, there it was: this cluster of white buildings, which appeared to me like castles. I walked towards the building with the golden bell, bright as freedom—it could almost be confused with the sun. The green doors of hope opened, and a man stood to greet me. His smile was big. He shook my weak hand: a firm, practiced grip. As our hands fell to our sides, his rolled up sleeves exposed the hair that grew wildly on his arms. He wore a blue dress shirt that erupted with sour sweat all over, tucked into a new pair of khaki pants and cinched by a leather belt to keep his belly in. Like me, I learned that Mr. Bates was new to this school. And at least that was something we could share. That September, Mr. Bates taught me and my boisterous peers how to greet one another. Give them your eyes. Give them your hands. Give them your words. I rehearsed over and over and over again until I had memorized this perfect display of human decency. Mr. Bates was teaching me how to navigate the spectacle of human interaction. He was teaching me how to belong in this world. * October/ November 2016 A layer of frost crusted the fresh decay of leaves that, by the evening, would continue to rot in the late October mist. The wind in the dark was nightmarish. It brought shivers to the trees, whose sick leaves would slowly dance to the ground, awaiting the night’s nip of winter. Like the trees I often trembled, alone in the dark and blind with nervousness. Stumbling up stairs, I would enter a bright room fresh with the rousing exuberance of youths I did not know. On opposite sides of the ballroom, the boys in their blue suits pretended to be men while the girls glistened in a resplendent rainbow of dresses. This was etiquette class. I learned how to waltz. The stiff clutch of my tie eased when I finally managed to approach a girl to dance during the first lesson. The question, sinking in my throat, at last burst forth frantically. My eagerness became our awkward foxtrot. She wore a taut black dress that complimented her smoothe, dark hair. Below her soft and secretive eyes, her face was scattered with rosette freckles all over. She leapt like a leopard into the night, forever disappearing from me––nameless. Each week, I danced with a new girl. I practiced introducing myself respectfully, meeting her elegant eyes, shaking her hand gracefully, moving my feet, touching my left hand to her shoulder, touching my right hand to her hip, swaying, dazzling. * December/ January 2017 At dawn, the dim glow of the moon was fleeting, the stars fading. The soft snow slept on the driveway like the powdered sugar that dusted my breakfast. The avenue was still, and everyone was inside still asleep. The wind yawned, releasing a sweet puff of life that wandered freely. The sun kissed its warmth on my neck. The cold embraced me too. At Christmastime, my family would drive ten hours to visit my grandmother. She was a round woman with a bullous nose, sharp eyebrows, and defiant eyes. She would summon me and my brother with a sputtering yell––boys, the food is ready––her way of saying that she loved us. The suitcases huddled ready in the shut trunk. The muffled sighs of the car and the blue fumes rising upward became one with the cool winter sky. The icicles stuck to the edges of the undercarriage melted into a puddle of slush black as charcoal. The car’s fresh leather seats were warm, causing the frost on my window to melt away and reveal the figure of my grandmother, small and motionless in the frame of the door, watching us leave. She was waiting for our promise to return again. Goodbye. *** In our youth, we are taught how to greet one another. It is an act of maturity, an act of integration into the world, an act of becoming. We learn to be actors who play our parts with projected voices and firm, dramatic motions. Our masks and costumes are charming. We follow the script.We perform ourselves. Yet no one ever teaches us how to say goodbye. Perhaps, letting go must be a truth then: a testament to our character, to our love, to the depth of our souls. We do not need to go to school or to ballroom dancing to learn how to say goodbye. It already glows in our hearts. Ultimately, life is an act of letting go. It is standing alone in the open doorway, the cold creeping inside, and silently watching those you love leave for new adventures. It is welcoming the uncertainty of when you will see that person again. It is the comforting pain of their absence, and the sweetness of your longing. It is the fateful pleasure of the unknown.

