Also luckily, like all the book reviews I write, I will simply use this opportunity to spin the themes of The Sun Also Rises into as many new and interesting shapes as I can.

The plot is roughly: a man named Jake Barnes, footsoldier of the Lost Generation, has relocated to the expatriate communities of Paris. Tangled up in the web of Brett Ashley, a beautiful and beautifully promiscuous woman who can’t seem to help but fall in love with every man she sees, he tries to move on from WWI’s lingering shadows (which include an unspecified war wound that has left him impotent). His friends include Robert Cohn, an insecure Jewish writer and ex-boxer who strikes up a weekend fling with Brett and falls irreparably in love with her, Mike Campbell, whom Brett is to be married to, and Bill Gorton, another ex-soldier and perhaps gay (I jest, but he is the only one not to fall under Brett’s spell, so one must wonder).

Together, the five of them make their way down to Pamplona, Spain, to watch the bullfighting at the festival of San Fermìn. There, Brett falls in love with our last character, the entrancing bullfighter Pedro Romero, nineteen years old and already a portrait of masculinity.

But don’t rely on me to summarize such classics — please, read the book, or at the very least, someone else’s book review.

Still with me? I kind of figured.

Now, to the things I would like to talk about:

1. A Sense of Place Among Expats

I rather liked a conversation early on between Jake and Robert about the importance of place. Robert wants to go to South America because he has just realized he is defined by more than the few relationships he’s had. He’s let himself be trapped by his past two loves because he had always assumed they were more than he deserved; now he’s woken up, and he feels like he must travel to a new place to make up for all the time he’s lost.

At one point, he asks Jake if Jake has ever gotten the feeling that “all your life is going by and you’re not taking advantage of it?” Jake responds the only way one can: “What the hell, Robert.”

But still. It’s a valid question. Robert, in all his insecurity, feels a mirror to my own doubts, except I’ve been asking myself these questions since I was a child, and Robert only stumbles upon them at thirty-five.

Jake cuts to the heart of the matter in his rebuttal: he knows Robert does not want to go to South America out of a lofty desire to take advantage of the fullness of his newfound life. Robert wants to go to South America because he feels it will make him into something better, as if a change of scene could rewrite scripture. Maybe, Robert thinks, South America could make me love myself.

Jake goes ahead and says it straight:

“Listen, Robert, going to another country doesn’t make any difference. I’ve tried all that. You can’t get away from yourself by moving from one place to another. There’s nothing to that.”

But Jake has himself moved away from the past, has he not? Born in Kansas City, Kansas, shipped to the Italian front, and now studiously avoiding his wartime past in the Quarter. “Why don’t you start living your life in Paris?” Jake asks Robert. Really, he could ask himself the same question.

Trying to remake oneself in new, unfamiliar lands is what all expats are doing. Robert going to South America is no different than Jake going to Paris or Pamplona. Later, Bill summarizes expatriatism for Jake:

“”You’re an expatriate. You’ve lost touch with the soil. You get precious. Fake European standards have ruined you. You drink yourself to death. You become obsessed by sex. You spend all your time talking, not working. You are an expatriate, see? You hang around cafés.”

All of these little changes that Bill has noted down like writing a check, all these different ways expatriatism changes a person, and yet their conversation ultimately comes back around to Jake’s impotency and his accident. At the end of the day, Jake is still Jake. He has not shed his old wounds, nor his old feelings, in this new country.

In this way, perhaps, the entire book is about how the same struggles are carried from place to place, and no one ever gets away from themselves.

2. Brett & Jake & Love

At the beginning of The Sun Also Rises, Brett is in love with Jake, and Jake is in love with Brett. They have come to some understanding, though, even before their first meeting on-screen, that they can not be together. This is not for any of the usual reasons of fidelity, as we quickly discover that when Brett falls for a man, she has no qualms about the pursuit. Instead, it is because of Jake’s old, unspecified war wound, which has left him impotent. Many jokes and allusions are made to this wound — I wondered as I read if his penis had been shot off, because that seemed reasonable given the allusions, but apparently Hemingway himself said in an interview that this was not the case. Was it a psychosomatic thing, then? It is hard to say.

Brett loves Jake, and Brett, for the first time in her life, loves a man she cannot be with. She can have any man she wants (which we see later with Romero), except Jake.

During their first on-screen interaction, back in Paris, they have a little conversation about love:

“It’s funny,” I said. “It’s very funny. And it’s a lot of fun, too, to be in love.”

“Do you think so?” Her eyes looked flat again.

“I don’t mean fun that way. In a way it’s an enjoyable feeling.”

“No,” she said. “I think it’s hell on earth.”

“It’s good to see each other.”

“No. I don’t think it is.”

“Don’t you want to?”

“I have to.”

I think this is Brett’s perspective on all love. She is promiscuous, yes — she has affairs with Robert and Romero, she is to be married to Mike, and she loves Jake. But she does not do it for the thrill or even because she wants to. No, she does it because she has to, because she is compelled to, because something in her is forcing her hand.

It’s an interesting perspective on love, and while Jake never seems to weigh in on it, having sworn off love because of his injury, the other characters seem to agree.

For example, take Robert. A few weeks after Robert’s weekend tryst with Brett, he sees her again, only to find himself a stranger in Brett’s eyes. Robert proceeds to spend their time in Spain making a fool of himself: following Brett everywhere like a stray puppy and picking fights with everyone. Many characters tell Robert to stop, and Robert himself acknowledges that what he’s doing is awful and shameful and embarrassing. But he can’t help it. It isn’t that he wants to do this; it’s only that he has to.

3. Brett & Jake & Love, Part II

Later, in Spain, after many arguments between Mike and Robert (on account of Robert’s having slept with Brett, and Mike’s planning to marry her), Jake reassesses his relationship with Brett. Specifically, he thinks to himself:

“To hell with women, anyway. To hell with you, Brett Ashley.”

Then, on further rumination:

“Women made such swell friends. Awfully swell. In the first place, you had to be in love with a woman to have a basis of friendship. I had been having Brett for a friend. I had not been thinking about her side of it. I had been getting something for nothing. That only delayed the presentation of the bill.”

I spent a long time trying to decipher this passage. Now, I’m no English major (I am, in fact, planning a degree in engineering), but still, I feel like it should not have puzzled me as it did. I could not decide whether Jake thought that relationships, specifically male-female relationships, were transactional or simply that they were limited in lifespan. I could not tell if Jake really meant what he said, or if this was his bitterness speaking. Or the alcohol. I could not tell whether, when he talked about not thinking about “her side of it,” he meant that he had been leading Brett along and had not thought about how he would inevitably have to disappoint her because he could not follow through with that love. Or did he mean that he had not thought about how she had been suffering all along? Because she certainly seemed, back in Book I, to have been suffering all along.

4. Philosophies of life

Anyway, Jake moves from his bill to Brett to bills in general:

“Enjoying living was learning to get your money’s worth and knowing when you had it. You could get your money’s worth. The world was a good place to buy in. It seemed like a fine philosophy. In five years, I thought, it will seem just as silly as all the other fine philosophies I’ve had.

Perhaps that wasn’t true, though. Perhaps as you went along you did learn something. I did not care what it was all about. All I wanted to know was how to live in it. Maybe if you found out how to live in it you learn from that what is was all about.”

I love this part because it goes just the way my thoughts go. First, Jake proposes a new philosophy that he came up with, drunk and depressed and lying on his bed. Life is just about paying the bills, he thinks to himself; enjoying life is learning which bills to pay and which not to.

Then he thinks to himself, well why don’t I adopt this philosophy?. After all, all his philosophies turn out to be silly in retrospect, so why not adopt another one, a transactional one, one that mirrors how he feels about Brett?

And then he turns around again. He argues against himself, saying that this kind of cynicism is the wrong way to go about things, because every wrong philosophy he’s adopted is something he has learned. Everything he has learned has taught him how to live in the world. Maybe, if he learned enough about how to live in the world, he could learn retrospectively what life was all about.

This is how my thoughts go to: I think of a new, somewhat stupid idea; I think, cynically, all my ideas are stupid anyway, so why not throw myself into this one?; and then (this is the part I haven’t quite mastered) I think, everything I’ve done has turned me into who I am now, so maybe I should spend less time judging my ideas and more time throwing my shoulder to the wheel.

5. The True Passion (of bullfighting)

In Pamplona, Jake and co. bear witness to a wonder of his trade: Pedro Romero, bullfighter. If you are to read The Sun Also Rises for anything, read it for the descriptions of Romero’s bullfighting. Hemingway manages to convey such a sense of skill and competence at a sport most know nothing about — we readers do not know by which metrics we are to judge bullfights, but we are taught, and then we are taught who has scored well along these metrics, and how we know they have scored well. Hemingway leads us through Romero’s fights the way Romero leads the bull around the ring; that’s the best analogy I can come up with.

What Romero has is not called competence, though. It is called “afición,” or passion. I like the passage where Jake is interrogated by a collection of Spanish aficionados to determine if he truly has afición or if he is simply excited. I think it encapsulates this concept of “afición” well. Jake describes it like this:

“There was no password, no set questions that could bring it out, rather it was a sort of oral spiritual examination with the questions always a little on the defensive and never apparent”

Passion, here, is a feeling. The only way to prove passion is indescribable; there is no test, nor one right answer. Similarly, when one has that passion, one has gained some higher status. Jake describes how another aficionado, Montoya, viewed bullfighters:

“Montoya could forgive anything of a bullfighter who had afición. He could forgive attaches of nerves, panic, bad unexplainable actions, all sorts of lapses. For one who had afición he could forgive anything.”

Oh how wonderful it would be if all the world worked like this, for all things! If passion trumped every bad unexplainable action, because all of us could see you had put your heart and soul into it.

6. Brett & Jake & Love, Part III

At the end of the book, I couldn’t quite tell if Brett and Jake were still in love. Brett had run off with Romero, only to find that they were incompatible species. Brett then sent Romero away and telegraphed for Jake, begging rescue; Jake, ever chivalrous, traveled from Paris to Madrid and picked her up from her hotel.

This naturally speaks of love. Jake clearly cares for Brett, enough to travel from Paris to a place he has just left, and all this despite Brett running off with Romero. Or perhaps Jake came to understand the way Brett felt love as a powerful, uncontrollable force that swept her up into whirlwind romances and, just as suddenly, back down to Earth.

Brett similarly sent for Jake when she needed rescue, which could speak to her deep love for him, but could also speak to the path of ruined relationships she had created by running away with Romero.

At the very end of the book, Brett is to be married to Mike, who will happily take her back, and Jake is to return to Paris and continue his journalism. We end with a beautiful little vignette:

“Oh, Jake,” Brett said, “we could have had such a damned good time together.”

Ahead was a mounted policeman in khaki directing traffic. He raised his baton. The car slowed suddenly pressing Brett against me.

“Yes,” I said. Isn’t it pretty to think so?”

I wonder if the strength of Jake and Brett’s relationship is not built on their being very much in love with each other while being entirely unable (unwilling?) to act on those feelings. In the afterglow of the what-could-have-been, they have built a mutual understanding. Brett will always call Jake first, and Jake will always answer, and in this way, they will stay forever in love without having ever to fall out of love, as Brett has a habit of doing with everyone she pursues and wins.

In another life, they might well have had a damned good time together. Maybe Brett would find fidelity. Maybe, as a romantic might imagine, Brett is only so promiscuous and so deeply disappointed in every tryst she has because her heart belongs to Jake and she can’t find happiness anywhere else. I think it is in Brett’s nature to view love as something that passes through and never stays, though. I think Jake and Brett would not have lasted any longer than Brett and Mike or Brett and Romero. I think it’s the imagining of a romance that is the true romance between the two of them.

