Cover by Hyde Flanders
only the hills on friendship and forevers
by Sydney Pearson Illustrated by Julia Park
“All things come to an end. No, they go on forever.”
- “Train Ride” by Ruth Stone
***
At 1 p.m. on September 1, 1914, the world went silent. At least, that’s what I imagine. Because it was at that moment when a centuries-old cacophony ceased, and the final breath in a history of trillions was exhaled. On that late summer afternoon, the last passenger pigeon in the world, a 29-year-old named Martha, died in the Cincinnati Zoo. The nation’s most common bird had gone extinct.
When I first learned about Martha and the plight of the passenger pigeon, I was struck with sadness. How could an entire species disappear in mere decades? How could something once so alive, so abundant, vanish in the blink of an eye?
***
When I was younger, it was hard to fathom that things could disappear. With so little experience, every moment felt infinite, every relationship permanent.
Letter from the Editor
Dear Readers,
I signed up to write the editor’s note this week because I thought it would be easy; on the eve of Halloween, in the depths of true fall, I thought I would be swimming in inspiration. I pictured myself spinning a moody piece about purple sunsets and orange foliage, about apple picking and cooking with sage, about witchy pointed boots and soaking in my last Providence fall. But, in the throes of midterms and my thesis and filling out my ballot and entering the poster competition for my Modern Architecture class, I forgot.
This week in post-, our writers have been a little forgetful as well. In Feature, Sydney discusses the extinction of the passenger pigeon and how massive, seemingly permanent things (species, relationships)
That’s what I believed about my friendship with Megan. At the beginning of 8th grade, Megan became close with me and one of my best friends, and soon we became an inseparable trio. We shared overpriced chocolates and bus rows and stupid inside jokes. We had our chosen lunch table, one of the blue metal ones outside the math classroom, second from the left. When I found out that the two of us would be attending the same high school, I was overjoyed. We had only been good friends for a year, but now there would be four more. Four more years of laughter, four more years of lunchtime conversations, four more years of being known, truly, by someone.
The summer before we started high school, I visited her house. We swam and talked on her floor and ate cauliflower rice and fancy chicken nuggets with her family. We went to the nearby frozen yogurt shop, and after my mom picked me up in the warm August darkness, I remember thinking this was how things would be forever. We would always live in the summer and we would always exchange stories on bedroom
floors and we would always be friends. We were going to high school together. That had to mean something. Then classes began and I rarely saw her. The times we did interact I was my annoying 14-year-old self, bringing up old jokes and taking random pictures. It was high school, a time for reinvention. But I clung to the past,refusing to change, so we drifted apart. When I finally noticed the distance a year later, it was too late. The damage was done, and we both had new friends. I grieved for months at the realization, lamenting the friendship I let slip away. Where had that year of closeness gone? What could I have done to save us?
I know growing apart is natural, but for the longest time I blamed myself. I could have been a better friend, less pestilent and clingy. And I could have noticed the decline before it was too late.
***
One reason the extinction of the passenger pigeon came as such a surprise was due to the sheer volume of the species. It’s estimated that when Europeans first came to the Americas, there were three to five billion passenger pigeons in the United States. The birds gathered in the forests of the Midwest and East Coast, migrating to the southern states in the winter, and so many birds would roost in the trees that the weight could often snap branches clean off their trunks. Stories detail how flocks were so numerous and densely packed that when flying over towns and cities, the birds covered the sun for hours, as if the apocalypse had arrived.
Yet by the end of the 19th century, no passenger pigeon remained in the wild. A combination of deforestation and the rise of the commercialized hunting industry began to wipe out the species by the thousands. The birds’ communal nesting habits and large numbers made them convenient targets for cheap meat. With the rise of telegraph systems and the national railroad in the 1800s, people could quickly learn of and travel to nesting sites and then sell the carcasses across the country. Settlers shot and hit and poisoned and suffocated bird after bird after bird; in Petoskey, Michigan, it’s estimated that for five months in 1878, 50,000 birds were slaughtered per day. Tables weighed heavy with the rich, golden meat, floors lay scattered with pale blue, orange, and gray feathers, and the pigeons began to disappear.
Etta S. Wilson, writing on her childhood experiences with the passenger pigeon trade near Lake Michigan, describes how professional hunters scorned Native American advice on sustainably hunting passenger pigeons. When her grandfather recommended to white hunters that they practice an “offseason,” or a year where they abstained from hunting, they disregarded his advice. Scoffing, the men told Wilson’s grandfather that they knew as much,
can come to an end if we are not careful. In Narrative, Benjamin talks about missing a call from his sister and how their relationship has changed since being apart for school. Also in Narrative, Lynn forgets all her early Halloween costumes, except for a beloved Tinker Bell costume, influenced both by her Vietnamese family traditions and obsession with American media. In Arts & Culture, Evan discusses two rappers at Brown who have committed to music full-time, forgetting previous pre-professional aspirations. Also in A&C, AJ recounts Bruce Springsteen reckoning with his place in the American canon and the tensions that come along with that. In Lifestyle, Daphne reflects on her most recent dreams and missing her mom. Inspired by John Green’s The Anthropocene Reviewed, Katherine reviews some of her favorite fall things on a spectrum from trick to treat. Before you
go, check out post-pourri where Rchin thinks about technological advancement across the ages. Finally, a crossword that is as fun as it is spooky! If I’m being honest though, there’s nothing more Halloween than throwing something together at the last minute. A costume is best when it's ramshackle, cobbled together from your favorite bits and bobs from your friend’s’ closets. If you’ve been putting Halloween planning off until the last minute like me, pick up a copy of this week’s post- and you’ll be sure to find some inspiration.
In line for the midnight organ concert,
even more, than the Native populations. “There'll be pigeons as long as the world lasts,” they said.
***
Even when I grew older and had witnessed how middle school friendships had drifted apart, I still held onto a hope of permanence. That’s what I believed with Luca. During our junior year of high school, we became intensely close by having multiple classes and a study block together. He could talk a mile a minute, and it filled me with outrageous amounts of giddiness and energy as we played card games with our friends at lunch and edited each other’s poems in English class. That winter was sunny, and the sky always seemed the brightest of blues. I remember sitting on the grassy hill overlooking campus with him and my best friend, doing our reading for class and laughing about whoknows-what as the flag waved in the February breeze. I remember baking him a cake for his birthday. I remember singing “Pocketful of Sunshine” in math class with him, and later that night texting the lyrics back and forth in all caps until I messed up. I remember the sun, and I remember the oak trees, and I remember feeling that everything was so perfect.
