Cover by Emilie Guan
why do writers twist the knife?
on the words that wound us
by Nahye Lee
Illustrated by Cayden Garrett
In my Intro to Creative Nonfiction class, I wrote about my grandmother for my first piece. I wrote about her because she was dead, and nothing comes more naturally than remembering a person who no longer exists.
I considered the woman my grandmother was. I talked about her food, her funeral, the people there I didn’t know who pretended they knew me, the festering realization that my grandmother had not been the all-sacrificing cooking angel I knew in my childhood. I expressed my regret at being unable to remember her food. I wrote, “I remember she atrophies until what remains are the bones only: bare and white and clean. I pray she turns them into broth.”
I added this line to my final draft and then gave myself a standing ovation. But in my first iteration of the piece, before two rounds of workshop, I had written in a reflective twist at the end of the piece. I’d since cut it
Letter from the Editor
Dear Readers,
These are my first printed words in post-, and probably also my last. So a bit of hello and goodbye at the same time. We’re not entirely strangers though—this probably isn’t the first work of mine you’ve seen. This is my 57th issue that I’ve designed for post- (I counted for the first time today). So if you’ve read an issue of post- anytime since fall 2022 and noticed any column alignment errors, that's on me. After four years, the individual issues and the long prod nights with good food and good friends start to blend together. However, I do remember the way it all felt and the genuine happiness that doing layout for this wonderful magazine has brought me.
Our writers this week have also been thinking about memory, and what you take with you. In Feature, Nahye reflects on how expressing grief and pain in writing can rob the writer of those feelings, and Francis writes on how
because I didn’t think there was enough room to accommodate the implied gravity of this thematic extension: I’d accused myself, in the end, of eating from her table, of taking from her, until nothing was left. I’d said that I was taking away from her even now.
It was true. I was using my grandmother’s memory to write a three-page draft of a college assignment that would never see the light of day. I was using my experience of her death to squeeze out a piece of badlywritten creative writing two hours before it was due. I had reached into myself for things I could plaster onto my professor’s prompt and hooked, unceremoniously, onto the most theatrical thing I had experienced, ever. Someone in my family had died. Someone who raised me had died. Someone who played dolls with me as we sat on the carpeted living room floor had died, and here I was: turning it into an assignment.
to see the good in uncertainty. In Narrative, Helen talks about the memories of home that sweet potatoes evoke, and Jedidiah discusses the bittersweet nature of visiting a childhood home. In A&C, Sara reflects on Fleabag and the omnipresence of love, and Ishan talks about the book Why Fish Don’t Exist and finding order in chaos. In Lifestyle, Daphne channels Buzzfeed for a Thayer restaurant personality quiz, Jedidiah reflects on Google storage limits and the ephemerality of memory, and Lily has created a crossword you need a little luck to solve. For post-pourri, Emmanuel writes about rugby and approaching new experiences with neutrality.
I’ll be leaving layout in the capable hands of two incredible new co-chiefs, who I’ve had the privilege to know, train, and see totally eclipse my own design abilities. The role of designer, and especially layout chief, is a supporting role above anything else, and I love it for that reason. I get the opportunity to highlight the work of all the talented writers and artists on post- and package it up for
easy. You just have to sit down at a typewriter and bleed. All your little hurts, he advises, will become wells of sanguine ink that you need only dip into to churn out masterpieces like a machine. It’s tempting, as a writer, to translate pain into a story. Sadness is inspirational. Grief is generative. Artists apparently do their best work during the worst time of their lives. The depressed artist, the starving artist, the oppressed artist—there’s nary a creative great out there who hasn’t experienced some sort of personal trouble, and hell if they didn’t condense it into their art.
It’s a masochistic impulse. You drive the knife deeper into yourself because others might enjoy the artistry of your agony. They will come watch your torment transcribed neatly into something visible, legible, comprehensible. James Baldwin, in Conversations with James Baldwin, writes that art is important because it’s a “great liberation for the suffering, struggling person, who always thinks that he is alone.” I don’t disagree with him. The list of personal crises I’ve worked through by turning to Sally Rooney—“Frances, are you planning to drown down there?”—is long enough that I truly do believe there’s a power in art that charts the path to healing, to empathy, to understanding yourself by understanding others, and vice versa.
A Korean singer, Yim Jae-beom, said something in a variety show that has stuck with me for a while. It was a show where anonymous singers were invited to compete for fame, and Yim, a seasoned vocalist, served as one of the judges. One of the contestants had recently lost her mother, a fact she only revealed in later rounds. She shared this profound sense of loss with Yim himself—following his wife’s death in 2017, he disappeared from the public eye for five years. In his commentary about her performance, he says that “this pain that we feel in our bones is, as people who sing, a kind of resource… I think we must live with gratitude that our sadness has been given the opportunity to comfort that of others.”
I watched this show in the fall of 2024, a few months after my grandmother passed away in July. I scribbled his comment in my journal, thinking that this was why I wrote. I wanted to turn my pain into something meaningful. I wanted to find meaning in my pain’s ability to
you, the reader, to enjoy. As far as I’m concerned, there’s no better job here.
There’s a wall in the office that was bare when I first got here. Over the years, it has slowly filled up with photos, signs, and a haphazard assortment of other objects documenting in some way the people who spent their Wednesday nights in that room. From my point of view right now, graduation and beyond feels a bit like copying my consciousness and memories into a clone and sending it forward into the unknown where I (as I am now) cannot follow. It’s hard to know what will transfer, which parts of me will keep moving forward and which parts will stay behind. But I’ll always be happy knowing that some little relic of me—my beat up freshman year ID— will stay affixed to that wall, in the company of friends, no matter where that future self goes.
