“Instructions for living a life: Pay attention. Be astonished. Tell about it.”
- Excerpt from “Sometimes” by Mary Oliver
1.) The way the sun finally came out today. I sat in its warmth in the corner window. I forgot what a ray of sun was like. I remember now.
On the first day of February, 2024, I began to write down one thing per day that I found beautiful or that brought me joy. At a particularly anxious place in my life, trying to find some peace and grounding, I stole a practice from a class I had shopped at the beginning of the semester. Every day write about one thing that brings you wonder, joy, or awe, the professor instructed us. Sitting in that cramped classroom, I wondered if this exercise would be the thing that would fix me. So, soon after, sitting on my bed at the end of a long day, I opened up a slightly-used journal and wrote down a moment that had made me smile. Then I tried to keep going, one day at a time.
35.) Sparrows jumping in a puddle. Cloudy skies but they were finding joy, even in the remnants of the rain.
Letter from the Editor
Dear readers,
This past week, I’ve found solace in an old hobby: crafting. It seems that sometime during my three years in college, I have lost the creative spirit that I once held so close. I used to spend summers scouring Pinterest and perusing the aisles of Michael’s for the perfect activity. Armed with construction paper and some washi tape, handmade gifts were my love language. As the semester begins to pick up, and I try to distract myself from the impending end of my time at Brown, I’ve found myself in a whirlwind of shrinky dinks, paper chains, and coloring books. Crafting has soothed an ache that I did not know I had.
Our writers this week search for comfort in little things too. In Feature, Sydney finds joy in documenting one thing she finds beautiful each day. Jasmine
Paying attention is not an easy thing to do. Our focus is drawn in a million different directions at any given moment: a conversation several feet away, assignments whirling through our minds, blinding headlights and our ears freezing in the Providence wind and our phones buzzing and buzzing in our back pockets.
Herbert A. Simon, a psychologist and economist, coined the term “attention economy” in the early 1970s. The term refers to a system that “sees our focus as a finite resource to be captured and monetized,” a place where our attention is a currency that can be bought and sold. If that sounds alarming, I agree. While some see the attention economy as a sign that companies and systems are providing consumers with content most closely aligned with their needs, the idea also indicates that in order to make money, businesses will do anything to pull our attention. They move our minds to be focused on what they want us to be thinking about, rather than the things that will fulfill us or that we truly care about. The attention economy is the reason behind adtargeting. It’s why there is so much money pumped into manufacturing trends and peer pressure. It’s the reason we think about that new device hours after leaving the store or
in Narrative also journals as her creative outlet, using writing as a way to make sense of her life. Our second Narrative writer, Gabi, also finds beauty around her, reflecting on nature and how her feelings about winter have evolved. In A&C this week, Eleanor speaks to her connection to Headache’s music, and our second writer muses on how her attitude toward men has matured. Michelle, too, reflects on change; to celebrate our first-ever issue with two Feature pieces, she writes about the migration of birds, tying it to growing up and moving away from home. In Lifestyle, Indigo ruminates on crying, listing her observations from crying on campus. Finally, AJ makes a heart-shaped crossword as an early Valentine’s Day gift.
Despite my joy in crafting, I am certainly not
three hundred and fifty steps to devotion learning
to pay attention
by Sydney Pearson Illustrated by Angelina So Instagram:
closing our browser. Even the phrase “pay attention” connotes a commodity. Our inner thoughts are tradeable, whether we realize it or not.
62.) Latkes. Crispy, delicious in sour cream and applesauce. Trying to find joy in the small things. It’s hard, sometimes.
Ross Gay’s The Book of Delights is a collection of essays stemming from a similar writing practice to my own. Every day for a year, Gay tried to write about one thing that brought him delight, joys such as a hummingbird in a dead tree or a purple infinity scarf or being tapped on the arm by a stranger. In the preface of the book, Gay describes how by engaging in this writing journey, “I felt my life to be more full of delight. Not without sorrow or fear or pain or loss. But more full of delight. I also learned this year that my delight grows - much like love and joy - when I share it.”
As I’ve gone through the practice of paying attention to joy for the past year, I’ve found that some days are easier than others. There are times when everything seems to go right, days when I go on long runs through the city and the Ratty serves coconut magic bars and I spend hours sitting on my friends’ couches laughing until my ribs hurt. But there are also times where things seem like
without slip-ups. I have found myself time after time erasing mistakes and redoing paper cutouts, or sometimes, leaving the evidence of a mistake just as it is. The non-perfection of it all is exactly why I hold it so dearly. This long weekend, dear readers, I implore you to find comfort in a craft, and who knows, maybe you’ll find inspiration in a copy of post-.
Making Valentines,
Tabitha Lynn Lifestyle Managing Ed
they’re falling apart; I get in an argument with my neighbor and I have a project due the next day and the anxiety won’t stop playing pinball inside my body. The former days feel like they’re bursting with content for my little green journal. The latter appear to be dry wells.
But looking back at what I wrote on those days when nothing seemed to go as planned, I realize how much more important those entries are. On days I would usually just collapse into bed ruminating on how awful everything was, I forced myself to look back and think about one good thing, no matter how small. It was a reminder that there is still beauty, even in the most difficult moments.
256.) Curled up in bed, drifting off in a mid-afternoon nap. Sunlight at the edges of the blinds. Doors creaking, people laughing, wind and birdsong through the open window.
Not only does the attention economy turn us into commodities in the eyes of business and algorithms, it also sets a quiet precedent that we should distance ourselves from daily, non-commercialized life. When we turn our eyes to our phones in the middle of dinner, we cut ourselves off from the person across from us. When we focus on that massive, blinding advertisement over the freeway, we ignore the sight of the clouds racing across the sky. Every time we give our attention to one place that’s designed to capture it, we sacrifice it in another.
As we turn our focus toward the distractions of the attention economy, we don’t just threaten our relationships with the people around us, but also with the world itself. We look at our phones instead of interacting with our neighbors. We allow the lure of success and comfort and empty promises to blind us to the suffering outside our front doors. Children go hungry and forests burn, but we don’t notice because there are so many other things grabbing at our minds.
You may be wondering why any of this matters. In our broken and breaking world, what impact could our attention truly have? Mary Oliver, in her essay “Upstream,” wrote that “Attention is the beginning of devotion.” To pay attention is to demonstrate a care for something else, a loyalty to a person or setting or moment, even just for an instant. Our attention will always be somewhere; what if we directed it toward the things we
believe are worth fighting for rather than fleeting distractions? While it is not the cure, perhaps the first step to resisting these systems that keep us captive is to look up and look around. Attention is the beginning of devotion.