But one day we got sent home from school for months on end, and the spell broke. I’ve never been great at texting, and I rarely messaged him over those seven months. When we finally came back to campus, the skies always seemed cloudy, and everything was so cold, and nothing was ever quite the same again. I had been thoughtless, and now another friendship had waned.
33 years after Martha died, the Wisconsin Society for Ornithology dedicated a monument to the passenger pigeon among the forests surrounding the Mississippi and Wisconsin rivers. The bronze plaque was inlaid in a tower of sedimentary rocks, and on it was an image of a pigeon perched on a branch, one eye trained toward the viewer in an expression of unblinking judgment. Beneath the bird read the note that “This species became extinct through the avarice and thoughtlessness of man.”
To commemorate the building of the memorial, Aldo Leopold, a writer and conservationist, penned the essay “On a Monument to the Pigeon.” In it, he wrote:
“We meet here to commemorate the death of a species. This monument symbolizes our sorrow. We grieve because no living man will see again the onrushing phalanx of victorious birds, sweeping a path for spring across the March skies, chasing the defeated winter from all the woods and prairies of Wisconsin.”
“Men still live who, in their youth, remember pigeons; trees still live that, in their youth, were shaken by a living wind. But a few decades hence only the oldest oaks will remember, and at long last only the
I remember the joy I felt when I settled into a college friend group after a particularly difficult freshman winter. We did all the things I had imagined stereotypical students doing: going to dances, holding impromptu movie nights, getting meals and developing jokes, sitting on each other’s floors talking about our lives. It was everything I had hoped for, and my sophomore year felt like a dream come true.
But junior year, interpersonal problems began cropping up, and as hard as I tried to ignore the pain, it wouldn’t go away. Despite being buried in classes and extracurriculars, the strife crept in through the cracks, and it only seemed to grow as the semester rolled on. Our foundations began eroding, or maybe they had never been as steady as I had believed. The cracks ran deeper than I could fathom, and by the end of winter break, when I realized the extent of the damage, it was too late. Everything had fallen apart.
The day before returning to campus that frigid January, I was sitting in my friend’s house in upstate New York on a group trip. The conflict had hit its peak that evening, and as the snow fell in the midnight cold, I climbed the stairs from the ghostly silent kitchen to the bedroom where I was staying. I paced through the room as I packed, careful not to hit my head on the sloped ceiling, the silence only punctuated by the occasional shuffling of her cat across the wooden floor. I wished we could be together and cry and mourn and figure this out. I wished my heart wasn’t breaking quite so deeply. I wished I had someone to talk to. But my only company was the cat, and it was so quiet and so cold. So I lay on the bed and stroked his bronze fur and felt the tears drip down my cheeks, knowing deep down that things would never be the same again. Our group was gone. Soon enough, only the hills would know.
Perhaps I was naive for thinking things could last forever. Perhaps I should have seen the warning signs. But I was blinded by the joys of our communal friendship, by bagel runs and impromptu dorm room chats and study sessions underneath the honey locusts. How could you ever believe something like that could go extinct?
***
Revive and Restore, an organization dedicated to using gene editing technologies to save extinct and endangered species, organized the “Great Passenger Pigeon Comeback” to revive a new generation of passenger pigeons before 2025. As of 2019, the organization was working on utilizing CRISPR technologies on pigeons to try and propel the geneediting project. No updates have emerged since then. While I understand the desire behind projects such as these, I cannot say I agree with them. The
woods and fields of the 21st century are vastly different from 150 years ago, and the ecology and food chain may have changed. We are not reviving a species so much as forcing them into a world to which they’re no longer accustomed. But, more importantly, bringing back an extinct species doesn’t change the fact that billions died at the hands of mankind. No amount of gene editing or cutting-edge research can truly restore what once was. The passenger pigeon is a lesson for us to look at our history and move forward, trying to treat those around us kinder than before. It is a reminder to acknowledge our thoughtlessness. It is a call to love better.
***
Over the summer, I visited my best friend at her school, which Luca also attended. The two of them had kept in touch, and one night we arranged to get dinner together and go paddle boarding. While Luca and I had never stopped being friendly since 2020, we seldom talked, and I hadn’t seen him for over two years. But when he hopped in the car, we immediately fell back into rhythm. We began to crack jokes and talk fast, and after we got onto the paddleboard and set off across the water, I felt like we were back in high school, the years and distance melting away.
After my friend group broke down last winter, I was filled with deep anger and grief. Why did all of this happen? Why did something that once seemed perfect have to be filled with so much strife and pain? But as I’ve moved forward, my sadness has subsided. I’m still friends with everyone involved; our relationships just look different now. I’ve still found joy and connection with them all, despite the pain we endured. What happened was tragic, but I know that I’ve grown amidst it all. Sometimes that’s the only lesson we can glean from loss.
A year ago, I posted on my Instagram story about how I had seen my favorite musician in a coffee shop. A few hours later, I saw a DM pop up. It was from Megan. She had known how much I loved the artist, and she messaged that it was a dream come true for me. The DM was short, less than ten words, but it made me smile all the same. At that moment, I wished I could have teleported back to my high school self, amid her sadness, and told her everything would be okay. Things change. We don’t always treat our relationships the way that we should. We grow apart. But not all is lost. We keep moving and living and loving some more.
I do not want to suggest that the extinction of the passenger pigeon was a good thing. It was an awful, ugly massacre fueled by human greed and disregard for our fellow creatures. It should never have happened. Yet it did. So we can mourn those beautiful, lively birds, and all that they once were to us. Then we can move forward, knowing we must do better, and remembering that life, that hope, still remains.
“Dude, do you like socks?”
“She’s really into textures.”
1. Joe Biden 2. Joe Mama 3. Joe Maffa 4. The little one from Boygenius 5. Hawk Tuah girl 6. Neil Mehta 7. The Beatles 8. Rashid Zia
i missed my sister's call
since I went to voicemail
by Benjamin Herdeg Illustrated by Kaitlyn Stanton
My sister called me last week, but I didn't pick up. She texted that she wanted to talk. But then I forgot.
At first, time passed quickly. I got busy. When I would leave the library at night, the world seemed small as it came back into focus. I'd get dizzy. My head would feel big and heavy on my shoulders. I felt what was in my mind could not fit within a day.