In case I don't see ya,
Layout
Gray Martens
Chief
console others, just as the art of those who came before had found me. How beautiful and noble was this ambition? I bore the cross. I would lie down on the operating table and drag the scalpel across my own stomach. I would perform a
the hospital room on the eighth floor, and then deleted them. It was important to establish that my grandmother was dead for this piece to work, but I could not bring myself to turn the pain that was the process of her dying into words on a page. I had unearthed what I could from the fact of her death, and it seemed like an unforgivable transgression to exploit the process of it for just another story.
I don’t think I’ll ever talk about that room.
So let me consider something else: In the days that followed her death, I sat in a swivel chair at her funeral and thought about how I could turn this into a piece of writing. How couldn’t I? It was so… opportune. So pregnant with meaning. I told and told and told myself to shut the fuck up for once—but I couldn’t help it. In a month I would move halfway across the world. This was my first funeral ever. My grandmother had spooned rice into my mouth while I read books at the dinner table. I mean, she’d practically raised me. What was this if not a God-given metaphor for the way I would peel away bits of childhood from my life and become an adult? With-grandmother, without-grandmother. In-Korea, Out-of-Korea. Child, Adult. Younger, Older.
A brilliant binary.
I sat in that chair in mourning clothes and everyone hugged me and said, “At least she got to see you graduate.” Now wasn’t that a thought? My grandmother walking me to kindergarten versus sitting in bed watching me graduate on a YouTube livestream from the same K-12 school. Couldn’t that be a metaphor for something? There had to be a metaphor somewhere in there. What kind of death doesn’t leave a metaphor behind?
We dip into the well of our suffering and absorb just enough material to create something
identifiably sympathetic, but we can’t just write about it because let’s face it: no one really wants to hear about the hours I spent doing nothing in the funeral home. I watched reels. I went down the rabbit hole of derailed rollercoasters and deactivated animatronics and what-I-eat-in-aday videos since I was stuck swallowing funeral food all day. In order for my grief to inhabit art, I had to extract meaning and emotion from it like a nurse draws out blood: regret at not going over often enough to eat her food, disappointment at the person she turned out to be to my relatives, shock at the sheer amount of Christians who showed up, horror at their religious zeal, guilt at turning the tale of her loss into a draft for ENGL0930.
Kait Rokowski says, “Nothing ever ends poetically. It ends and we turn it into poetry. All that blood was never once beautiful. It was just red.” I turned the excruciating boredom of my three days at the funeral into writing. I contorted it into the form of poetry. I made it art. My grief had been meaningless until I imbued it with meaning. It was a pile of dirt until I excavated the metaphor within, a crude block of marble until I freed the sculpture begging inside.
What was it that Hemingway wrote? Bleed
And so I inflict wounds upon myself and turn it into ink. I write, in October 2024, about her death and the incoherence of it. I write, in January 2025, about the grief I must have felt. And I write now about… well, not necessarily her death, but it serves as the thread that braids my piece together. A happy resolution, you would think—writing as a coping mechanism, a productive (in both senses of the word) processing of loss.
I didn’t cry once.
In the poem “Jessica gives me a chill pill,” Angie Sijun Lou points out that “not everything feels like / something else.” But to me, everything has to feel like something else. Otherwise what would I write about? As it turns out, the knife with which you sacrifice yourself at the altar of artistic altruism is not only double-edged, but also plastic. In turning your pain into art, you chip away at your ability to feel it for what it is. You dull the edge. You numb the ache.
I grieve the grief I lost somewhere in my search for meaning. And even that, you read.
Pies
home
sweet home
on uncertainty and other nice things
by Francis Gonzalez
“Do you wanna see his finger?” My friend reaches into his pocket to grab his phone, grinning like we’re talking about high school drama.
“Um, not really,” I tell him. He’s immediately deflated. I don’t remember the last time he was so eager to show me something. I don’t get why this of all things has him so excited.
I FaceTime my mom the day after. I usually call her on the weekends. Or I used to, at least. I’ve missed…how many weeks now? I can’t even remember. But I’m calling her now. She picks up, not yet out of bed—and I’m about to drop dead.
“Hey, how are you?” she asks me.
“Good,” I say. Anything else and she’ll freak. It’s not a lie though. At least, I don’t think it is.
“How’s school?”
“It’s good.” I need to come up with a better answer.
“That’s good. Enjoying yourself?”
“Yeah.” I pause, and then: “This semester’s been a lot better.” Just to add some more substance. I don’t know if it’s really true. It might be, but I honestly feel so burnt out that I’ve forgotten to experience everything.
“Oh, that’s great!”
“I’m just kind of worried that things are getting better now, since I only have a year left. It would be kind of sad if my last year was the only time I actually wanted to be here.”
Again, I don't know if this is true. It’s not rehearsed though, and it comes out organically,
“I’m
keeping my hazard lights on so people know I have fear.”
“I
won’t have sex with you, but I will marry you.”
“Sweetest Pie” by Megan Thee Stallion & Dua Lipa
Boysenberry
Whoopie
Illustrated by Coco zhu
so there must be at least some truth to it. Maybe except for the part where I said I was worried. I’d love for next year to be the best of my life.
There’s a pause in the conversation. My mom reassures me that this is normal—“I think everyone feels that way. Your cousin said the same thing.” A bit comforting to be honest, but I don’t really want to talk about this. I change the subject.
“Hey, is there any news on the kid?” I watch her face change. She’s much less excited to talk about this.
