on fragmentation and my disappearance [A&C]
By Leanna Bai | October 27Please hand-write a one page essay about yourself. Due tomorrow.
Please hand-write a one page essay about yourself. Due tomorrow.
I first felt certainty at my masaní’s (grandmother’s) farm. I felt safe in her hogan, curled up with blankets, the stove fire hot on my cheeks, side-by-side with my younger siblings. I’d listen to their breathing, a steady rhythm accompanied by soft crackles from the burning wood. Through her ...
My oldest sister, Nikila, brought Radish home as a party favor when I was in the third grade. He was a purple betta fish, our family’s first pet, and the first animal I would ever form a bond with. I would crawl into my sister’s room every day after school to catch a glimpse of Radish swimming in ...
In kindergarten, our class read the story of the Gingerbread Girl, who comes alive after she is baked and runs away to escape being eaten. We had parents come into class and help us build gingerbread people, and then set them in the oven to bake during recess, only to find them missing when we returned. ...
“Robin-Robin-Robin—after this, you’re gonna be a man!”
I am a gentle giant on stilts as I stumble in my heels across the wooden floors of my kitchen. He’s already in the car, as he always is. I shove a Ziploc pouch of apple wedges into my oversized and overstuffed tote bag and flounder out the garage door.
Since around summer 2020, “casual Instagram” and other “casual” forms of social media have taken over celebrity profiles—not to mention those of the general public. Despite conflicting opinions on the trend, casual Instagram has many abandoning highly edited posts in favor of blurry mirror ...
When I was in the fifth grade, I was given an assignment to write a poem about “who I am.” A big task, really, for a fifth grader with naive brown eyes and puffy cheeks and very little concept of what it meant to be something or someone. In a font meant to imitate handwriting, centered on a page, ...
As I walk into my living room, my dog Sammie lifts her head at the sound of my approaching footsteps. My eyes meet her sleepy round ones, full of—as I believe—the secrets to world peace and of the universe. As I gaze into her sweet chocolate eyes, I notice the slight wag of her perfectly curly pug ...
I’ve always known that if you really try to stare into space long enough, you can pry open the screen of reality and reveal a sliver of what is behind. Growing up, it was like a game, to lie awake during naptime and stare until I could see the frames of the world shifting off-kilter the slightest ...
“If you run away,” said his mother, “I will run after you. For you are my little bunny.”
NOTICE: The recommendations in this article are NOT from a professional doctor, a pre-med student, or even someone who remotely comprehends biology. The following “facts” are based on an English concentrator’s own experiences for remedying sicknesses. She is not to be held responsible for worsening ...
It’s roughly 5 p.m. I’m plopped down at our six-seat kitchen table and observing my roommates as they begin to trickle in from their days on campus in search of food for their rumbling bellies. A symphony commences: microwave beeps, fridge slams, the click of our gas stove that has a laggy ignition. ...
Morgan Wallen hails from Tennessee—the home of the Ku Klux Klan, the former land of lynch mobs, and the deathbed of the Civil Rights Movement’s greatest hero—and croons endlessly about its virtues and beauty. After he famously said the N-word, his fans made him a martyr to cancel culture, saluting ...
Fall is really flying by, thanks to the universe deciding to jump from summer breeze to winter gales (with a little help from a hurricane), and I bet some of you are freezing your asses off. The wind is blowing, the rain is pelting, and you are caught on 45 degree mornings wearing sweat shorts and another ...
Cake week. Episode One. As I watch the notification from Netflix momentarily block out my chemistry notes on an early Friday morning, I let out a sigh of relief. The start of autumn has officially been rung in by everyone’s favorite justification for giving themselves a break: the Great British Bake ...
In her aggressively air-conditioned studio, Asher White—musician, visual artist, writer—struggles to keep a blanket up around her shoulders as she looks for a pencil and paper. She wants to explain to me how she conceptualizes songwriting using a graph with four quadrants. The graph is structured ...
Your first therapist is for a speech delay. She feeds you sentences and you regurgitate them back to her. She makes you drop pennies into a mason jar. She teaches you animal sounds, fills the house with oink and moo. After a few months, she leaves, and your voice stays.
I came into work for my typical Thursday evening shift at High Point Creamery to find my coworker, Ashley, in tears. I didn't know her very well—only that she was in her late twenties, assistant manager of the shop, and that she was married to another one of my other coworkers, Sam. They lived ...