post- 03/14/24

post-

Cover

by Sydney Pearson Illustrated by Emily Saxl

“if someday you can’t find me you might look into that tree or—of course it’s possible—under it.”

from “Green, Green is My Sister’s House” by Mary Oliver

Green: the quiet lawn two stories down, the oak trees out the window, one chipped sage wall of the dorm room. It is my favorite color, the shade of forests and ferns and frogs, so I took it as a good omen when I walked into the dorm for my summer internship in Tulsa and saw so much of it in front of me. I put down my bags, pulled five small succulents from my backpack, then placed them on the sunny granite ledge by the window. They added their own special hue, a personal mark for the next 10 weeks we would spend in this room. Green on green on green. It was the perfect summer home.

LowCas was the first to die. A symmetrical, dusty green plant in a taupe pot, I doted on him during the school year, moving him to the window in the morning and back to the cart beside my bed each night. I shared him with my roommate at Brown but won sole custody at the end of the year, so in late May I wrapped LowCas in tissue paper and carried him with the rest of my succulents to Oklahoma.

To water LowCas, I quickly ran him under the sink every few weeks, but his flat leaves made a concentric pattern that just covered the edge of the cup, making it difficult to judge when his soil was still wet. One day that

Letter from the Editor

Dear Readers,

Didn’t see you there. Probably because today I went to the optometrist and got my first prescription. My 20/20 long years of boasting perfect vision have finally come to a close. This afternoon, I got to live out my long-time dream of trying on every pair of glasses in Warby Parker. For every pair I donned, I could imagine the new person I would become. I can see myself in a pair of chunky square tortoiseshell glasses, studying late at night in the Rock. Or maybe with the clear wide-rimmed glasses in a coffee shop downtown, sipping an overpriced matcha. The metal wire-framed glasses would transform me into the mysterious girl walking down Thayer, big headphones drowning out the noise. In the face of this upheaval, I am reminded that each day brings a new opportunity to become the person I’ve always wanted to be. With or

summer, after noticing an unusual amount of leaves falling off, I tugged him out of the pot and realized the soil was drenched and smelled of mildew. Root rot, a deadly mold infection, had set in. I didn’t know what to do, so I did what I could, pinching the soil off his roots and repotting him. But I failed to breathe him back to life, and was doomed to watch as the black stain of mold ate up his stem, exposing his pith to the air, until it finally reached his perfect teardrop-shaped leaves and shriveled them one by one.

I buried him in the bark underneath an oak tree outside my window. As I poured LowCas into the ground, I whispered my apologies. For not knowing him enough. For flooding his home.

As the weeks crept on, the heat and humidity left me with an unquenchable longing. I missed my hometown in California, the cold fog from the bay rolling over the road in the early morning, the mountain punctuating the Western skyline, the sound my dog made as she jumped on my bed. I yearned for college—the old, creaking windows overlooking the green, the soft piano in the chapel on Friday evenings, my basement room where animals scampered outside my window. I entered the summer believing that Oklahoma would fill me with its newness and possibility for adventure, adding the final grown-up touches to my life. But despite the friends I made and restaurants I tried and churches I explored, the wide, unoccupied sidewalks and quiet dorm hallways and vastness of my room felt like a vacuum, constantly exposing all I had left behind.

without new glasses.

This week in post-, our writers, too, contemplate momentous life changes. In narrative, one writer muses on the triviality of life upon turning 20, while the other writes about crochet as a means of weaving together her past and present. Meanwhile in feature, our writer reflects on the growth and loss of her plants, a reflection of her transition to a summer move. In A&C this week, one writer contemplates the circular nature of life and grief, and the other speaks to building familiarity in her house, transforming it into a home. One lifestyle writer similarly muses on the meaning of home, struggling to define what it means amid new spaces. Another lifestyle writer this week reflects on taking number theory as a humanities major. Finally, our crossword will leave you feeling lucky for St. Patrick’s Day this weekend.

Next time you see me, I’ll be a new person. I’m not

“The first step toward the successful adoption of a houseplant is giving it a good container. The homely plastic pots that plants come in not only lack eye appeal, but also may be cramping their roots. By the time you've taken a fern or jasmine into your life, it's probably ready for new quarters.”

- from Tovah Martin’s “Antidotes for the Blues of Winter”

After LowCas’s death, I feared the same fate for my other plants. So, one Sunday in late June, I took a tiny bus to a home improvement store and searched for the right ingredients to make an adequate soil mixture, eventually settling on a bag of fast-draining soil and another of perlite, an aerating mineral.

Once I returned to my room, I dug out a plastic spoon and began to evaluate the repotting situation. Violet, with her sturdy stalk and thin leaves that had gone maroon with the intense Oklahoma sun, was the easiest. I kept her in her same white-and-blue-striped pot, once home to my first-ever college succulent. Violet’s soil tended to be dehydrated, but her pot had no drainage, so I added a good amount of new soil for nutrients and a scoop of perlite for aeration. In the fresh mixture, she continued to grow, but she remained parched, her leaves retaining their sunburnt blush.

At sunset, when the stifling heat dropped, I would sometimes walk to the center of campus and sit on the steps of the massive library. I would bring a journal and

quite sure what new persona I will embody once I get my glasses; maybe the new frames will allow me to see the world in a new light, or allow me to focus on what’s really important (or maybe, just let me see the board during lecture). But one thing is certain: the first thing I’ll do once I get my glasses is pull out a copy of post-.

Mary Oliver’s Devotions to watch the sky change colors, smile at the dogs running across the green, and listen to the drone of the cicadas. Gazing at the sparrows settling in for the evening, I took off my shoes to soak in the warmth and soft grit of the sandstone. In those moments, I finally felt at peace.