Paranoid in Detroit: A Retrospective Airport Guide

Elsa Eastwood

April 28, 2025

In the beginning, Delta Airlines created a 10am flight to Los Angeles, and I arrived early at my gate, enveloped in a net of peace, anticipating a night in my childhood bed back home, and the sun rose over Providence. But then the Intercom said, “Let there be a $1,500 airline voucher for any travelers willing to transfer to the 5pm to Los Angeles through Detroit,” and I awoke. Too good to be true? Perhaps. This morning would mark only the beginning of my chaotic pilgrimage. Here’s what I wish I had been told: Accept the voucher, but know what you’re getting into. Don’t lose yourself in visions of a restful Christmas vacation—you must first earn it. Your new flight is in nine hours. Text your dad: no longer getting home today, sorry. Listen to the charismatic British-Canadian rugby player you meet at the gate when he informs you that no one wins anything by standing patiently in line. Muscle your way to the front for your updated boarding pass. Find creative ways to pass the time while you wait. Stare at the stretches of gray carpet, the seas of hurried bodies. Treat yourself to a $16.50 meatball sandwich, which will inevitably taste like wet cardboard. Find a nook and doom-scroll into oblivion as time crawls, turtle-like, past you. Apologize to the universe for cursing the droning intercom voice that announces each delay. Airport attendants have dreams and families. Attempt to restore your karma. Once finally on board, strike up a conversation with the young, bearded Amazon employee in the neighboring seat. He may buy you a small bottle of airplane bourbon and confess to you his aviophobia. Comfort him, but know you’ll be on the tarmac for another three hours and that he’ll be drunk enough by then not to notice he’s airborne anyway. When your phone informs you midair that your connection out of Detroit has already departed, accept the truth: no airport sprint nor desperate plea will get you home today. And don’t say you hate Detroit. It doesn't want you there either. After you land, an agitated agent at a Delta “Help” desk will claim she can’t rebook your flight or help you find a place to sleep. Ignore her. Get a second opinion and an off-the-freeway motel voucher. Don’t talk to irritable strangers at 1am on the airport shuttle en route to said off-the-freeway motel. Hop across the lily-pad stains on the lobby carpet to lighten the mood. On the way to your room, try not to picture bodies in a range of consciousness behind each door or an eerie solo violin accompanying you down the hallway. If you must, have a makeshift weapon ready. You’ll hear water running when you enter. The bathtub is full, the faucet stuck. Estimate how long you have before a flood consumes the room. Futz with the thermostat to no avail. 30°. Nice work. You’re sleeping in your clothes. Never rely on a fatigued and hungry mind. There is no skeleton hand on your pillow, no gelatinous tentacles emerging from beneath the bed. That languid, naked woman on the windowsill? A trick of the light. (Deadbolt the door twice.) Sacrifice your vigilance for some shivery sleep. Imagine yourself somewhere more forgiving—the dentist’s office or DMV waiting room, the kitchenware aisle of a suburban IKEA. Wake up to a 5am alarm. Brave the snowstorm, the lonely motel muffin, the shuttle back to the airport. Drag your bag the final few yards. And once you’ve collapsed into your seat and let your eyes fall closed, find solace in the Los Angeles skyline appearing against the darkness of your eyelids, the weight of a new $1,500 in your pocket, as the plane wheels roll steadily forward.