Beauty gets lost when you stop feeling the need to notice it, I guess. (Written 7/4/24 )
While I would love to say that I have maintained this practice consistently for the past 377 days, I only have 350 entries. For several stretches of time early on, during spring finals season and a short, tiring week of the summer, I forgot to log my daily observations. Or maybe I just stopped caring. After all, a few months of the practice hadn’t radically transformed me into a wildly different person, full of vigor and overflowing amounts of gratitude. What was the point?
It took a few tries, but eventually I got back to writing daily and the habit stuck. While motivating myself to open up my notebook every night was a challenge, I ultimately realized it was nice to have a dedicated record of the beautiful things in my life. And as I devoted time to ruminating on joy at the end of each day, I began to notice it preemptively. As I smelled the eucalyptus in the rain-soaked air of my hometown, I filed it away to journal about. When I watched a Carolina Wren perch on my window, I smiled, thinking about how lovely it is to know another creature sees you. I rarely spent long pondering these moments, but as I looked up and paid attention, I learned to better appreciate the mundanity of everyday life and revel in the present.
68.) 90% eclipse. The air chilling, sky duller, sun a sliver of a crescent. Blanket on the Quiet Green, blowing bubbles under the trees.
On a clear, early April day, the Brown University student population left their dorms and their libraries, pulled out their picnic blankets and sat outside. Across campus, people played music and annotated readings, periodically stopping to stare up at the sky, where the moon was slowly crawling over the sun. Finally, at 3:29 PM, the air now cold and hazy, everyone halted all other activities, looked up, and cheered, reveling in the interloping moon and the thin slice of
sun glowing orange through eclipse glasses. Reminiscing on the eclipse, it wasn’t just the wonder of nature that was breathtaking. It was the fact that thousands of people, on campus and across the country, stopped their usual activities, their scrolling and striving, just to be together and witness a miracle. We all took time to look at the world around us, and in doing so we looked at one another. We chatted on picnic blankets. We played with bubble wands. We reclaimed our attention, took it back from the forces that want us distracted and malleable, and we gifted it to each other and the vast sky above. 350.) The first peek of a new leaf, budding from my Monstera in the sun.
At the end of Mary Oliver’s poem “When Death Comes,” she remarks that “I don’t want to end up simply having visited this world.” Statements such as these are common in Oliver’s poetry; her work frequently centers around themes of living and embracing life to the fullest, rather than simply enduring it. But too often we fail to follow this advice. We muddle about our days, barely paying attention to what’s right in front of us. Oftentimes we’re just trying to survive. But, as Oliver illustrates, doing so can be our final regret.
I don’t think our phones or marketing or the general trappings of 21st century American society are evil or wrong. These things have made our world more connected, created new art forms, and allowed for a variety of novel human flourishings. But I worry that giving too much of our precious, fleeting attention to our screens and strivings, rather than the world around us, will ultimately lead us down an isolating, limited path. We have to do more than just visit this world.
For the past three hundred and seventy seven days, I have been trying to better notice this world as I live in it. Some days are still easier than others. Some days are boring or tiring, and specific moments of joy are not easy to remember. But I am learning to look up and slow down a little bit more each day. To get off my phone. To look around and give my attention to my fellow humans. To pay attention, be astonished, and tell about it. To devote myself to the beauty of the world.
“Even
if he’s gay, I’m first in line, so back off buddy.”
“I
wish everyone would invade my personal space.”
what guides the geesese flight paths and farsickness
by Michelle Bi
Illustrated by Ruby Nemeroff
Here is how I discovered the meaning of the word “sky.”
I was six years old, and although I don’t remember much about that age, I do remember that the first direction I looked every time I stepped outside was upwards. In suburban Illinois, I was usually met by the dark gray underbellies of gathering clouds, or dense sheets of plunging rain.
Today, though, an expanse of cerulean stretched above me, broken only by the small feathery shapes that formed a wide V-shape across the blue. They winged their way towards the horizon in perfect, unflinching formation.
“Canadian geese,” I learned they were called. For years after, I found myself enchanted by any creature with wings. I tore through every bird-related book I could get my hands on during elementary school. I tracked each American robin that darted above my street, learned the rhythms of the red-bellied woodpeckers rapping on the trees lining the sidewalk.
Even today, I can’t picture a sky without a flock of geese moving steadily across it, each pair of wings rising and falling like an eddy in a river. Some part of me has always been jealous, I think, of that innate compass that seems to thrum between their hollow bones. That sense that brings them home to their nests, and then halfway across the world, and
then back again, with a certainty that I’ve been chasing ever since I learned how to look up.
*
It wasn’t until after I moved to sunny southern California—after I noticed the birds appearing in the autumn and disappearing in the spring—that I began to research with intention, or as much intention as a seven year old can have.
The core of migration is simple: birds do it to survive.
But the truth of the matter is a bit more complicated. About 20 percent of the world’s bird species embark on sweeping, largescale seasonal journeys in search of essential resources. Birds generally move northward during springtime toward regions rich in insects, plants, and nesting locations. In the winter, once those resources begin to run dry, they reverse their path and head southward to warmer climes again.
Scientists have categorized migrating birds based on the distances they travel: from permanent residents that stay rooted in one location year-round to medium-distance migrants that fly for a few hundred miles.
Arguably most striking are long-distance migrants, who travel distances and heights difficult to even comprehend. The barheaded goose soars from areas of East Asia to its wintering grounds in India; on its way over
the Himalayas, it can survive on less than 10% of oxygen available at sea level while reaching altitudes of up to 7,000 meters. The bar-tailed godwit migrates from Alaska to New Zealand in a nonstop journey every year, traversing over 11,000 kilometers without ever stopping to eat or even land. And the arctic tern travels 90,000 kilometers from Greenland to the southern Weddell Sea every single year, the longest migration in the animal kingdom that we know of today. Arctic terns can live for over 30 years, meaning that throughout their lives they may fly an equivalent distance of three round trips to the moon.
All this to say: there is an astonishing amount of muscle and endurance packed into every small airborne dot that we’ve learned to take for granted. All this to say: I am fairly confident there are worse things in the world around us to be captivated by.