One night, too dark to read but not wanting to go back to my room, I wandered the perimeter of the library. Reaching a patch of grass, I saw a flash of light, then another, then another. Fireflies, dancing through a grove of trees. I grinned. For a moment, it was the most beautiful sight of my life. I could stay there forever, listening to their faint electric buzz, watching them illuminate the dusk.

“A Ming Aralia, Uprooted

Q. My seven-year-old Ming aralia was doing fine until I moved to a new apartment. Then it started shedding more branches than usual. I always water once a week and have never used plant food. Please advise.

A. It’s an old story: a happy houseplant is moved and boom! unhappiness reigns. Differences in obvious factors like light levels and in subtle ones like tap-water temperature cause stress that often makes plants pare themselves down, and Ming aralia (Polyscias fruticosa) is particularly vulnerable to change.”

from the Oct. 26, 2006 New York Times Garden Q&A

Repotting Klaus and Jerome was the most tedious process. Klaus, a dark green succulent with soft leaves down his stem, had begun to grow his roots through the drainage hole in his tiny pot and had also produced a second sprout in the dirt, no bigger than a fingernail. If I left him for much longer, his growth would be stunted, squeezed in by the terracotta vessel that I had painted with green hearts. So I mixed the perlite and soil in a white pot patterned with pink triangles, then wiggled Klaus out of his old pot, careful not to damage his roots or, worse, snap him entirely in half. I dumped the excess soil in the new pot, then placed him inside.

Jerome, my oldest plant, with long, dangling, spiked leaves, had been living in a disposable plastic container for the past month, as his pot had broken near the end of the school year and nothing I had on hand would properly fit his lanky proportions. After repotting Klaus, I made a similar mixture in his old pot, then replanted Jerome’s short, stocky roots into it, hoping they would branch down with time and patience. Maybe, one day, he could finally ground himself where he was planted.

I don’t remember when I first noticed that the room’s ceiling was growing mold, but it must have been around the time I began crying for everything and everyone that was out of my reach. I imagine that during those nights, the tears flew upwards, defied gravity’s sickening pull,

and planted themselves in the ceiling tiles above the headboard. There, they stagnated and grew, blooming into mottled black and brown rising suns.

I submitted a maintenance request one day. It took a week for them to replace the tiles, and when I came home from work I found dust and small chunks of the white, fibrous material scattered across my floor and bedding. I washed it all immediately, hot water to scourge any remaining contagion that may have fallen. Maybe this time, I thought, it would be better.

The mold grew back. I continued to cry.

“There was someone I loved who grew old and ill One by one I watched the fires go out. There was nothing I could do

except to remember that we receive then we give back.”

from “At the River Clarion” by Mary Oliver

When I removed Sunny, my smallest plant with tiny lime-green rosettes, from her plastic container, the square base of her soil seemed bone dry. But when I finally squeezed the roots to allow them to reshape, I realized that the middle was soggy and smelled like grass. She was molding.

I frantically tossed some extra perlite into the new mixture I had made in LowCas’s old pot, hoping root rot hadn’t set in yet. But about a week later, Sunny died, in the same way, and the same place as LowCas. But unlike LowCas, I didn’t bury her immediately. I left the crisp, dead leaves sitting in the pot for weeks on end, lacking any motivation to give her the rites she deserved.

I didn’t want to take that death-laden pot home, so I gave it away at the end of my internship. I wish I had thrown it away though. I think that LowCas and Sunny both permeated the porous terracotta, despite my best efforts to wash it. I don’t think that anything but rot can survive there now.

Around the same time as I replanted the succulents, I met a woman with a pot-your-own-plant stand at a market. I chose a cactus, one near blooming, and a glass with images of roosters on the side. She walked me through the process of placing charcoal and river rocks on the bottom to help with drainage and prevent mold, scooping soil in the middle to feed the plant, and then carefully inserting the cactus with a pair of rubber tongs. I decorated the edge with dusty white rocks and little animal figurines, then placed a cowboy hat on top to complete the look. I named him Billy Joel.

I was determined not to repeat my past mistakes, and the woman at the stand assured me that the less I watered Billy Joel, the better. But when I returned to California

girls

after my internship, I noticed that the circle of dirt at his base was rising out of the rest of the soil. I chalked it up to underwatering, but I knew the problem went beyond hydration. With the combination of soil and rocks and charcoal and little decorations, he didn’t have enough room to grow.

Or, maybe, he wanted to go back home. To Tulsa.

“ Joy is not made to be a crumb.”

- from “Don’t Hesitate” by Mary Oliver

One Sunday in Tulsa, visiting a nearby church, I learned about the concept of “defiant joy.” It is the idea of finding happiness where you are and taking time to praise God, no matter how difficult the circumstances. That same day, Billy Joel flowered. A single bright magenta bloom.

In late July, Violet, Klaus, Jerome, Billy Joel, and I made it to California. We stayed in my home for a month before school began, acclimating to the weaker light and less extreme temperatures. I showed the plants around the house, wondering if their perch on my bookshelf felt like just another layover, if it was nothing more than a guest room to them. And I suppose that in some ways, I felt the same. Despite calling California home, despite the memories in every corner of my house, I, too, was passing through.