Language Undone

Juliet Corwin

April 15, 2025

I was born in silence. In the first year of my life, my hands and my face were my only ways of communication. My curiosity was not limited by a lack of sound, and as an infant I absorbed the colors, shapes, textures, tastes, smells, and vibrations all around me. I spent much of my time on the floor—in part because walking is a skill that takes practice, but also because lying on the floor is the best way to experience the world. Through the floor, my body learned to recognize my father’s footsteps, a closing door, my sister’s excited hops, the calm ring of my mother’s laugh. I learned the different meanings of eyebrow and lip movements, which twitches meant worry and which meant laughter. My parents, both hearing, spoke endlessly to me, pressing my hands to their throats so I could feel the changes in pitch, the pauses in their words. I remember the warmth of their skin, the steady hum of their voices against my palms. They picked up elementary signs to teach me, pairing them as best they could with the words streaming from their mouths. My first signed word was “shoes,” two fists knocking together—sometimes I wonder if this wasn’t just an accidental bump of my knuckles. My pudgy fingers learned to fly. Soon my words soared through the air, my sentences sprouting wings, flying higher than my parents’ unpracticed eyes and hands could reach. But Mmy parents made the decision to raise me with hearing technology in the hearing world. This was by no means an easy choice, but the world has not been a kind place to Deaf people, and has been particularly unkind to Deaf women. My parents wanted their daughter to be safe, to be autonomous, to feel that this life was mine to create. *** I was one year old the first time a surgeon drilled into my skull. In a cochlear implant surgery, a small area of the skull is shaved away to create an indent in the shape of a tiny upside-down snowman, an exact match to the internal magnet which is placed in the indentation and cemented in with bone paste. Attached to the magnet is a string of electrodes, which are wound around the cochlea in place of cilia, the tiny hairs along which soundwaves dance to the brain. As a result of a recessive gene, GJB2 Connexin 26, my cochleas cannot receive sound properly. The cilia that transmit waves to my brain are absent, broken, bent, or lonely. Through two surgical procedures for cochlear implants, my cilia were replaced by electrodes spun through the spirals of my cochleas, which now receive electrical signals from an external processor. This leaves the bones in my ears without a job. I hope they are not too bored. There are three bones in each ear, named for a hammer, anvil, and stirrup. They bring vibrations from the eardrum to the inner ear by turning them into waves that can travel through the membrane and fluid of the inner ear. Their main function is to bring sound to the cochlea, which connects to the brain. The bones in my ears, dedicated to connecting my eardrums to my cochleas, must be very confused. Soon after getting hearing technology, my preschool teachers held my hands in my lap and I was taught to speak using only my mouth. For Deaf children that are turned into deaf children—assimilated into the hearing world through the use of hearing technology and verbal language—there is debate around continued use of sign language. Some believe that a focus should only be placed on spoken language, as it is assumed that young children will default to sign language if given the opportunity to use it freely. The first time a scalpel graced my skin it un-capitalized a letter, grazed my not-yet formed identity. The second time a scalpel stroked my flesh it cut away a language in my fingers. *** The human hands generally consist of twenty-seven bones each. Eight carpal bones, formed in a row between the wrist and the palm, five metacarpal bones reaching up to the fourteen phalanges that hide in the fingers. These bones are carefully situated so that the hand is flexible and can rotate freely. Two sets of twenty-seven bones working in tandem are used in nearly every human activity. My two sets of twenty-seven bones grew wings, flew too close to the sun, and were left stunted and slow. In my oralist early-intervention education program, my hands were not free. My eyes were trained to read lips and to maintain eye contact at the same time. I still