Like Jake says: isn’t it pretty to think so?

More so these days, because it comes up again and again; resting on the windowsills, under the dresser, laid out on the table beside my plate, half-hidden behind the shower curtain, tucked into my notebook like a bookmark. Death has haunted me since I’ve known of it, but some days it appears more violently and suddenly than I expect. It rears its ugly head and demands I stare unflinchingly into its sunken, empty eyes.

I do not like to personify death; not in any cliche form. Death should be like the kind, cheerful Death of The Sandman, Terry Pratchett’s beloved, sympathetic Death who loves cats and pretends to be Santa Claus, or the exhausted, deeply kind Death who narrates The Book Thief. Anything but the Death of Harry Potter and every myth (Thanatos, Azrael, Hel, Mot, Yama, fuck them all), the Death of every poem and every Shakespeare play and every goddamn Medieval painting.

Someone in my family is dying. She gets neurological tests and sees the doctor for her balance, her memory, strange pains that crop up and won’t go away. No one says she is dying, but I see it in the looks they exchange when they think I’m not looking. And she is not dying, exactly, not right in this moment. Still, she is coming closer to death. Death brushes her hand with cold fingers. Death lingers in the doorway when she enters a room.

She has been coming closer to death for a while now, presumably. We just never noticed until she started getting dizzy and falling more often and began forgetting little things and, later, big things. Or maybe she really is dying in this moment. I can think of nothing but the worst.

Why will no one will say it aloud, even though it is so visible, so stark? As if saying it out loud makes a difference, even though we all know the facts of the matter. Words uttered are hard to take back, and this makes us believe they have the power to make something so. But really, all words give us is a way to put the inevitable into something manageable.

Every so often she has another visit to the doctor’s, and the family is convened to review the results of this and that test, and they each have a look in their eyes that means they are realizing the people in their lives are mortal afer all. A realization others have already had, too early in life, a kaleidoscope you look into once and can never forget.

I forget, sometimes, often, that others in my family have seen Death. I forget that I saw it once too, so young that it was washed away. I was lucky. To forget the face of Death requires a special kind of innocence; most people do not get to wipe that slate so clean.

I sometimes imagine my family dead so that I will not feel so much pain when the inevitable occurs. I dream of the cops waiting for me by the gray asphalt curb outside my dorm. I’m walking back, hand in hand with my friends, giggling. But I still even at that distance, because I’ve caught a glimpse of the uniform. Because I know, I know what they’re going to say. And one cop opens his mouth, pink flesh and white teeth flashing. The world shrinks to a point.

There’s been an accident–

Did you also imagine the deaths of your loved ones when you were little so it won’t hurt so much? Do you do it now, when you need something that hurts tangibly, the same way you might dig your nails into the palm of your hand or press a knife to the soft inner skin of your wrist, just to justify your deep, unfathomable sadness?

Usually, in these dark fantasies of mine, I grieve in sobs and screams and violence. I have less inhibitions in my dreams; I punch the walls, I tear apart furniture and friendships alike with the desperation of a cornered animal. I let myself feel every emotion.

Usually, in these fantasies of mine, I learn to move on. The grief becomes a stinging wound that does not heal, a Tragic Past that nips at my heels and comes up in casual conversation. It is a Past I can be bitter over, a cut I can nurse and bandage and protect and let fester.

Sometimes, in these fantasies, I think about the stories I would tell if I ever needed to give a eulogy. I try to remember the best memories I have of each person and how I can spin a story that rings true. I always incorporate humor, even though I am torn about whether I should. I could never read writing that was only solemn; I need a phrase I can say with a breathy, half-sobbed laugh or I’ll never make it though.

If I were ever called to give a eulogy, I imagine I would cry bitter and ugly tears. I can’t see how I could finish any speech, however moving and well-threaded it might be. I don’t like others to see me cry, so I would fight the tears desperately, but they would come anyway. Utterly humiliated, I would break down in front of the crowd and run off stage to hide in the bathroom. I would be unable to finish my story, my perfect story, the story that perfectly encapsulates and honors the person to whom I still have words to give.

Usually, in these fantasies of mine, there is something I never told the person who is dead. It might be a regret, like never having said i love you, an annoyance I nursed until it was too late to vent, a sorrow I wish I had shared, a secret I wanted to confess. I am always a day too late in the telling, and I am left with nothing but the bitter taste of regret.

Usually, in these fantasies of mine, the person who has died are angry with me, they have cast me out, and that makes it easier. Easier to let their memory go, or possibly easier to keep their death as a knife to my wrist, something with which to hurt myself over and over again. Imagine their pain, I tell myself. Imagine their disappointment. Their anger. Their cutting words. You were never our daughter. Or sister. Or friend. You failed us. You failed us all. Or worse: You got us killed. If only you were faster, smarter, better. You’re the reason we’re dead.

My grief is always red-hot pain. My grief is always a way for me to hurt myself. Somehow even their death is always about my suffering.

I am so lucky that Death is but a figure in my dreams and that likely I will not have to face it for a long time. That all I see is the edge of a cloak in my closet, an eye peeking out from behind the door, a hollow emptiness reflected in the mirror. A sentence in a book, a whisper in class, a strange and subtle dream.

I am so lucky I can imagine Death and wake up and go downstairs to eat breakfast with the living.

I am so lucky I get to be afraid and do not have to understand.

“Let the past hold on to itself and let the present move forward into the future.”
Douglas Adams

My freshman year of college is over.

I’m under the covers in my bare dorm room, walls stripped of all the colorful postcards and memories they’d accumulated through the year. The window is open, finally, because my roommate departed yesterday. Through it come birdsongs and the happy shouts of people saying see you later. It feels like my last night on earth.

I’ve had a terrible year, really. I was so fcking depressed all the time, was the main issue. I spent my days oscillating between planning aborted suicide attempts, acing all my classes, and being abnormally outgoing; between this juggling act, I didn’t have time to commit much of it to memory.

So much has happened to me this year: thanks to saying yes to everything thrown my way and deciding, finally, that sleep was indeed for the weak, I was able to experience a lot of things I would never have experienced as my old, introverted self. I do not regret the night I stayed up talking with a friend on the lawn until 4 am, when the sprinklers went off. I do not regret abandoning my studies to go stargazing or to the park. I do not regret all the nights I walked to my dorm alone under the neon lights of Main Street, two fingers around my keychain in case any of the biker gang bastards tried to make a move.

However, I didn’t exactly do a lot this year, in a “this was my choice to do this/try this/experience this” way. I was a very passive (albeit high-energy) person, and I’m strongly disappointed in myself and my underperformance along this particular axis.

I came into college with a lot of expectations — this blog was one, but there were many more related to academics, lab work, and other, more rigorous achievements. I’ve continued my bare minimum: (1) taking the minimum number of difficult classes I need for my major and passing them with flying colors and lackluster studying; (2) participating in two productive clubs at purely internship-level positions (i.e., non-leadership positions) (3) joining (without really planning it) two different labs, one wet-lab and one computational.

On paper, now that I write it out, this all seems quite reasonable for a first year of college. My expectations, though, were much higher, and I think rightfully so.

I expected to start a blog that involved actually good writing, i.e., a blog that other people would interact with and leave comments on. Or at least actually read. The blog would have been a mix of genuinely insightful nonfiction and fantasy-adjacent short stories that would be building towards my first planned novel (something else I have always expected from myself).

I expected to have published at least one interesting paper by now, preferably as a first or second author.

I expected to have at least one leadership role on campus, preferably in a club relevant to my major. Preferably under the mentorship of an older student whom I would befriend and learn from, who would consider me a sort of prodigal daughter.

I also expected to have at least one person romantically interested in me, thanks to the incredible glow-up I had planned out for myself (it would have begun mid-first semester, I think).

I would have read at least three classic tomes in my free time, likely Godel, Esher, Bach, Infinite Jest, and War and Peace. I would have read these books in paperback, and when the weather turned nice, out on the lawn. My performance would have garnered impressed looks and at least one new friend, who would have knelt in the grass to talk shop with me.

Most importantly, I would have made at least one important and useful discovery about myself. I had hoped to make at least one each year I was in college, accumulating at least four life-altering truths by the end of my time here.

I said that I think these expectations were rightfully high, and I will stand by that. I was incredibly overachieving in high school, and if my mental breakdown had not begun in senior year and escalated exponentially over my freshman year in college, I honestly could see myself having accomplished most, if not all, of what is listed above.

The one thing that I would have sacrificed to achieve these things — the one sacrifice that I have not made anyway, in falling Icarus-style from the sky — is the unexpectedly close relationships I’ve developed with my new friends. I’ve come to really value these friendships, especially as someone who was always a bit of an outcast. Honestly, I would regret it if I had to sacrifice those relationships for a laundry list of accomplishments. Still, there’s a real possibility that I could have accomplished two-thirds, even three-fourths of my list while still retaining those relationships if I hadn’t deteriorated so thoroughly.

The biggest regret I have from this year is the series of bad habits I’ve accumulated. My prolonged mental breakdown would honestly have been fine if it could have been resolved in containment. Instead, I now find myself having to fix my terrible mental issues alongside a series of unbreakable new habits.

These habits include: truly atrocious eating habits, i.e., not eating breakfast and sometimes lunch — fine for most people but, for me, compels me to eat multiple plate-sized chocolate-chip cookies at 11 PM or possible an entire box of Oreos; becoming addicted to melatonin to sleep (I’ve come to realize I need to take at least 4 gummies — today, in an attempt to break my habit, I went cold-turkey, but it is now 4:38 AM and I likely won’t sleep a wink; becoming vaguely addicted to coffee to stay buzzed during the day; becoming EXTREMELY addicted to listening to music 24/7, especially when trying to fall asleep, because I could no longer stay in my head with my thoughts; relatedly, downloading a series of social media apps and video games for distraction, which has (1) drastically increased my screentime, (2) caused me to break my lifelong rule of no screens before bed, screwing over carefully developed reading habits, (3) opened up a world of new, worse habits (thanks, Tumblr), and (4) overall decreased my ability to think carefully and critically and the time I have to dedicate to academic pursuits.

Weirdly, I think I’m going to miss this, though. I tend to do that — to romanticize periods of my life when I felt particularly low. I miss my middle school years, when I cried every night over my tenuous relationship with my best friend and wasted my time doomscrolling webtoon and ao3 and writing shitty fanfiction. I miss my freshman year of high school, when I was so lonely I ate every meal outside and read 126 books in one year, and cried for fifteen minutes in the single-stall bathroom before and after every exam. I miss my junior year of high school, where I was so busy and so stressed out of my mind that I would wake up at 2 am and stay awake until 4 am every single day, just staring at the ceiling and willing my heartbeat to slow. I have yet to miss my senior year, but I’m sure one day I’ll look back with lingering nostalgia on my year of starving myself out of my mind and crying every day over college applications, and then later, absurdly, college decisions.

I already catch myself romanticizing this winter, when I would walk every night down to the bridge by the water and weigh the pros and cons of swallowing the bottle of pills I kept on hand for such occasions. There will certainly be parts I wipe from my memory like bad dreams, but there are little pieces I’ll remember forever – the beige of the bathroom stall I’d use when indulging in my worst habits, the quiet walk by the river, certain food places I frequented late at night, staying up all night to see the stars move across the sky.

I’ve been reading a lot of other essays on this site from college students. They really seem to know their stuff — the students I usually read are MIT students, though, so perhaps that tracks. They write a lot of good narrative essays about themselves, while simultaneously writing some very good nonfiction. They can seamlessly tie their lives to greater ideas, whether that is the circuitry of the mind or the lifecycle of a tree or simply the lyricism of a beautiful sentence. Their narratives never feel self-centered because they bring something beyond a summary of their lives. I fear that this is just another box I have yet to tick — I am no poetic prodigy, much as I like to play as one, and therefore my yearly review will have to stay just that, and nothing more.