At the beginning of September we all went back to Providence. My plants now live by the window of my new room, soaking in the sunshine and occasionally being misted by the rain. They seem content but with every move they have changed. Klaus and Violet have grown taller and tilt in their pots: Klaus, out of lazy contentment, and Violet, in her yearning for the sun. Jerome’s leaves have grown shorter and sturdier, refined with age. He frequently falls out of his pot, and every time, I place him back in, patting down the dirt around his still-short roots. Billy Joel is dead. His arms began withering in California, and they finished the process once in Providence. It felt cruel to dump him in the trash or abandon him to the wind. So under a cloudy, moonlit sky, I walked outside with the rooster cup in my hands, its glass cool in the night air. I tried to dig in the dirt outside my window with a plastic spoon, but the earth refused to yield, so, as I had done before, I settled on the softer bark around a bush. I hope he has enough sun and space in his new home. It is not a final resting place—I believe that whatever is left of his spines and stalk and roots will nurture something new, and through him, I, too, will grow something. Pieces of ourselves, our joys, our pains live in everything we care about. No wonder loving is hard. No wonder leaving is harder. We place our hearts in things, walk away, and if we’re lucky, they’ll multiply again and again and again.

“What would you do if I was friends with a baby? Would you step in?”

“If I ask that on Google will that register me as a racist?”

spooled

keep in touch

by Ana Vissicchio

Illustrated by kendra eastep

Sun streams in through the dirty windshield of my green Subaru. I prop up my knee as I drive, and if my mother saw me, she’d be upset. But you are the one in the passenger seat next to me, twiddling with my phone to pick a song on our nine-minute drive to Michael’s.

The aisles of the craft store bring us comfort; spools and spools of brightly colored yarns all organized neatly by acrylic, wool, and mohair for our browsing pleasure. Fifty percent off all yarn today! Paper bags overflowing in our arms, we walk back to the car with our loot.

We’re entering our twenties now, which means internships, boyfriends, darker shades of lipstick, reading books other than young adult romance novels. But I still think about third grade—noisy recorders, dirt in our hair from the playground, and after-school crafts— with a warm familiarity. I remember the periwinkle case you made me, a home for my loud, neon instrument, crocheted from scratch imperfectly, yet with so much care. I remember when you tried to show me how. We wove thick threads clumsily together with our hooks. Yours, a perfect stitch. Mine, not so much.

The physical distance between our colleges sits on my chest: a throbbing pain. I wince when I think about the parties you go to, the dates you go on, the people you meet—noneof which I'll ever know. I was used to being the center of your universe, or at least occupying a little part of it. Now, we struggle to squeeze in a phone call each month. Each time I come home, you say little things and have certain mannerisms that weren’t there before. I wonder who passed them onto you; who wove those threads into the inner workings of the mind I used to be so familiar with?

I cling to the memories of our coffee dates. The Subaru brims with yarn and conversation, and we speed over to our favorite spot, where we both order zucchini bread and cold brew, sit outside even if it’s freezing, and crochet. Last time, we both worked on scarves— you, working side to side, and me, creating a long ribbon that I doubled in width. Your scarf was a pale pink. Mine, a soft cornflower blue.

I tuck my chin into my scarf on the Amtrak back to

school. The train car is stuffy, but I don’t have space in my tiny carry-on to store the scarf. A thread has become loose; I try and fail to tuck it in, so I leave it be.

Providence is cold. I walk out of the library for the first time since arriving back from home, and I feel like I’m going to fall over; the railing of the steps leading down from the Rock anchors me against the gusts of freezing wind. My scarf, tucked away beneath my huge puffer jacket, soothes me with its heavy wool, crisscrossing around my neck like a hug.

The light blue of my scarf slowly fades and the sheen grows fuzzy. A bit of thread peeks out of each little crevice, slowly, slowly—cheap yarn does that. Each night, I wrap the scarf delicately into a little ball and place it on my desk. In doing this, I notice how it’s stretched out in certain places, how the edges aren’t as straight as I thought they were when I first finished the project— changing little by little.

I met a new friend at RISD. One Thursday afternoon she took me to the “yarn vault,” a place I technically wasn’t allowed to be. The stash was unlike anything I’d ever seen. Walking through a room of looms, student projects hanging unfinished, and rolls and rolls of textiles and fabrics, we eventually entered the vault. The shelves and shelves of yarn, threads spilling over the sides and spindles squeezed together with barely any breathing room put poor Michael’s to shame. The room, slowly filling with conversation and yarn, reeled as we grabbed scissors and got to work. I rolled up little balls and stuffed my Patagonia fleece pockets with as much as they could hold. We spun project ideas back and forth, my mind a bobbin on a sewing machine.

The next day, I laid all the loot out on my desk. What was I thinking? A little ball of dark raspberry, a spool of olive green, some threads of ochre yellow. Not enough of one color to make a whole project, even a little keychain.

Most crochet projects start with “the magic circle.” Looping the strands of yarn around your fingers, a slip knot fastens in a certain way, allowing for easy readjusting of this circle of thread. This starting method is perfect for projects like hats, or granny squares, where looping stitches around the circle over and over again creates the project’s unique shape. Strands of yarn interweave, over, under, around, making a home for hands or a blanket for a bed.

Crocheting frees my mind to wander; I loop stitch after stitch over each other to create something simple, something useful. Yet, learning how to crochet

is a multifaceted process. The journey starts by finding footing in simple projects and trails off in explorations of new patterns and adventurous designs. The translation of these patterns requires the adoption of a new language. Chain becomes ch, slip stitch becomes sl st, single crochet, double crochet, half double crochet, and triple crochet—sc, dc, hdc, tr. Short terms guide novice hands: inc, dec, turn, join, rep wreathe my brain as I complete stitch after stitch, row after row.

The scarf was just one spool of medium-weight wool yarn hand-spun into single crochet stitches, all joined together into one long rectangle. Intricate patterns, rainbows of colors, dimensions of texture had no place here. I sat and stared at my brand new, little spools of contraband yarn; spiky mohair threads, twisty textured fibers, and shiny metallic filaments shed onto my desk.