rely on lips about thirty percent of the time, and more in poor acoustics. Reading lips is a skill that I tire of sometimes. Each person, regardless of their language, moves their lips and shapes their sounds differently. Each person I meet means a new pair of lips to learn. As a toddler I was presented with posters and books of cartoon faces squeezed into scary expressions, rewarded with smiles and cheers when I spoke and left my hands behind. Every year since I was one, I have been led into listening booths and told to repeat the words coming at me through a speaker until the heavy, sound-proofed door opens again. This process typically takes about three hours in total, and leaves me exhausted and drained for the next two days. I often grow increasingly tired as the tests go on, and I begin responding to beeps that haven’t played or saying nonsense words back to the speaker. *** I’ve always found it difficult to speak up. I’m not sure how much of this is due to being a deaf woman. I don’t trust my mouth to make the correct sounds. I am scared to take up space in the hearing world, terrified of what it may mean to remind those around me of my disability, of my constant accommodation of their language and lifestyle. Sometimes, a word will slip out of my lips coated in the Deaf accent I still sneak back into at night, and I will pray it goes unnoticed. I grew up being complimented on my clear language, on how invisible my disability was. My preschool classroom was a praise paradise, so I fell in love with hiding this part of myself. I was good at it, and even at that young age I understood that in order to succeed, hearing was the best thing I could be. I used to dream of waking up to noises instead of light. From a young age I knew I was supposed to speak up when I needed more. I was taught to advocate for myself, to explain my disability and to demand accommodations from reluctant ears and swatting dismissals. I was never taught how to say no to a man who was determined. I didn’t know how to run away from someone who showed me affection, even when he became an aggressor, attacked me in a way that seemed far too easy and familiar. Eighty-three percent of disabled women are sexually assaulted in their lives. I had watched a boy turn into a predator, naively believing that I didn’t make for easy prey. I fell into the hands of a boy on the hunt and found myself helpless. In all my training of how to gracefully need more, I hadn’t been taught when to walk away. Under his grip, my hands forgot how to fight as quickly as they forgot their first language, lay limp by my sides the way they were trained to. My protest, rough against my lips, lay in the air and settled along the dust on my cheek, pressed to the floor. *** When I was nineteen, a pulsing tattoo gun scraped along my right hip. A black-ink fine-line daffodil. I was in Minnesota, fighting to keep my body with me. I was a few months into my first year of college, in denial about the flashbacks that kept me awake and the nausea I couldn’t push down when I kissed new people. I told myself he couldn’t follow me here, told myself that was enough, and called my new ink a sign of how healed I was. Daffodils represent forgiveness and rebirth. A type of starting over that accepts the past. I was trying hard to be a daffodil. I wanted to be a flower, open and bright, standing tall on my stem. I wanted to cover up the handprints I felt along my hip with petals and leaves. The artist was rude, which felt unfair since she was dragging a needle through my skin. She started the appointment an hour late, glared at me when I presented a sketch of what I hoped the flower would look like, and silently drew her own version instead. Hers was much better than mine, and I quickly admired the purple outline along my skin before settling in for the session. She didn’t ask me what the tattoo meant, just told me to sit still. At one point she asked me, annoyed, if I was holding my breath. I was. Over the years I have collected more ink, sprinkled over me in whispers. Behind my ear hides a black-ink fine-line outline of the sun. My earliest memories are silent and bright. Fuzzy rays of warmth, dust floating and illuminated in front of a glowing window. The few mornings that I am left to wake without an alarm, I open my eyes to a shift in the light. The first moments of the day are my tired blinks and the beckoning brightness.