“Yeah, they found him. I’ve told your sister she can’t go to the mall alone anymore.”
I frown. “I don’t think we’re targets.”
“I don’t know. This is the eighth one recently.” Oh. It’s much worse than I thought.
I nod and watch her. She’s itching to change the subject. She looks back at me, and then her face lights up. “What are you doing for your birthday?”
Oh, right. My birthday’s this week. I turn 21. That’s a big deal in this country, I think. What am I doing? “I’ll probably just have dinner with friends.”
“Oh, not New York?”
I laugh. “No, not this year.”
When she hangs up an hour later, I pass out on my bed. I haven’t washed my face, brushed my teeth, anything. My laundry is unfolded, filling my hamper while my dirty clothes pile up on the floor. I wake up four hours later, the sun still down. What am I doing for my birthday?
A kid was kidnapped at my high school the other day. He was 14. Maybe home’s a lot less safe than I thought.
Tomorrow’s my birthday. The first part of it, at least—this year’s not a leap year. But I have a paper due tomorrow, so maybe I just call my birthday March 1 and move on. No point having a doublebirthday if I can’t even celebrate them both. That’s disappointing, though—I wanted to test if liquor stores counted me as 21 on February 28. I guess I’ll never know.
I quickly text my friend, asking if she’s free on Saturday. I told my mom I was having a dinner—I might as well have it. She gets back to me pretty quickly. Should be. Well, at least that’s something to look forward to.
I feel like it used to be a pretty cool thing, not feeling settled down where you are. At least it was cool when I was a first-year, because everyone felt that way. Maybe the schtick got old last year. But if it’s gotten old for other people, just imagine how old it’s gotten for me.
I get a text from my dad. How are you celebrating your birthday? I don’t open it. I turn my phone off. My hair falls in front of my eyes. I run my fingers through it, but a strand catches on my chipping nail polish, and suddenly I can’t take my hand out. I grunt, frustrated, and use my other hand to pull the caught strands free.
Instead of writing my paper, I spend the next day filling out internship applications. There’s one listing I really want, so I write out a cover letter. While writing it, I scan the job description. That’s when I see it: “We do not accept international students.” I sigh at my near-finished cover letter and scrap it. So much effort, and for what?
For someone that always wants to go home and never wants to come back, I sure feel bitter about the idea of going home for the summer. I could absolutely get an offer there. I might even be able to build a career there. I’ve always wanted
to move back, so why do I care about this? Why am I suddenly worrying about my life in two years when my visa expires? If home is where all my best memories are and this country has housed some of the worst, why am I so reluctant to go back?
Twelve hours into what is sort of my birthday, and I’m 12 hours overdue on my paper. I can’t bring myself to write it. I have some ideas, some conceptions about Hertz and Van Gennep and whatnot, but no words can come out. I have another paper due tomorrow. I need this thing done.
It takes me another three hours before I submit. As I hit the button, I wonder if I’ve ever submitted a paper on time.
My friend has a call at 9 p.m. We meet at 7 p.m., so we have a good two hours.
The first restaurant we go to is full. I’m hungry, so we head to another—this takes us an extra 30 minutes.
“You know, we could’ve probably gotten a table.”
“Yeah, I know.”
It’s 8 p.m. by the time we get to order anything. I ask her how important her call is—she says it’s fine, she can be a little late. I make a mental note that she hasn’t so much as mentioned my birthday yet. I’m not sure if it’s intentional or not. I look down at the menu.
“Okay, on birthdays I usually don’t like trying new things, so I’ll just get this,” I say, pointing to their specialty. I blew it, I think. That was not subtle at all.
I look up and her eyes have widened. She brings her hand up a bit.
“Wait.”
I start to laugh. I used to keep track of my friends a lot more aggressively. On a leap year it should be impossible to forget it. In a normal year, you have two days to greet me, so missing it is crazy Obviously, people miss it anyway, because I’m not the center of their world. But I like to pretend I am.
But this time it feels good to talk to someone who forgot. It’s nice to remember that the world doesn’t revolve around me, and that really, no one cares whether I’m turning 21 blacking out at a club in New York or having ramen with a friend in
Providence.
We get back at around 9:30 p.m. She’s late for her call, so she says bye and rushes home. I walk home alone.
When I get back, my mom FaceTimes me. I pick up.
“How was your birthday?” she asks.
“Good,” I reply.
“What did you do?”
“I got dinner with a friend.”
“That’s it?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, did you have fun?”
“Yeah. Probably my best birthday I’ve had here.”
“That’s good! Oh, by the way, we’re about to go out for lunch.”
“Oh, what for?”
“We’re celebrating your birthday!”
I stare at her in disbelief. “I’m not there.”
“Yeah, I know.”
We stare at each other for a while, my mouth slightly agape. She calls over the rest of the family. My dad and brother say hi. My sister gloats about her grades which, admittedly, are better than mine were at her age. We talk for a while longer as they get into the car and leave home.
“I have to hang up now. Love you!” my mom says once she gets to the restaurant. I say bye to them all as they leave to celebrate my birthday without me. When she actually hangs up, I start to laugh. My suitemates probably think I’ve got issues.
My hair falls in front of my face. I run my fingers through it, moving it out of the way. Hair strands hook onto my chipped nail polish. Pulling my hand away feels like pulling my nail off. I let out a groan before taking each strand, one by one, out of my nails.
I look at my hands. My nails have grown too long. All 10 of them have chipped at least a little. Most of the patterns are gone. Keeping the paint is doing me more harm than good.
I stare at them a little longer. My friend back home did these nails two months ago, just days before my flight back to America. There’s still some chrome left over.