Crochet projects can dip in and out of different colors. For a single crochet, you insert your hook, wrap the yarn over, and pull through, then use the new color to repeat through both loops. Seemingly simple, and yet I struggled. Intertwining the two separate threads of yarn, one kept slipping through the loop of the other—they were incapable of meshing together.

–

As time inches on, days looping into weeks and months, I find myself wishing I called you more often. There is difficulty in weaving together my present life— Providence with its cold weather and pilly scarves—and my past, where I wait in your driveway, my backseat stuffed with yarn eager to become a warm project, ready to pick you up and drive to our spot. There are times I pick up the phone, then put it down; it’s been so long that I don’t even know where I would start, what I would say, if you even found what I said interesting. But I think of you when I spin threads into chains with the little metal hook we bought together, and I especially think of you when I successfully weave two colors together. When little ends stick out and I have to tuck them in; when I learn a new pattern and get excited to teach you when I’m home again; when I finish up my scarf and wrap it snugly underneath my jacket. Memories are woven into projects, new and old.

I haven’t given up on with my patchwork project. For now, when it gets cold, I still reach for my overworn cornflower scarf, finding solace in knowing it will always keep me warm. Maybe when I get home, you can help me, and we can start over together.

eureka euphoria

striking gold amidst meaninglessness

by Lynn Nguyen

Illustrated by stella tsogtjargal

“Happy birthday!”

My best friend performs a humble rendition of the birthday song before I blow out candles of the numbers “1” and “9” atop my chocolate mini bundt cake.

“What’d you wish for?” she asks teasingly.

If there’s one thing I learned from the summer, it’s that everything is trivial.

I emerged from my first year at college in ruins (though I did not know it then)—wasted time, unhealthy habits, memory loss, unpleasant relationships. Without much thought, though, I moved on to my summer plans with zeal as I was to partake in my first ever internship at a Hollywood company—a tangible hope that I could be a part of the film industry as per my childhood ambition. It had also been four months since I was last with my best friends from back home; we looked forward to the next three months reunited not as naive adolescents but as learned adults.

It was only in the last quarter of summer that an unexplainable, existential bleakness surged over me. What am I doing? How did I spend a year making so little progress in my education? Why am I giving time to people I know will hurt me? What makes me good enough to break into one of the hardest industries that excludes people like me? Will my realities diverge from my dreams in five years?

When my best friend asks me what I wish for on my birthday, I have no articulate answer. 19 is the last year of adolescence, the last time I may ignore the future. But I simply feel that everything around me amounts to nothing in the end.

With my hometown friends already gone at college and my internship program concluded, I am left alone with the time to contemplate my own questions, which I avert in anticipation of the near return to school. I

spend hours on end perusing inspiration photos for dorm decorations, videos documenting the experiences of campus life or study abroad, and online stores for envisioned outfits throughout the school year. I distract myself from the dread with short-lived excitement, but in the back of my mind dwells a constant question of “What am I doing?”

Upon returning to campus, I oscillate between an eagerness to re-enter my adventurous routine and a fear of my nihilistic subconscious. It is a battle of distraction: When I am in conversation with friends or focused on a reading, I am not wondering about the insignificance of our talk or this single reading out of infinite others I have yet to touch. But in those brief moments of failed distraction, the triviality of everything holds me down.

My first paper for the English course is due in three days and I have only finished the first chapter of the book I plan to write about: Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse I chose this reading because it’s the only novel that I have even opened, and its curious stream of consciousness roped me in. The critical essays we discussed in class describe Woolf simultaneously as an ambiguous, spiritual modern and an elitist anti-Semite. I am unsure of what to expect from this book…

Halfway through, I find a wealthy, dysfunctional family and female characters I pity for their negotiations in an outwardly chauvinist community. I think that this book is one of the many in college that are ostensibly confusing, but I nonetheless take a liking to Woolf’s drawn-out prose that borders on poetry. And the theme I clutch onto so far is impermanence. The characters’ desperation to prevent endings lets me see how I’m desperate to cling to onto any shred of meaning I encounter.

As a tragic death divides the family further and cements the melancholy, there is a single moment that undoes the sorrow, that salvages a hope amidst the fading away of everything. A female painter named Lily fixates on this particular portrait of her friend, Mrs. Ramsay,

for nearly a decade. Lily wishes to know “the meaning of life”:

The great revelation had never come. The great revelation perhaps never did come. Instead there were little daily miracles, illuminations, matches struck unexpectedly in the dark; here was one… Mrs. Ramsay saying, “Life stand still here”; Mrs. Ramsay making of the moment something permanent (as in another sphere Lily herself tried to make of the moment something permanent)—this was of the nature of a revelation. In the midst of chaos there was shape; this eternal passing and flowing…was struck into stability. Life stand still here, Mrs. Ramsay said. “Mrs. Ramsay! Mrs. Ramsay!” she repeated. She owed it all to her.

I stop reading. My body feels light. These words are perfectly chosen and married together, speaking to the recesses of my mind that take in language. I do not fully process what is on the page, yet I feel a bodily response I can neither understand nor articulate.

I breeze through the rest of the book, struck by the characters’ fear of impermanence but also by their reliance on the ephemeral as a promise of change. The atoms within me suffuse to the top of my flesh and tingle all throughout, as if physically elevated but still within my body. Every muscle is perked up finishing this anthem of triviality. I feel perfect in this world, where everything is a miracle, where everything matters.

My discovery of pure euphoria crumbles my period of existential pessimism. It is a sensation I dearly hold onto in the face of unpredictability, recalled euphoria grounding me in the exact moment as if I am encountering it just as I did. I do not know if I will enjoy the same experience again, but it doesn’t matter: I am certain that euphoria exists and transcends.

