In the months before I first left for college, I started recording my friends. Not video, just their voices: the stories we exchanged in the car on the way to the movie theater, the way we said goodbye to each other after a day at the beach, the jokes we told at sleepovers—which we only found funny ...
“Get rid of death. Celebrate increase. Make it be spring.”
After four years at Brown, I have amassed a list of the must-do things that I credit with having made my time so special. Treat it like a bucket list, treat it like a guide, or treat it like a nostalgic senior’s reflection on her happiest years.
In seventh grade, we had a long-term substitute teacher for social studies because our teacher had fallen down the stairs. Besides his need to remind us he wasn’t strict (he was “just preparing us for the real world”), I only have one memory from his time as my teacher: He made me cry. No—he ...
Monday, 4:33 p.m.: I am sitting at the McDonalds in the Barcelona airport and the world feels off-kilter.
The first chord of Chopin’s Nocturne No. 13 is a low, resounding C that beckons you—slow, crashing waves meet your feet as the moon gazes at your form. Hands alternate between soft bass notes that sink into your core and a high-pitched melody that yearns. This dance drives you through the scene, ...
The last time I was supposed to write for post-, I got dumped. Just as I was about to start my piece, my world shattered, the future I imagined for myself came crumbling down, and the person I thought was the love of my life no longer wished to be in mine at all. Thoughts of writing or school work were ...
From the days of the broad-shouldered financiers who peddled an English drape to the dependable flannels of the power suit, Ivy League campuses have always been hotbeds of the styles associated with the upper class. Originating in Princeton and Yale (sorry guys—we can’t take credit for this one), ...
I’m on the car ride home with my best friends. We’re piled in, with five in the middle seat and two curled up in the trunk. Don’t tell my mom! The sun roof is open, the windows are down, and the velvety summer air is funneling through our hair, blonde and brown and black waves weaving into each ...
To wonder is to admire the inexplicable, to notice a rare delight; it is to allow one’s curiosity to take a meander and prod at something surprising. Lately, I have begun to collect small moments of wonder. I pluck them from this soft world as if I was born to do it—to look and listen and be filled ...
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I sat in my dorm’s communal kitchen painting my friend’s nails. It was mid-first semester and the heat hadn’t turned on yet, so it was uncomfortable to wear anything less than a sweatshirt. Every time I finished a nail, my friend would lift his hand close to his eyes to examine the quality of ...
One year, my mother committed herself to scrapbooking my oma’s life. For weeks, she scoured the depths of old boxes and dusty albums, until she’d found records of every pivotal moment of my oma that she could. Sepia, water-stained photos adorned the pages, accompanied by careful captions, dates. ...
The tiny European car parked outside the window of Babu’s cafe in Zürich has a few droplets of water on the rear windshield. The people come and go around me, on and off like the intermittent rain. They move, and I sit. A few of them are coming into the cafe, maybe even to sit by the window with ...
As if by reflex, I grab the keys off the kitchen counter and toss them to my sister. A frequent inhabitant of the passenger seat, I am more than happy to relinquish control of the car. We head into the sticky garage, and the familiar humidity of a Rhode Island summer greets us. Our routine begins.
“Liu Bei’s men were getting closer. You could hear them beating their drums, waving their torches, shouting their war songs into the frigid air as they sailed closer and closer.
Solutions by The State News
