Lights flicker and reflect across our frightened faces as we pick popcorn kernels out of our braces. We laugh uncontrollably, to mask the pure terror that resides beneath. Desperate to encounter an adrenaline rush like the drugs we’re too young to take, we spend most of our free time riding roller ...
From: adi_thatai@brown.edu
I saw this TikTok that said the trip from college back to your hometown is like a “portal between two different worlds.” To me, flying from Brown back home to San Diego, the plane feels like a portal between two different lives. I peer over the sleeping bodies of my fellow passengers out the window ...
He hasn’t moved from the kitchen table. Yesterday’s hard-boiled eggs and toast sit untouched on his paper plate, no doubt cold. Everything but his left hand remains still. He’s been rewriting the same word, over and over. In harsh, repeated lines, I can read clay. I’m surprised the pen hasn’t ...
Last October, post- brought you this playlist roundup to suit all of your fall music needs. But so much has happened since then: a deer has broken and entered into MoChamp lounge, everyone and their lab partner have gotten COVID-19, mask mandates have been lifted, record-breaking blizzards have hit ...
I stand in the haircare aisle for six minutes.
Early last semester, the sound became a little too much to bear. Shuffling back to my room against the jetstream to South Campus where my friends partied on through the night, I passed the cars sauntering down Thayer, trunks bumping along with their hefty subwoofers. For the first few weeks I was in ...
adulthood is a punctuation mark: the period that is a washing machine door. and like every mark on paper, it is also a window/an eye, a way of catching my reflection watching myself watch my clothes spinning/riding a carousel, riding a fissure of time/my bored face. adulthood is me in the laundry room ...
It must have been seventh grade when my younger sister, my cousin, and I set our minds to making a VideoStar of “The Schuyler Sisters” from Hamilton. It was a warm day right after Christmas, and the basketball court next to my grandparents’ house was covered with moss. I was the oldest, so I got ...
When my sister was five years old, my aunt decided to forcibly use a chemical relaxer on her hair so that it would be “straight and beautiful.” This event was followed by sounds of torment that rang through the night. Screams filled the house as chemical hair relaxer burned through her scalp, and ...
It’s a Saturday night, and there’s a drunk girl standing on the bar. Her dark hair, still bearing the remnants of a fading dye job, swings back and forth in time with the plastic beaded necklaces on her chest as she gyrates her hips. She can’t see the boy bouncing below her, waving one fist in ...
“The eighties were the best time to be alive,” my dad always tells me.
How can a person be so obsessed with themselves, so narcissistic, as to believe that they alone can positively change the world. What drives people to act without regard for others, to act according to no moral boundaries to save their own destructive brand of egotism? What drives individuals to feel ...
As a child, I loved having my friends explain math to me. It was never really about the content, but rather about how the pen traced geometric shapes and scribbled equations, how my friend would look up from time to time to ask if I understood. I liked to focus on the tip of the pen leaving a trace ...
If you were to go through my search history right now, you would find the following question, posed on a Tuesday night at 8:36 p.m.: How do you write a good eulogy?
A tea bag in black ink winds its way up my upper arm, lavender and carnations blooming inside of it. The winter chill means it’s mostly hidden from the world. Sometimes I forget it exists. But in the back of my mind, I know it’s there: an amulet I carry with me, a reminder that I exist in the world ...
Solutions by The State News