As the cycle of seasons returns to summer soon, I think about how far I have come from a year ago. My plans are more ambitious, but I channel my self-doubt into self-determination. What am I doing? is a question of little significance to me as I continue on with my little daily miracles, and as I hold onto my treasure of euphoria.

anything but lines

mourning a past self with repetition

by Ishan Khurana

Illustrated by Stella Tsogtjargal

My dog likes to take me for walks around the areas familiar to us. He pulls me through night-covered forests and faintly-lit suburban sidewalks on paths of all kinds— spirals, ovals, rings—but never allows me to turn around. If I do, he stops, protesting and refusing until I face forward again. He makes sure that I don’t ever pause, even for a breath; he is stubborn, and I guess I am, too.

I try foolishly to resist. I tell him something along the lines of “It’s been a long day,” or “Can’t I just walk you for longer tomorrow morning?” but he either doesn’t understand or doesn’t care. So he drags me into the world and forces me to remind myself of what I love. He turns me around if I look back, and I seem to watch myself walk through the world with my legs waiting behind me.

I end up tangled in the past more and more as I get older. I am overwhelmed by the linearity of life and by the forces that push me forwards, so as I grow, I grieve the irretrievability of my past self and the grief that set him back, too. I struggle to reflect without regret and always wish to have done more, been more. I seek to circle back to instances where loss of identity defined my life in order to reorient my present path. The loss and I force each other into spirals, and I miss myself.

As my dog and I move along, I can’t help but think about the same things again and again. Thoughts wander in, dissipate, and reform before I can notice that they are gone. I have no control over what I internalize. We travel through reeds I’ve grown up with and ponds I’ve watched fill, and though I can’t quite tell, I get the feeling that the birds sitting in the water are the same ones that were there last week. They arrive and leave often, and I always wish I’d gotten to know them better.

Circles only. No lines.

After the death of his brother, artist Hiroyuki Doi began to draw millions of tiny circles at a time to distract himself from feelings of grief. The resulting

works—massive amounts of space with massive amounts of repetition—capture overwhelmedness in their circularity. Hurricanes of inconsistent ink spread across pages as though time lays them out involuntarily, and as I watch them, I can’t help but feel that they are moving.

So I try to move along with them. I walk in circles. I find simplicity in repetition, and I spend my time tracing shapes and watching them grow and shrink as I move with the day. I think my dog knows this, to some extent. He forces me into these patterns to help me heal and reminds me that there is nothing twodimensional about changing. And it’s nice outside.

I’m often told that grief and growth are linear, and that those five infamous stages are all one can and will experience, even though when I walk and when I watch Doi’s circles and when I read and when I sleep and wake up, I move in anything but lines. Nothing about the world around us is so direct, so I hope not to be either. I find myself healing from the past in patches; sometimes moments of uncontainable comfort emerge, and without realizing it, I have returned to a fuller self. In these instances, I am not the same as I was—I never will be, and I don’t necessarily want to be—but I am complete and I am more

Though these pockets of assurance come, they also go. Moments of familiar loss swing by without invitation or expectation, and I am forced to revisit (whether through nostalgia or discomfort) moments that have twisted me up. These moments come and go, but I continue on.

Circles only. No lines.

Hiroyuki Doi’s artwork captures, more than anything else, the unavoidable unpredictability of human life. It serves as proof that structures built by repetitive action can still create and be a part of something so driven by

variation. The amount of circles is overwhelming, but that’s also what makes the work so beautiful; each one takes up its own space to form an even bigger, more unstructured shape. The universe depicted in each drawing holds the efforts of repetition alongside the gradual coming and going of emotion. The roundness of it all makes the piece appear to flow, as though time and grief are held together in its spaces to allow for falling forward and away from the past. I like to think that if I tried to map out all of these comings and goings—blurs of contentment and corrosion, of comfort and nostalgia—I’d end up with patterns similar to the beautiful, repetitive chaos of Doi’s circles.

For me, resurfacing from spirals of the past is returning from an extensive journey back to my former identity with an extra layer of ink in hand. I am held up by the certainty that there is nothing certain about grief precisely because the freedom to grow at my own pace is the freedom to choose how I recover. With this autonomy, I walk in circles. I stare at drawings of ovals and rings, and I write words that remind me of the ones I’ve written before.

My dog comes to me, leash in hand and mind dead set on exploration, and he forces me to experience the same world again and again and again. I put on my shoes. We walk towards the same trees we always have, and he moves me onwards. We follow in the footsteps of our former selves, stopping only to laugh and make new prints and reconsider our lives, as we always do. There’s always room to reflect, to reminisce, and to regret, so we do.

But as we return home with the sun, and even if we aren’t content with who we were, we are content with who we will be. There’s no one else to become. Circles only. No lines.

when a house becomes a home

life unfolds in the living room

by Sarah Kim

Illustrated by Junyue Ma

I have changed. Since the beginning of 2023, I have been stretched out, hammered down, tugged at, and put back together. My face now has small red spots from taking naps under the sun, and I know how to hold contempt in my hands. I like lentils, floss more regularly, learned how to be more emotionally vulnerable even when it is terrifying, and no longer believe 3 am is a passable bedtime.

Other things have changed too. My nails are painted red. I think I’m getting better with dogs. At school, I now live in a house instead of a dorm. My room has three exit doors: one cannot be fully shut, and the doorknobs on the other two fall off when I close them.

I cried the whole drive up to our new Providence home. Turmoil unexpectedly shoved itself into my family’s face. Rain started to pour almost immediately after I began the drive from New York. Alone for the first time in weeks, everything I had been suppressing—frustration, exhaustion, guilt— came pouring out too, right on cue. By the time I pulled into our treacherously narrow parking lot for the first time, rain was still coming down. But it was Providence rain and no longer New York rain, and I felt like I could breathe again.