I will say goodbye here, then, before things get too long. I just hope this summer will be more more more, just as this year has already been so many different, ever-shifting colors.

The Prediction

This poem is a mimic of “The Prediction” by Mark Strand.1

IF HOPE IS A THING WITH FEATHERS THEN I AM NOTHING AT ALL

This poem is a mimic of “‘Hope’ is the thing with feathers” by Emily Dickinson.

137 Species Go Extinct Every Day and Your Neighbor Uses ChatGPT to Write Birthday Cards

This is a mimic poem of “The Bees are Dying and Your Neighbor is Searching Recipes on ChatGPT” by Meggie Royer.2

The Perks of Writing Mimic Poems

Mimic poems are great for many situations.

1. If you don’t feel confident in your poetry, writing a mimic poem can take away that self-consciousness and embarrassment around your writing abilities, because you are mimicking a well-known and well-regarded piece. As someone who believes her poetry is utter shit, this can be helpful.

2. If you feel you haven’t found your voice, mimicking other poets’ voices can help you discern what you like and what you don’t like. For me, I sometimes find myself changing the poet’s style towards something that must be closer to my own.

3. If you don’t have the motivation, energy or creativity in the moment to write an original piece, using another piece or a couple of lines as a starting point can keep the words flowing. I wrote all three of these poems when I was quite exhausted, but I didn’t feel like they were painful to set down.

All to say, try it for yourself, and let me know.

Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino is not the book I was expecting. It is written in an Arabian Nights style, a set of double-page descriptions of fantastical cities framed by a conversation between Marco Polo, the explorer and the storyteller, and Kublai Khan, the emperor, the commissioner of the report, and the listener. Each city is described only as a place. There are no character interactions and we follow no individuals; there are only long descriptions of city streets and building walls, lampposts and bridges. Because of this framing, each narration feels removed, like we’re reading a list of cities set down in a travel guide or on a blog.

Each city serves a larger purpose, though. The chapters are named not by the name of the city but by a category. “Cities and Desire 4” or “Cities and the Sky 2”. That is, perhaps, our first hint at larger, unifying themes. Some cities have mirror cities of the dead or of the unborn or of the infernal or of heavenly virtue. Some cities blossom outward, ever expanding, while other cities pick up and move when the inhabitants tire of their old lives. One city’s pathways trace the orbits of celestial bodies; another city is built on wooden string bridges suspended over a chasm of mist.

Every scene is beautifully written. It is a book translated from Italian, and like Elena Ferrante’s Napolitano series, it retains a foreignness that makes the language formal in a way that perfectly suits the narration and the subject matter. Each chapter is not more than a few pages, and that too suits the vignette-style guidebook it becomes.

Occasionally, we get italicized conversations between Marco Polo and Kublai Khan which further illuminate important themes. Khan is trying to understand his empire, and when he first meets Marco Polo, Polo does not speak his language. Consequently, they speak in gestures which hint at further meanings. When Polo does eventually learn Khan’s language, they quickly find that the precision of a shared speech can not replace the fluidity and innate understanding of gestures, and they return again to their shared, unspoken language of signs and symbols. Eventually that too becomes stagnant and repetitive, and they fall silent, fabricating conversations, exchanges, rejoinders, questions, in their minds.

There are themes of memory in this book as well. Again and again, Polo emphasizes that no city is static or unchanging. To return to a place is really to visit another place, a place set in the future. To return to a place is also, importantly, to visit the past. To recall a place in description, as Polo does to Khan, is also to warp it and even forget it as it was. Everything happens only once and can never be remembered.

I never quite understood the title. Don’t get me wrong, there were many illusions to invisible cities. There was a sense that the cities described by Polo were fictional even to Khan; there was a sense that the cities were symbols and past, present and future woven into space; there was a sense that the cities could be places that were yet-to-be, places with technology, places with today’s names; there was a sense that the cities were really the places beyond cities, the mirror images of the lives we lead in reality. Still, despite all of the references to invisible cities, I didn’t quite understand. Are invisible cities the ones that hover just beyond our sight and haunt us? Are invisible cities the ones we construct as prisons or homes for ourselves out of thin air? Do invisible cities invite us to think of our entire being as a series of symbols yearning for life? Do invisible cities simply serve as metaphors that reveal to us what our lives are, have been, could be? All I know is that we all live in invisible cities; I’m still trying to figure out what that means.

1. Write a paragraph or two (the best thing to do is spill your thoughts out. i promise that however stupid your thoughts are, we can polish it up in the next few steps)

Today I went to the grocery store. It wasn’t as exciting as you might be imagining, I only had to buy some yogurts because I was out. I ran into a friend on the way, which was different because the path I take is usually empty. For once I waved at her, instead of ducking my head and hiding in my phone the way I usually avoid eye contact. I’m trying to get better. I walked by the river today because my friend texted something stupid that hurt me more than it should have. I wanted to do something worse in the bathroom, but I thought better of myself and decided to be healthy and well for once. Which, for the record, I did for exactly that amount of time, because both before and after I was my normal problematic self. Then I stood and stared out across the water under the bridge and thought about the things I could do. Anyway, do you think this paragraph is long enough to write a poem with? I think it depends on how long the poem will be. I had an essay this morning in my class. I hadn’t realized how long it's been since I wrote an essay, especially a timed one. I’ve forgotten my words and the English language. It’s actually so bad, I wish I could turn back time to a moment when I knew how to string together a sentence.

2. Add line breaks wherever the hell you feel like it (longer is better, maybe — my English teacher always said that people tend to cut their lines too short when starting out, before they’ve got a proper feel for poetry)

Today I went to the grocery store.
It wasn’t as exciting as you might be imagining,
I only had to buy some yogurts because I was out. I ran into a friend on the way,
which was different because the path I take is usually empty.
For once I waved at her, instead of ducking my head and hiding in my phone
the way I usually avoid eye contact. I’m trying to get better.
I walked by the river today because my friend texted something stupid that hurt me more than it should have.
I wanted to do something worse in the bathroom,
but I thought better of myself and decided to be healthy and well for once.
Which, for the record, I did for exactly that amount of time, because both before and after
I was my normal problematic self.
Then I stood and stared out across the water under the bridge and thought about the things I could do. Anyway, do you think this paragraph is long enough to write a poem with?
I think it depends on how long the poem will be.
I had an essay this morning in my class. I hadn’t realized how long it's been since I wrote an essay, especially a timed one.
I’ve forgotten my words and the English language.
It’s actually so bad, I wish I could turn back time to a moment when I knew how to string together a sentence.

3. Cross out & make minor adjustments like there’s no tomorrow (poetry is not necessarily meant to follow grammatical structure, so get wild with it. Some tips: cut any filler words you might have included in your rambling, change the tense of at least a few verbs, add some unrelated nouns, add some adjectives and figurative language. Often when we ramble at least half of what we say is fluff, so cut at least half of what you’ve said)

Today, I went to the grocery store.
It wasn’t as exciting as you might be imagine ing,
I only had to buy some yogurts. A pomegranate and strawberries. Soft rain. because I was out.
I ran into a friendon the way, which was different
because the path I am take is usually empty.
For once, I waved at her, instead of turning my head towards the sunset, ducking my head and hiding in my phone
the way I usually avoiding eye contact. I’m trying to get better.
Today, the river I walked by the river today
because my friend texted something stupid that hurt me more than it should have.
I wanted to do something worse in the bathroom,
but I thought better of myself and decided to be healthy and well for once.
Which, f(For the record, I did for exactly that amount of time, because both before and after
I was only my normal problematic self).
Then I stood and stared out across the water under the bridge and thought about the things I could do. Anyway,
Do you think this paragraph is long enough to write a poem with?
I think it depends on how long the poem will be.
I had an essay this morning in my class. I hadn’t realized how long it's been so long since I wrote an essay, especially a timed one.
I couldn’t seem to think.
Some yogurts. A pomegranate and strawberries. Soft rain.
I’ve forgotten my words and the English language.
It’s actually so Too bad, I wish I could never turn back time to a moment when I knew how to thread string together a sentence.

4. Finishing touches (cut some things, add some things, rearrange; for me, this also involves adding stanza breaks)

Today, the grocery store.
It wasn’t exactly like you imagine,
I only had to buy some yogurts, a pomegranate and strawberries. Soft rain.
I ran into a friend, which was different
because I am usually empty.

For once, I waved, instead of avoiding eye contact.
I’m trying to get better.
Today, the river.
Because my friend texted and I,
I wanted something worse in the bathroom,

but I thought better of myself.
(For the record,
I was only being selfish brave thoughtless myself).
I stood and stared across the water, which is
Water under the bridge, watch it pass us by.

I thought about the things I could want.
Some yogurts, a pomegranate and strawberries. Soft rain.
Anyway,
Do you think this is long enough to write a poem with?
I think it depends on how long the poem will be.

Today, an essay.
It's been so long since I was timed. I couldn’t seem to think.
I’ve forgotten my words and the English language.
Too bad, you can never
Turn back time to a moment when I knew how to thread a sentence.

5. Title it & done! (If you can’t think of a title, the first line of your poem is always a great way to start, or any other small snippet from your poem)

Today, The Grocery Store

Today, the grocery store.
It wasn’t exactly like you imagine,
I only had to buy some yogurts, a pomegranate and strawberries. Soft rain.
I ran into a friend, which was different
because I am usually empty.

For once, I waved, instead of avoiding eye contact.
I’m trying to get better.
Today, the river.
Because my friend texted and I,
I wanted something worse in the bathroom,

but I thought better of myself.
(For the record,
I was only being selfish brave thoughtless myself).
I stood and stared across the water, which is
Water under the bridge, watch it pass us by.

I thought about the things I could want.
Some yogurts, a pomegranate and strawberries. Soft rain.
Anyway,
Do you think this is long enough to write a poem with?
I think it depends on how long the poem will be.

Today, an essay.
It's been so long since I was timed. I couldn’t seem to think.
I’ve forgotten my words and the English language.
Too bad, you can never
Turn back time to a moment when I knew how to thread a sentence.

I do always adore writing fake deep tumblr poetry, so thanks for coming along for the ride. Try this exercise at home, and send me the final results if you feel so inclined.

CLARA sits alone at an old wooden desk in an abandoned schoolroom. The room resembles the old-fashioned, dark academia schoolrooms of English boardinghouses and Oxford before the Aztec Empire. CLARA sits at the front of the room and faces the blackboard, but her head is turned so that she is looking slightly to the right of it, out the window. It is cloudy out there, and gray, like a storm is brewing. A light rain patters against the roof. Without turning around, she speaks—

CLARA: Get the FUCK out of my head.

There’s another figure in the room. It’s CROW, standing in the back, among the old bookshelves and piles of textbooks and a spare chair or two. She leans casually against the bookshelf nearest to her, expression halfway between bored and amused.

CROW: Hello to you too.

CLARA narrows her eyes at the windows, which reflect the storm in her eyes.

CLARA: What do you want.

CROW shifts amicably, crossing her arms and leaning more deeply against the bookshelf before she replies.

CROW: [mildly, a non-response to CLARA’s non-question] Look, I’m your better half. You know that, right? Just let me have your body. A day or two is all I would need. I promise, I can make you something great.

CLARA: Leave me alone.

CROW: Don’t tell me this isn’t what you’re always craving. I could make you into a tortured genius or a prodical daughter. A martyr and a saint or a sinner celebrée. A manic-psychotic, a girl with a heart of stone.

CROW: I can remake you into whoever–whatever–you desire. All you have to do is let yourself rest for a moment. All you have to do is let me in.