Maybe this isn’t so bad after all.
unrooted on home and sweet potatoes
by Helen xie
Illustrated by Lulu Cavicchi
I stand in the kitchen of my off-campus apartment, staring at the lumpy sack of Japanese sweet potatoes on the counter. The shape is wrong. They are smaller than the ones Mom buys from the Asian Food Markets back home, their skin covered in little scabs as if they’ve made a hard journey to get here.
If I were home, Mom would be wearing my brother's old zip-up, the reindeer apron I made in third grade tied around her slender frame. She would peel the potatoes in long, curling ribbons, cut them into thick rounds, nestle them gently into the rice cooker among fine grains of jasmine rice. I would always reach for the driest, crumbliest pieces first. They tasted like candied chestnuts, oozing with sweetness.
I do not own a rice cooker. Our scratched-up, grey counters are home to a mishmash of tupperware, spices, jars of peanut butter, and a lone microwave from the tenants before us. I do not know why I bought these potatoes in the first place—maybe out of some stubborn longing, a need to prove that I could recreate something familiar in a place that never quite feels like home.
The urge to dial up Mom and ask her what to do rises within me, but I resist. I have to do this on my own. Rip off a sheet of paper towel, run it under the sink until it is dripping, then wring it out until it is just damp enough. Swaddle the potato, tuck it carefully into the microwave. I skip the butter. Five minutes pass, and then a beep cuts through the silence.
I should be used to it by now—the constant cycle of leaving and returning, of carrying pieces of home only to find they do not quite fit the way I want them to. I should know better—that things shift, stretch, shrink when carried across distances. That the past never slots neatly into the present, no matter how tightly I hold onto it. But still, the ache curls in my ribs. I think of my parents' kitchen, where the mail piles up in quiet chaos, where mugs from every continent crowd the counter, waiting to be used.
A quick Google search for how to make sweet potatoes brings up instructions from a website aptly named Healthy Recipes Blog: wrap the potato in a damp paper towel, microwave for five minutes. It feels wrong, the hurriedness of it, the way the recipe calls for American sweet potatoes and butter— butter, of all things. But maybe that is what happens when things travel too far from where they started—they change, adapting to what is available, reshaped by new kitchens and new hands.
I reach in too fast and burn my fingers, dropping the potato onto a plate with a dull thud. I peel back the paper towel. The skin is intact but lifeless, the inside mushy in some places, but strangely dry in others, as if the potato gave up halfway through cooking. I take a bite. The flavor is a ghost of what I remember. I cling to it anyway, pretending, just for a second, that I am home.
It almost works.
Maybe that is the nature of sweet potatoes. They are carried across continents, planted in unfamiliar soil, made to grow and adapt where they were never intended to. Most sweet potatoes are never consumed where they first took root. Maybe that is why I bought them —why I keep trying.
these walls remember
home is where the heart is
by Jedidiah Davis
Illustrated by Ellie Kang
Houses are living things. Maybe not quite as sentient as Encanto’s Casita or the literal living house in Monster House, but they have hearts—a pulse beating through the pipes, a unique personality built into the walls, memories ingrained in the foundation. There's credence to the saying, home is where the heart is. A tender proverb, its warm message has been proclaimed, sung, and printed in cursive swoops on home decor since time immemorial, as a comforting reminder that we’re never too far from home. I’ve been thinking a lot about memories and leaving lately (a side effect of life as a second semester senior), and, as I prepare to leave this home I’ve found in Providence, memories of my childhood home well up in my mind. They’re preserved, crystal clear but far away, like words on a distant sign I can just make out. When I think about that house, I feel its own memories tugging at my shirt all the way from Manila, beckoning me back from a 17-year separation: “You can always come home.” But can I?
Homecoming is a bittersweet thing. One lazy summer day when I was 15, my dad gathered my family into the car and drove us
down a side road in Rome, Georgia, coming to a stop in a cracked asphalt lot by the projects. The compact, identical housing units squashed into long brick rows were a familiar sight to me, but to my father, they were more than that. His childhood home stood somewhere before us, indiscernible to me from the other units, but my dad remembered the way. He guided us through the gridded neighborhood until we reached the end of one unassuming building— the place where he grew up just over 70 years ago. As we stood in reverent silence, I tried my best to conjure images of his youth. I could almost make out his ghost playing with his five siblings in the tiny yard plots and making soap side-by-side with his mother behind the house. As I watched him walk the perimeter, I knew my visions didn’t hold a candle to what he could see so clearly, what the chipped-paint door and concrete steps whispered to him, how happy the windows must have been to see him again, and what familiar voices echoed out to him from behind the brick. And yet, that was where the homecoming ended. There would be no entering the home, no heartfelt tour of the rooms and the memories they carried. After all, that unit was now home for another child, and who knows for how many other children over the last half-century.
Visiting my mother’s childhood home wasn’t much different. We approached the apartment building, dwarfed by the nearby Tokyo Skytree, in a similar air of silence. My mother stood before us and wordlessly scanned the building up and down, leaning this way and that, hoping to sneak a peek
inside. A car horn blared in the distance. She turned to face us with a sigh and smiled. “The place has changed,” she said. As glad as my parents must have been to see their childhood homes, and the homes glad to see them, a look from the outside was as far as the reunion could go; there was a barrier that could not be overcome any more than time itself could be rewound. They had returned, but they hadn’t come home.