I am sure things have been similar for her. I am sure that after I went to voicemail, she went on with her day as if she hadn't called me at all, time passing quickly for her too. Both our days start in the early morning. Both of us see the hours getting longer and the sun setting sooner. We expect spring to have arrived by the time our alarms ring. We see so much in a day that it must be a season from now when we've rested and deserve a change.
I know we live similar lives. But our days are just different enough for her to call me. A small change. Something small reshaped her life in a subtle way, just enough that last week, she felt the need to let me know.
Every day I wait to call her, I wonder if the change gets bigger. Do we still do the things we used to do? I wonder if she still feels dizzy when she is tired. I take coffee with dinner now. Has she started to as well? I wake up to gulls on some brisk mornings and pretend I am at the beach. I always leave my window open, no matter how cold it gets. She must still do the same.
Time has started passing faster. The more hours I stay up, the less I remember what I did with them. I added a blanket to my bed because the weather was getting cold and yet, I always leave my window open.
My hair grew long and tangled. I ran to places so I wouldn't miss things. I wore clothes I could sweat in to class. Life became a timed exercise: if I did everything a second faster, I'd have another second free. If I could say one word a second, I'd save a word for my sister for every little thing I had done.
Things have happened that way for a while now. Every moment is reduced to a word.
The whole morning I'd be waking. The entire evening I'd burn. And at midday, I'd be sitting. I'd look at
the smaller and larger hours on either side of noon and decide which ones I'd like to go to. But I could only go forward.
I'd pass entire days, waiting to spot one thing that was different, one thing that I'd never seen before. I would tell her this one thing if I ever found it. Even still, in all the sameness, I wanted to call and tell her everything is the same, but I never felt it was worth the words or time.
And I am not so patient to wait for a word that matches her worth.
Then, night comes. The nights are short, but I rely on them when the things that change are dreams. I wish I could remember them in the morning. I can't call her to say there was something that I forgot.
I am dust. And the dreams I have every night, I think, are wind. I wake up blown to bits and disintegrated. I'm all over my room, flying unseen between the ceiling and the floor. I spend the days putting myself together.
When I am dust, I am shiny grains of earth before sunrise. Particles of me pixelate my view. Pink and red and tangerine color me and reflect on me, and it feels nice to be a part of the world.
But I have to tear myself away and put myself together. I have to clean myself up. There is no time when I am putting myself together to pick up the phone. How does she find the time?
We used to share a room. We were so young. I once jumped so hard and high on my bed that I hit my head on the ceiling and fell off while she laid under her covers and watched. I might have scared her at the time. The cuts did not scar. I cleaned myself up. I do not think she remembers now.
I don't remember if we ever talked at night. We were so young. I wonder when it became clear in our childhood that we would call one another when we got older.
She lives a bit far now. She got away from the cold. But here, the seasons have started to change. I know she knows that.
I walked outside just now, and a leaf fell into my open hand. There was still enough light at 9 a.m. that I could feel heat on my skin, but not enough that it reflected off the clouds and hurt my sleepy eyes. It is fall because the leaves have changed, but they are hanging on, and there is a breeze that isn't strong yet. I have begun floating through the day as time has slowed down.
a fairy magical halloween
odd childhood fixations
by Lynn Nguyen Illustrated by emilie guan
The white tiles of the living room were cool to the touch of my bare arms and legs. In between the gaps of the tiles were lines of grout, some light gray, some dark, some brown, and the uneven surface discomforted my forearms and chest as I lay down on the floor. My mind was not wary of my body. Before me was a miniature princess castle interior with pink and purple accents, built with detailed walls and furnished with minute tables and chairs.
While the origins of this toy set escape me, the bottom of my forearms retain the memory of imprints from the ridged floor and memories of playing with the set when I was in elementary school. The princess figurines of the castle were lost possibly as soon as I got the set, yet I can still remember fidgeting with a tiny orange-brown plastic mushroom in the castle’s kitchen. I wanted to find a mushroom resembling the very one of the castle, but it seemed to be an American variety I could not find in the Vietnamese dishes my grandma and mom served me. While the mushroom was simply a toy, I wanted to taste it.
This castle could have been my gateway into what it meant to be an American girl—a childhood of Disney fairytales instead of weekly trips to the temple to hear the philosophies of the Buddha. I grew up attached to movies like Ratatouille, One Hundred and One Dalmatians, Spiderman, and the first three Harry Potter movies—primarily because my dad kept a limited selection of Blu-ray discs and movies he pirated onto a flash drive. The rest of his DVDs were of foreign films, typically Chinese or Japanese. He put them on mainly to watch something on the TV that wasn’t completely unfamiliar to my immigrant mother or grandma, who weren’t invested in American media and didn’t know much English. Either way, his choice of movies rarely included ones with a female protagonist.
Along with these movies, I kept legends and myths close to my heart: ancient Greek gods, Santa, and the Tooth Fairy. I wanted to believe in magic, in things beyond the normal—to feel as though I was part of a special outside that only a select few could access. When I first tucked a fallen tooth under my pillow, disappointment sunk in me as I lifted the pillow to see my tooth still there. I should have done better. The next day, I shared my failure with my mom who then helped me clean and wrap my tooth in a tissue. After waking up the next morning, I jumped out of bed when I found a 20 dollar bill instead of a tooth. 20 dollars, for my tooth!
When Halloween time came around, I was unsure of what I wanted to dress as. Classmates, teachers, and aunts all proposed a princess costume, but the idea offended me: Princesses were not special, for they did not know magic. To spark an idea in me, my dad took me and my brother to a local Halloween store. I began by walking around inspecting the disturbing, mutilated masks of horror characters and bloodied scythes until an employee helped escort me to the kids’ section. There, I found princess costume after princess costume. My brother emerged with a Harry Potter costume, his bored face and sighs urging me to pick something already. I took a good look around, glancing past the costumes of Snow White, Cinderella, the Little Mermaid, Little Red Riding Hood, witches, unicorns, superheroes—until I saw Tinker Bell.
While I cannot remember if I ever watched the Tinker Bell movie on my dad’s unlawful flash drive before or after I got the costume, I know I was utterly
fascinated in the Halloween store. There was an allure about the costume that called me to pick it up from the shelf and hand it to my dad for purchase. It was confusing since I hated the idea of myself as a princess, and yet I was very happy to be a fairy: the only wellknown fairy in the Disney franchise.