House Home

Anonymous

April 12, 2025

House, Home I would sleep in the woods every night if I could. To the times when the morning sun's motherly warmth caressed my face, which peeked out from the top of my sleeping bag. My eyes opened slightly as my ears were entranced by the Mountain Chickadee’s singsong tune somersaulting through the forest, and I threw on my jacket to combat the crisp mountain air. Unzipping the tent, my lungs filled with the purity of pine and burning logs coming from the small fire my father was nursing to warm up frigid backpacking hands. Later I spun around in a circle and pointed to the highest mountain peak I could see, stating that we must reach the top. Leaving the campsite we climbed higher and higher into the thick Evergreen forest; jumping through boulder fields and laughing our way to the summit where the sky was unlimited and all ours. We did snow angels in the July leftovers that we supposed stayed unmelted for the sole purpose of our moment above the clouds. As the sun began to tire and drop from the middle of the sky, we found a lake fed by waterfalls, gurgling pools twirling down a snow melt stream. There was a rock near the center of the lake and we knew that we had to swim to it. My mother smiled as she took out her camera and 1, 2, 3, we grabbed each other's hands and jumped. Our bodies paralyzed with the shocking cold, we gulped for air as instinct and adrenaline propelled us further and further away from the safety of dry land. We reached the rock and flopped down, soaking up the sunshine’s radiating warmth. Our hearts beat raw against our chests, our skin painted with goosebumps and mud. We wondered if any other humans had stepped onto this rock island deep in the Rocky Mountains or if we were the first ones. Our own little palace. Our own little world. One where we could write the rules. All ours. +++ She stood outside, her backpack coated with a layer of dirt and twigs that had decided that her pack was a much more sensible home than the mountain trail she had hiked alone earlier that day. Her head rested on the wall of the house behind her and she traced her fingers across the bricks, feeling the peaceful protection of where she had been break into leftover memories drowning in the corners of her mind. Her heart quickened in anticipation and she counted to ten before turning around, taking one final deep breath, and sliding open the side door of the house. The screaming echoed off the panes of the windows and she felt her fists tighten until her knuckles turned white. She hesitated slightly, eyes glued to the floor, before forcing herself to go inside the house. Mom, Dad? Go to your room. +++ In elementary school, my class would go camping in the mountains twice a year. I would pack my sleeping bag, sleeping pad, extra clothes, and a backpack, a daypack as we would call it. It was filled to the brim with everything you would ever need for any kind of mountain weather: sunscreen, a rain jacket, a fleece, gloves, a camelback, a sun hat, a winter hat, rain pants, snacks, and sunglasses. I would wait by the door of my house jumping up and down in excitement until I was taken to school. We went rafting down the Colorado River, biking through the red crushed arches of Moab, and backpacking in the Rocky Mountains. Returning with my face covered in mud and a head packed full of stories that would sooner than later turn into dreams. +++ She got to her room and shut the door softly, hoping her parents would forget that she was there at all. Looking up at the ceiling, the lights appeared to twinkle through the tears flooding her eyes, though without the comfort of the stars that blanket the mountain’s night sky. The walls of her room reverberated with the growing terror in her heart as she shoved a pillow over her ears to muffle the repeated sounds of strikes echoing through the kitchen. She wanted nothing more than to go but was too scared to move, sickened with the hope that her mother’s rampage would end before it was turned towards her as it so often was. That one day, the yelling and pain and tears would stop and her house could become a home. +++ Why are you in the woods? My friend texted me and I turned my phone away from my face, replaced instead with the dark sky and steadfast trees. I marveled at the fact that I somehow always ended up here. As if my feet carry me to safety if my mind starts to flood too deep into sinking swirls. Tears rolled down my face and I used the cuff of my shirt to wipe them away, softly accompanied by a lullaby conducted by the echoes of the trees. Because when you are in the woods, what does real life really mean anyways? Back to the primitive being of true humanity. Finding food and water and wood to stay alive. Telling stories you would never think to share if your mind wasn’t given the opportunity to wonder. Where the natures dance becomes your family and the trees your home. Please let me come. You are not a burden. Okay. And so he ran down to the edge of the woods and together we lay side by side, the stillness between us holding more than words ever could, the smell of moist wood and falling leaves lulling us into a safe security that tomorrow could never bring. +++ Sometimes she doesn't sleep in a tent but opts instead to sleep outside under the stars. The quiet surrounding her is a safe embrace as if nothing can hurt her as long as stay within the limits of the trees. Because no one is angry in the mountains. +++ In the woods I am home.