CLARA grits her teeth. She still stares straight ahead of her, but her gaze has become dull and lifeless.

CLARA: Leave. Me. Alone.

CROW waits a moment, lets the silence and the rain swell to fill the room.

CROW: [somehow even more mildly] You know I can’t do that.

CLARA: You’re nothing without me.

CROW: And yet you stay. Does that not say more about you than it does me?

CLARA: Fuck off.

CROW: Feisty.

You can practically hear the smirk in CROW's voice.

CROW: If I were gone, what would you do? Honestly.

CLARA is silent.

CROW: You’d have no one to talk to.

CLARA is silent.

CROW: You’d be nobody.

CLARA is silent.

CROW: You don’t think you’d go insane, in the resonating quiet?

CLARA is silent.

CROW: Just you, in ever-expanding darkness?

CLARA is silent.

CROW is also silent. She lets the silence go on and on to prove her point. They are waiting to see who will cave first.

The wind whistles through the windows—they can hear it’s faint keening despite the glass and the brick walls. It sounds like a child who got lost in a supermarket, begging to be allowed by the universe to go home.

CLARA: [suddenly, violently, bitingly] You don’t fucking know me, Crow.

CROW knows, when CLARA is the first to speak, that she’s wonm and she begins to smile. CLARA know’s CROW’s won, too, and she flinches when she finishes her sentence.

CROW: [stretching like a cat while kicking off from the wall into a standing position] My offer remains standing. My hand remains outstretched.

CROW: Don’t ever forget that you need me, Clara. Don’t you ever forget.

The room and all the books, the bookshelves, the scattered papers, the old wooden desks with unknown initials etched into them, are caught up in a great storm that smashes the windows inwards and uproots everything. All is chaos and noise, the shattering glass a rain of silver, the wind a raw and hurtling anger. CLARA raises her arms above her head to shield herelf from the onslaught but there seems no escape, and then—

As quickly as it begins, it ends. Everything swirls tighter and tighter, racing inwards to a central point like a black hole. There is a slight flicker, almost a glitch, and all flashes out of existence.

When you’re thinking “well, at least this is better than the alternative” and then you have to pause, because suddenly you’re not sure.

You know it’s been a bad night when you’re scrolling fanfic on ao3 to distract yourself from the itching and the ache, but the only fics you open, you later notice, are the ones with tags like “self-harm” and “bulimia” and “suicidal ideation”.

When your computer is playing indie rock music over a pirated tv show while you alternate between reading a webcomic, scrolling ao3, and playing a video game on your phone because only with this maximum overstimulation will your brain turn off.

When only by experiencing everything simultaneously can you achieve blessed silence inside your skull.

You know it’s been a bad night when you’ve turned the lights off, then on, then off again about a thousand times by now.

When you kicked off your covers and unbuttoned your shirt because you’re hot and uncomfortable and you can’t make anything stand still.

When you sneak downstairs just because you can, praying that no one hears the floorboards squeak.

You know it’s been a bad night when Crow shows up.

You know it’s been a bad night when the next morning, you feel like you’re made of energy and vibrating with potential.

When the mirror grins red.

When a failure to flinch is victory enough.

You know it’s been a bad night when they say over breakfast (with their eyes and their subtexual innuendos), you look like you’re doing better, Clara.

When you laugh your way through three hours with friends and none of them ask how your slept or how you’re been holding on.

You know it’s been a bad night when you’re just counting seconds until the sun will set again.

I promised I would publish once a week, but I forgot. I was going to skip this week, too, except I did make a promise to myself, so have a small post-ramble that spilled out when I opened the ‘new post’ tab.

Dear Indigo,

You’ve been my friend for a thousand years. My greatest and truest friend. I just need you to know that, before I begin.

Today, I finally summoned the courage to ask you a question I’ve always known the answer to: Indigo, did you cut yourself way back when we were little kids? Did you cut red-raw lines into the soft underbelly of your arms? Did you make yourself bleed, when we were small and snuck off to the library after lunch instead of running circles in the grass like the other kids?

I’m sorry, Indigo, I couldn’t help changing the question when I wrote it down. To your face I said “Did you cut yourself in 7th grade?” but in my mind we were children, not tweens, still learning how to put one foot in front of the other.

I knew you cut yourself; knew about the cuts on your arms, at least, made with rocks and swiss army knives. I knew you would climb through your window and sit alone on your roof in the middle of the night. I filled in the gaps myself.

I also knew you told these things to all your other friends, but you never talked about them with me. I never got any confirmation from you and it ate me up inside, not knowing how deep your hurt ran. I heard second-hand stories, like when you texted words too dark to our mutual friend Alice and her mom called your mom and you stopped speaking to her. You told me you’d been role playing, that she misinterpreted. I let myself believe you.

I was so fucking scared, Indigo. I need you to know that. I was scared of losing you, both in the usual sense of your death but also in the fucked-up middle school sense of losing your friendship. I thought that if I pretended none of it was happening, I wouldn’t be ex-communicated like Alice. I told myself I was doing the right thing, because as long as I wasn’t ex-communicated, I would still be able to help you. I could make you happy again.

You told me that you always figured I knew, and my silence meant that I approved, or at least that it must not have been so bad a thing to do. I should have told you to stop.

Indigo, why the fuck didn’t I tell you to stop?

You said it went on for years afterwards. I didn’t know that part. I never really thought about it after 7th grade, because I was a fucked up, solipstic little girl. I figured you had stopped, and I don’t know why. Why would I assume you had stopped?

I’m so sorry, Indigo. I failed you as a friend. I used to lock myself in the bathroom at night and sob because I was afraid of waking up the next morning and hearing you’d killed yourself. I was deathly afraid I might say the wrong thing to the wrong person. I knew if I did, you’d never speak to me again. I’d have fucked it all up trying to help, and then you’d kill yourself, and it would be my fault.

And maybe I was trying not to kill myself too, a little, those years. Don’t worry, Indigo, I wasn’t on your level, I promise. Not then. (Did that made me a little jealous at the time? I tell myself no, but the true answer is closer to yes. I was a fucked-up enough kid to be jealous of someone else’s more deeply felt emotions and physical wounds). In denying your suffering, I was also denying my suffering. I wanted to pretend we lived in a world where everyone was happy, because if you were happy, then I was happy, and none of us had shadows in our closets.

You asked me, after you’d finished baring your soul, if I was alright. I was quick to shut it down. I’m sorry, Indigo— even as I spoke I knew I was doing to you the same thing you had done to me. I hide my tracks better, though, I think. There’s nothing for you to suspect, except my fluctuating weight and occasional tiredness, and what kind of diagnosis is “has become fat and laughs a lot”, anyway?

We’re not in 7th grade anymore. We don’t sit on the bus together. I won’t roll up my sleeves like you did, on a field trip to the coast. You showed me your marks and when I whispered, breathily, are you okay?, you reassured me that it was only marker. I nodded skeptically but I made myself believe you.

Fuck, I’m sorry again, Indigo. I made it all about me. I always do. You’ve suffered so much, and I let it happen because I couldn’t handle it.

When you said, with an air of finality, that you were done with cutting, I believed you. I thought to myself: Maybe you’re hiding hurt, but you don’t cut your arms anymore, at least. I know because you roll up your sleeves. I know because you say you don’t. That makes me happy. I know because you talk more openly about these things. The way you told the story made it sound like it happened to someone long ago. Someone you no longer are.

God, I didn’t even blink when I swallowed.

Afterwards, I wondered what I should have done. Demand your thighs, your ribs, your upper arms? Force a promise from you to never cut again? There were words of comfort that sat just out of reach; I couldn’t think of them in the moment, and I still can’t think of them now.

If you were suffering now, would you open up to me? I’m still that asshole who pretends everything is fine when it’s not really fine. I’m still a coward.

Still. Still. You talked about it. You bared your heart to me in no uncertain terms. That was really fucking brave of you, Indigo. I don’t think I get this right, but I’m still so fucking proud of you nontheless. For the things you said to me. For the things I know you survived, even if you never told me. For being alive. For everything.

Someday, I promise I’ll trade you some stories, and maybe we’ll both feel less alone.

Love you forever,

Clara

There’s something important you should probably know about me. I’m honestly kind of surprised I haven’t mentioned it here yet, since I spent the better part of three or four years — all of my middle school years and a sizeable chunk of my high school years — thinking about the subject constantly.

The thing you should know: I have no clue what my sexuality is. I’ve thought I was straight, bi, lesbian, ace, demi, pan, aro, and just generally broken, not necessarily in that order, but always with great confusion and too much back-and-forth.1 I used to think about and question and categorize and reassess my sexuality constantly, and to be completely honest, I still do. Shall we take a deep dive? (Since I’m the writer, I get to decide, and I say yes.)

Let’s start where one should always start when talking about love. For most of my childhood, I believed I was a perfectly, ordinarily heterosexual girl who was also deeply Not Interested in boys, dating, or love. I was a nerdy, gawky, unattractive little girl, and looking back, I think my over-the-top disinterest, which I often liked to project to my friends with a kind of high-horse magnamity, was a defense mechanism to my own perceived (and real) unlovability. It was easier to swear off romance than to foster an obsession with something I knew I’d never have.

At the time, though, my romantic disinterest seemed natural enough. My friends, obsessed with naming the cutest boys in the grade and giggling madly, seemed to understand that I was a bit too weird to feel the same as they did about love. I correspondingly believed that I was more intellectual than them, and that explained our different approaches to heterosexuality. Real feminists, after all, didn’t need men in their lives, even if they were, obviously, deep down somewhere very hidden, attracted to them.

Some time later, maybe around 7th grade, I went through a phase where I could only fall asleep after what felt like hours of dreaming up scenarios about fictional characters. I’m sure you’ve all done that, if you had any imagination at all as a child— taken characters from your favorite books and pictured them going on wild adventures of your own creation. I lay in bed and the characters I loved learned magic and slayed monsters and, obviously, became friends with my self-insert ocs.

At around the same time, I discovered internet fanfiction. You can see the parallels. Fanfiction is where I learned that imagining boys cuddling you was actually much less fun than imagining boys cuddling each other (this also applied to boys kissing). I found plenty of explicit stuff too, because it’s the internet, but I found any sort of allusion to sex uncomfortable and, frankly, off-putting, and would frequently abandon a fic once the clothes started coming off. I mostly wanted slow burn and pining and the tried-and-true hurt/comfort.2 I didn’t even really care if the characters kissed at the end, as long as they spent a lot of time thinking about how much wanted to kiss.

Also, straight couples in fanfiction didn’t interest me at all either. Maybe because I read fanfic mostly on ao3, where there are probably like 3 straight couple fanfics on the entire site, maybe because of the specific fandoms I was in, maybe because straight sex felt way too close to something I would one day be expected to do myself and sex disgusted me at that age, maybe for other reasons that I’m sure smarter people than me have figured out. But I didn’t have a preference which kind of queer coupling, so long as they weren’t boy x girl, they just had to be queer.3

The fanfiction-community-to-queer-community pipeline is, I think, a very real thing. Maybe most people follow it the other way, exploring queerness in online spaces and accidentally falling down the johnlock rabbit hole, I don’t know. But I traveled the opposite way almost immediately, jumping from fanfiction to queer tumblr, then queer YouTubers, then queer everything else. This was an incredibly educational time in my life, and is where basically all of my knowledge about the queer community comes from. I learned about every microlabel under the sun, even the animal-gender ones, I learned about queer history, I learned about queer slang, I learned what to say if a friend came out as non-binary, I learned all the flags, even the difference between the old lesbian flag and the new lesbian flag, I learned about all of the different arguments people made for which label to call the queer community.4 To this day, I consider myself pretty darn educated about queer internet history.