I’ve often wondered what it would be like to see my own childhood home again. It stood at the corner of two streets, hugged by white concrete walls and petite palms in a Pasig City suburb. Inside was a wide space, serving as both kitchen and common room, with tile floors that cooled your feet and a staircase along the wall that faced the sunset. A wooden table with benches for chairs sat like an island in an ocean of comforting scents—the soothing blend of coffee and oak, the gingery warmth of tinola, and the sun-scorched concrete outside. That house is where I hosted my first birthday party, tried to slide down the stairs in an inflatable tube and crashed into the wall, wore tank tops at Christmastime, watched my dad venture into a typhoon to help our neighbors whose house got flooded, fell in love with gymnastics, shared a room with my sister, and rode bikes with the neighborhood kids. These memories are tinted gold in my mind, precious stores of sensations that represent the prime of my young life.
But then we left. Left our belongings with friends, unable to carry them with us. Left the first home I knew. Left a part of me behind to
leap halfway across the world to rural Georgia, near where my dad grew up. When I’d ask why, the answer was always the same and delivered matter-of-factly: “God told us to.” It was a sufficient reason for my parents, who’d been working as Christian missionaries and had built their trust in a higher power, but it was one that my young mind could hardly wrap itself around. Even today, I’m still a ways away from fully understanding it.
Though I was only five, a longing stirred within me. It lingered quietly but ebbed into waves of yearning when winter nipped at my cheeks, dried mango tasted phoney, and my sister and I rode bikes alone. To return would mean to wrap myself up again in a blanket of security, yearlong warmth, play, and carefreeness, unwrinkled by change. If my heart is there, how can I call this new place home? Nowadays, having seen for myself how homecoming isn’t always what it’s cracked up to be, I’m left wondering if it’s even worth the return. It’s why I sometimes feel a subdued envy toward friends who have lived in one place their entire lives. There's an irreplicable quality to a house that has grown and changed with you since birth, that has soaked in and is brimming with all the soul and character of your family.
I imagine how the house has memorized the placement of your steps up to the front door; how proud its walls feel holding up childhood photos arranged lovingly with the slope of the staircase; how it moves in tandem with you through the cadences of bustling mornings and lazy evenings; how it remembers the echo of your voice as a child, your laughter bouncing off its walls in the same way now as it did then; how in bad weather it reminisces to when you were scared of thunderstorms, “Don’t worry, I’ll protect you again”; how it holds your dad’s hand on the railing ever since he fell down the stairs that one time, how it’s proud of your sister for knocking on your door after a fight, how it greets you coming back for break the same way it did after your first day of school, “Welcome home.”
Leaving is a part of life, something each of us inevitably has to grapple with. There’s a quote that has stuck with me from one of my favorite movies, Celine Song’s Past Lives: “If you leave something behind, you gain something too.” The main character, Nora, reckons with the life and the younger version of herself she left behind in South Korea when she immigrated to Canada as a child. On my first watch, as I reckoned alongside Nora with what I’d left behind, the near-empty theater blurred into somewhere far away. I saw a wildhaired toddler banging his hands on the table in demand of breakfast in a stout suburban home in Japan. There was a 5-year old boy with Olympic gymnastic dreams walking down the stairs one step at a time in a house in the Philippines. A 9-year old searching for new dreams while gathering fallen pecans in his front yard in rural farmland Georgia. A newlyturned teenager doing assisted push-ups behind a closed door in a shared apartment room. All my little past selves, still haunting their respective homes. In leaving, I felt like I had to abandon the child I was, lift my chin up, and replant my roots.
What’s more important is where I am now. Holding on to the past was too painful, and it
felt easier to sever myself and start anew. I’d left my past selves behind, and they’ve been in limbo, waiting for me to acknowledge them and come pick them up from their long stays away. Over time, I’ve gone back to reclaim all of them—except for that 5-year-old boy. His presence looms in my mind like the final boss of my past. Should I go meet him again, I’d have to bear the weight of my entire life’s trajectory thus far, how I’ve grown in ways that I wouldn’t have imagined, and how I’ve made choices I promised I wouldn’t. But there’s little point in wallowing in the melancholy of departure, because every parting is paired with a new opportunity. I’ve found that leaving tends to offer a refreshed sense of purpose.
My father came along to help me settle into my first semester at Brown, and as he was leaving my dorm for the journey back south, he left me with a maxim, one he’s repeated on almost every phone call home.
“Remember what you came here for.”
I thought I knew what that was, but my reasons for being here have shifted, somehow both narrowing and broadening over the last three years. Still, I have found purposes that exercise new facets of myself, facets that may have remained dormant had I never left the Philippines. I’ve found places and people that have helped me build the courage to invest my heart regardless of where we’ll be in the next year. Though I didn’t realize it as a child, I gained more from my time in the Philippines than I may have lost. There are people who remember my family and keep in contact over Facebook, always offering their homes for us whenever we may visit. I have a friend aiming to represent the Philippines in men’s artistic gymnastics in the 2028 Olympics. I’ve seen and remembered the impact of small kindnesses leading strangers to found families. I know what a real mango tastes like. I’ve learned it’s a gift to have somewhere to return to.