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.

Gaybash: A Review

Desi Silverman-Joseph

February 23, 2025

The invitation arrived as a Google Calendar notice via email: GAYBASH: Sat Nov. 9, 10 pm - 1am. “A party by gay guys, for gay guys” the subheading read. “Bring whoever fits the bill.” My heart leapt as I read the invitation and forwarded it to three friends. This was the party of my high school fantasies, the kind of thing I prayed would await me in college after four years of celibacy, when the jocks who ruled the party scene refused an invitation to any boy outside their varsity-playing, Creatine-crazed circles. The result: Friday nights at home watching TV with my mother and a whole lot of pent-up sexual curiosity. This feeling of desperation, I realize, is a common one for many gay guys who come flocking to Brown from not-so-cosmopolitan high schools, desiring shared experiences, romantic connection, and (let’s just say it) sex. And unlike at their high schools, gay guys at Brown may come to occupy the upper echelon of society, forming friend groups with formidable influence and social capital. My friends and I call such high-status homosexuals “Sirens.” In pop culture, the word denotes a female temptress who leads men on only to squash their hearts in the end. Among my friends, however, the word has come to describe a very particular kind of gay man at Brown. Your average Siren is beautiful, fashionable, and mean. In the summer, he wears baggy jorts and covers his perfectly-proportioned upper body with a scant white wife-beater. In the winter, he wears cargo pants with a knit sweater and a delicate scarf that could have only come from your voguish aunt’s wardrobe. His ears are pierced, his friends are hot, and he makes sure you know he reads in his free time. If you are not on his level, do not try to talk to him—he won’t give you the time of day. When I arrived at the address listed in the invitation at 11 PM that fateful Saturday night, I was disappointed to find practically no Sirens in attendance. The party was filled almost entirely with nerds making awkward conversation and vague attempts at flirtation with people they knew from class. They swayed their bodies back and forth uncomfortably to house music, but few actually danced. I fluttered about looking for an interaction I could enter without worrying about how quickly it would turn stale. At 11:30, the Sirens arrived at once. Everyone seemed relieved; Gaybash was not some lame gathering we had been tricked into attending but a real party with Sirens and all. They stood among us, and this was our chance to associate, to integrate ourselves among their ranks. One Siren whom I had met briefly at a campus event approached me. He grabbed my hand and offered a warm, Sireny hug. I blushed and tried to sustain a conversation without losing composure. Exhausted by the effort, I pretended to get distracted by a friend in the crowd. I bounded away, satisfied that I had been the one to kill the interaction. It’s a good feeling when you make a Siren yearn. It turns out I wasn’t the only one feeling conscious about a perceived divide between the high-status and the humdrum homosexuals. One stranger introduced himself by asking if I was a “scary gay.” It was his intention, he told me, to meet all the scary gays at Brown that night. I laughed and told him that I wasn’t scary—eager to disprove his assumption through warmth and relatability. Secretly, though, I was a bit flattered. I had indeed elevated my self-presentation with the hopes of intimidating the crowd: I had put on my softest, most tight-fitting shirt, my thrifted gold-beaded choker, and my most expensive, gender-neutral scent from Le Labo. Maybe it was something about the influx of Sirens, or the increasingly claustrophobic conditions of the party, or the sight of my ex-boyfriend yukking it up with some friends in the corner, but I began to feel sick to my stomach. People danced around me in a blur of color and commotion. They sang along to the music, which had transitioned from house to pop classics that I embarrassingly didn’t know the lyrics to. The room stank of sweat and alcohol. It was all too much. The Siren from before approached me again. Shit. There was no way I was going to be able to sustain my illusion of coolness this second time around. My best hope was to let him do the talking. I asked him questions. He flirted aggressively. Oh god, he was really hitting on me. I should’ve been happy. This guy was hot shit. I dreamed of befriending guys like him all through freshman year. But the whole thing left me feeling nauseated. I could feel the acid piling up in my throat. My heart was throbbing. I was surely going to puke. “I’m sorry—I think I have to go. I’m not feeling so good,” I panted, making a beeline for the door and bolting out before he could respond. That sucked. But I was relieved to have some fresh air. It felt good to be out of there and in the familiar world of heterosexuality again—where people dressed badly and did not know all the words to Lana del Rey. Here, I could be plain and uninteresting and it wouldn’t matter. After ten minutes of walking around the neighborhood, I felt better and returned to face the gays. Not long after stepping back through the door, I was shuttled out again. It wasn’t just me—every last person at the party had to leave. Word was that the police had arrived. People lined up along the narrow staircase and funnelled through the front door. The crowd was irked that the festivities had been cut short. “If this were a frat, there’s no way the police would have shut this down,” someone yelled out. “Yeah—fuck the police,” someone else responded. “Wow, this is sooo homophobic,” another boy chimed in. I couldn’t totally tell whether people were joking or in earnest. Outside, the officers seemed amused by the sight of us. “Looks like a bunch of RISD kids,” I heard one say, picking up on the alternative, femme aesthetics that everyone was sporting, that perfect nexus between streetwear and sophistication which is sure to boost your rank. A hundred boys gathered outside the house in mixed-up huddles of scary gays and soft gays and nerdy gays and diva gays—all refusing to leave the premises and all united in a sort of performative indignation. “Disperse, disperse,” the police yelled. The crowd stayed put. Everyone seemed bent on goading the police into violent confrontation, as if Gaybash were the next Stonewall. Two boys ran out into the middle of the road and began to perform ballet, spinning and twirling and leaping provocatively on the asphalt in front of the all-male police squad dressed in navy blue and standing with their feet wide apart. “Go home, disperse!” the police yelled again through a megaphone. When there was no movement, they blared their sirens at a deafening volume (as if there weren’t already enough loud Sirens around), and everyone walked off into the darkness. In the end, I had more fun debriefing Gaybash with my mother on the phone than I did attending the party itself. As a highschooler, I anticipated feeling liberated at a function like this—free to dress as I please, talk as I please, flirt as I please. In the end, though, I felt no less uneasy at Gaybash than I did at the parties I attended in high school. But the quality of the anxiety felt fundamentally different. In high school, popularity was unthinkable, and I often felt on the outs. At Gaybash, what I think unnerved me most was the lure of status, the fact that I, too, could slip into the quicksand and become cool and beautiful and scary.