When I donned the costume at home and showcased myself to my mom, she giggled in glee, perhaps because the clothes matched perfectly with the glitter TOMS she bought me to match with hers. My mom, brother, and I set out from the house with our plastic tubs covered in Halloween-themed graphic designs—mine purple and my brother’s green. It startled me to see numerous families out and about this early, already taking candies that could have been mine. But nearly every humble house in the neighborhood was made ornate with sheer strings of synthetic cobwebs, skeleton bones scattered throughout lawns, stacks of pumpkins with hyper-detailed carvings and those that were obviously done by a child, and fog that crept along the porches. I was relieved, expecting several houses to dish out endless amounts of treats. At this point of my life, my diet consisted primarily of chocolate, and I was most excited to collect a candy that I couldn’t find in classrooms, doctor’s offices, or the local Asian market: Tootsie Rolls.
The night left me with vivid memories—not of moments, but of feelings. The fear as I approached the doors of elaborate homes for a trick was thrilling. My smile brought laughs to my neighbors, whose affection then brought glee to me. Finding a good amount of Tootsie Rolls, doubled by my brother’s stash, satiated my post-dinner dessert for weeks to come. Tinker Bell is the sole Halloween costume I can remember wearing in my early childhood, not simply because I wore new versions of the same costume for several future Halloweens, but also because of the nostalgia.
Upon retrospection, the strange interests that marked my childhood were vital to my upbringing. I grew up with snippets of knowledge from the American media I engrossed myself in and from the Vietnamese traditions my family passed down to me. My unusual curiosities within Western culture stemmed from the mingling of my divergent backgrounds. I was obsessed with my toy mushroom because it was something in
the toy set that was familiar to me, just like my mom and grandma’s food. My media consumption was malecentric because my dad did not know enough about Disney heroines to even show me their movies. The tooth fairy was so special because it meant that I was normal, experiencing what other kids did even though my parents didn’t know about the fable until I told my mom about it. I chose Tinker Bell in that store, for she was as magical as the tooth fairy and she was a singular magical heroine that made me feel greater for dressing up as her. With these odd fixations, I found myself in joy amidst a culture that was not fully mine.
a night with Osiris and friends
the
community of renegades rapping inside an institution
by Evan Gardner
Illustrated by Ella Buchanan
It’s an uncommonly warm Friday night in Providence, and fans are slowly filing into AS220, a local nonprofit venue, for a night of rap and companionship with Osiris and Friends.
Inside the room, folding chairs are arranged carefully around the merch stand, where Osiris sits selling home-printed posters and custom stickers tagged “pay what you can.” As the room begins to fill and the laughter gets louder, the crowd congregates around a brown paper sheet plastered to a pillar in the center of the room, scribbling their answers to the prompt of the night: “What feels like home to you?”
The lights dim. Osiris and his partner Mick Banks climb to the front. The rustling whispers die down. All eyes are on the stage.
“Before we get started, I have one request,” Osiris announces. “Turn to your left. Say hello, how are you? Turn to your right. Learn a new name.”
When I first met Osiris (Osiris Russell-Delano) and Mick Banks (Jesse McCormick-Evans) it was in a very different setting. Instead of standing in front of limegreen spotlights and protruding speakers, we sat tucked between a pot of meatballs bubbling on the stove, a communal chore list hanging in front of us, and a plastic pull-up bar dangling above our heads.
As I talked to them in the bustling kitchen—squeezing in as many questions as I could between beeping timers and five additional roommates passing through—I learned that Osiris and Mick Banks started their musical journeys in opposite places: one classically trained, one homegrown; one in Queens, one in Cambridge. But despite all these differences, the two artists shared one thing in common: a messy independence.
“My earliest memories were with my dad, in my grandma’s house, where he was living at the time, in East Elmhurst,” Osiris told me. “I’d play the keys, not knowing what I was doing. He didn't get me any actual classes or anything, but I was cooking on that, and then eventually I went to Guitar Center, got my first bass, and started writing songs in kindergarten.”
For Mick Banks there was some technical training, but it wouldn’t last long: “When I was really little, probably four or five, my parents put me in piano lessons,” he said. “And I remember I would always have just scales [that were] classically oriented. And every week I would instead just make up my own stuff and come in with songs that I made.”
Until, one day, at age six, he officially dropped the charade. The young Mick Banks put his tiny foot down and told his parents, “No, I like making songs.”
By the first grade, both boys had a feel for the pen and a desire to strike their own path.
12 years later, that passion in their palms subsided, but it never died down entirely. In the fall of 2021, Osiris and Mick Banks arrived at Brown University as scientists: Osiris planning to major in political science, and Mick Banks in public health. But before long, the facade began to crack. Science wasn’t who they were, and the pen was still calling.
Osiris, in pursuit of law school, tried to ignore the regret of abandoning his passion and hoped the feeling would pass. But the longer it went unacknowledged, the more the regrets began to eat away at him. “It was
one of the worst, most turbulent times of my life,” he told me, as he pushed around the meatballs in his pan. “I wasn’t living up to myself, or my dreams.”
Mick Banks remembers the time well. After meeting Osiris in MUSC 1240R: Rap as Storytelling their first semester at Brown, the two quickly hit it off, becoming best friends and eventually roommates. In the restless nights they spent together, the two finally reached their reckoning.
“I remember we were having these big talks about whether we go the suits route or the artist route,” Mick Banks said, recalling a time when it felt like they’d reached a stalemate. But one night, the fever broke. Osiris couldn’t take it anymore, and the dreams he had tried so hard to repress suddenly broke out.
“One night,” Mick Banks recalled, “I had woken up and I was just chilling there, and this dude [Osiris] shoots up in bed, across the room, and he’s sleep talking. He’s like, ‘Harry! Meghan! A suit won't change anything. It never will!’” (Osiris was quick to clarify he was watching Meghan Markle’s dramedy Suits at the time.)
After that, everything changed. The two dropped the act, switched their majors, and decided to pursue music full-time, or, as Osiris put it, they finally went “all in.” The decision was hard, and the transition at times was grueling, but according to Osiris, the driving force was simple:
“Why would I waste the years of my life when I have the most freedom being unfree?” ***
These days, Mick Banks no longer jerks awake to the grating call of an alarm clock; instead, he starts his days with the sunrise—sometimes. For some artists, going “all in” might mean Google Calendars overflowing with appointments, writing with militaristic precision, and relying on rigid rituals, but Osiris and Mick Banks don’t create that way. To them, the creative process means freedom; it’s messy, sporadic, and impossible to wrangle, and that’s exactly how they like it.
