In the months before I first left for college, I started recording my friends. Not video, just their voices: the stories we exchanged in the car on the way to the movie theater, the way we said goodbye to each other after a day at the beach, the jokes we told at sleepovers—which we only found funny ...
Monday, 4:33 p.m.: I am sitting at the McDonalds in the Barcelona airport and the world feels off-kilter.
The first chord of Chopin’s Nocturne No. 13 is a low, resounding C that beckons you—slow, crashing waves meet your feet as the moon gazes at your form. Hands alternate between soft bass notes that sink into your core and a high-pitched melody that yearns. This dance drives you through the scene, ...
I’m on the car ride home with my best friends. We’re piled in, with five in the middle seat and two curled up in the trunk. Don’t tell my mom! The sun roof is open, the windows are down, and the velvety summer air is funneling through our hair, blonde and brown and black waves weaving into each ...
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I sat in my dorm’s communal kitchen painting my friend’s nails. It was mid-first semester and the heat hadn’t turned on yet, so it was uncomfortable to wear anything less than a sweatshirt. Every time I finished a nail, my friend would lift his hand close to his eyes to examine the quality of ...
“Liu Bei’s men were getting closer. You could hear them beating their drums, waving their torches, shouting their war songs into the frigid air as they sailed closer and closer.
As we shuffled through the halls of the Vatican Museums, we were packed like sardines, herded like cattle, moving like a flock of sheep. Not much thinking was required of us, except maybe to keep on walking—do not stop in the immediate path of another person and hinder the current of this sea of people. ...
Tears, laughter, and joy spill across the strings of Taylor Swift’s guitar. This is the Taylor I know and love. She is the one who always listens, the one who got me through middle school, the one who makes me jump and shout with glee—all with a mere click on Spotify. This Taylor disappeared with ...
Editor's note: This article was written by an author who is in the midst of exploring their gender identity. In order to maintain a sense of privacy, they requested this piece be published anonymously. In addition, they do not intend to take away space meant for non-binary or trans people, or minimize ...
The cyberpunk city is nocturnal—buildings that skewer the layer of clouds in the sky with their billboards. Neon Chinese characters decorate dark alleyways with splotches of artificial color. Hovercrafts and other extreme feats of technology layer over a dilapidated urban landscape. And the main character ...
할머니 paints, but her paintings never really leave the apartment. There must be over 40 canvases scattered around, propped up on the floor in sets of three or four so you can sort through them like vinyl in a record shop. I discover six older ones I’ve never seen before when I follow her to her ...
I used to tell people I hated country music. Growing up in the conservative suburbs of the Deep South, hating country music was a quiet rebellion against a culture that intrinsically did not align with my values. Throughout high school, I walked a wide berth around the Morgan Wallen tours that passed ...
He took to the road before dawn, the moon still visible through the early March mist. The night before, he had patched his torn trousers and fixed a new strap to his hat. He was approaching fifty, gray hairs frosting his head, and applied mugwort to his legs to strengthen them for the journey.
June 6, 2008 was the first time I saw an iPhone. I was sitting in a Jewish deli next to the hospital where my mother was in labor with my brother. At the time, I only knew the flip phones I saw in movies and the Blackberries my parents used, which solely piqued my interest when they let me borrow one ...
The drive back down to Providence crosses between two of my own realities as it crosses state borders. Every single time I embark on the journey back to campus, the hour-long car ride is always accompanied by a torrential downpour. The kind of rain that loudly pounds against the windshield and consumes ...
My childhood best friend Lilah once discovered a copy of Super Mario Bros. on the hallway floor of our middle school and stole it. Neither her conscience nor mine stopped us from taking it to her house after school and immediately plugging it into her pink Nintendo DS. For the next few months, every ...
There was no second of purifying blackness, no raising of curtains or lowering of wires, no mechanized magic at all. Samia strode out to the microphone stand at centerstage, wearing her characteristic wide-eyed fishnets, mid-calf black leather boots, and a tiered white miniskirt that clung to her waist ...
My grandfather, a motion picture exhibitor, used to declare every film he saw the “best picture of the year.” I can still hear the natural inflection of that phrase in his voice revealing his pure, unadulterated delight. My grandmother would walk out of the theatre and tell him she couldn’t believe ...
In the very first episode of Fleabag, a beloved comedy-drama, the titular character and her sister Claire attend a feminist lecture together, in which the speaker asks the audience: “Please raise your hands if you would trade five years of your life for the so-called ‘perfect body.’” The rest ...
Solutions by The State News