The Gold that Stays

Annabelle Stableford

February 21, 2025

When I was eight years old, my dad shot a deer. I lay on its body when we reached it, sucking on the black licorice stick that had incentivized me to go hunting as tears streamed down my face. My dad taught me to touch the deer’s eye to make sure it doesn’t blink, to make sure it is dead. I touched the deer’s eye and it did not blink. Nature’s first green is gold, / her hardest hue to hold. When we got home, I ate raw meat from the deer’s body, so fresh it was still warm. It was strange consuming an animal I was still mourning, but there was a sense of purity in the direct connection between our lives that allowed me to do it. It seemed like a natural cycle of life to me then, and the meat made sense in my mouth. I widened my eyes at my dad and bounced up and down next to the kitchen table to express how good the deer tasted. But the image of the animal’s unblinking eye as it lay on the ground stuck with me. I saw the deer running; I saw the deer dead. The two irreconcilable thoughts stuck together in my mind like magnets. As my dad gathered the rest of the meat from the deer’s body in the garage, I somehow got hold of one of its hooves and for several weeks after that night I carried it with me. My mom quickly banned me from bringing it inside, so I wrapped it in a paper towel and brought it into the backyard. As soon as I got home from school each day I went to check on it. I sat there with it, stroking the black hoof and the bit of hair above because it was the only part of the deer I could still care for. I don’t remember how it happened, but slowly the hoof disintegrated. Maybe I lost interest in it and it turned to dirt in the backyard, or more likely another animal took it in the night. Either way, one day the hoof was gone. Nothing gold can stay. ⚘⚘⚘ I had a lot of worries when I was young. At night they swarmed around me and I couldn’t sleep. “One more question,” I called down to my parents night after night after they had tucked me into bed. “Why do bees like pollen?” I would ask anything to keep them near me, to keep them talking. I wasn’t so worried when I wasn’t alone. In middle school I got a small patchwork bag filled with worry dolls on a camping trip in Joshua Tree. I’d already tried a hundred ways to soften my fears at night–therapy, an energy healer, crystals, visualisations, meditations. They all helped, but I didn’t latch on to any of them the way I did to my worry dolls. They were small, about half the size of my pinkie, maybe eight in total. Each of their wire bodies were covered in small pieces of bright fabric that looked like skirts and shawls, and tiny eyes and mouths were drawn onto their paper faces. At night I took them all out of the bag and whispered a worry to each one before putting them back inside. “I’m worried I will never find my favorite necklace that I lost.” “I’m worried that I’ll throw up.” “I’m worried that Mama will die in a car crash.” “I’m worried we shouldn't have killed the deer.” Once they were all back in the bag I pulled the string tight and tucked it under my pillow. I felt so much lighter. Night after night of whispering my worries to the dolls, I came to know each of them well. I felt safe knowing they would hold my fears at night so I could sleep. One day, the patchwork bag ended up in the washing machine with my pillowcases, and all the little worry dolls fell apart. Her early leaf’s a flower; / But only so an hour. I felt torn apart with them, cleaved in two. I held the broken figures in my hand and pressed myself under the drying rack in the laundry room, trying to cry hard enough that I would escape the pain. But no matter how hard I cried or how small I curled up I could not escape. Nothing gold can stay. ⚘⚘⚘ In high school I sat on a bench in the park on New Year's Eve. The line between us where my body pressed against his, the side of my thigh, my arm from the elbow up, my shoulder, was electric, even under my down coat. There were so many stars above, shatteringly clear in the crystal cold night. He saw a meteor and looked at me with wide eyes, but I had been looking at him and missed it. We stared at the sky again. I saw a meteor and nudged him, but he had been looking at me. This time we swore to stare at the sky until we saw a meteor together. We watched for a while, inching closer and closer because it was cold, and also because we had never been so near to someone like that. I could smell his shampoo: apple scented. Suddenly, from the crest of the sky, a meteor broke loose from between the stars. This one was bigger than any I had seen before. It had a thick, fat tail