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.
My grandfather grew up in small-town, middle-of-nowhere East Java, right around the old Dutch sugar plantations.
I’ve bought a journal every year since 2018. It’s been seven years, though it doesn’t feel too long ago that I was a middle schooler gripping a ballpoint and carving letters into paper for no apparent reason. I struggle to remember exactly what drove me to my first notebook, what motivated me ...
I take a rest on the oily, heat-stained seats of the L Train to Brooklyn. My feet tingle after the long summer walk to the station, buoyancy enveloping my limbs. I feel the body heat of a close friend from Brown next to me. She sports jorts. Classic. A navy tank top and rose-gold jewelry, too. She is ...
“Do you wanna see his finger?” My friend reaches into his pocket to grab his phone, grinning like we’re talking about high school drama.
Solutions by The State News