When I asked Mick Banks if his sunrise runs helped him find a creative ritual of his own, he promptly rejected that theory. “I would like to say it does, but honestly, I don't think so,” he said. “I think that the best people who do this for a living have learned to create and be healthy. But for me, it'll be a week where I'm just living crazy, but the creativity is
just coming. And that goes back to the big challenge of this whole thing,” he added. “There’s no one telling you what to do. There's no structure. It's all in your hands.”
At times that independence gets lonely, but when the inspiration hits, the words come in bursts. The work becomes all the company he needs. “If I'm locked in, I'll be locked in for three days straight,” Mick Banks said. “I won’t eat, exercise, shower; I'm just straight making music. I don't feel good, but I feel fulfilled.” ***
“I would describe it more, but I’m telling the story loosely,” Osiris raps on “Feels Like Home,” a single from his latest project that he performs for his finale. As a listener, perhaps there is no better way to describe their project. With all its loose structure, the work of Osiris and Mick Banks is also an intense exercise in storytelling.
“I grew up with a lot of books and writing, and then also a lot of music, both from my mom and my dad,” Osiris told me. “I think I found rap as the perfect medium to express both of them. And so I think for me, with my art, a lot of it does feel very literary.”
And he certainly has the literary bonafides to back it up. His grandmother, whom he often lived with, was an English professor; his mom is an avid reader; and, at one point in our conversation, Osiris casually brought up novelist Toni Morrison’s four-hour daily writing practice as if it were common knowledge.
Mick Banks too comes from a house of storytelling. Growing up, his mother was a screenwriter who took great care with his cinematic education, but while she was focused on the screen, he was enraptured by the music.
“I would just listen to movie scores, casually,” he said. “And I think that was super formative in terms of how I think about music. My music is very visual to me. I always have a visual world happening when I'm making music.”
In the tiny room at AS220, it was clear that what was once a private project had already become something bigger—it was, as Mick Banks put it, an entire world, built around their music. Whether you’re jumping up and down with them in front of the stage, sitting in their buzzing house of seven, or squeezing between legs and elbows on the floor at one of their listening parties, these artists are always rebuilding that house
of storytelling, along with the family inside it.
“For me, all of it is about building community,” Osiris said. “My mission is helping people learn more about themselves because it helps me learn about myself.”
Even when they’re off-duty, this creaky old house puts the two artists right back where it all started. Every communal pot of massive meatballs shared lovingly between sessions is a steaming hot reminder that, even while he may tinker alone, Osiris first “fell in love with rap in a room with a bunch of my friends.”
The heart of the rappers’ craft will always be introspection. But when Osiris and Mick Banks put their creations out into the world, their music suddenly grows a lot more vast. It turns into a house littered with drumsets, keyboards, and an upright bass in the living room; it turns into a shoe rack overflowing with too many pairs to count; it turns into potluck dinners, stirred throughout an interview. It’s a house where everyone creates together.
american myth in motion
the many faces of Bruce Springsteen
by AJ Wu
Illustrated by Dinah Biga @dinah_does_art
His blue-jeaned ass is emblazoned on the cover of 30 million copies of Born in the U.S.A. , swaying and teasing. In ’80s concert footage, he’s a sweatdripping, fist-pumping powerhouse with muscles bursting out of a sleeveless flannel and fuzzy sweatband. He’s earned his title as the hardest working rocker in the business; A Springsteen concert has no opening act, might start early, and is three to four hours of pure energy from The Boss and his faithful backing musicians, The E Street Band. He ricochets around the stage, dipping into backbends an inch from the ground, hanging upside down from the mic stand, toppling to the ground in a faux faint amid roaring calls for an encore, his signature, raw rasp wrapping around each word. He’s one of the greatest stadium performers of all time, and he knows it.
He looks like the all-American man. “Born in the U.S.A.” plays at Fourth of July barbecues, car dealerships, and political rallies of any party— anywhere red, white, and blue is draped. When Born in the U.S.A. took over the 1980s, its title track was quickly co-opted as a patriotic, at times jingoistic anthem, and it became Springsteen’s most misinterpreted song. “Born in the U.S.A.” contrasts an upbeat full-throated anthem with a blistering critique of American policy during the Vietnam War and its impact on the alienated working-class men who returned.
“Born in the U.S.A.” was infamously misunderstood by Reagan during the 1984 election cycle, after which Springsteen became more explicitly political, often proclaiming at concerts that “nobody wins unless everybody wins.” Springsteen’s politics have continued veering leftward since. His long body of work includes: endorsements of Democrats from John Kerry to Kamala Harris; his most controversial song, “American Skin (41 Shots),” about the killing of Amadou Dillo by NYPD officers; his live performance of “57 Channels” interspersed with audio from news coverage and chants of “No justice, no peace!” during the 1992 Rodney
King riots; his Amnesty International world tour; rocking a field of 300,000 youths in East Berlin and stoking the fires of liberation a year before the Berlin Wall fell; every album he’s released about the alienation of the working class—see Nebraska, The River, The Ghost of Tom Joad (his astonishingly literary Grapes of Wrath -inspired album about the struggles of Mexican migrants); refusing to perform in North Carolina in 2016 to protest a “bathroom bill”; and his announcement just this week that he’ll be headlining a joint concert/rally in Philadelphia with Barack Obama (with whom he also co-hosted a 2021 podcast).
In the mid-90s, Springsteen started performing a dramatically different acoustic version of “Born in the U.S.A.” In the style of Delta blues and played with slide guitar, this haunting version leaves no room for misinterpretation. Springsteen eschews the upbeat chorus and ends abruptly with “I'm ten years burnin' down the road / Nowhere to run, ain't got nowhere to go.”
Despite everything, “Born in the U.S.A.” can’t seem to shake its legions of fans that hear only gaudy patriotism. Perhaps it isn’t trying to. As much as “Born in the U.S.A.” criticizes America, it doesn’t give up on it. Springsteen admits, in retrospect, that he would’ve liked to have released his blues version of “Born in the U.S.A.” along with the upbeat original, clarifying his vision of America with room for all the possibilities, a protest and an anthem. Because at the heart of Bruce Springsteen’s six-decade-long career is his obnoxious optimism about what the country could be.
“Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out (Live in New York City)” is the most electrifying 19 minutes and 16 seconds of human existence. As theVoice-Of-The-American-Spirit-ThroughBruce-Springsteen needs you to understand, it’s a “ROCK-AND-ROLL EXORCISM, A ROCKAND-ROCK BAPTISM, A ROCK-AND-ROLL BAR MITZVAH!” Huddled before this frenzied altar of rock, I tried to determine why I’ve been obsessed with Bruce Springsteen since the first time I really listened to “I’m Goin’ Down.” The best I can come up with is that, in the context of our national mythology, he’s probably the closest we’ve got to an American god.
Here’s what I’ve jotted down so far as tenets of American mythology: the open road, outlaws à la Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, the anxiety and appeal of motion, the salt flats in
Utah, dust-red handprints on the walls of a dried and ancient canyon, and dangerous nostalgia for a non-existent better time.
Like any good god, Bruce Springsteen strikes a larger-than-life figure, both in work and image. Of all his songs, “Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out” is the E Street Band’s creation story. Scooter meets the Big Man—the rest is history. Hearing Springsteen tell the story of how the band, specifically he and saxophonist Clarence Clemons, came together is like hearing a mythos—the convergence of volcanic forces. And more than any artist— admittedly perhaps by longevity alone— Springsteen has spent his career wrestling with what it means to be American and what it means to be an American myth. His optimistic vision of America might’ve been considered naive in 1984 and even more so now. Critic Steven Hyden compares the decline of Heartland rock to the erosion of the American center. Decades later, the man who inspired “Youngstown” is now a Trump voter; in 2024, many of the bluecollar workers Springsteen claimed in the ’80s have become disillusioned with his vision and are now politically at odds with him. It’s an evolving reality his work still contends with. But if Springsteen’s songs are evidence enough, he seems to understand that American mythology also encompasses the violence, dissatisfaction, and ambiguity of its own creation and upkeep. ***
Like the many interpretations of “Born in the U.S.A.,” Springsteen’s hypermasculine persona is also full of complexities. When it came to his themes and wardrobe, Springsteen made himself in the image of his father, a man he describes as both his hero and greatest foe. His father was a WWII veteran who struggled with depression and schizophrenia. He was a rug mill worker, a bus driver, and a prison guard, but was usually unemployed. He drank ferociously and showed his son little love. In Springsteen’s autobiography, Born to Run , he muses that his father saw his own hidden, inward softness reflected outwardly in Springsteen and tormented him for it. He once said about his stage persona, mid-performance: “Those whose love we wanted but didn't get, we emulate them. That's the only way we have, in our power, to get the closeness and love that we needed and desired. So when I was a young man looking for a voice to meld with mine, to sing my songs and to tell my stories, well I chose my father's voice… All we know about manhood
is what we have seen and what we have learned from our fathers.”
There’s a part in Springsteen’s Broadway performance of “My Father’s House” that gets me every time. The song is about running through the woods towards his father’s house. When he arrives, a stranger opens the door and tells him that no one by his father’s name has lived there for a long time. Midway through the song, Springsteen stops playing and launches into his signature spoken-word storytelling—he tells the audience he has a dream these days about performing in a sold-out stadium and spotting his dead dad in the crowd. He walks over to him, kneels down, and, pointing to his own shining silhouette on the stage, tells his dad, “That’s how I see you.”
Springsteen’s meditative and ethereal synth-heavy follow-up to Born in the U.S.A. does a complete 180 from the album that made him synonymous with 80s pop culture. Tunnel of Love is Springsteen at his most honest and autobiographical. It’s a devastating reflection on the dissolution of his first marriage, interwoven with his anxieties about manhood and living with his father’s shadow hanging over him. The complexities of his masculinity are on full display—he’s tough and fragile, loving, and deceitful.
There’s something incredibly queer about Bruce Springsteen’s hypermasculine ’80s stage persona. He might be an icon of macho heterosexuality, but through a queer lens, his performances of butch masculinity are so ridiculously intentional that he could easily be a drag king (he’s not, but like, imagine ). He rocks a workman’s jacket, tight jeans, and huge forearms. During his energetic shows, he would also frequently kiss his saxophonist and close friend Clarence Clemons on the mouth (here’s a Twitter thread dutifully providing documentation). In numerous performances of “Thunder Road,” during the climactic ending where the young lovers escape their hometown, Bruce throws himself onto his knees and slides ten feet across the stage into Clarence’s open arms, where they share a long impassioned kiss. It’s unsurprising that he has a small but dedicated queer audience, and there’s a delightful subfield of academic literature (and many zines) analyzing queerness in Springsteen’s work, persona, and performances.
In “Beyond blood brothers: queer Bruce Springsteen,” Rosalie Fanshel compares Springsteen to Walt Whitman, writing, “Whitman interweaves his views of the United States with his love for its men. Many Springsteen songs read like Whitmanian portraits of the American moral landscape, not a few sharing Whitman’s erotic language to describe his feelings for his brothers.” In Springsteen songs, e.g. “No Surrender” and “Backstreets,” men swear devotion to one another, kiss goodbye, live on the outskirts of society, and fall asleep together on riverbeds—free and alive.
At 75, Bruce is on his first world tour since pre-COVID (“When the world shut down, I made a promise that if we got through this I’d throw the biggest party I could”), and there’s no doubt he can still bring it. In 2024, his sound is contemplative and celebratory of the musicians he’s been in fellowship with for 50 years—some still on the road with him, some who have passed. Road Diary, his documentary following life on tour, came out last week, and as he proclaims spiritedly in it, “I plan on continuing until the wheels come off!” If there’s any American myth we can count on, perhaps it’s Bruce Springsteen.
trick or treat
The Anthropocene Reviewed (fall edition)
by Katherine Mao Illustrated by Ariana R. Jimenez
A few months ago, I read The Anthropocene Reviewed by John Green. In the book, Green portrays the modern human experience through small anecdotes from his own life. Each chapter is centered around a seemingly mundane topic and conveys a specific message that connects unlikely subjects and themes. At the end of each chapter, he gives the topic a rating out of five.
In the spirit of fall and Halloween, I thought I would add a twist to this concept and write my own adaptation. Instead of a five-point scale, my ratings will be given out as a percentage of “trick” or “treat.” For example, as an avid Harry Potter fan, I would give the series 1 percent trick and 99 percent treat. The series is wonderfully orchestrated, save for an unforgiving and unexpected death in the fifth book. There aren’t many foods that I dislike, but I have a bone to pick with mayonnaise. I would almost never add it to a BLT onf my own volition, but I suppose it’s more tolerable when combined with other ingredients—say, to make spicy mayo for sushi. I would give mayonnaise 80 percent trick and 20 percent treat.