I was the first of the incoming group to move in. The light wind from the rain had left the back door ajar and I entered in the dark, stumbling up a few steps before the lights were motioned on. I knocked on our unit, which creaked wide open by the third knock. Two guys, sitting at the kitchen island eating noodles with chopsticks and watching something on a propped-up phone, greeted me with a "Hey," and a nod and told me the key was on the table around the corner. I walked in, then realized that I would soon be doing this exact thing daily, and wondered if this was the way I would always walk into the house. Where would I set my keys or take off my shoes? (I’d later learn to hang my keys on the left corner pin on the corkboard, next to Naomi and Mai-Thanh’s. And outside or by the door please, thank you.) In the

living room, a gray couch with a pronounced dip and a wobbly floor lamp, clearly in need of tightening, were spaced awkwardly far apart. The house looked different from when I had toured the previous year— emptier. It felt different too—smaller, darker, more somber.

It was not until I moved the rest of my stuff in later that week that I noticed the white brick fireplace and yellow and orange stained-glass window that made the whole living room glow in the afternoon.

I came to learn the creasing patterns of our house: the drawer that gets hot when the oven is on, the force with which you have to pull the back door so it shuts properly, which light switch combination provides the most ambient light. I would also learn that Mai-Thanh lets the bath faucet get warm before pulling for the overhead shower. I’d come to find out you can put chili crisps on just about anything to make it taste better—something Naomi has known her whole life.

This house is beginning to feel more like home: we have sesame oil in the cabinet, the rice paper I grew up eating in the pantry, and kimchi and gochujang in the fridge. Flavors and warmth grow familiar on my tongue and my heart breaks the way it did in high school. On a Sunday evening, I crack an egg into the boiling soup and swirl it around like Mom showed me, then take the ramen noodles off a little earlier like I learned I love.

When I’m done, I take the ramen pot to the nesting spot I’ve found in the living room: the outside chair at the brown squeaky wooden table. Mai-Thanh has settled into her preferred spot on the couch, legs on the coffee table and computer in lap. Naomi shuffles out of her bedroom with a book, her slippers softly meeting the floor, and plops herself into the red armchair that swallows her whole as she falls into it. The candles are still lit from earlier when I needed more light to write, now illuminating a romantic dinner for one. I eat and aimlessly browse my computer, Mai-Thanh works, and Naomi reads.

The scene almost resembles the start of a sitcom. xxx

I know every line of every episode of Friends. It happened without me noticing. In high school, I watched the show every day. When I finished it (for the second time), I moved onto New Girl. On the bus ride home from school, I walked straight to the back, plugging my earbuds in as I made my way down. Once settled with the screen resting on my knees, I’d begin the episode where I left off the night before. By the time I arrived home, I was onto the next one. I’d switch to my iPad which would follow me around the house, effortlessly propped up—as I washed my hands (bathroom), peeled off my socks (bedroom), and put a pot over the stove to boil for ramen (kitchen).

By the time I entered high school, my sister had left for college and my mom had started working again, leaving early and coming back late with my dad. I found myself in an empty house most of the time, so I filled it with Friends who would sit around and chat and live their lives alongside mine.

In Providence, after my long day on Thursdays, I love coming home. If I’m lucky, my girls are also back. I can always tell by the warm glow of light from outside. I hurry in. Opening the back door with a push of my foot, I spot Naomi pulling sheet pans of sweet potato and tofu out of the oven. She always assembles her bowl without hesitation and has a bounce in her step that falls on beat with the music playing from her speaker. Before I make it around the corner, Mai-Thanh’s cough, muffled under the blanket she and her iPad are wrapped in, gives her away. I swap my day’s clothes for sweats and plop next to Thanh on the couch; she lifts the side of the blanket to invite me in.

The TV in our living room is hardly ever on. Even when us three girls overlap in the living room, not doing much, we’ll sit there and not do much. Maybe we’ll chat and get excited about the weekend or recap our days with funny stories and reenactments. Otherwise, we will migrate to our nesting spots and ‘parallel play’—what Maddie describes as “indulging in independent activities side-by-side.” Consumed by her book, Naomi will barely realize she is tapping her foot to the same beat I am nodding along to. The kettle will click off in the kitchen, and we’ll refill our cups of tea before resuming our activities.

With only a few months left of my final year at Brown, I am thinking about change and what it means. Four years ago, I was in high school, my senior year marked by yet another runthrough of Friends, following me from the car ride home until I dozed off in bed. Now in Providence, when evening comes and the house grows still, I seldom have the urge to fill it with Joey and Chandler’s banter or Monica and Rachel’s girl chats. The familiarity that I once sought and created through a screen in front of me has written itself into this very living room. This is it.

This, I realize, will change. Come June, this house will no longer be ours and we will be moving once again. I will pack its contents—the posters and sauces and plants in the living room—and place it all into another space confined by walls. This home will revert to a house on John Street.

But tonight, Naomi will close her book with a stretch, sleepily bidding us goodnight, and Mai-Thanh will crawl into bed to finish her work for the day. The speaker turns off and the night quickly silences. In a bit, I’ll blow out the candles, switch the living room lamps off, and draw the blinds. Black screen; cue end credits.

Things change, sometimes it turns a house into a home.

lessons from number theory on

romanticizing your math class

by Indigo Mudbhary

Illustrated by Caroline Houser

The “fun fourth class” is a coveted space in the Brown undergrad’s schedule. As high schoolers, we were forced to churn out a couple hundred words on the importance of the Open Curriculum. Whether or not you’re living out college as your high school self said you would, you’ve likely taken advantage of it at some point in your Brown career—probably through your “fun fourth class.” As a humanities concentrator, I am sick and tired of the bulk of my courses being relegated to the realm of the “fun fourth class.” I get it—the small class sizes, the more scenic locations, and the quirky titles on the syllabus all make my courses easier to romanticize than, say, ENGN0090 or CHEM0330. But I refuse to let this romanticization be a one-way street that only traverses from B&H toward the Lit Arts department building. I will literally enroll in a pure math class just to make my point.