The queer internet is where I discovered that, actually, a lot of people out in the world were queer, or bi-curious at the very least. I started to wonder if myabe I was like them, if maybe I liked girls myself. After all, I was obsessed with sapphic music and media5, and something about the queer community tugged at me in a way that no other internet group had ever done before. The more invested I got in queer internet, the more the fiction fantasies in my head started to shift— the boys kept kissing each other, but the girls started kissing me.

I started referring to myself as queer, bi/bi-curious, and questioning in my head. It was always all in my head, of course, because I was never confident in any one label, and coming out on a maybe felt like it was setting myself up for failure. Still, it made sense. I kissed fictional girls in my dreams, and I liked it. But also, obviously, I liked boys. Right?

I graduated middle school and went to high school. My new best friend, who had been only an acquaintance in middle school, was the most magical, breath-taking girl I’d ever met— brilliant, shining, full of energy and overflowing with joy. We were coincidentally taking all the same classes and participating in all the same clubs, and when we weren’t in class I followed her everywhere. Not surprisingly, we became extremely close.

I had never been a very touchy-feely person, but I wanted to touch her constantly. Link arms, rest my fingers lightly over hers, lean in, run my fingers through her hair, share secrets and signs and jokes that were ours, only ours. Once I noticed it, I tried to dissect it, trace the urge back to a root of either real friendship or a burgeoning crush. I couldn’t figure it out, though. Was this the longing that came from wanting desperately to have a soul-bound friend, or from wanting desperately, full stop? All I knew is that once in junior year we found ourselves in an empty science classroom lit with the warm afternoon light of early autumn, and as I listened to her ramble and watched her lashes flicker and her quirking smile and her dimples, I had the sudden, overwhelming urge to learn forward and discover what kissing felt like.

Around this time, I also started deconstructing my relationship with guys. I hadn’t had identifiable crushes on guys in literal ages (helped, probably, by covid lockdowns), and while I was pretty sure I’d probably liked a boy or two in elementary school, I couldn’t remember it or conjure up the feeling. I couldn’t picture myself kissing a dude. I started calling myself (to myself) a lesbian.

In the middle of high school, about a year into deciding I was probably a lesbian, the queer internet community told me that most people want to have sex. I did not want to have sex, not with boys and also not with girls— although to be fair, I had exactly zero idea how sex with girls would even work. I started calling myself an ace lesbian.

I didn’t understand, at the time, or possibly didn’t want to understand, that people learn to desire sex at different stages. And, in different ways. Or, thanks to their over-sheltered upbringing, people might have no idea how to find the part of themselves that desires sex, much less interpret it correctly. At sixteen, I was very obsessed with collecting shiny new labels that made me feel like I finally belonged somewhere, and less interested in whether every girl my age needed to have a fully functioning, fully recognizable sex drive, or else they were ace.6

By the end of senior year, I was too preoccupied with work and hiding various depressive and anorexic tendencies to think about love. I went to prom with a guy friend who asked. I flirted with the idea of falling in love with him, and probably strung him along because I liked this novel feeling of being liked.7

I stopped having interest in girls, and didn’t have a single crush for the entirety of my senior year. I played around with the idea of identifying as aroace in my head, but was so depressed by the idea that I would never love anyone or have any romantic relationship in my life that I began to lean more heavily into the idea that I would mature into someone who enjoyed and wanted romance.8 I started swinging back around to where I had begun, and by my graduation, I had come to terms with the fact that I was, in all likelihood, a sexually and romantically confused and all-around seriously messed-up heterosexual. Then I went to college.

A semester into college, three of my closest friends are bi girls, and I find two of them, plus a third straight girl, really hot. I entered our college’s informal matchmaker site as a bisexual, got matched with a pretty girl, and stammered my way through a mostly platonic date. I told my friends my match was a girl, to test the waters. I told one girl that my sexuality was “very confused” and she suggested I kiss all my friends platonically.9 I deflect questions with great skill whenever we talk about who’s hot, our sexual orientations, or our past crushes.

In other words, I’ve returned to being confused. Guys sometimes make me blush and freeze up and act aloof and feel awkward. The idea of kissing them or even caressing them, though, makes me feel nothing except vague discomfort unless I focus hard on truly being in that fabricated moment, in which case I’m overwhelmed by a wave of sheer embarrassment and want to hide in a hole. Girls don’t make me flustered or tongue-tied but sometimes I want to twirl my fingers in my one friend’s hair or hold her hand in mine or even sometimes, rarely, press my lips against hers just to see what it’d feel like.10

I don’t want any of it, though. Not really. No dates, no long walks, no wondering if they still love me, or wondering if I’m really going to bare my soul to this person or if I should lie, no romance, no candlelight. I’m barely a stable person, and it would be careless to let another person near, even if I did want anything. Which maybe I do. Or maybe I don’t. Fuck. This is why I don’t think about this stuff anymore. It’s been years since I obsessed over labels and whether or not I needed to come out to my parents. Now, I’m just myself, and while I don’t like that, I do bury any questions deep in the recesses of my mind.

I’m still confused. I’ll probably always be confused. But I’m still hoping that one day I can come to you and say, Look, I’ve figured out this one small part of myself. I’m one puzzle piece closer to being whole.

Thanks for sticking it out with me, especially through all of the footnotes. I just recently learned about the footnotes and I love them very much. Perhaps I should date footnotes instead of real people, I think it would go better.

I like to write poetry about the stars, so I compiled a collection of some of my recent star poetry. Some of it references some slightly more obscure cosmic notions, which I did my best to explain, so this has become a strange lyrical essay of poetry and astronomy lectures. I hope there is someone out there who enjoys a strange mash-up of literature and lecture.

give me eternity

My scientific asides: Red dwarves are the smallest, dimmest, and coolest kind of star on the main sequence. Main sequence here refers to the place where stars spend most of their lives, where they fuse hydrogen into helium in their core and before they begin to run out of fuel. When a star runs out of hydrogen to fuse, they exit the main sequence, its core contracting and heating up to form a red giant or supergiant, depending on its starting size. Giants go on to cool and dim, becoming white dwarves, while supergiants contract so forcefully that they go supernova, spewing their guts across the sky.

Red dwarfs are the most common type of main-sequence star in the Milky Way (at least in the neighborhood of the Sun, the area we have most carefully observed). However, because they are so dim, most are not visible to the naked eye. In fact, if we use the stricter definitions of a red dwarf, none are visible to the naked eye. The most famous red dwarf is Proxima Centauri, which also happens to be the star closest to our Sun, and the subject of many a sci-fi colonization effort.

Other fun properties of red dwarfs include the fact that they are fully convective, so helium does not accumulate at the core (unlike larger stars), and they can burn a huge proportion of their hydrogen before they leave the main sequence. This is why their lifespans are so long!

What matters for this poem, though, is that red dwarfs have estimated lifespans that far exceed the present age of the universe, and thus no red dwarf has ever left the main sequence. When I read that in our textbook, my first thought was that every red dwarf anywhere in the universe was still alive, was kind of functionally immortal, and thus I wrote this poem.

aster

This poem is rooted more in etymology than in cosmology, but nonetheless, it is about stars. Namely, I was inspired by this note from one Anthony Eterin, who also writes poetry, and definitely writes poetry better than I write poetry, although I am aspiring.

ode to quiet deaths

My scientific asides: This poem is based around planetary nebulae. To understand a planetary nebula, we must return to the idea of red giants, which are main-sequence stars of about the size of the Sun. When a star like the Sun runs out of hydrogen to fuse into helium, its core begins to contract and heat up while its outer envelope begins to expand and cool down. This expanding envelope of ionized gas forms a nebula of sorts which dissipates into space and sort of blows away on the stellar winds. When the outer layer has fully blown away, we are left with only a white dwarf, small and barely glowing.

I was particularly entranced by the ionized gas of the planetary nebula being dissipated by a gentle stellar wind, which is paradoxically defined as a flow of gas ejected from the outer atmospheres of stars. They are driven by radiation pressure acting on stardust, pushing the nebula outwards and forming those beautiful rings of colored gas.

Our star is about the right size to become a red giant, which means it is likely to become a planetary nebula, which makes me happy. Scientists are, as usual, not completely sure about this, though—there is a chance that the Sun will be only a white dwarf and not a nebula, and will therefore only be small and dim and dense instead of light and bright and beautiful.

That’s it from me about the stars for today! At the very least I am fufilling my blog name, moongazing, and my profile name, MoonSun&Stars, both derived from my eternal love of the cosmos.

As usual, my book reviews are not reviews of the book so much as they are reviews of my life through the lens of the time I spent reading the book.

I first encountered The Best Minds in a bookstore, among the other new & notable award-winning books. The yellow sticker declaring Pulitzer Finalist is a tantalizing pull for me, who has always enjoyed the social respect that comes with reading a book deemed ‘worthy’. The cover illustration is what made me come closer, though—a simple doorway framed by darkness leading into what was so clearly a venerated academic institution, Oxford or Cambridge or Harvard or Yale. It turned out to be Yale, although I only read the inside flap because of the subtitle: A Story of Friendship, Madness, and the Tragedy of Good Intentions. I didn’t care much for the tragedy of good intentions, but I adore stories of friendship—so much of my own life revolves around my friends—and madness, when paired with The Best Minds, has an alluring mystique. I am in a toxic relationship with the concept of dark academia.

I wasn’t reading much at this time. I’m in a strange relationship with reading right now; I once read voraciously, borderline desperately, every night before I slept and nearly every morning. I would consistently read over a hundred books a year. They were a good way to escape—a good way to explore dark fantasies I wouldn’t explore otherwise.

Then I picked up this book, and was once again swept away by a narrative so compelling and morbidly fascinating that I could not put it down. It did what books always do for me, what I’ve been missing all these literature-lost months: I picked it up and things changed.

For a long time now, my mind has associated mental disorders with self-harming disorders. If you’re depressed, you hurt yourself, whether physically or through social isolation, or with the vicious cycle of thoughts swirling in your head. If you’re anxious, you stress yourself out until you can’t literally function. Eating disorders? I think those speak for themselves. There are other examples, but these are drawn from my own life. And sure, you end up hurting people around you, but I don’t think you can say you’re hurting anyone more than you’re hurting yourself. This book reminded me that my view was both limited and entirely wrong. There’s a world of mental disorders where the person hurts everyone around them, and it is horrible and tragic. Sometimes they can’t even function in our world at all. I must remember that no matter how mentally ill I may be, I at least perceive the world roughly the same as everyone around me. I do not see, for example, the paranoid, fiery delusions of Michael Laudor, a man who woke up every day and believed his bed was on fire, and ultimately killed his pregnant fiancée because he thought she was a robot sent to kill him.

The other thing that stood out to me was the narrator. Rosen sometimes disappeared into the background of the narrative, but he couldn’t help his opinions bleeding into the story. Rosen hated the good intentions of those around Michael who encouraged him to put himself into the world, overstretch himself, and believe himself capable of things that his schizophrenia quite frankly did not allow him to do (if he had been medicated, a different story might be told; but Rosen argues that the support of his Yale professors and editors and the Hollywood industrial complex made Michael believe that he could do it all without being medicated–that it wasn’t really a mental illness at all, but the world around him refusing to bend and accommodate him).

The comparison between mental and physical disabilities is a current that runs through the entire book. One of Michael’s mentors at Yale Law tells him that he will be Michael’s “ramp”, as if Michael’s schizophrenia can be dealt with in exactly the same way a physical illness can be dealt with. Rosen hates this. He hates it with a passion that he tries his best to smother because he wants his narrative to remain impersonal, but he really despises it. To Rosen, mental illness is something that requires a heck of a lot more external … decision making? than physical disability. Rosen argues that those in the throes of schizophrenia don’t believe that there is anything wrong with them, but that they are nonetheless a threat to themselves and others, and must therefore have important decisions about treatment and what they can handle be made for them, by others who know better. You can’t simply change the world to them, the way you might construct a ramp for someone in a wheelchair.