I asked my father for the address of that house in the Philippines when I turned 22 this year. I haven’t seen it in seventeen years, and even though Google Earth is right at my fingertips, I felt no urge to see it again. Not like this. I want our reunion to be in-person, to come with all the dredged-up emotions of confronting a past life face-to-face. I can see it now. I’ll put the address into Google Maps and be carried by taxi from airport to suburb, echoes of the past leading me down the right roads with nary a glance at my phone screen. My heart will quicken, and as I step out at the hallowed sight, it will slow. The corner will look a little smaller than I remembered. I’ll finally be tall enough to look over those surrounding concrete walls. The floor will be hardwood now. The streets will be quiet and still. As I walk along the outside, I’ll hear my mom call us down for breakfast, soft but clear from behind the walls. I’ll see the arc of hose-water rainbows offering cool relief from the glaring sun. I’ll watch my friends and I tear down the street on our bikes to the neighborhood pools. I’ll catch a whiff of tinola in the air and a whisper of the Disney Channel theme song from the TV inside. I’ll taste a long-lost childhood in a heartbeat and then be reminded of reality in the next. I’ll watch from the periphery. I’ll have returned, but not come home. But it’s a gift to have somewhere to return to.
here’s to peace—and those who get in the way of it
what is a “bad person” anyway?
by Sara Harley Illustrated by Emilie Guan
Palm to forehead, mouth agape, and wiping away my tears with a blanket, I have never had such a physically emotional response to a television show as the first time I watched Fleabag . The mini-series is a one-two punch: What begins as a comedy about the owner of a guinea pig cafe twists into a meditation on the omnipresence of love.
Put simply, Fleabag is about an alcoholic, bisexual, thirty-something-yearold woman who uses sex and humor to cope with her inability to process grief and sustain deep emotional connections. Named after its protagonist, the title acknowledges Fleabag’s flaws by implying she is an outcast; however, her anonymity also creates a mirror for the viewer to observe themselves. Investigating the protagonist’s flaws reveal broader revelations about human nature. The series is a BBC adaptation of writer and star Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s one-woman show. Fleabag maintains her storytelling authority on screen by using elements of stage performance including strong lighting, staging, and even direct reference to the audience.
With only 12 episodes, its short form and pre-credit cliffhangers practically beg you to binge it. A cymbal-crashing, non-stop crescendo, not a single joke, line, or glance is wasted.
At face value, Fleabag is a bad person. She uses vices to avoid her problems, lies, steals, has sex with her best friend’s boyfriend, and shuts down when asked to communicate. However, Fleabag’s awkward social interactions, inappropriate jokes, and anxiety make her a terribly relatable and even funny character. Fleabag knows that her choices stem from her past trauma. By slowly revealing the roots of her insecurities, her authenticity and clear emotional turmoil win the audience’s hearts. In its totality, Fleabag begs the question: Are people who are self-aware of their repeated poor behavior actually bad people?
By depicting femininity as capable of untamed trauma-infused destruction, Waller-Bridge shows that female protagonists deserve more complex plotlines than domesticity or feminism. In an article for The i Paper, Waller-Bridge writes, “I wanted to create a character who was trying to convince the audience that she was a true cynic in a bid to hide her broken heart beneath. Jokes were, obviously, essential for this set-up to work.” Waller-Bridge toes the line between comedy and drama to create a character that exceeds the rigid confines of genre.
Some of the most funny and tragic moments of the series are when Waller-
Bridge stares down the barrel of the camera lens. Never more than a cheeky glance or crude quip, the repeated fourth-wall breaks create a window to candidly view Fleabag’s brokenness. If only for a fleeting moment, she is able to openly communicate with the audience in ways she cannot with her family or romantic partners. At the end of both seasons, breaking the fourth wall forces Fleabag to acknowledge the consequences of her behavior.
The first season walked so that the second could run. Originally released in 2016, the first installment explores the backstories of Fleabag and her family in the wake of her mother’s death. Other members of the cast are also unnamed, including Fleabag’s father and Godmother (and later, of course, the hot priest). Understandably, Fleabag never calls her parents or the priest by their first names. By leaving their identities anonymous, the audience can imagine the characters (especially Fleabag’s parents) in the context of their own lives. The notable named characters are Fleabag’s sister Claire, Claire’s horrendous husband Martin, and her best friend Boo. Each of these characters are highly flawed. What makes the series heartbreaking is that all of them are stubbornly avoidant in discussing their emotions.
Season two challenges Fleabag's fear of communication. The hot Catholic priest is introduced as the first character capable of seeing through Fleabag’s tough exterior. While he desires to be a voice of reason for her, the priest ultimately becomes enmeshed in Fleabag’s life in ways that make it impossible for her to heal. The series finale remains the best conclusion to a television show I have ever seen. If emotional warfare was a crime, Waller-Bridge would be in prison for life.
Fleabag shows that people are more than their mistakes. With great restraint to avoid spoilers, the roots of Fleabag’s indescribable grief and pain are more complicated than how they manifest. To play devil’s advocate, when people are reduced to the consequences of
their internal turmoil, the notion of who is a “bad person” becomes fundamentally subjective (there are, of course, exceptions including psychopaths, murderers, and Ted Cruz). Even so, this does not undermine accountability. To truly transcend the collateral damage of unresolved emotionality and miscommunication first requires feeling worth forgiving.
The subtext of Fleabag is nearly larger than the series itself. An exploration of why she must resort to vices, the series attempts to understand the true nature of “bad people.” At her core, Fleabag is capable of loving and desires to be loved, but her previous trauma obstructs her ability to be vulnerable. When her familial and romantic relationships repeatedly falter, the audience is reminded that one’s ability to love others hinges upon one's ability to confront their own internal battles.
In the final episode, Fleabag’s father says, “I think you know how to love better than any of us. That’s why you find it all so painful.” Beyond its calamities, the true crux of Fleabag is that it is human nature to love and be loved. However, despite love’s inevitability, it is also inevitable to be hurt by those we love. If grief is the absence of love, the source of Fleabag’s emotional suffering, then is it worth the pain?