that glowed brilliantly orange. It dove down in a long, smooth arc until it vanished near the horizon, like a stone dropping into dark water. Neither of us moved; we had both seen it. After a while, he put his arm around me. I had never felt that way before-burning, falling. My heart dove toward him, dropping inside his darkness like a meteor into sky or a stone into water. That night I came back with frostbite, dark purple kneecaps and blotches on my hips. I rubbed at them in the shower, holding my breath, holding my breath, until the purple faded to red. I took deep breaths. I knew the meteor was a sign of something magical, something no one would believe if I tried to tell them about it. Orange like a fiery tail burned behind my eyelids as I fell asleep, my smile lingering on the scent of his apple shampoo and the weight of his arm around my shoulder. There were more nights cold enough to break if you breathed in too fast, too cold to hold hands so we took turns sharing our pockets. For months we met only after dark, only outside, in a starry world that never quite felt real. By the time the stars started blinking out I was so used to the dark that I didn’t notice. Then leaf subsides to leaf. / So Eden sank to grief. I hadn’t yearned for my worry dolls in years, sometimes I even wondered if my swarm of fears had found a different queen, but by summer I spent most nights falling asleep shaking with the effort of keeping my pillow dry and no one to tell. It took me until fall to admit to myself I was wrong. The meteor wasn’t a sign, the frostbite was, teasing me like sparks but blooming into bruises that I couldn’t see. Nothing gold can stay. ⚘⚘⚘ I only have one poem memorized, a short eight lines by Robert Frost called “Nothing Gold Can Stay” that my dad recited to me over and over when I was young. The lines occur to me randomly sometimes, when I finish a book or walk home at dusk, or when I think about how much my dad loves Robert Frost. Nature’s first green is gold, Her hardest hue to hold. Her early leaf’s a flower; But only so an hour. Then leaf subsides to leaf. So Eden sank to grief, So dawn goes down to day, Nothing gold can stay “Stay gold, Ponyboy,” Johnny Cade says in the The Outsiders as the fire that burned him, extinguished now but still roiling across his skin, steals his final heartbeats. Stay gold, I say, stay gold. But nothing gold can stay. ⚘⚘⚘ When I learned about fireweed this semester it fit like a puzzle piece between the contradictions of those lines. Like its name suggests, fireweed is one of the first plants to grow after a wildfire. It takes to the blackened ground like a phantom, sucking life out of the ashes. It blooms across meadows and mountainsides almost as fast as fire itself, leaping in arcing colors across scorched land, touching all the places that died and igniting them in a magenta-tinged remembrance. As it spreads, though, it slows down, then stops. Instead of taking over mountainsides and charred forests and holding them forever captive with its blossoms, fireweed, in the end, chokes itself out. The purple miracle flower falls back to the earth, not sentenced there by fire like the trees and shrubs on the land before it, but sentenced there by its own overpopulation, its own drowning. So dawn goes down to day. But then, from the fertile remains, new sprouts emerge. Not only short-term flowers and brush, but the trees that will make forests that could stand for centuries. ⚘⚘⚘ Maybe that is the answer. We do things that die. Sometimes we have to do them so that they will die, like killing a deer, telling worry dolls your darkest fears, loving someone who will stop loving you. Burn the forest, flower the ashes, grow the trees. The finality of the deer’s unblinking eye was splintering, and I’ve recognized that same splintering ever since-the washed bodies of my worry dolls, the slow curve of the meteor in the sky as it broke apart. But even when the deer’s heart stopped beating, she kept existing outside of that moment, as a figurative presence in my heart when I touched her eye and she did not blink and as a literal presence in my body after I ate her meat. What’s dead is gone, but it depends on where you look. The worry dolls taught me to make sense of my fears, to put them into words so that when it mattered, when I was losing him, when I was suffering anything, I knew how to face it. Maybe those two weren’t related, but even if they weren’t consequential ripples they collided, like the deer’s heart and mine, like flowers and ash building a forest. Then leaf subsides to leaf. So Eden sank to grief. So dawn goes down to day. Somehow, there is a gold that stays.