hostel-hoppers [narrative]
By Damian Wasilewicz | March 17It was not long after we met Valentina that we learned about the Coldplay dollar.
It was not long after we met Valentina that we learned about the Coldplay dollar.
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.
The Alps presented a problem. The mountains, spotted with white provincial houses angled on the slopes, flanked our train car. This day of travel was an opportunity to experience rustic clothing and an aestheticization of mountain life so extreme I’m surprised we didn’t go looking for edelweiss—lederhosen ...
Preparing for a spirit circle is easier than you might think.
We are born into clumsy bodies. We flail around with fat fingers as we learn to make sense of the fuzzy shapes around us, and to assert important truths like “ba” and “ga.” As we grow, we are given a fuller set of words to wrap our hands around, including words that are supposed to describe ...
note: contains version translated into Spanish at the end.
twinship
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 ...
cw: homophobic slur, mentions of gender dysphoria
When the lights come on, there is a single spotlight, trained on the center of the stage. The actress is there, basking, lounging in the glow. Her legs dangle off the edge of the piano, willfully uncrossed. Her hair is piled high atop her head into a mount of carefully aligned curls. She wears a fitted ...
It’s Friday afternoon, and I’ve arrived home from middle school just in time to catch the last game of the European professional League of Legends scene. The rest of my night will be spent catching up on highlights from the games I missed while I was at school, with breaks only to eat, walk my dog, ...
There are the ones I left in a drafty room over a frigid New England December, only to come back from sun-baked California to their slouching, frozen corpses. The countless overwatered succulents, the root-bound vines, the pothos I just couldn’t make happy. The ones left forgotten, unwatered on my ...
The rain waltzed through the antiquated, beige porticos lining the cobblestone streets. Soaked as I was, there was respite in the distance, peeking through the sun-dappled smog: Humana Vintage in all its vanity-inducing glory.
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 ...