In short, “trick” is a measure of how deceiving a topic might be and “treat” is an indicator of how much pleasure I take in the topic. Here is my attempt to review the Anthropocene in Fall 2024.
Harvest Salad : Food is an expression of love. The meticulous preparation and presentation, the careful experimentation to perfect every flavor—it all tells a story.
My hyperfixation meal this fall has been a harvest salad. Well, maybe not a hyperfixation, because my meal prepping has fallen off since the start of the semester, but there was a week in midSeptember when all I ate for lunch and dinner was my harvest salad. I drew inspiration from sweetgreen’s Autumn Harvest Bowl, which has blackened chicken, maple glazed brussel sprouts, roasted sweet potatoes, apples, goat cheese, roasted almonds, wild rice, shredded kale, and balsamic vinaigrette. I’ll credit sweetgreen for the idea, but their prices are beyond unjustifiable.
Now, I’m not claiming to have recreated the exact recipe. I’m a college student with a meager pantry and limited time, so I made my own concoction, substituting some ingredients at my convenience—feta for goat cheese, quinoa for wild rice, and others that don’t necessarily have a direct correlation to the original. No almonds because I’m allergic. Chickpeas and corn, just because I felt like it. Each component plays a pivotal role in the salad, bringing a unique element of warmth, crunchiness, or acidity, or aromatics. Tossed together, they create a harmonious synergy.
Perhaps it’s the ingredients in the harvest salad that resemble the coziness of fall—kale, apples, sweet potatoes. Something in it reminds me of the comfort I feel at Brown. Everything and everyone feels familiar. When I read a text from my friends, I can hear it in their exact tone and voice. When I ask a spontaneous question, I know their answer before they get the chance to speak. There are memories in every corner of this campus, shared with the people that make this place so special to me. As the biting wind brushes across my cheeks and I hear the crunch underneath my feet, I recall tender moments of embrace, raucous bursts of laughter, peaceful notes of home.
I give a homemade harvest salad 5 percent trick and 95 percent treat. If it’s ordered from sweetgreen, then 95 percent trick and 5 percent treat.
Tunnel Construction : I live right next to the tunnel on Thayer Street. Probably six out of seven mornings, without fail, I am woken up by the drilling of jackhammers and the pounding of metallic equipment. I try to convince myself that this is a blessing in disguise (it will force me to wake up early and be productive). Yet at 7 a.m., as I am rudely awoken by the cacophony of the construction, I am never as optimistic as I think I will be.
Sleep experts say that waking up naturally, with a faint and soothing alarm, or even with
no alarm at all, has proven to be better for our health and well-being. We wake up feeling more positive, alert, and focused. I can attest to that theory. During the summer, the sun rose earlier. Illuminating the curtains and sheers of my bedroom, its warmth and soft brightness would wake me gently. Those were the days when I rarely relied on caffeine to keep me energized. However, I suppose the tunnel construction is not entirely to blame. I could go to bed earlier at night and still get sufficient sleep. Ideally , that’s what every college student should be doing, regardless of whether or not they hear screechy drilling in the morning. But realistically, we’re either too stressed doing work or letting time slip away with endless yapping and scrolling. If nothing else, I can be grateful that the construction at least gives me consistency. Jolted awake, I brush my teeth, eat breakfast, and make my daily coffee.
I give the tunnel construction 80 percent trick and 20 percent treat.
Softball: For 10 years, from ages 8 to 18, I had a routine softball game every Saturday. When I had sleepovers on Friday nights, early the next morning I tip-toed around the sleeping bags of dormant girls on the floor and quickly changed into my uniform in the bathroom, texting my teammates: “Is it cold enough to wear the long sleeve Under Armour?” “Should I wear my heart guard over or under?” My mom would wait for me in the car outside with my bat bag prepared in the trunk. As she pulled out of the driveway, I would shoot my friends a text that they wouldn’t see until three hours later: “Just left for softball.”
Softball is typically a spring sport. In the fall, it’s called fall ball. My parents had tried to convince me to venture into other sports during the offseason—soccer, basketball, swimming—but I insisted on only doing fall ball. In Little League, we played away games which were typically a 2040 minute car ride. If we were ahead of schedule, my mom would stop by Dunkin’ Donuts to pick up munchkins for me and my teammates. From the second the box was placed down on the bench, little girls became indistinguishable from large felines, pouncing on the glazed and chocolate ones. After the stampede, the stragglers would indifferently select from the old fashioned and jelly left at the bottom. Dunkin’ Donuts, David sunflower seeds, and Big League Chew gum were the Holy Trinity. Having all three was always an indication of a good game. The scapegoat for a poor performance was always the sun, either directly in our line of vision when we were out on the field playing defense, or absent, leaving us shivering as we waited in the dugout to bat on the offense.
Now, my weekend mornings are spent groggily staggering around the kitchen, squinting without my glasses on as I unload the dishes from the night prior. If I wake up before 10 a.m., it’s either because I’ve made a commitment in advance, or I’m woken up by the tunnel construction. The smell of early fall mornings on the weekend will always teleport me back to my softball days: the morning dew on the grass, sometimes turned into frozen droplets in late October and November;. tThe cheers and chants from the dugout;. tThe echo of balls hitting the inside of gloves during between-innings warmups:. fFrom infield players to the first baseman, from the pitcher to the catcher and back to the pitcher again. The excitement of youth sports is a feeling I will always be fond of and long for. I reach for it with outstretched arms and sense it
within millimeters of my fingertips. So close, but just far enough away. Maybe I’ll experience the spark again some day through my children’s eyes.
I give softball 15 percent trick and 85 percent treat.
Northern Lights: A few weeks ago, the northern lights were visible in Rhode Island. I was eating dinner off-campus with a friend and missed the first wave at around 7:30. I had heard my phone ring multiple times during dinner, but intentionally ignored it out of courtesy. After we finished dinner, we got in the car and saw the news. OMG is it still happening??!! Put your phone to the sky, can you see it??? We were only seven minutes away from campus, so I unhesitantly yanked the gear to “D,” with tunnel vision towards home. The adrenaline, euphoria, and anticipation morphed into an emotion that’s indescribable, a state of genuine excitement that I had probably only felt on Christmas morning (before I found out that Santa isn’t real). By the time we arrived, the lights were fading, but we held out hope for a few more hours. At 10, magic struck as the next wave of light arrived. We raced from one destination to another, trying to find the darkest viewing spot. Governor Street, India Point Park, and eventually we meandered through the woods to Scituate Reservoir Causeway. At long last, our eyes were shimmering hues of pink, purple, and green.