I don’t know how I feel about this argument? Like, I understand where Rosen is coming from, especially since his childhood best friend literally murdered someone after being given too much freedom and choice. I also don’t know if I should be supporting the removal of free will from those with mental illness. Rosen strikes a nice balance between the two extremes, in my very uneducated opinion, and I enjoyed reading about his takes.

As usual this was a terrible book review that does not make any sense, but I shall be posting it all the same because that is how we learn, isn’t it? Forcing ourselves to write again and again until the final product is something we can be happy with?

I’ve been having strange dreams of late. Last night, I woke up on a planet marked for destruction. Humans were evacuating to a singular starship, which we’d use to search the cosmos for a new place to call home. There were limited tickets to board, so my family and I were hurrying to the docking port, clutching the silver-edged papers that marked our salvation in desperate hands. All around us was deserted wasteland; mountains of rubble piled to the sky and the dessicated skeletons of trees bent over like old men.

As we walked along the winding dirt road, we were approached by an older woman, dressed very shabbily and clutching in her hands not a ticket but a small, engraved stone. She didn’t say a word, but through her gestures and wide eyes, we understood that she needed to be on that starship. She held out the stone to make us understand.

The stone was grey, covered in white rings and runic markings. My subconsciousness stirred as I examined it; somehow, I knew that this stone was an object of great cultural importance. My mother reached out to trace the stone’s lines. My father bowed his head to the woman, a moment of reverence I had never seen in him before.

After the woman had made us understand her need, everyone looked at me, and I recognized that I was not well-liked here. The woman needed a ticket, and I was the obvious choice to be left behind. I could either give her my paper willingly, or have it taken from me by force. I held out my ticket to the woman, and she accepted it with a quiet word of thanks. My family did not even spare me that.

I stood there for a long time afterwards, watching her figure recede into the distance with the rest of my family.

When I next opened my eyes, I was a child in a strange house. It was small and old-fashioned, with wooden floorboards and a tiled backspray, rickety straight-backed chairs and floral wallpaper. The light coming in through the windows indicated it was mid-morning and summertime. The house felt both entirely unfamiliar and like my childhood—it’s hard to articulate the emotions it drew from me. I stood there, my bare feet growing cold, tracing the room with my eyes, when I noticed an old man sitting at the table in the corner. He beckoned me over.

I had never seen him before. I had known him all my life. He had grey-white hair and a white beard, and he was wearing a patched-up cloak even though the room was warm. His face was weathered and sunburnt. The wrinkles around his mouth made him look wise, but there was something in the glint of his eye that made him look scared. He looked like someone I had known from another life.

“The ghost has grown too powerful, Clara,” he said, when I had gotten close enough. Or maybe he hadn’t said it at all—I didn’t see his lips move. “We must leave this place.”

That filled me with unimaginable sadness, but I did not respond.

I open my eyes again and I am back in the desolate wasteland, all alone. But it isn’t a wasteland anymore. Or at least, on the edge of this dirt road, amid the dust and oppressive heat and post-apocalypse, stands the house I had just been in, so small and insignificant, painted a light shade of robin’s egg blue. It is trimmed in white, with navy shutters. There are red brick flowerboxes under every window, although no flowers grow. Stone steps rise from dust to a deep mahogany door.

I find myself compelled to approach the house, one foot placed hesitantly in front of the other. There is a looming foreboding that overtakes me. Somehow, I know where this is going.

I open the front door and find myself back in the kitchen where I encountered that old man, all those lifetimes ago. The room is quiet, interrupted only by the hum of appliances and my own footsteps. My feet are bare. It doesn’t make any sense.

There’s a warm yellow glow from the overhead lights permeating the room. I close my eyes, and the room is filled with another Presence. I know what I must do.

“You can finally have me,” I tell the ghost.

Something fills my chest with wind and fire, flows down every neuron. My veins burn, I am turning to ash, all I can see is white white bright burning—

I open my eyes and look down at my hands. They are translucent and paper-thin. I have become blurry at the boundaries between my flesh and the world. Or perhaps I have not become. Perhaps I have always been. I can not remember the last time I looked at myself.

I stumble through the kitchen, wallpaper and tiles and varnished cabinets taunting me in their silent unfeeling. I open the door to the bathroom. There’s enough light from the window, I don’t need to turn on the lamp. I look at myself in the mirror, and I understand.

What do you do when you were always the ghost, when you were born the ghost and will stay a ghost, forever haunting an insignificant, robin’s egg blue suburban house on a dusty road on a tiny, doomed, wasteland planet?

I wake up.

(Read Conversations I here & learn more about Thea here.)

CLARA: I think I wish you were dead.

THEA: You don’t mean that.

CLARA: No, I don’t mean that.

CLARA: Except, maybe I do, sometimes. On really dark nights, when the world falls away.

THEA: [sharply] You’re fucked up.

CLARA: [almost exasperated] Tell me something new, please.

THEA: You think you’re in the right because you’re fucked up in the head. You think it excuses all your behaviors.

THEA: It doesn’t.

CLARA: Doesn’t it excuse all your behaviors?

THEA: Well, you want me dead, don’t you?

CLARA: They don’t, though. All our friends fucking adore you.

CLARA: [softer, more bitter] They love you far more than they’ll ever like me.

THEA: That’s because I have a better personality, dipshit.

CLARA: [dryly humorous] Heh. You’d never say dipshit in real life. That’s a word I only use for myself.

THEA: Doesn’t make it any less true.

THEA: People like me because I’m a fundamentally better human than you. Even if I’m more fucked in the head. Even if I bother you, specifically.

THEA: [a reflective, less biting afterthought] And what did I ever do to you, anyway?

CLARA: [frustratedly] I just hate that you do it better!

CLARA: Being fucked in the head.

CLARA: You make it seem romantic. You don’t eat because you’re too fucking sad, while I starved myself for no reason at all, hated every moment, and then lost the ability the moment I let myself go. You isolate yourself in a way that feels mysterious and provokes pity and love, while I do it in a way that causes everyone to drift away. You make it seem enviable, while I just ruin every relationship around me.

THEA: [incredulously] You do know how messed up it is to be jealous of someone for being better at being fucked in the head, right?

CLARA: [rolling her eyes] I mean, yeah, duh.

CLARA: I’m not entirely socially inept.

CLARA: But you just make it seem so— perfect.

THEA: [thoughtfully] Do you think you, I guess, almost made yourself fucked in the head? Trying to copy me?

CLARA: [shaking her head] Nah. Before you, there was Indigo, who was like you but toned down. She could have just as easily tempted me into it.

CLARA: To be fair, you definitely taught me about the starving bit. But you didn’t make me sad.

CLARA: You also kind of helped me justify my feelings to myself. Observing you, I could almost think that I was being, well, normal, that these were normal thoughts and emotions.

THEA: You’re a fucking idiot.

CLARA: I know.

THEA: So, what, you want me dead because…?

CLARA: Because,

CLARA: Because—

CLARA: Because I don’t need a constant reminder about how I’m failing even at being fucked up.

CLARA: Like, I know I have issues. I know better than to compare myself to normal people, most of the time. But I can’t help but compare myself to you, because aren’t you even more fucked than I am, so why do you make it look so elegant, so effortless, so natural?

THEA: You’re jealous because I’m better at depression.

CLARA: Yeah.

THEA: Fuck you.

CLARA: That’s fair.

THEA: No, really. Your ego knows no ends. Do you want everyone who is better than you dead?

CLARA: Yeah, maybe.

CLARA: Sometimes.

CLARA: Sometimes I fucking hate my sister because she’s so effortlessly skinny and happy and loved.

CLARA: [a pause] Isn’t that horrible?

THEA: [with emphasis] Yeah, it is. You’re seriously fucked up.

CLARA: Aren’t you supposed to, I don’t know, comfort me? Make me feel better?

THEA: You created me. Apparently that’s not what you want, not really.

THEA: You want someone to tell you that you’re fucked in the head.

CLARA: Fuck my brain.

THEA: Yeah.

CLARA: How am I supposed to stop being so fucking jealous of everyone around me? How do I stop fucking hating you, constantly, unceasingly, unendingly?

CLARA: [voice laced with despair] I don’t know what to do.

THEA: Do you want to hate me?

CLARA: No!

CLARA: [a pause, then, hesitantly] Maybe?

CLARA: [another pause] Why would I want to hate you, though? What do I gain from torturing myself like this?

THEA: I guess you get someone to blame for everything. If you hate me enough, you can transfer all your self-hatred onto me.

CLARA: But all hating you gives me is another reason to hate myself.

THEA: Then just fucking stop doing it.

CLARA: Yeah.

A long silence.

THEA: You won’t, though, will you?

CLARA: [opens her mouth, closes it, opens it again]

CLARA: I just can’t help myself.

CLARA: [voice tinged with desperation] If I knew how to turn off that part of my brain, please, you have to believe I’d do it in a heartbeat.

THEA: And until then, you’ll just lie awake at night sometimes and wish I were dead.

CLARA: [without thinking] Yeah.

CLARA: [reeling] Fuck.

CLARA: [so very softly & sadly] I’m sorry.

I’m trying to get better at writing dialogue and imagining scenes while simultaneously processing some things. This seemed like the most reasonable thing to do. Thea is loosely based on my friend, while Clara is completely & wholeheartedly me.

(Read Conversations I here & learn more about Thea here. Also, if you like learning about the people in my life, you might also like my case studies about friends here).

Not all categorization systems are the product of YA novels and teenage social dynamics, though! Some of them are grounded in science and applied to the world around us with a naturalist’s care and attention to detail. I don’t know if the orchid child/dandelion child stratification falls into the former category of sorting systems that are frankly stupid or the latter category of systems that have a scientific basis and real-world applications. I do know that it’s a lens through which to see children that I’ve never quite been able to let go.

A disclaimer: I never did look up the real definitions for orchid chidren and dandelion children. I am working on my knowledge of terms I last saw when I was eight years old. Forgive me all my trespasses, but please do correct me if I was way off-mark.

I read an article, when I was maybe eight or nine, that discussed the categories of orchid children and dandelion children in the context of PTSD and the young survivors of a brutal civil war halfway around the world. I think it was a National Geographic feature. I don’t remember much from the article, but I do remember reading about those categories and understanding them instantly. I wouldn’t have needed a definition.

Dandelion children were hearty and strong and optimistic like the weeds that crept along our front lawns. Even my dad praised dandelions for their heartiness; he tried for years to grow real, seeded grass, but our rocky lawn could only really be a home for dandelions. Dandelion children, like those hearty weeds, could grow like wild shoots in any soil, even in the cracks of sidewalks, even when scattered haphazardly into a field of grass.

Orchid children were delicate and soft and fragile, like the young shoot we once tried to nurture over the course of a summer. It needed special ice cubes placed in its arid soil in specific multi-hour intervals, or else it would wither and die. Though we followed every instruction, it didn’t last the summer. Orchid children, like that flower that never blossomed, cried a lot and needed the best of everything, or they’d wilt and waste away.

Dandelion children, according to this article, were the ones who walked away. Orchid children were the ones who never recovered. They were trying to draw a line between the children who escaped the effects of war and trauma and those who would be haunted for the rest of their lives by PTSD, depression, anxiety, and every other mental illness left by physical suffering. It didn’t matter the environment in which the child was grown. It didn’t matter the caretakers, or the food, or where they were planted after the storm. All that mattered, when it came to trauma, was the plant-child themselves. Their stems, their flowers, their roots.