*
My high school graduation ceremony was held on our football field at dusk. Our town is small enough that I could name and recite the trite gossip about every student in my year, the people I’d grown up with since first grade. The sun slipped beneath the distant yellow hills as speaker after speaker took the stage, as each of us walked across the turf and prayed not to trip, as the hours rolled by.
And then it was over. We sprang to our feet and threw our caps into the air, tumbled onto
each other amidst a storm of falling tassels. I flung my arms around my friends’ necks and laughed through tears. Call me—visit me—the future's so bright , we told each other, over and over. But I could never quite find the words to describe the deep ache settling in my bones, the sensation of missing all my friends months before they even left. The floodlights tinted everyone’s edges hazy golden, already fading into the soft evening air. I thought of tassels scattering like feathers. I thought of Canadian geese and faraway wings and migrations away from each other. *
The week I moved in at Brown I spent my days in an indescribably overwhelming blur of introductions, lunches, and exchanging contacts. When I returned to my dorm at night I passed hours on my phone scrolling down internet rabbit holes, too jetlagged and keyed up to sleep.
During this time I read about Zugunruhe : a German term for the “migratory restlessness” that comes right before animals undertake their annual journeys. Birds under human care have been observed to display a burst of energy in the fall and spring, fluttering their wings and hopping in place. When placed on ink pads inside tall paper funnels with a view of the night sky, birds leave a cluster of footprints in the direction of their natural migratory path. Some part of them simply seems to know where to go, when to do it.
I killed countless hours during the first few months of school simply walking through campus, circling around the Main Green or trekking down to Jo’s or investigating every last corner in the Rock. It took a far shorter time than I thought it would for me to grow comfortable with New England, with its temperamental sunshine and clouds. Still, though, I saw the Santa Monica mountains when I closed my eyes, rolling hills and wide dusty trails, crows’ nests perched atop curling coastal oaks.
I watched my step count on my phone tick up and up. Whenever I sat stationary for more than an hour I felt the itch to move, to migrate. To where, I didn't know—only that there was another place else I needed to be, on the other side of campus, back in California. I missed my friends with an unrelenting ache. My feet carried me in every direction at once and all of them felt like home, and none of them felt right.
Meanwhile I began to notice the eastern bluebirds swooping over my head, and the American robins that gathered outside my window. The leaves turned brown. I kept looking up. *
Besides their internal clock, birds migrate using three known compasses: the sun’s position, the constellations, and the planet’s magnetic field. Juveniles begin their seasonal flights using inherited instincts to simply “fly south.” As they take the same journey annually throughout their maturation, they are able to hone their mental maps with incredible precision, sometimes to the point of returning to the very same perches year after year.
In comparison, my flight to Pittsburgh was nothing. I spent Thanksgiving break at Carnegie Mellon visiting my childhood
friend; the past three months had been the longest we’d been apart in twelve years. In the evenings I curled up at the foot of her twin XL and we talked for hours about our high school friendships now scattered from San Diego to Shanghai, our growing up, our distance in between. In the daytime I trailed her around her new home, watched her turn down streets I didn’t know the names of, greet faces I didn’t recognize.
In the moments in between, I saw her eight-year-old self stretching to life beneath her shoulders. Bright eyed and California tanned, calluses from the playground monkey bars dotting her palms. Then I blinked and then she was all grown up again, in a life all her own. I was the visitor in the nest she’d built.
And yet her dorm felt like coming home, simply by virtue of her presence, and the magnetic pull in my chest. When I flew back to Providence, I still felt that pull. Sometimes I think some part of me is a compass needle and it spins in the direction of everyone I’ve ever loved, and it’s always spinning. An impossible amount of migrations to make. A world full of safe places to land. *
Outside my house is an avocado tree that’s been there ever since we moved in; five years ago a mother sparrow constructed her nest there. I watched, rapt from my window, as her eggs became chicks, then fledglings, then gone. The next year she returned to her empty nest, hopped around it for days, as if in confusion.
I remembered her when I stepped back into my childhood bedroom over winter break: the walls and shelves half-bare, the rest of my possessions in Providence. My photostrips from senior prom and my May 2024 calendar were still pinned to my bulletin board. Like the sparrow, I circled the space over and over as if seeing it for the first time.
It wasn’t until I reunited with my family and my friends that the unfamiliarity began to dissipate. Even though I kept running into the corner of the towel rack in front of my bathroom, and even though I’d forgotten the route I’d taken every week to Costco, I fit into the crooks of people’s arms and collarbones as if we hadn’t been apart for more than a day.
So it was easy to pretend, to slip back into the skin of the person I’d been before college. Sitting shotgun in my friends’ cars, or scaling the hilly hiking trails that hem the borders of my town, or waking up to familiar doves crooning outside my window. Everything else too began to slide back into place. Sometimes I could forget I’d ever even left California at all.
But I couldn’t ignore the unease that coiled in my stomach during the quiet moments: a feeling that, when I looked out the window at the dried grass and trees, that I should be seeing bare oaks and a blanket of snow instead. A sense that I was both home and so very far away from it. I felt that restlessness again, that pull in my chest— this time, in two dozen different directions. My college friends were now scattered across the country and the songbird in my chest longed to fly to them, everywhere, all over. Simply put: I missed them so much it
scared me a little.
*
There must be something in the fact that the older we get, the more places we learn to inhabit, and the more people we learn to love. There must be something in the fact that growing up is simply getting better at saying hellos, goodbyes, hellos again.
*
We still don’t quite know how migration evolved in the first place. What drove the first thrush or starling or sparrow to lift up her wings and leave her whole world behind. Was it purely for survival, as her normal home grew barren in the winter and her stomach growled with hunger? Was it a deep-seated genetic instinct, a sporadic mutation in her DNA that would be passed down through generations, a physical urge to move ? Was it simply an accident, a flight blown off course, or a spur of the moment?
I’m still chasing certainty in a lot of things, and I can’t pretend to know the answer to this one. But sometimes I like to think that something more than genetics and physical instinct pulls birds from home to home. A yearning like an echo through their hollow bones. An ancestral nest, and the desire to build another, to return to the place that shaped them.
*
I came home to Providence after winter break, put my suitcase down in my dorm, and imagined something in my chest clicking back into place. So many of the birds around campus are gone now; the trees are quieter. I hope we’ve switched places, and they’re basking in warm golden sunlight, the promise of New England summer thrumming far off in their minds.
And as I spent the next few days enveloped with hugs, “how was your break”s and “it’s been forever”s—as I traversed ice and snow on the way to class—as I settled back into the familiarity of my friends and the rhythm of our conversations—I couldn’t help but feel warm too.