This question is answered in Fleabag ’s concluding scene. In the background, the song “This Feeling” by Alabama Shakes plays. A soulful ballad about acceptance, the song’s lyrics are sung with an indulgent slowness that evokes nostalgia. After weeks of listening to it, I recently noticed an organ synth humming during the third verse that can only be described as a sunrise. Frontwoman Brittany Howard sings overtop: “So, I just kept going / I just kept going and hoping I’m growing near / Well, that’s good and fine / I spent all this time trying to find my way here.” While we may lie, hurt, forget, and be forgotten, the cause of incredible grief and pain is also the antidote. And so, a new dawn rises.
everything is everything inevitable entropy, finding order in chaos, and “Why Fish Don’t Exist”
by Ishan Khurana
Illustrated by jiaying li
Fish don’t exist. It’s quite a simple concept, though I suppose I should elaborate. Language, and the way we use it, comes from the innate human need —not desire, need—to categorize. We create words so that we can express new, unknown, or indescribable concepts in a concise manner. We pull these words together into sentences to layer complexity, to orient ourselves in the chaos and the uncertain and to find our place among it. This applies to more than just words; we fear the unknown, so we do what we can to know it.
And somehow, we always fall short.
In her nonfiction work Why Fish Don’t Exist , Lulu Miller tells the story of naturalist David Starr Jordan and his fight against this same uncertainty. Jordan spends much of his early life learning, naming, and categorizing—skills he eventually uses in the scientific field. At a young age, he begins collecting natural specimens and drawing maps, attempting to learn the names of as many local flowers as possible. When his mother begins to throw away his work in disapproval, Jordan continues, anyway, with unmatched determination.
Alongside the story of Jordan, Miller tells her own story, describing her search for order and purpose within her thoughts. When she is young, her father—a scientist—repeatedly mentions to her that life is meaningless. To him, this lack of defined purpose means freedom, but to her, it is disorienting and dangerous. Her father’s perspective prevents him from understanding Miller’s struggles with mental health, which causes her, in turn, to fall further into fear.
I spend much of my time thinking about the way that I think. I can feel myself move in circles. I’m tangled in time, perhaps. Moments of movement and change swirl around my head, as though dancing.
At the end of high school, I struggled with the idea of starting again. I was excited by the prospect of a new experience, but comfortable in my bubble of friends. I feared losing old connections in the process of making new ones. I didn’t think about much else for a while. Historically, I do not deal well with the unknown.
Persistence ultimately becomes the theme of Jordan’s professional life. He begins to study fish and collect them, fascinated by their appearances and behavior. Inspired by Darwin’s newly published On the Origin of Species , Jordan considers working in the field of taxonomy, a decision driven by his battle against nature’s entropy. He begins to dedicate his life to acts of finding and identifying.
Miller, on the other hand, struggles with identity. As this uncertainty takes over Miller’s life, her mental health begins to decline, and she spirals. She finds herself desperate for a guide or a path to follow. Then, she finds the story of Jordan and begins to see him, and his persistence, as a sort of example to look to.
As I started college, I immediately began to fall into endless, inevitable worries about the future. I was initially excited to begin something new, but the brilliance of novelty quickly faded into panic. I became overwhelmed by my lack of definition, questioning my self-imposed conception of myself. If I wasn’t engaging in activities that defined my previous life experiences, was I even the same person?
To Jordan and Miller, this process of naming the unnamed becomes a philosophical act of rebellion against the Second Law of Thermodynamics. Defining something new makes it, in some sense, real; things that lack names cannot be referenced without difficulty. After teaching at several colleges, Jordan takes a position at Indiana University, later becoming president. He continues to expand his collection, working tirelessly to discover and map more than ever before. However, the 1883 fire that burns down his laboratory also takes with it thousands of new, unnamed specimens of fish. Somehow, this delay doesn’t slow Jordan down. He begins collecting again, storing tags in the fish jars to name them more securely, and works to rebuild his collection. Soon thereafter, he moves to California to become president of the newly founded Stanford University.
However, an earthquake once again manages to destroy his collection. Specimens and their nametags are scattered throughout his lab, and it is impossible to pair them together. Yet, as soon as the building is safe to enter, Jordan gets to work, identifying the fish he could and sewing name tags onto the specimens themselves.
This detail of Jordan’s life drives Miller to begin writing about him, inspired by his stubborn persistence to overcome the world’s chaos. In doing so, she believes she’s found her own purpose and motivation. Jordan, to her, becomes a symbol of hope and determination in a world she finds chaotic and cruel. She begins to look up to him, admiring his endless quest to know.
Throughout freshman year, I began looking to my past for purpose. I spent hours reading old pieces of writing and staring at art I’d made, searching for meaning in the old me. I fell deep into regret, thinking that the person I was becoming would be a disappointment to the person I’d wanted to become. I struggled to balance life and leisure; I worried too much about the past and not enough about the future. I began chasing an ideal self from an old me.
So, I decided to make a change. I discovered that uncertainty was not an obstacle for me, but rather a requirement. I needed to be somewhere that allowed me to try more . I moved across the country, and I
began again.
However, Jordan’s obsessions with taxonomy, categorization, and evolution eventually leads him down dark paths. He becomes obsessed with dangerous ideas of biological “purity” that lead him to the concept of eugenics. He begins to advocate for forced sterilization, convinced that this same sort of biological preservation, a survival-of-the-fittest mindset, is the only way to preserve the human race.
Miller, upon discovering this, is horrified; the person whose story she’s relied on and found her truth in holds values that disgust her. She begins to fall into yet another struggle of identity and meaning; if the person who dedicated his entire life to finding order among chaos was broken by its inevitability, how could she possibly find her own purpose?