At eight years old, the experience of reading this article struck me so deeply and so desperately that I can close my eyes now and feel the thin magazine paper in my hand. I can even feel the warm sunlight streaming in through the open window as I stood, transfixed, even if I can no longer remember the photo or the words.

Apart from a swirl of primal emotions, I remember thinking two very distinct thoughts about this article. These thoughts were, of course, only about me. I didn’t spare a second for those children, suffering in faraway places, many younger than I was. I didn’t think about how they were being bombed out of homes and out of their lives and out of their families. I didn’t think about how scared they might be, or how lonely. I didn’t think of them at all; I thought first, and only, of myself.

And what were those thoughts? Well, my first thought was of longing. I wished desperately, achingly, and with every single tragic fiber of my being, that I could be in a war, a natural disaster, a plane crash, or some other Event of Great Trauma. Why would a fragile eight-year-old girl wish something so calamitous upon herself? Well, you see, I needed to prove to the world I was no orchid flower but a dandelion weed. I wanted the chaos and confusion of a bloody conflict. I craved famine and flood. I needed every ounce of suffering thrown at me, all so I could emerge on the other side victorious, bruised and bloody but still whole, still alive.

I was desperate to show the world all that I could do, and all that I could be, given the space and the stakes. I knew that the only way to prove oneself strong was to lift a great weight, so I knew that the only way to prove myself hardy was to survive a Great Suffering. I wanted to be a child soldier in a war or sneak through a tunnel under the Berlin Wall. I wanted to shelter under a hurricane or sell my body so that my siblings could eat. I wanted to be a street rat, a pauper, a dirty urchin. More importantly, I wanted to walk out the other side of the fire self-assured and stronger for all that didn’t kill me. I wanted to come out bruised and scratched but ultimately fine; a dandelion child, bright and radiant as the sun.

I guess my self-worth was intrinsically tied to my self-sufficiency, my independence, and my ability to suffer and survive. I guess I had a massive fucking chip on my shoulder.

My second thought came right on the heels of this selfish, desperate plea to divinity. It swept me away, this wave of bitter realization; it took the breath out of my lungs, it knocked me to my knees. In the moment after I had prayed for my Event of Great Trauma, my Great Suffering, I knew, with horrible, instinctual certainty, that I was no dandelion child. I was an orchid, frail and self-righteous and transleucent as wet paper.

I can’t explain it, how I just knew in my heart. It was just one of those thoughts that the moment you’ve had it, you know it is true.

Don’t get me wrong, I hated this truth. I tried to bury it as deep down as it would go. I dug a hole in the back of my consciousness and buried it with rocks. I tucked it in a box in a box in a box and put that box in the dusty attics of my long-forgotten memories. I tried and tried to erase it. Nothing helped. I couldn’t unlearn what I had read and what I had thought. It was etched into my brain with a finely tipped diamond blade, unerasable, glowing, always watching.

Oh, god, even now I hate it, knowing that if I were a child soldier, I’d be the one who couldn’t handle death before their eyes. I’d probably blow my brains out on a foggy night with the pistol they gave me for creating a better future. If I were an orphan tasked with the care of my siblings, I’d drown them one by one in the river like kittens to stop their hungry cries, and then I’d fill my pockets with stones and turn myself into a haunting ghost. If I were tortured, I’d crack immediately and have nightmares about it for the rest of my life. If I were ever to be broken, I’d never pick up my pieces; I’d hoard my hurt and never be a functional human again.

I knew, at eight years old, when I closed that article and stared out my window at our lawn, that I wanted with all my heart to be a dandelion. I also knew, as I stared into the green grass, that I was a fucking orchid.

I knew, at eight years old, this truth: there were two types of children in the world, and I was of the inferior group.

Has anyone else heard this term before? Is it just me? Did I fabricate this entire memory and the basis for a not-insignificant part of my childhood rationalizations from thin air?

Also, does anyone else have any other niche examples of child-sorting/categorization that they want to share with the class?

I enjoy writing about nature & my (lack of) place in it.

On another note, do you prefer screenshot poetry or poems written in a proper post? Let me know, I can adjust for readability.

Lungs are for breathing, and breathing is something I’ve been struggling with lately. Not because of my physical health—that has always been fine unless the maladies are self-inflicted. No, it’s just that I’ve been forgetting how to breath again. It first happened when I was in sixth grade. I would lie down, ready to fall asleep, but as my eyes got heavy, I would simply stop breathing. I would wake up gasping, not five minutes later, my heart racing and the feeling of drowning in my throat. Now it’s returned. Maybe it’s the return to campus? Lots of my friends have been sleeping poorly. It isn’t just me. Still, I’m the only one whose subconscious has stopped operating.

I worry I ruin something by bringing in facts. A feeling can’t stay a feeling when it’s grounded, and I have a tendency to reduce ad infinitum. But I also realize there’s nothing else to deconstruct. Even though it feels petty and childish to reduce the symptom of being stranded outside of time and outside of space to a failed exam or an argument, an essay I read or off-hand comments, it feels equally unproductive to take feelings out of the environment that bred them.

I can’t quite pinpoint the moment when I switched from being somewhat well-adjusted and fine, really to standing alone in a field, overcast and lightly raining, with wind rustling the stalks of flowers dried by the autumn cold. [redacted]. I can not stand being in my body, or in my mind, or in any part of my being.

It is easy for me to toss the blame to someone else. I am a strict determinalist, so the chain stretches unbroken to the beginning of the world. Still, I wonder why there are some days when I stand still, the world rushing to a halt around me, and I can think of no reason why I should care.

It’s an odd feeling, because it always comes after the best of highs. If I could have just stayed on track, things seemed like they were going along so smoothly. [redacted] And then–

The world thunders to a halt; I am thrown forcefully from a moving train. Something in my head switches off. It feels like a curtain falling, or a fog descending. I stop and look around, and find myself alone in field. The weeds are up to my knees, and they go shhhhhh as the wind brushes through them. There is no one around. The sky is cloudy in a way that doesn’t deserve the word cloudy. Stormy, perhaps, is better, because I can smell the sweet scent of thunderstorms and there is lighting electric on the wind.

This is the moment when the illusion falls apart. It’s like pulling the threaded corner of an embroidered scene. It takes less than a moment, and it feels instantaneous. Afterwards, there is nothing. No feelings, no thoughts. I ask myself why I do it all, and the answer, when there is no answer, is always to just stop being.

A small part of myself is panicking because now that I’ve gotten off the train it will accelerate to infinity. I can’t get back on. I’ve been left behind, and being left behind is my Great Fear. I find I can’t breath. I scrabble at my throat, panicking. I’m drowning in the storm, it’s pouring into me and rushing out of me all at the same time, I’m nothing but a mechanism of convection.

I drop to my knees. I feel watched, or haunted. I wonder, vaguely, if it is Crow, come to pay me one last visit. She would have jumped off the train—she would never be thrown unless she chose release. She would enjoy watching me choke. She’d find it amusing. Deep in my heart, I wish her a painful death, worse even than being buried alive in a storm.

Still, there’s a part of me that doesn’t mind being thrown off a moving train. It is quiet and peaceful now. The meadow grass is still and there might even be birdsong. It almost feels like I’ve figured out how to make it all stop. Even if it wasn’t me, even if I haven’t necessarily made it all stop, I can just stand in the field and listen to crickets. If I concentrate, I can even tip my head upwards to inhale the slightly electric scent of rain, and feel absolutely nothing at all.

Two lonely figures sit perched on a rooftop overlooking the city. It is dusk, and the summer air swirls around them with birdsong and the sounds of traffic.

The boy is MAX. His short brown hair is in his distinctive perpetual bedhead, and his face is dusted with freckles. He’s in a zip-up sweater and stone-washed jeans despite the borderline-oppressive heat, legs swinging absentmindedly over the edge of the building.

The girl is CLARA. She’s wearing a black leather jacket over a plain white tee, and grey cargo pants over combat boots. Her legs are tucked against her chest. Her chin rests thoughtfully on her knee.

MAX: Well, I don’t think it’s so bad.

CLARA: No?

MAX: Yeah, well— [shrugs] why can’t it be like falling asleep?

Silence, as they both consider it.

CLARA: [in a tone of reluctant admittance] I don’t like falling asleep very much. It’s so— dark. Like a void has swallowed you up.

MAX: Mmm. [a pause; he tilts his head to one side, considering] I know what you mean. But there’s something welcoming about the way everything fades, you know?

CLARA nods. Another spell of silence. The sun has nearly dipped below the horizon now. Both their eyes are locked on its last few rays of light.

MAX: I don’t think I’d mind as long as I had some time to say goodbye.

CLARA: Do you think you will?

MAX: [thoughtfully, almost too lightly, considering the subject matter] I think I’ll know when it’s coming.

CLARA: [shivers once, like she’s being haunted] Me too. I don’t know if that’s better, though. Maybe it’d be nice if it just snuck up on me— then maybe I wouldn’t always be looking over my shoulder.

The last of the sun vanishes. The world seems to hold its breath.

MAX: Will you— regret anything?

CLARA: [a short, almost unconscious laugh, and then, an instant later, a wince] Everyone has regrets. That’s what being human is, or whatever.

CLARA: [becoming more serious] Yeah, I’ll have my regrets. How I treated people. The things I kept from them. The way I carried grudges.

CLARA looks sideways at MAX, waiting for him to say what he’s holding on the tip of his tongue.

MAX: [very quietly] I don’t want to regret anything when— but it seems that every choice has a hidden opposite, and choosing one side of the coin always means leaving something else behind. [frowns, mouth twisting] I just wish—

MAX: How do you—

CLARA: There are two wolves, aren’t there? Fighting in every decision. The one that wants to keep it in, keep them safe, keep them out. And then the one that wants to live, truly live, spill every secret and make every mistake.

CLARA: [shrugging] One will always be disappointed. Doesn’t necessarily mean you have to have any regrets.

MAX: Which one usually wins? For you.

CLARA: The first one. [wryly] I think it ate the other wolf a long time ago.

MAX: [fingers tapping nervous against the concrete rooftop] I think the same is true for me, generally.

MAX: But sometimes I just want to—

MAX: I can’t ruin his life, you know? How could I do that to him?

MAX: But—

CLARA: [finishing the unspoken thought] But you’ll regret it forever if you don’t say a word, too. I get it.

CLARA: I guess I have to take back what I said. Sometimes there’s no winning, and you’ll have regrets no matter the choice.

MAX: What do you do then?

CLARA: [shrugs] Honestly? I don’t know. I think that’s something everyone needs to figure out for themselves.

CLARA: [looking sideways to catch MAX’s eye] And you know what, Max? I don’t think there’s a wrong answer.

MAX: [hesitantly, looking back at CLARA] You think?

CLARA: You can’t do it all. It’s not on you.

MAX: [exhales shakily] Yeah.

MAX:

MAX: I know I shouldn’t be but—

MAX:

MAX: Sometimes I’m just really—

MAX: scared.

CLARA: [shifts over so that she can lay her hand over MAX’s]

CLARA: [softly] I am too, Max.

CLARA: Sometimes I’m really fucking terrified.

It’s a long term project we’re working on, as much a startup as it is a piece of academia; we’re a forked branch of a larger, parent organization, although we don’t like to use the word parent, or, for that matter, organization. It’s a project that requires the kind of long, late hours that turn acquaintances into friends and then into something even beyond that, something like family. It’s hard to explain, and there’s a lot I can’t say, even if it would make certain things easier to understand.