Sometimes I wish that I could collect every person I love into one city, even one building, to have my entire network an arm's length away: but I think that might just be the nature of it all. Caring comes hand in hand with missing people, and I am always missing someone. And yet my longing is far outweighed by my gratitude that I have places and people to long for.
In the meantime, I have late night conversations in dingy lounges, the feel of three of my friends and me sprawled across a single bed, the quiet walks and the loud laughter. In the meantime, I’m familiarizing myself with the crosscountry journeys and the nests on either end. I’ve made peace with the fact that we are always in motion. That home can be present in so many places at once, and every one can be right. I stretch my affection over the distances; it grows tenfold as it goes.
Nowadays I still stop to watch the geese soar across the blue every time I see them, navigating on the basis of nothing but a feeling, and that feeling is everything. The migrations we choose, the people we cross the skies for. We love with abandon. We leave our houses to come home.
winter's blanket coats of white, of warmth
by gabi Yuan
Illustrated by Yoonseo Lee
The red bench stands out in the stark whiteness. The tarp above, which sits at a slight tilt from the weight of the fallen snow, protects the bench from icy remnants. The steady shiver of my hands, a few brave fingers dangling out of my parka, is perhaps a sign of the harshness of winter. If I tasted the snow now, the tip of my tongue absorbing the freezing mound, would the flavor be bitter?
I lead myself to the bench, in hopes that sitting outside doesn't freeze my hair further. My surroundings are dry, seemingly untouched by the cold drift just inches away. Placing my bag on the ground, slipping off my red-striped mittens, a realization drifts to me, landing softly upon the edge of my ear:
Seasons are interchangeable.
Winter does not exist where it cannot be touched. I look directly in front of me to find that perhaps, Winter is not what I had always known it to be.
In front of me lies a road I have driven on, walked on, laughed and danced in circles on countless times. Round and round and round I go—the dizziness tasting like a rich buttercream frosting, coating over every sense. I dance and dance in that flurry of snow, the feeling of roving eyes washing over me. If I imagine with enough fervor, it is once again bustling with students rushing to class, bundled up in throw blankets taken directly off their living room couches, hands refusing to switch to a hot drink during the transitional months.
Imagine the drink, assembled, reassembled, disassembled at the tap of a finger, glittering cinnamon littering the floor, transitioning elegantly into wafting, peppermint foam. The seasons escape me again as my eyes return to the empty road.
I look around for a sign that something else is alive around me. But, for as far as my eyes can stretch, my gaze rests only on lengths of pure, untainted white. They attempt to focus on it all, roaming for longer at the edges of the snow, glowing yellow from the radiant lamp lights.
No motor roars oscillate from the left. To my right, the wind tickles my dry cheek. My hair, sitting as a bundle on the top of my head, continues to drip cold water, tear after reluctant tear. But even that sensation goes unnoticed as I spot, on the road, a red car.
A Subaru chances through the snow. It drives as if on tiptoes, any more timid and it might have slipped unnoticed by me. No indentations are left on the snow-covered road as it glides along.
Circling my finger over and over against the ridge of the bench, I train to keep my eyes fixed on a particular location, but beyond my control, they continue to dart left to right—in search of how I have never been here before, this time in season. The shivers mimic the melting, the eager shrugs of a winter jacket off once inside a fire-lit house.
Inside lives a happy family of four sitting around a rectangular table, sharing dishes
family-style. The silence in the home pinpoints a mellowness: the sinking feeling of Chinese egg drop soup spreading over the tongue, eager eyes wandering to the ginger molasses cookies resting on the rack, the mother’s weathered hand pouring warmed milk into a glass.
I come back to know, perhaps, after all, I have always had life like this in the winter. The simple silence, granted, allows the thoughts trembling in my head to settle, finally nodding off to a quiet, fetal, sleep. My mind is attuned to now notice the way snow falls, piece by piece, inch by inch, its care to overlap, pressing neatly against one another. Winter has put its final coat onto me, slipping off its very own to reveal the moments before.
The snow on the road pillows up like my mother’s drifting face powder and, as I close one eye, training it on a particular patch of snow, I imagine how intact and yet moldable the snow must be—soft as a warmed, buttered croissant. I remember how no dents emerged after the red Subaru passed through, the snow seemingly touched up by an invisible watercolor brush.
The only sounds are the light echoes of the wind on my inner ear that feel like childhood whispers, rocking me to sleep, an irresistible smile coming to my lips before dozing off to the touch of my mother’s hand on my head. The slight rumble of my stomach overlays the echoes, the snow glazing away any other sounds.
My chest, aching moments before, is now delightfully full of air, that sudden fullness I feel. For once, maybe the first time in this month of December, I feel thankful.
I live a little life!
The life I have filled has become a life. For once, gratitude is inescapable as I realize what it means to be busy, to do busywork, to work. The cold is a blessing. It is only now that my mind rests long enough to realize that perhaps, all along, what winter has shown me paralleled whimsy, moments in my short, shortest, shortening life.
12.03.19
I concentrate on moving my toes back and
forth, which are contained within the soft, warm wraps of wool socks, layered with leg warmers. The socks, cradling my feet, swing and sway in wonderment. Goosebumps trail the line of my arms, down the sides of my legs, leading to the sensitive swelling between my thighs, arriving neatly back down at my feet.
Outside, the world is white—winter even. The shocking coldness hits me the same every day, a snowflake landing on a different part of me, inflicting wincing, unavoidable kisses. Most days I shudder frequently, walking from one street to another, kicking at the snow, resenting her for leaving unattainable aches in my body from my careless slips on graying ice.
Why are you so stubborn?
And yet, and yet,
All is worth it when the sky finally dims, my ears defrosting from the outside (still pink and tender) when I realize…yes!
It is time.
Do you understand what I mean?
The feeling of rubbing your frail hands on the indentations of your long, thick socks, peeling them off inch by inch, slowly because they’re sticky and wet, but more so for heightened effect, the thick water clogging every other pore in the body. Moving back your ankles, rotating them clockwise and counterclockwise when finally, the warm, yet arrogant temperature hits your bare feet.
Ahh. Ah-hah.
Yes, this must be it.
The stark feeling of being reborn, remade, rewoven to fit under the wrinkles of my blanket, flexing ankles up and down, through and under different layers of my baby blue bed sheets until finally, they settle nicely to the ends of my blanket, tucked neatly and tightly, a fixed replacement to the momentary care of my socks.
