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 ...
After skipping breakfast as usual, you stride into the Sharpe Refectory for lunch, stand in line with a heavy backpack (because there are inevitably no seats), get ignored by a few passing acquaintances you tried to make eye contact with, retreat to refreshing your Instagram homepage, and finally get ...
But first, I wish I knew where to begin. It is midnight again, and I am sitting at my computer, hoping this keyboard-clacking will somehow transfigure into the wisdom I need for tomorrow. The people I walked past today, avoiding puddles just like me, were hoping for wisdom too. I could simply be projecting, ...
Growing up, my father had a common saying. “Work before you play,” he would tell me at every waking moment: when I was caught lounging on the couch watching TV, sitting at the dining table eating a snack, or just doing the normal, trivial activities a pent-up, boisterous kid does. The idea behind ...
Maybe I started loving you in the kitchen. I remember one late Sunday morning in fall: I could smell something cooking, cinnamon-sweet, wafting down my hallway. I looked in to find a group of my friends huddled around the stovetop, French toast a-sizzling in the pan and dinner-party jazz ("Happy ...
It’s early November, and I’m bored. I lie on my bed and stare at the ceiling. A sigh escapes from me, unintentional. I reach for my phone and mindlessly open TikTok, my short attention span appreciating the immediate satisfaction each video gives me. I pause on a video of someone recommending My ...
My mom shook me awake. Taking a nap outside my bedroom door had seemed like a good idea to me at the time until my mom said she hadn’t been able to wake me up for several minutes. Because I wasn’t just napping—I had passed out. She plopped me down on the couch and force-fed me a cookie until I ...
Bouncing vivaciously around the stage in athletic track pants, a purple t-shirt, and pink mini Ugg boots, Remi Wolf is electric and eclectic. And so is her audience: The Boston Royale is packed with flamboyant fans of all ages, many sporting merchandise from her official collection. Some wear neon hats ...
As I’m driving in from Providence and the buildings roll past my window, I crack open the glass and let the wind wash away all of the ink that paints me as a little city girl. With the skyline in my billowing hair and the unbreakable musical tradition of Frank Sinatra bursting through the radio, I ...
Solutions by The State News