There are only four of us: me, Sebastian, Magnus, and Max. Yes, it’s me and three white guys. No, I don’t know how that happened. We needed people with rather specific skills, and they were the most qualified applicants, I guess. I’ve known them all since high school, even Max; I met them at those events that all young, intelligent, and ambitious students attend, like the science fair or the junior olympics except for what we do. Having seen their faces before (I’ve even had conversations with them over committee lunches and after-parties) makes a lot of things easier. It’s almost like we were already friends, long before we were properly thrown together.

Of course, when I say ‘we needed people with rather specific skills’ and ‘we were thrown together’, I don’t mean a group that includes me—I’m referring to the parent organization that oversees us. The organization that, for a reason I still don’t quite understand, assigned me a team to lead, and made those three my team. They don’t even go to my university, although they do live in my city—I live in a university town, after all, with more than enough schools to go around. The four of us meet up when we need to, and we work hard when we’re apart, and we send updates in the slack, and we make it work.

If you had asked me a year ago if I was leadership material, I would have said yes if I was in a college interview and no if you had ambushed me at any other time. My biggest issue with the notion was that I just didn’t think I had what it took to be liked, much less listened to. In our line of work and study, though, competence and knowledge get you a lot farther than personality, so the others overlook a lot of my personal shortcomings in deference to my abilities. They listen to me because in the limited context of what we do, I have the most experience and likely do know best. They wouldn’t trust me with so much as a coffee offer, though, outside this small realm.

So, now that you understand our strange work situation to whatever extent I can reasonably explain, let’s talk about the people.

Sebastian goes to a university just as, if not more, prestigious than mine. He’s the smartest, from the book and archaic knowledge perspective, not just because he genuinely knows more (literature, quotes, and philosophy, anyway—I’m still the one to go to for science) but because he’s been a world-class debater for most of his life and it shows in every carefully articulated syllable of opinion he gives. Even the way he gestures with his hands screams intellectual.

Sebastian is, when he isn’t working with us, completing an entirely useless degree in applied math and philosophy. Entirely useless not because I find both subjects seriously lacking in real-world applications but because we all know the moment he graduates he’s going to be snapped up by our parent organization and go on to become rich and powerful using skills rather far removed from math or philosophy.

He carries himself like an academic—curly dark hair that he only cuts about once a year, gold-beige scarves wrapped around his neck, and long thick grey coats that swirl around his knees. He has yet to appear in anything less formal than khaki pants and corduroy. God, I once saw him wear a bow tie to a casual meeting. A fucking bowtie!!

When he has down time, during meetings or during our too-frequent casual team hangouts, he never fails to pull a book out of his bag, or open the New York Times crossword. He loves the sound of his own voice, and can moralize or argue or debate or expand on any topic. He’s quick with obscure facts and quicker with a dry, deadpan wit that he can wield either like a knife or an olive branch.

In another life, a life where we’re all perfectly ordinary, I’d probably have a crush on him, and watch him out of the corner of my eye instead of paying attention in French or Medieval Studies or whichever strange elective I cross paths with him in. He’d be so far out of my league but I’d still read books I’d heard him mention conspicuously, before class began, in the hopes that he would notice and spark a conversation. I’d put on a lofty persona around him, pretend not to care about his stormy eyes, participate more than I’ve ever participated in any class saying witty things I’ve repeated under my breath to get perfect. He probably would never notice me, in this alternative universe. We’d go our separate ways at the end of the semester. I’d forget his name after a few years, and that would be that.

In this life, though, we’ve been thrown together by fate/our parent organization, and my crush on him is short-lived, lasting only a couple of days before it fizzles out. Now we’re good colleagues, his ambition and hunger for knowledge driving me towards things I’d never try for alone. I think he’s sort of jealous that I’m innately better at what we do without ever really trying or wanting it; he’s from a reasonably powerful family, so I guess he has a chip on his shoulder, or something to prove to himself. Despite this, we get along well, and he’s excellent at what he does.

Magnus is probably Sebastian’s polar opposite. While Sebastian is all white-hot flame and silver tongue, move fast and break things, Magnus is green ferns and thumbs hooked awkwardly on his baggy, washed-out engineer’s jeans. He’s grown out his hair since high school, which always throws me off, because he looks a lot—for lack of a better word—cooler than that quiet, geeky kid I used to know. He keeps his hair tied back in a short ponytail but it always comes undone when we’re working late, and tangles around his face in a mess of dirty-blond curls. I really have no clue if he even knows what a brush is. He likes band shirts, Maneskin and AC/DC and Metallica, and washed-out blue denim jackets with fuzzy inner linings.

Magnus is kind, and quiet, and he laughs a lot but he does it softly, like light rain or coming home. He is always there for you, solid as the Earth and just as evergreen. He will mend your wounds, he will listen when you need to spill your bleeding heart, he will pull you back from the edge of any abyss, gently and without judgment. He has an absurdly green thumb, an old van that he fixed up himself, and he’s studying biochem, I think. He wants to become a doctor, eventually, which doesn’t surprise any of us.

Magnus is also deeply broken, as I sometimes think all immensely kind people are. He told us, after a particularly painful late night of work, after we’d gotten cleaned up and gone out for 3 am fast food, that his mom died of cancer when he was 12. He said it so carefully, like the wrong syllable could shatter the whole image. I knew, already, had heard the stories and read the file I was given, but a story from the source is always different from one that is second-hand. The way his voice caught in places, only ever for a millisecond, made me want to wrap him up in a thick blanket and promise him, again and again, that nothing bad would ever happen to him again.

In another life, this would be a promise I could make, at least halfway. In another life, we could have been good friends, maybe even best friends, who spent too much time in the makerspace with the 3D printer and the woodworking machines. He’d bring me shoots of his houseplants, which I would instantly kill, and I would quiz him for his MCATs. He’d take me on rides in his car, windows down and music blasting, and I’d be his wingman and find him some cute guy to settle down with. They’d have two kids and a tortoiseshell cat and I’d visit every day, and he’d be absurdly happy and I’d be absurdly happy just knowing he was alright.

Instead, every day we work is a reminder of just how fleeting a life can be, and I see his past in a lot of what he does. It certainly colors a lot of his relationship with Max.

Max is—how do I put this kindly?—kind of ordinary. He has short, spiky brown hair, and wears a lot of Patagonia zip-ups and straight-legged jeans. I never see him without his distinctive black thermos decorated with a hundred stickers, all hiking or rowing themed, inspirational quotes, and little cartoons, with the loose string of a teabag or two perpetually poking out from under the screw-cap. He’s solid and reliable, always open-minded (his go-to phrase seems to be ‘that’s fair’ with an accompanying bashful head duck that reveals the absurd sincerity of his words). He is calm despite it all, and rational, and careful. He loves his history and his science, and he loves to code. He’s studying chemical engineering, with a healthy helping of computer science, and he is always ready for a logic puzzle or a trivia question.

He and Magnus bonded early and quickly, over so many things but mostly the fact of their attending the same university (their dorms only a quick walk apart), their love of working with their hands, and their love of the Great Outdoors. They used to plan trips out to the lakes or the forests near our city, which they forced me and Sebastian to go along with the excuse of ‘team bonding’. They do less of that now, though. No one says it out loud, but Max has slowly become less able to do a lot of outdoor activities like that, as his chronic pain worsens. It’s a bad idea for us to be out so far, alone and vulnerable and far away from a hospital.

Max has a neuro-autoimmune degenerative disease (something like that—I don’t know what it is exactly, he never mentions the specifics) and we can all tell it’s been getting worse. There are days when he can’t manage much at all—I try to visit him whenever I can, but I know Magnus goes every time, shows up unannounced with Gatorade and soup and cards and lofi playlists. Max always keeps Magnus at arm’s length, though. I think it’s because of what he knows about Magnus’s mom. He won’t let himself be yet another person in Magnus’s life who leaves, and takes with them a part of Magnus’s heart. I can’t say I disagree with his sentiments (I’d be a hypocrite if I did), as much as I want them both to have their happiness in whatever time is allotted.

He and I get along well in a very particular way. I recognize in him my own pain, and he sees in me, I think, the same comfort. We have an easy relationship in that we never talk about any of it. He knows to leave it alone and not ask too many questions, and I know to sweep into his room and ramble softly about nothing when he’s too tired and in too much pain to do much other than curl up on his bed.

I’m the one he can talk to about Magnus, too, because I know a little something about pushing people out of your life, and in return I don’t push him away and he doesn’t feel like he has to do it himself. I talk to him about dying, sometimes; he makes it sound so much better than I could ever put it, and we are both comforted by feeling less alone.

In another life, I’d rarely talk to Max because we’d have nothing in common, but we’d be friendly, mutual acquaintances or course buddies who wave to each other across the street. I’d do my best to set Magnus up with Max, shove them into each other if that’s what it took, but more likely I’d have to do nothing more than watch them bond at a mutual friend’s party over their little hobbies and favorite hiking trails. In another life, Max wouldn’t worry about hurting Magnus and Magnus would grow him beautiful flowers and Max would plan picnics and I don’t know who would propose but they’d be so fucking happy it’d be ridiculous. Sebastian would be Max’s best man and I’d be Magnus’s best woman or whatever-you-call-it and that’s how Sebastian and I would meet again. While the four of us sat, somewhat drunkenly, laughing after the ceremony, I’d mention how I first met Sebastian, all those years ago in Medieval Studies in uni, and he’d admit he didn’t remember me in the slightest, and we’d be friends. The four of us would go on trips every year to someplace new and we’d have a group chat instead of a slack and maybe we’d live in the same city but maybe we’d only see each other every few months and we’d all be incredibly, absurdly happy.

That life wouldn’t be mine, though—wouldn’t be ours. So instead, we make the best of what we have.

The four of us make a pretty dysfunctional team, I know. We all have our flaws, way too many interpersonal relationships, too much baggage and too much pain. We still have so many secrets, and so many things we’ll never say aloud. However, we do have each other’s backs. We have this… project, this thing we’re creating. We have our shared goal, our shared purpose, our shared history.

These three silly, stupid, absurd human beings are like my family, basically, in this weird way, even though we don’t talk outside of work and SOS calls. Despite all the cracks they really do mean the world to me. Isn’t that what being human is all about, sometimes? Finding family amidst the rubble, and choosing this painful life over every other dream?

I used to think I was good at reading people because I saw hyper-nuanced thoughts in every nod of the head and wrinkle around their lips. Now, I know I’m just delusional.

It’s the mind of a writer, isn’t it? To always be making up stories? Always with a reason behind every footstep. It makes it easy to wrap up essays, at least. When I find the answer to the unasked question, the rest of the essay is just there, already fully formed. It’s what years of journaling does to you. I may not be a good writer, but at least what I get down on paper these days is what I wanted to say.

Scientists try to see patterns in sand, too, but they aren’t delusional. Maybe I’m just being scientific. My little homo sapien brain running circles around my reality. I used to come up with psychology studies when I daydreamed, based on the lives of people around me. What is the correlation between door-holding and how manly someone feels? Is there a link between laughing often and hidden trauma? What about between creativity and depression?

I thought that if I wrote an essay that made no sense, I might get somewhere, like how sometimes you just have to keep throwing out ideas until you find the one true solution. Instead, this is a jumbled mess that is neither jumbled nor messy enough to point to anything greater.

I like imagery of space and of oceans. Great big expanses that stretch on until the end of everything. They are beautiful and vast and holy and frightening, yes, they fucking terrify me, deep water most of all. And yet I am drawn back again, to the storms and churning oceans and suffocatingly still waters that drag down into the abyss, like a thread or a threat or a promise.

The darkness I fall into sometimes reminds me of the ocean. There’s no sound, no light, no feeling at all, and so much pressure building in my chest. There is no escape, they whisper. Do not resist, just sleep. Let the stillness have your heart.

Oh, surely it means something, right? It has to. I can’t keep falling for nothing and dreaming of stars.