I close my eyes. This must be it. This must be what snow feels like if it melted like marshmallows on my tongue.
If,
If everything were to melt, ice melts best when you see her, standing there waiting for you, snow drifting around her mid-winter.
why i journal a reflection of my most treasured hobby
by jasmine Willoughby
Illustrated by Lesa Jae
People are hoarders of various things. Some collect antiques, dolls, shoes, or clothes; some dedicate their entire lives to the unfulfilling quest of storing mounds of money. I guess you can call me a hoarder of memories, of experiences. I am a journal enthusiast. Nothing delights me more than using a recent CVS receipt in a decorative spread, picking up the newspaper and looking for things I can cut out, and using ungodly amounts of washi tape. When I’m simply not in the artistic mood, I love to pick up my favorite gel ink pen and recap my week, noting my thoughts, introspections, opinions, struggles, triumphs, and everything that falls in between.
I strongly believe that every single person should own and use a personal journal, be it to write, paint, scribble, collect, or even just destroy. I make this claim because as a selfproclaimed writer, artist, and collector, I have come to know myself with such intimacy as a result of simply deciding to make space for myself. Unburdened from the weight of performing for other people and instead being able to vent without an audience sets me free. I may be old-fashioned, but a physical journal is the best means of establishing intention; I believe the act of writing forces one to slow down, both physically and mentally.
It was inevitable for me to find journaling in one sense or the other. I grew up in Kingston, Jamaica with two parents who believed that children should always be expanding their horizons and trying new things. So, every single summer, there was something new: basketball,
swimming, pottery, dancing, and theater, to list a few. But I consistently chased creative expression above all else.
Growing up, the stationery aisle was my bliss. Wherever I went, I would always be in search of papers, pens, stickers, and anything else I could use to create. There is something to be said for an emotionally sensitive child in search of the blank page; I was always excited to start new notebooks—which back then were blindingly pink Barbie diaries, a stark contrast to my favorite pastel-colored Moleskine journals now. Although I loved the newness of it all, my goal was always to achieve a filled-up book—one that was personalized in a way that couldn’t be recognized as anybody else’s but my own. I’d always seek that accomplished feeling, knowing that I stayed committed to the habit. Even now, I love lived-in journals, their sense of comfort and familiarity evoking a warm feeling.
It wasn’t until the isolation of the COVID-19 pandemic that I decided to fulfill that childhood dream of keeping a journal consistently. I can objectively say that 15 is a dreadful age to be. Being stuck in the confines of my home with no physical interaction with friends or the outside world? Disastrous. Nearing the tipping point of insanity, I started a bullet journal to find some semblance of organization. The person I was when I started that little blue and purple marbled journal on June 25, 2020 was not at all the person I was when I finished it a year and a half later. I navigated my faith within the dotted pages, writing prayers and documenting the hard and confusing transition of living for God when nobody else in my household did. There are pages soaked with my salty tears, wondering when I would find a friend group and when I would escape the hell of Zoom. I documented, as if for some historical record, the unprecedented headlines of the day, and how the weeks seemed to be melding together, binding me in a cruel time loop of sameness. What started as a neat
and polished bullet journal became a space for vents, art, unsent letters, and random collages— an outlet for the turmoil that only a teenage girl would know best. The more that I would put on the page, the lighter my heart and mind felt, and I began to feel more regulated in my mental and emotional wellness. So in a way, the habit of keeping a journal is healing and introspective, but also caters to that inner child within me who flocks to the stationery aisle, writes in her little pink diary, and goes crazy for stickers.
I’ve also learned a lot about life itself by simply manifesting my thoughts into physical form. I recall sitting in my online class in 2021 pondering a quote that I had seen from my beloved Pinterest feed: “Are you living or simply existing?” I dedicated a spread to the quote, layering the page with brown paper, irrelevant newspaper cuttings as a stylistic choice, and a pasted-in square with the question. At that point in my life, I felt utterly stagnant, and I made the distinction then and there that I had just been existing. I think a lot of people are in this unfortunate situation without realizing it; days, weeks, and months can go by, and they can’t recall anything that happened in that chunk of their lives. This quote inspired a mindset shift toward gratitude for every single thing in my present reality, whether big or small. I’ve learned that living is a choice in a cycle of monotony.
As I transitioned from my first to second journal, I became focused more on the content of my entries than their flashy appearances. Most times I would document things, not at the height of the moment, but more as a reflection of an emotion, thought process, or reaction. There is a particular entry that stands out to me every time, one that deviates from my neat script handwriting and evenly spaced lines, one that is filled with the rawness of my emotions, navigating romantic feelings and the baggage that comes with them. At the height of an anxiety attack, I
sat down on my bathroom floor and scribbled away, sometimes in all caps, exactly what was running through my head. Many question the act of journaling on a philosophical level, wondering whether one writes to remember or writes to forget. Writing is usually the process of memorialization, yet some find it even more therapeutic to leave their worries on the page, never to be read again. I usually write to remember, but there is a tangible shift in that four-page relic; writing to forget is often a much more aggressive disposition.
On nights when I’m journaling in a Didionesque style with no real purpose, I find it quite amusing to take a walk down memory lane. I flip through my own writing, and it's as if I am reading things that are foreign to me. I love that part of documenting life. I often read day-by-day recaps or look at collages with random mementos, thinking “I would’ve never remembered that otherwise.” I also come across the most heart-wrenching entries that radiate the hurt I’ve hidden on the page for relief. I cry for that version of myself, those emotions and that unresolved pain momentarily resurfacing. Most of all, by this practice I learn the very important concept of perspective. I physically see how much life can change month to month, year to year, journal to journal. It makes me more aware that my current trials are but a vapor in the rainfall of life. It’s a tragically beautiful practice, writing poems for no other audience but yourself and letters for people who will never read the words you’ve secretly addressed to them.
I’ve acknowledged many reasons for writing, yet I guess I can relate slightly to George Orwell's assertion of a writer's vainness. Sometimes I write to see how flowery I can make my words sound—to mimic Plath’s tragic mood, or match my tone to those of the classic literary figures like F. Scott Fitzgerald and Frances Hodgson Burnett, whose books I fell in love with. I read quotes capturing profound emotions with words so beautifully simplified, and they speak to my soul. Sometimes I challenge myself subconsciously to reach the depths of those writers, and each time I learn about how to communicate simply to describe the complex.