That’s right, you didn’t misread—this semester, I’m taking Introduction to Number Theory, or, as I prefer to call it, MATH0420. If you don’t believe me about the course code, look it up on C@B. As I took my first math exam in college last Wednesday, the middle schooler in me—that snot-nosed, immature devil on my shoulder— secretly hoped that I would score a 69 on the test. Can you imagine? A 69 on my MATH0420 exam? (I’m 20 years old.)

But I digress. At first glance, number theory might not seem like the most relevant thing to this so-called “real world”—how does the study of numbers actually affect anything that matters? Finding the next largest prime number won’t decrease the line at the Ratty or make it sunny again. (Though, fun fact, it could actually win you a lot of money!) Despite number theory's applications in cryptography, I’m not here to expound upon its importance to the security systems that protect

our credit cards. If you wanted to hear about that, you’d be on the second floor of Salomon every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, sitting next to me in the back by the open window with a beautiful view of the green (peak daydreaming territory). I’d like to share with you my personal takeaways from MATH0420, the ones you won’t find in the textbook, or on the Canvas site or the syllabus. These silly musings are mine alone.

First, I believe the limit (no pun intended) to what can be feasibly romanticized is much higher than we think. For example, “problem set” is a phrase that immediately strikes dread into the hearts of students all across campus. And I can see why—the problem sets I have done for the class have been time-consuming and often futile, akin to suddenly picking up a shovel and trying to dig to the center of the earth. But even this laborious weekly undertaking can be made fun—just last week I sat on the green, in my best sundress and sweater, with the beginnings of the spring sunshine beaming down on the cream-colored pages of A Friendly Introduction to Number Theory. As I aimlessly attempted to solve a system of congruences (a Sisyphean task for yours truly), I was struck by the beauty of time as we travel along the x-axis of life. One moment you’re a high schooler who just got into Brown—“I never have to take a math class again!”—and the next, before you know it, you’re voluntarily in a pure math class because why not? Would high school me even recognize that girl on the green—legs crossed confidently as she attempts a ridiculously hard problem set for no reason other than to expand the realm of what she knows?

I’ve also learned that math has many applications outside the classroom—namely, it’s a great conversation starter for your friends when the dining hall chatter has reached a natural lull. Did you know there are infinitely many prime numbers? Did you know that there is no such thing as an odd perfect number—well, more specifically, we haven’t found one yet, so we don’t know if they exist? Additionally, the way we prove things in MATH0420—trying a bunch of examples, ascertaining a pattern, formulating a conjecture, proving the idea, repeating for every theorem in mathematics—has a beauty to it that I think we could all learn from. What if

we all looked at what’s going on in our lives through the lens of an amateur S/NC mathematician? What patterns do you notice? What trends do you see? How do you feel about them?

The thing about number theory is that it’s constantly changing—old conjectures are finally being proven centuries later, computers allow us to work with numbers larger than ever before, and bold, new, mostly incorrect claims are made by students at Brown University as they hastily finish scribbling their psets before the weekly deadline. If numbers—arguably older than civilization itself—and what we know about them are constantly changing, then why can’t you? So, pick up those knitting needles, cut off that toxic friend, audition for that show—it’s never too late.

What strikes me most about number theory is its vastness. With an infinite amount of natural numbers, to prove anything that holds true for all numbers seems to me to be a pretty miraculous feat; you can always find me in awe in the back of the classroom after a particularly elegant proof has been drawn on the chalkboard for us 20 lucky students. At the risk of sounding like I have partaken in 4/20 rather than MATH0420, I believe life is similarly infinite and rife with potential, brimming with that electricity of the unknown, like how I imagine those huge primes that live outside the realm of the known ones. So what will you do with your vast, infinite life, a life that is filled with so much potential we could not possibly fit it on a Cartesian plane?

The number one (“1” in mathematician speak) comes up a lot in number theory. Neither prime nor composite, the divisor of any whole number you could possibly come up with, 1 is the beginning (if we’re starting at 0 and neglecting those negatives) of something infinite. 1, with its sharp shoulders and beautiful square base, may not know that beyond it lurks an infinite sea of numbers that never ends, that not even the best computer could ever reach the end of because there simply is no last number. Just like our friend 1, you have one (1) mind, one (1) body, and one (1) lifetime. What will you do with it? I, personally, am going to learn about some numbers.

QED.

notes on the possibility of home

on trying to comfort in new spaces

by Ishan Khurana

Illustrated by Junyue Ma

My head fits into the groove between my mother’s shoulder and neck as though I was born out of her collarbone, and I often wonder how where I come from decides where I go. I am shaped so strongly by the spaces to which I belong—places are sculptors, and I am their stone to chisel— and yet, I struggle to define belonging. I’m trying to figure out what “home” means, so that I can learn more about how I’ve become the person I am. Here’s some notes from the process.

1. I like to think that I am more than the cities I’ve been to and the people that come with each, but the truth is, I wouldn’t be me without them. There’s no way to separate my changes and the roots of my belonging from the places where they’ve taken place. Maybe that’s a good thing, but I’d like to learn what it’s like to be myself regardless of the environment. I’d like to not need context clues to define my own identity, and I’d like to know who I am even when I don’t know where I’m going. Maybe home is the capacity to understand oneself? That seems unlikely.