I had always imagined that seeing the northern lights was a distant dream, that would maybe someday become a reality if I went to Iceland, Norway, or another Scandinavian country. The beauty that we can see with our eyes, or rather our phone cameras, is remarkable. An occurrence like this is grounding. It reminds us how even the smallest moments, like seeing colorful lights in the sky, can fill us with joy and etch an everlasting impact in our souls. We never know how often, if at all, these experiences might occur, or if they will come back around. In these moments, no words have to be spoken, no thoughts have to b-35 It whispers, “I’m here for you, you are safe with me.”
I give the northern lights 100 percent treat.
you are always your mother’s child
mom, I miss you.
by Daphne Cao Illustrated by Coco Zhu
On Saturday, October 19, I dreamt that my mother died. I woke up at 8:32 a.m., the grief my dream persona experienced ebbed into relief as I realized it wasn’t real. As my heartbeat slowed to a steady pace, I sniffed and felt tears rolling down my face.
I sat up and wiped them away with my sleeve, but more poured out, and soon I was quietly sobbing on a sunny Saturday morning, birds chirping, because of the death of my dream mother. At exactly 9:07 a.m., my tears stopped, and I caught a glance of myself in the mirror across from my bed: face flushed and blotchy, eyes bloodshot, hands fiddling with the blanket on top of me.
I promptly fall back asleep for another hour, thankfully into a dreamless rest.
About three days later, I woke up from a dream where my mom told me she didn’t love me. I could still recall the confusion and rage I felt in the dream, how I begged for a why, a when, a how—any answers.
But I didn't burst into uncontrollable tears. I only had one thought: What a ridiculous dream.
I know that my mother is very much alive and very much loves me. She’s in good health, and I can tell she loves me when she asks me if I bought my train tickets home yet, gives me pointed, candid advice when I tell her about my (oftentimes petty) drama, and repeatedly checks if I need her to bring anything from home when she visits.
So how did my brain even come up with not one, but two dreams like that?
And then it hit me: I just desperately missed her.
I miss walking down the stairs and seeing her there. I miss hearing about her day even if I’m
only half-listening. I miss eating her cooking. I miss hearing her laugh. I miss the warmth of her unprompted hugs.
I miss her constant presence.
Last year, as a first-year, I had the excitement of meeting new people, living in a new space, and scrambling to keep up with classes to distract me. But, now that I’ve settled in as a sophomore, and Brown no longer has that shiny novelty, I’ve grown to ache for my mom and home more.
I speed-walk to my class tugging at the belt loops of the jeans she wore when she was my age and wrapped up in an old jacket she gave me after I went home for the long weekend. My phone holds an unread text from her. I sit down in class and take out the notebooks she gave me, the laptop littered with stickers she bought me.
When I return to my dorm, it’s nothing like coming home after a long day of classes back in high school. Instead of a house that’s always humming with creaks in the floors or conversation among my family, I’m in a cramped room with a broken drawer and no one else to help fill the silence.
But there are still traces of home here: the nail dryer on my shelf gifted to me by my mom, the command strips my dad helped put up on the walls, and the empty suitcase that’s tucked under my bed, waiting to be packed for my next trip back home. My mother isn’t here physically, but she’s left little pieces of her love behind.
I unzip my jacket that was once hers and hang it up in my closet, already missing its cozy warmth. But I know it’s there waiting for me to wear it again, to act as a soothing balm against the autumn cold and my aches for home.
POST-POURRI
BEFOR E YOU GO
look behind to see the future
a story about humanity’s past and our tomorrow
by Rchin Bari
Illustrated by Ellie Kang
In the late 1800s, predictions about futuristic technology such as the electric floor cleaner, a flying postman for faster information travel time, and a telephone with pictures to see who you are calling were prophesied. We have these today, but in wildly different forms than were once imagined.
Imagine observing human progress from the very beginning: A caveman who might point and utter basic sounds to direct his tribe, instructing them to throw sharpened sticks when a mammoth came too close. Gradually, these sounds evolved into a rudimentary language system.
A mega-annum later, a Sumerian farmer offered one cow in exchange for three goats, but a delay occurred with the third goat. So the farmer scratched out pictograms with some sticks and clay to represent the agreement.
A few millennia afterward, a Greek engineer was contracted to build a bridge. The engineer turned to Cyclopean masonry techniques to construct a stone bridge in Argolis, Greece.
Centuries after the bridge, a scientist aspired to create a spacecraft capable of reaching the Andromeda constellation and back without going over the speed of light. They read countless theories and papers, crediting all the people who inspired them to come up with new modes of
intergenerational transportation.
Examples such as these show humanity’s progress in transmitting knowledge across time and space, documenting and preserving ideas in forms like pages, contracts, academic literature, and other media. Yet, what are the limits of this progress?
With advancing technologies, we are reaching a point where information storage and retrieval may become flawless, undamaged, and limitless. Today’s computers, aided by AI, provide summarized understanding and analysis. Still, our predictions remain partial and imperfect.
When people need answers, they turn to books, encyclopedias, articles, newspapers, and computers. But what if that’s not the end of what’s possible?
On October 9, 1903, an editorial in the New York Times claimed that the demands of flight would take anywhere from 1 million to 10 million years for humans to reproduce. Weeks later, on December 17, the Wright brothers made their first successful flight.
Today, when we look into the future, we see a grim possibility of AI replacing us completely. The future holds technology inconceivable to the present; it would be naive to rely on our past to predict it with such certainty.
We don’t know where the future will take us. But human resilience remains. While other species faded, Homo sapiens continues to survive.
Creeping It Real
by lily coffman
“In my short time here, I know that every one of my delusions, desires, and dreams in every world, universe, and multiverse all connect to create the truest version of myself.”
Gabi Yuan, “Reinventing” 11.09.23
“I will always welcome a story about my past. And for my first tale, I have a souvenir that retells it to me every day.”
Marin Warshay, “Woven into the Seams” 11.04.22