Life moves quickly, and I find it moves even quicker when you allow it to pass you by. Slowing down and reflecting is how I keep up, as counterproductive as that sounds. The modern emphasis on fast-paced lifestyles seems entirely unbalanced to me. I think we as humans were designed to take things slowly. We can look to nature for evidence; a chicken egg doesn’t hatch overnight, and it takes 365 days for a single revolution of the Earth around the sun.
It's a marvel to see how attached I get to these journals, but it makes sense because they're all extensions of the past versions of myself. I self-regulate and feel serenity within this simple hobby. And as many ups and downs as I go through, and as much as they feel life-shattering in the moment, I love to feel deeply—to be numb to everything is like dying while still alive. The graveyard of empty gel ink pens that have faced the wrath of my emotions is proof that my feelings existed, and that I lived.
losing your grip
“the head hurts but the heart knows the truth” by headache
by Eleanor Dushin Illustrated by Ariana R Jimenez
**CW: Suicide, depression**
Have you ever woken up and wondered where you are and why you’re naked? You are now listening to Headache. “You would like this.” He listens to music loud enough that the whole car shakes with the boom of the percussion. A group of three men sitting at a patio table turn to look at us as we sit parked in a concrete structure off Lloyd Street. Before stepping on the gas, he lets the voice from the rest of the album come in.
I used to take my breakfast off of a mirror. Now I just walk around and stare at people in the park.
I have no idea what the voice is saying. I add the entire album to my playlist. Maybe I’ll think more about the lyrics later. Maybe it’s not that deep.
+++
In May 2023, electronic artist Vegyn collaborated with poet Francis Hornsby Clark under the name Headache to release the EP The Head Hurts But the Heart Knows the Truth . While Vegyn has received attention for his production work with artists like Frank Ocean, JPEGMafia, Dean Blunt, and Travis Scott, his solo work speaks for itself. At age 32, Vegyn is among the most prominent and influential artists in electronic music. The voice who speaks throughout the EP belongs to neither Vegyn nor Clark—instead, AI performs Clark’s lyrics over Vegyn’s music. In an interview with The Quietus , Vegyn says, “People get concerned about AI, but people hated drum machines when they first came out. It’s still about the human experience, somebody actually playing a thing.” In the same way that Vegyn plays with layers of drum beats and dreamy highway synths, Clark plays with words and characters.
I’ve always been partial to awful main characters, so Headache’s idea to make an album about the most unlikeable man in the world struck a chord. The voice is a selfobsessed and self-righteous middle-class white man who develops an obsession with the worst woman in the world. He makes excuses for his poor choices and offers far more empathy to himself than to anyone else. Behind his words, the music emphasizes the disconnectedness of his internal and external experiences. The percussion feels grounding, as if you can feel the beat vibrate from the floor to your knees, but the melody floats far above it, blinking and glittering as if in midair. In lyrics and sounds, there’s a constant push-and-pull between the real world—sharp, rigid hi-hats and snares—and the voice’s inner world— smooth, windchimelike, head-in-the-clouds electronic refrains. Headache’s voice continually fails to confront his problems head-on. He embodies the anti-self help-book, superficial
antiestablishmentarian who shifts blame to a vaguely defined ‘other’ rather than finding a foothold on life—exactly the type to proclaim that you don’t owe anyone anything, your mental health is out of your hands, you aren’t at fault, you aren’t to blame, you’re doing everything right, and no one is mad at you. In “The Thing with the Rabbit,” the second track on the EP, he says, “I shouldn't be responsible for what I say / Someone else should be responsible for what I say.” He lives in a world that revolves around him, yelling his woes into the microphone as if expecting others, or even the listener, to help him. In “The Beginning of the End,” he says, “Do you think I'm normal? / Say I'm normal. / Please, for fuck's sake, please say I'm normal.” He lives entirely in his own mind, demanding validation from the listener while unable to detach himself from the web he’s spun. But within and between the voice’s self-pitying monologues, there are hints of relatability. +++
I get stuck in the same loop of selfindulgent suffering. I wake up at 5 a.m. and stay in bed until noon. I lay by my phone and wait for someone to ask to come over. I listen to Headache.
And I just wish stuff would stop happening so fast
I just want to catch my breath and feel that I exist in a moment
Within a moment
Inside this time right now
I let myself stay there. I don’t wiggle my toes. I don’t open the journal whose spine sits an inch in front of my nose. I don’t click the pen that grazes my thumb every time my heart beats. I don’t turn off the music. My pain doesn’t feel like it’s entirely mine: I didn’t do anything to give myself this pit in my stomach. It isn’t my fault, so it can’t be my responsibility. No one is going to save me. I refuse to save myself.
The AI voice is just human enough to sound familiar, and Clark’s writing isn’t a 1:1 representation of a real person’s lived experience—at least certainly not that of Vegyn or Clark—but it has real implications. The narrative doesn’t really belong to anyone, and the events seem unbelievable at times, making it easier to relate to. It isn’t an album about a breakup that’s just a bit too different from your own. It’s about sleeping on the street, not paying for dinner at a restaurant, mailing suicide notes to news media conglomerates, hearing voices. It’s that partial suspension of disbelief—the moment when you know you’ve felt that way before—that brings you into his world.
Headache’s voice lives so deeply inside his own mind that he exists a step behind his body. He loses his grip on reality, reciting incantations that toe the line between nonsense and poetry:
The cow is for land and the horse is for water
But can you really feel the sound of two hundred people eating?
I was in Ancient Egypt with the rabbit I saw the whole thing I exist like cocaine
The voice explains the meaning of his lyrics on “The Pavement is my Pillow Talk,” saying “It’s deep / But it’s not that deep.” There is a deeper meaning to the words that the voice says, but it’s not that deep. The real meaning is in his free-associative lament. +++
I walk home from the library with a friend. By the time we get to North Campus, I’m not absorbing my surroundings. I don’t know how I got from A to B. All I can say is, “I’m fourteen years old, and I never learned how to walk. I’m made of sticks and glass and I’m stuck together by mud from a lake in Massachusetts. I don’t know what lake.”
“Are you okay?” she asks me. Tears are falling off my cheeks and soaking into the fibers of my scarf.
“It’s 1927 and the Great Depression is coming and no one will listen to me because I won’t tell them what the Great Depression is. And I don’t believe in the Dust Bowl because I only learned about it last year and if it actually happened then I would’ve learned about it earlier.”
We aren’t walking anymore.
