There’s no feeling quite like returning to my hometown after being away at college. When I begin to recognize my surroundings again, when I notice the road I took to get to my high school job, when I see the familiar trees lining my block: It’s like being born again. It’s simultaneously beautiful ...
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 ...
Ma won’t make poha for us on Sunday evenings anymore, and even on the rare occasions that she does, she won’t serve those golden-yellow grains alongside a glass full of steaming hot milk. I no longer ride behind your metallic cycle on my pastel one every school morning. I go by car, the one you ...
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 ...
This world is made of boxes.
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.
Baba talks like he will never stop again.
Consider, for a second, the value of forcible constraint: the weight of the absent “e” in Georges Perec’s lipogram A Void, or the mysterious vividness of the paper cutouts Henri Matisse made when illness prevented him from painting. Forcible constraint may not be pleasant, but the perspectives ...
It’s funny to think how much the passage of time can change our relationships to ideas, hobbies and beliefs. This is something I’ve been grappling with lately: How much of our present selves are defined by our past identities?
I walk out of my dorm in my polka-dot pajamas and short-sleeved crushed watermelon T-shirt to get myself some food. Halfway to the Ratty, I realize I have made a pathetic decision. I pull my phone out and frantically text the group chat:
I was sitting on the steps of Hope when a woman asked to pray for me. The late morning sun peeked through a web of elm and oak leaves, and the breeze carried the springtime revival in its wisps. Shades of pink, ivory, and violet magnolia blossoms had begun to flower, enticing the beetles and the bees ...
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 ...
Fine! Fine. You got me, okay? I said all week that I wasn’t going to write a piece that started with two lines from a song that unexpectedly has deep and personal relevance to me, cut to some narrative, cut back to two lines from later in the song, rinse and repeat. But here I am. It works! I get ...
During your young adulthood, the only thing more inevitable than acne is the three-week Minecraft-playing phase you’ll undergo at least once per year. For me, the game once again infiltrated my computer following the release of the 1.21 update this past June—the internal peace I gain from mining ...
Solutions by The State News
