Lands of opportunity are frequently co-inhabited by lesser-known creatures: decisions. Opportunities gambol and frolic around, but if you look closely, tailing each opportunity is a little decision or two, nipping at its heels, encumbering it just a tiny bit. This ecosystem is more complex than we may ...
As 22-year-olds, we take ourselves pretty seriously. We’re convinced that our two romantic decisions (anything before tenth grade is negligible) indicate a lifelong pattern to which we are bound, irrevocably so. We’re sure that, despite results of an allergy test that say otherwise, we are allergic ...
My mother gestures me into the room. As I walk in, I look around—it’s vastly different from the last time I was here. I used to spend multiple days a week here, where we had our movie nights, where I had my band practices, where my parents forced me to go with my friends because my dad didn’t ...
In another life, I never moved away from Illinois. I spend summers laying out picnic blankets in the fenceless backyard that we share with eight of our neighbors. We drink iced tea out of plastic cups and run after fireflies, watching the yellow lights weave through our fingers.
It took seeing one friend repeatedly reassure another that nothing was wrong and then, in their absence, proceed to describe everything that was, in fact, wrong for me to realize that I’m a very direct person. Obviously, I’ve told half-truths and stalled a confrontation for another day, but in a ...
What does it mean to learn from preservation and reimagination?
content warnings: description of mass suicide, mentions of rape
For the past three years, my family has upheld the same end-of-summer tradition: On a Saturday in mid-August, we drive four hours north of San Francisco until we hit Eureka. On Sunday, we run the Humboldt Bay Marathon.
There is an altar in my mother’s family home.
A gap in the calendar. A kind of pause that hovers as the months bleed into each other, when leaves flow in the wind and daylight thins into dusk. From a windowsill, the gap is like the pause between inside and outside, connecting what is still clinging to what has already stepped away.
I have never seen a yellow-rumped warbler in real life, though I feel like I have because of the hundreds of photos I’ve looked at. They are small, stout creatures with a pronounced beak. The black feathers surrounding their eyes make them appear more like deer than birds. They carry daisy-yellow ...
Recently, there has been a curious, serendipitous pattern in my media space. In a week, I encountered three works united by a common idea—the Law of Talion, which may be more familiar to you as the principle: “an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth.” These pieces included the Spanish story “Ley ...
“Where are you guys from? Oh yeah, our rail system’s shit.”
In 2018, my mother was cancelled by a Twitter mob. “Katie Roiphe can suck my dick,” one user wrote. Others called her “human scum,” a “ghoul,” and a “harridan.” Enraged by the hypothetical contents of her not-yet-published Harper’s Magazine article, they preemptively took to their ...
Evening breeze winding through my small, soft hands. Tall grass tickling my ankles as I passed. It was just after sundown in the summer, and I was sprinting through a field, and I was still young enough to be unafraid of stumbling.
I think I owe the moon a love letter.
“E se ibi ti e ti bere, ese ibi ti e ba de, a dupe ore re, e se ibi te mu wa lo.”
April is the cruellest month, breeding
If you’d asked my twelve-year-old self to close her eyes and go to her happy place, she would have done so dutifully: contemplated, ruminated, and then cast herself to the Burbank, California IKEA.
Solutions by The State News