“I’m eleven years old.”
She shrugs and swings her arms outward, hands still shoved in her pockets. “I’m four!” I smile, stop crying, hug her goodnight, and walk into my dorm. I go to bed with the feeling that something within me will never go to rest when I want it to.
Headache perfectly captures how it feels to be unwell—every thought you have is disconnected, but they all feel relevant. Your mind moves too fast to keep track of any singular thought, and you exist in an internal haze of your own creation. The man shaking your shoulders is 20 feet away. The alarm is going off and begging you to pick yourself up, but there’s ease and comfort in remaining unwell. Choosing to heal takes courage and effort. Stay in bed. Feel your emotions deeply, but don’t engage with them. Your pain isn’t just the truth of how you feel, but it’s the right thing to feel.
+++
The voice finally escapes his selfpitying cycle through what Vegyn refers to as “happy melancholy,” a common theme in his solo work. There’s a moment in the EP when something switches. The voice finally engages with the life in front of him and breaks out of his haze.
My head hurts but I know the truth I know that love is the only thought And pain is the only feeling
And I'm ready to dance
I don't know what happened to me
But I don't really care anymore
There’s a lot that’s out of your hands. You can’t control how people treat you or what happens to you. You can’t make others heal you. You have to let yourself accept it. Find your own love, heal your own suffering, accept your own grief. Find a foothold, get a grip.
game over boy on men and forgiveness
bY Zoe Foustier
Illustrated by Dinah Biga
Instagram: @Dinah.draws
I used to hate men.
I reached this conclusion in my senior year of high school, eroded and weathered by the ostensible impossibility of a man seeing me as his equal and his friend.
I grew up playing video games, a pastime in which women make up the minority of partakers. Every Christmas, my cousins would roll up with a Nintendo 3DS in one hand and a Minecraft stuffed animal in the other. They wore T-shirts, jeans, and sneakers while I sat cross-legged in my dress, Mary Janes, and barrettes, sneaking peeks at the Pokémon battles and Legend of Zelda odysseys illuminated on their tiny screens.
I tossed aside my Barbies and begged my parents for a laptop, with which they graciously obliged me after a year or two of pleading. Unable to wait, I remember ripping the box open and trying to set up the laptop right there in the car. Finally at home with wifi, the first things I downloaded were Minecraft and Steam.
I recall an early memory of the zombie fighting game Unturned, where I discovered that players could communicate with each other through an in-game voice chat. Excited, I pressed the button on my keyboard, leaned in toward my mic, and started talking. Immediately, I was greeted by the laughs of a hoard of prepubescent boys.
“Bro, is there a girl in the chat?”
“I wonder if she’s on her period.”
I couldn’t have been older than 10 or 11 at the time, and only had a vague idea of what a period was. Still, my stomach twinged and my cheeks got red as I was filled with a mix of shame and confusion. I felt like I had done something wrong, but I didn’t know what. The players kept laughing, and I’m sure they said other—likely worse— things that I didn’t understand then but would soon come to know. I would learn words like
“bitch,” and every allusion and sexual euphemism under the sun while I continued to play online video games as a girl, just trying to have fun like everyone else.
At school, I had friends who were boys. We played tag on the playground and talked about the Percy Jackson books together. We traded our fruit snacks for chips and Skyped each other over the summer breaks. In sixth grade, I moved away from my hometown for a year before coming back toward the end of seventh grade. I was looking forward to seeing my old friends, but somehow everything had changed.
“He keeps asking me for nudes. He tells me he is going to hurt himself if I don’t.”
My friend was referring to one of the boys I had been close with in elementary school. I couldn’t believe or even fathom what I was hearing. We didn’t know what to do. It seemed like it was too dark to tell an adult, and who would believe us anyway? We were only 13.
The same boy soon started DMing me with similar messages on Instagram, which I ignored. The other boys I had been friends with were now shouting slurs in the hallways while wearing their parents’ MAGA hats. They ripped a girl’s rainbow pin off her bag and sexually harassed her friends by mass-circulating a cruel picture via AirDrop.
My one male friend in high school—who I thought was different—told me he had a crush on me, and I told him I wanted to stay friends. He stopped talking to me and told me he hated me.
When my dad left, I was 16, and I decided that men were the root of all evil. I felt a bubbling rage every day. Whenever my friends said the phrase “I hate men” as a joke, I would concur or repeat it with passion and truth. My entire friend group was female, and I lived at home with a single mom. Briefly, I was friends with a gay guy (out gay men were few and far between at my conservative high school), before being dismayed when he confidently started calling my friend a slut for sleeping with her boyfriend. It seemed to me that no man was the exception.
Early on at Brown, I started making friends with queer men. They were kind and funny, and it was one of the first times I could tell that a man
saw me as an equal and a friend. We could hang out one-on-one, and I didn’t worry about any potential subtext. I think, oftentimes, gay men think that they are excluded from misogyny, as seemed to be the case with my friend in high school, but my new friends at Brown were thoughtful and aware. I started to see a glimmer of hope and open myself up to trust again.
Still, I would give straight men a wide berth. My friends joked with me once that it was obvious I hated men. I felt defensive, even though I might’ve accepted that assessment in the past. I didn’t hate men, right? I had made so much progress.
Finally, through a few of my female friends, I slowly began to befriend a group of guys. I had never met men like them. While many of them were straight, they never made me feel infantilized or objectified. We had tons in common and started to make inside jokes. We played video games and went to the gym together. They were comfortable in their masculinity and thought that guys who acted like the guys from my high school were losers.
Of course, this is not to say that they were perfect, but I have learned to give grace where it is due. Together, we are always making mistakes and learning to decode the patriarchy that has permeated every aspect of our lives for so long.
I ended up rooming with one of them, along with two of my other female friends. I sometimes worried that he felt awkward rooming with three girls, but he texted us the other day:
“You guys have made this year for me.”
At the end of the day, gender doesn’t matter. We are friends and equals.
