On the way to the appointment, they talk about their New Year’s plans. It’s December, and A is getting her tattoos removed. M is driving her because she is the only friend A trusts enough to witness the betrayal of her former belief in permanency. M also just likes to drive her places pretty often. ...
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 ...
Baba talks like he will never stop again.
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:
It is easier, sometimes, to be outside of oneself.
I stand on the chair, trying to keep my balance. My right arm stretches upwards as I reach for the top shelf, and I carefully grab the heavy box. I place it on my desk and I open it, and there it is: “When I grow up I will fly.” Among all my old hand-written letters, I choose this one to keep reading. ...
I stepped onto a campus sidewalk, two days after the rush of move-in and still unsure how to find my way to V-Dub from my EmWool dorm, the Main Green a foreign field. I remember staring at your face, confused about why you were extending your arm forward to shake my hand, completely oblivious to the ...
I squeeze my eyes shut before the dive, even though they’re encased in my thick, blurry goggles. Perhaps my fear has to do with the near-drowning incident two summers ago, when the artificial blue waves of Sahara Sam’s Water Park held me down and I suddenly couldn't remember which way the sky was. ...
Seemingly, Paris is quiet at 1 p.m. on a Monday—at least in the Marais. I am sitting outside of a café, hoping for a mysterious, protagonistic moment with my journal and my whole milk latte (something only acceptable in France). The wind sends shivers down my spine, ripples through the pages of my ...
When we were kids, my cousin Lucas liked to build stuff. A computer, once, I think, and definitely a 3D printer. His house was filled with all these gadgets that seemed like they had been beamed straight out of a sci-fi movie. He was three years older than me and the coolest person I knew. My younger ...
After yet another late arrival, I wrote this in my notebook:
I rarely speak my native language at Brown. When I come back to my dorm and think in English—out of habit—I feel pathetic. It’s not because I don’t enjoy speaking it—it's this shift that reminds me of the performativity that underlies daily conversations. I sit on the floor and catch myself ...
You came to outrun last semester. The slacking, the smoke, the classes you let tip into a soft, resinous fog. You blamed Donnie Hazel. Hazel of midnight joints, floor-creak monologues, and the art of drifting out of the abstract world of collegiate commitment. So you hit I-95 and called it reform. New ...
As my feet, clad in an obnoxious blue and orange sneaker combo, hit the pavement again and again and again, I can’t help but feel guilty.
Mama Instant Noodles Shrimp Flavor (Tom Yum). That squeaky wrinkle sound became pleasing when I tore open the foil packaging. I dumped the brick of ramen and the powder of spices into a bowl, and my fingers darted to the switch on my electric kettle. I now had only a minute to get everything ready.
I dip a tiny strip of photographic paper into a vat of developer and I watch it sink. Tapping it gently with popsicle-stick prongs, I let my mind wander for two whole minutes. I’ll stop the developing process by running it into the “stop bath” for half a minute, then into the fixer solution for ...
Solutions by The State News