2. Settling into a new place means adjusting to lots of smaller new spaces. I spend a lot of time just trying to figure out where I am (often relative to whatever tall building my eyes land on); in order to get to somewhere new, I go out of my way towards something I recognize and reorient from there. It takes longer and requires excessive patience, but it’s nice to be somewhere familiar, even if it’s just for an instant. It’s exhausting to channel so much energy into just the process of trying to be able to recognize places—and I am tired—but it’s an important step in the process of settling. Maybe home is a space made up of a sense of familiarity? No, that can’t be it. There’s more.

3. I try to enjoy the uncertainty of it all. I take the time (when I’m not lost) to discover new classrooms, towers, and buildings. Each new activity takes me to the corners of a campus that feels so small and yet will always somehow be filled with something I haven’t yet experienced; It’s uncomfortable but somehow energizing. The newness of it all is distracting, and long walks through short neighborhoods serve as a way to escape the anxiety of not yet belonging. It’s easy to put pressure on myself and fall into spirals of unfounded self-criticism just because I don’t yet feel at home, but it might be more concerning if I already did. I don’t know what it means to belong, either. I don’t think anyone possibly can. Maybe home is where you don’t feel the need to belong? I’ll consider it.

4. I fall back onto the past for comfort. I repeatedly text friends pictures of beautiful places while trying to reassure myself that the decisions I have made are the right ones; it’s so much easier to forget unsettled feelings when there are pretty things to look at. I call my parents and complain about the work I have to do, and I can imagine them rolling their eyes at the absurdity of my thinking process. We talk about the weather back home and the cleanliness of my room often. They encourage me to be absolute in my choices and to wait for feelings of security to come to me rather than chasing them. I know they’re right, but it’s hard to focus on anything except grounding yourself when you’re shifting into a new life. Maybe home is the people you fall back onto? It’s possible, but I’m not so confident.

5. When I run into pauses in this schedule of exploration, uncertainty, and phone calls, I find

myself staring at the still-empty walls of my new room. I brought decorations with me— countless posters, photos, paintings, pictures, envelopes, letters—but I can’t find the time or energy to hang them up. In spending all my minutes searching for a concept of home, I neglect the opportunity to build my own. There’s a part of me that hesitates to settle into this new space, too, and I don’t know why. I think it has to do with a fear of having to detach from old places if I attach to new ones. It’s easy to pretend that the past was safer than it actually was when the alternative is a present whose path you have no knowledge of. Maybe home is nostalgia: a state of reminiscence? I hope not.

Sometimes, I try to sort through my notes on possible definitions of home, and I can’t help but laugh when I do. It feels insane to be trying to find comfort in this new place by trying to convince myself that I am doing the right things, but it also feels like there’s no other options. Newness, for me, comes with an unfiltered desperation to resolve. I want to be able to introduce myself without the fact that I am new to this school, but I feel obligated to do so because of the remote possibility of being

provided a solution, or perhaps advice for the process of building a new home.

I believe, though, that these notes accidentally highlight another aspect of home without identifying it: maybe there’s more comfort to be found in the indefinability of this state of “home” than anywhere else in the process. If home doesn’t fit any of the above categorizations, it fits perfectly with the idea of absence. I am most at home in the places I call home because I’ve grown slowly into them, as though filling space with my own changes in composition. Without even noticing, I stretch to occupy whatever empty space I am allowed in and weave into the environment. Home is sudden: it’s a feeling of missing something and longing for belonging and being stuck in uncertainty until it suddenly isn’t. Suddenly, I have the energy to put posters on the walls, and familiarity floods the streets as though it’s been gathering, plotting, and building up the entire time.

Maybe my head fits so perfectly alongside my mother’s arm because we share an absence.

Maybe home is an empty space that I’ll grow to occupy. Maybe this is right.

Luck of the post- mini crossword

by Will Hassett

4 7

Across

1 4 7

2 ¥ 8

Stain or Spanish sea, alternatively They can be attached or detached

St. Patrick's cultural origins 6

English novelist Smith of White Teeth

“The answers to all these seemed within our grasp. All it would take were a couple more candles, a healthy dose of belief, and another rainy, dark Wednesday night.”

— Damian Wasilewicz, “School Night Seance” 3.17.23

“In moments like these, I tend to have a hard time taking care of myself. I float around the edges of my body, slipping in and out of it with detached neutrality. It bumps into corners, lets go of dishes I’m trying to hold onto. It? Me? I’m not really sure.”

NARRATIVE 6

— Liza Kolbasov, “Stitched in Ink” 3.18.22

1 3 SOCIAL MEDIA HEAD EDITORS Kelsey Cooper Tabitha Grandolfo LAYOUT CHIEF Gray Martens Layout Designers Amber Zhao Alexa Gay Romilly Thomson STAFF WRITERS Dorrit Corwin Liza Kolbasov Gabi Yuan Elena Jiang Sofie Zeruto Sarah Kim Samiha Kazi

5 8

Down

Family of eels referenced phonetically in "That's amore!"

Ingredient in adhesives or varnishes

EDITOR-IN-CHIEF Section Editors Emily Tom Ananya Mukerji LIFESTYLE Managing Editor Tabitha Lynn Section Editors Jack Cobey Daniella Coyle HEAD ILLUSTRATORS Stella Tsogtjargal Junyue Ma COPY CHIEF Eleanor Peters Copy Editors Indigo Mudhbary AJ Wu Gabi Yuan

ARTS Aalia Jagwani AJ Wu Olivia Cohen Ellie Jurmann Sean Toomey Sarah Frank Emily Tom Evan Gardner Audrey Wijono Jeanine Kim Sydney Pearson Samira Lakhiani Cat Gao Indigo Mudhbary Will Hassett Ayoola Fadahunsi Joyce Gao Eleanor Dushin Malena Colon Alaire Kanes