Sometimes, when I think about the men I have met at Brown, they make me want to cry out of gratitude. I used to feel so angry all of the time. I never realized how much the chip on my shoulder was weighing me down. While sometimes I worry that Brown is just a bubble—an anxiety seemingly confirmed by my shock at Donald Trump’s election at the hands of a hateful movement with a large share of incels and angry young men—I remind myself that even if it’s true and all that exists is this bubble, that does not mean all hope is lost. I have met and known good men. I have to believe that they will overcome this modern narrative. They have shown me that there is a light.
notes from a week of crying in public or,
how to cry on campus
by Indigo Mudbhary
Illustrated by Rokia Whitehouse
Instagram: @1ma1na
“Devastating problems in your life can also be interesting, and they can interest you as they’re happening to you and as they’re causing you intense pain,” says Agnes Callard, a controversial professor of philosophy at the University of Chicago. I stumbled across this quote in “Agnes Callard’s Marriage of the Minds,” a New Yorker article that explores Callard’s opinions on love through her choice to leave her husband for one of her graduate students. I clicked on the article for the interpersonal drama (sue me, I love gossip) and stayed for the poignant one-liners (“We are desperate for information about how other people live because we want to know how to live ourselves, yet we are taught to see this desire as an illegitimate form of prying”).
Devastating problems can be interesting, and perhaps that’s why so many post- pieces are tender explorations of people’s most difficult traumas. Though joy fills this magazine’s pages too, it’s undeniable that there is something compelling about turning a difficult thing into words. It’s like taking a stone and turning it in the palm of your hand, feeling the weight of it, and maybe, someday, throwing it back into the water.
I have written about devastating problems in my life in post- before (see: here and here). Despite being no stranger to showcasing my vulnerability on the internet for all to see, the current devastating problem I’m going through feels different. I’m not ready to talk about it in an article linked to my very unique first and last name (I’m so Googleable—it’s ridiculous). Yet, I still wanted to write about my pain, sadness, and anger; to do otherwise would feel, to me, like lying by omission. How do you write about a devastating problem without going into too much detail about the problem itself?
I originally planned to write a quirky listicle entitled, “The 10 Best Places to Cry on Campus!” The first item was going to be “1. In your history class on American Empire. No one will give you a hard time—they’ll just think you’re really moved by the course content!” But the reality is, as I’ve gone through the most difficult week of my life in college thus far, there is nothing funny about sobbing in the back of lecture. So instead, here’s a list of observations from my last week of crying in public at Brown (CIP@B, if you will). Half-advice, half-autoethnography, I hope this list is helpful to anyone else going through a devastating problem in their life.
1. Crying on the Main Green will give you a main character complex that makes you feel just a little bit better about what you’re going through. I personally recommend the steps of the John Carter Brown Library or the tables at the top of the Campus Center for increased cinematic effect. The only risk is that someone you know may see you, but I’ve noticed that if they wave from a far enough distance (even 10 feet), the vast majority of friends and acquaintances won’t even notice you’re crying. Honestly, it’s a
pretty safe campus when it comes to people not recognizing that you’re crying. I don’t know what that says about our student body.
2. The last person in the world you want to see will inevitably pass by if you cry in public often enough. Though it will be annoying, the absurdity of their presence in the exact same part of campus as you at your lowest moment will, again, make you feel like the main character. The universe may be terrorizing you, but it also feels deeply humorous to have so much of its attention.
3. It’s very hard to violently sob with a heavy tote bag on your shoulder. Humanities majors, I’m looking at you. It will slide off. All your stuff will fall on the sidewalk in front of you. And you will laugh, through choked sobs, at just how pitiful you look in the wet, New England winter, scraping your possessions off the damp, salted pavement.
4. Crying in class is amazing if you have any lecture courses. I highly recommend walking to the back, opening up your laptop to hide behind, and just letting the tears fall. The back of a lecture hall is a surprisingly secluded place, and private locations to cry in are few and far between at this school. Some water may get on your notebook, but who cares? The professor posts the slides on Canvas anyway.
5. Crying in the wind will just make you feel worse. It will feel like your tears are freezing to your face, and as the wind whips against your wet cheeks, you’ll feel like the most miserable person in the world, which I personally have found to be an unhelpful feeling as I navigate my devastating problem. Especially if you’re a California kid like me, crying in the wind will just make you wish you’d gone to UCLA or UC Berkeley, where maybe you’d be having the same devastating problems, but at least the weather would be nice.
6. Crying in the shower is boring. It’s nice if you want privacy, but there’s nothing to look at except the clump of hair in the drain or your body wash. If you live in a dorm that struggles to have consistent hot water like I do, the sudden
bucket of ice water will just make you feel pathetic.
7. Crying on the phone to your mom, if that’s the kind of relationship you have, is nice, but don’t do it if you a) have T-Mobile and b) are on North Campus. The wind, combined with your choked-up voice and lack of cell service, will make it impossible for her to hear what you’re crying about.
8. I can’t recommend crying before bed enough. Between the bold blend they have at the Ratty and the Andrews cold brew, Brown students are constantly wired. I know I can’t be the only one who has felt my heart racing before bed and thought, “Maybe I shouldn’t have impulsively drunk three cups of coffee at the V-Dub this morning.” A true, drawn-out, guttural sobbing sesh in your bed will lead to the best sleep of your life.
9. A movie that you know will make you cry is a great way to induce yourself to cry if you know that you need to, but it’s just not coming out. For me, that movie is All That Breathes, a documentary that details the uphill battle of two brothers trying to save kites (as in the bird) in New Delhi. Though not exactly the same, it makes me miss Kathmandu, which I’ve been doing a lot of lately (I recently changed Siri to Indian English to deal with the homesickness). As a history major whose work mostly focuses on Nepal, it’s such a strange feeling to be at this predominantly white school, preparing to write a thesis about a place I so desperately miss. All That Breathes reminds me of that central paradox of my life right now, so it can always get a sob out of me, even those ones that are buried deep.
10. The best cries, though, are those that are not had alone. On a walk last week with my lover in the snow, I cried at a rabbit we saw. Thinking of how small they are in such a big world made me tear up, and what pushed me over the edge into sobbing territory was thinking of the people I’ve lost in this life being reborn as rabbits in the next one. As I began to cry, he put his arms around me, and I realized that in a week full of crying in public, this one was easily the best cry of them all.
“And I imagined what would have happened if I had spoken up, or cussed them out, or screamed, or flipped the table, or punched someone, or at least allowed myself to look angry. I think about this, and I can live vicariously through these fictional women. It is cathartic, and it is freeing.”
— Emily Tom, “The Craze for Feminine Rage” 02.17.23
by AJ Wu
“I think I want to write something new, something in the style of Anne Carson or maybe Maggie Nelson, but I am light-headed and flighty. I feel pinned like an insect to bedposts with nail polish stains that must be over nine years old.”
— Alissa Simon, “Christmas Adventures in OpenAI” 02.17.23