I quickly found myself returning to fear of uncertainty. Being a new person in a new place meant being free-floating, and this lack of tether brought me back down into spirals. I began questioning my decision to leave behind whatever comfort I did have, and, in turn, questioned my motivation for moving in the first place. I was overwhelmed by a sort of guilt; I had gotten what I wanted—and what so many others want, too—but I wasn’t happy. I felt let down; I’d reached this “ideal me” from a past self, but it wasn’t what I wanted. If my purpose wasn’t what I thought it was, then how did I find a new purpose? Was starting again even possible?
The answer to this question is, of course, the statement posed at the beginning of this work: fish don’t exist.
Despite spending his entire life working to define and organize the category “fish,”
phylogeneticists determine well after Jordan’s death that the term “fish,” much like “tree,” for instance, is a simple broad label, but not itself a taxonomic category. Fish, evolutionarily and taxonomically, don’t exist. Jordan has lost his battle with chaos, and his life’s purpose, which Miller so determinedly turned to, is upended and identified to be nothing more than an impossibility.
At last, because of this, Lulu Miller finds relief. The path of Jordan’s life proves to her that categorization leads only to hierarchy, which, in turn, leads to injustice. Miller presents the importance of “giving up the fish” as looking to the world’s nuances and details for purpose rather than looking for binaries and forcing structure upon ourselves. “Giving up the fish” means letting go of both externally imposed and self-imposed restrictions. Everything is everything, and anyone can be anyone.
Humanity’s intense fear of uncertainty is not a struggle worth engaging in. We so easily throw away meaning and emotion because we do not understand the unlabeled. The undefinable, however, is the first place we should look for meaning.
Just as Miller does, I’ve come to realize that there is no merit in labeling myself or my purpose. I’ve found myself settled into a new start and, slowly, I work to embrace the vacancy that is not knowing. It’s taken time and it will continue to take time, but this ambiguity of purpose excites me; I’m “giving up the fish.”
I spend more time dreaming now than I do regretting. I find comfort in living with patience, and I do what I can to do what I can. It’s nice to love a lot of things, and to not have to choose just one.
which thayer street restaurant are you?
haven’t you ever wondered which Thayer eatery matches your vibe?
Cao
bY Daphne
Illustrated by Junyue Ma
In the midst of midterms, it’s always nice to take a break and hit up one of Thayer’s many beloved restaurants to unwind. Whether you’re looking for a boba break, a quick bite, or something more upscale, this street’s got you covered.
Not only does Thayer have a diverse set of cuisines, its restaurants also have distinct atmospheres. From Den Den’s modern, trendy look to Vivi’s cute, abundantly pink decorations, there’s a restaurant for every kind of vibe. So, have you ever wondered which one matches your vibe, or, “Which
Thayer restaurant am I?” Well, fear not, because this quiz will answer that burning question!
1. Time to get started for the day! What time are you getting up?
a. Just in time for lunch (12 p.m. to 1 p.m.)
b. Bright and early (9 a.m. or earlier)
c. Middle of the road (9 a.m. to 11 a.m.)
d. I’m sleeping the day away (1 p.m. or later)
2. Now that you’re up, what outfit are you throwing on?
a. Anything, as long as it’s comfy
b. Something from my Pinterest board
c. The outfit I already planned out yesterday
d. Whatever’s at the top of my drawer
3. After a long day of classes, you’re starved and looking for a meal to get some energy back. What’s your go-to dining hall?
a. Ratty
b. Ivy Room
c. Andrews
d. Jo’s
4. Now it’s time to catch up on all those midterm assignments. Where are you locking in?
a. Rock
b. SciLi
c. Hay
d. Dorm/dorm lounge
5. During an extended study break, your friend is ranting to you about drama. How do you respond?
a. Cheer them up by telling some jokes
b. Tell them what I think bluntly
c. Offer emotional support
d. Silently listen and let them vent
6. Now that you’ve gotten all your work done, it’s time to unwind. What’s your nighttime activity of choice?
a. Bed rot
b. Friends
c. Party
d. Study
7. After a long day of studying and classes, it’s time to get some well-deserved rest! When are you going to sleep?
a. I’ll just have a coffee when I wake up (1 a.m. to 2 a.m.)
b. Eight hours isn’t enough for me (11 p.m. or earlier)
c. I need my eight hours (12 a.m. to 1 a.m.)
d. Up burning the midnight oil (2 a.m. or later)
If you picked mostly (a)s, you are… Chipotle!
You’re a person who likes to take it easy. You’re patient and open-minded and never the type to readily judge others. Your laid-back attitude makes you a great friend and super easy to talk to.
If you picked mostly (b)s, you are… Meeting Street Cafe!
You’re organized, put-together, and grounded. Once you set your mind to something, it’s not long before you get it. You’re the kind of person who has all their assignments done a week before the due date. Overall, you’re a very reliable person, and your friends know that they can always count on you for help and level-headed advice.
If you picked mostly (c)s, you are… Den Den!
You’re a social butterfly and always put the people in your life first. You’re very attuned to the emotions of others, and you’re usually the first one to notice if someone is feeling down or left out. Your friends can always rely on you to be there for them as a shoulder to cry on or an ear to listen to their troubles.
If you picked mostly (d)s, you are… Insomnia Cookies!
You’ve definitely pulled multiple all-nighters that you regret the next morning. You may always be cramming for assignments, but you’re such a down-to-earth person that you can effortlessly make people feel at ease. You prefer quiet, peaceful environments, where you can feel laid back and content, and your friends always feel they can come to you for one-on-one, easygoing hangouts.
continue without storage? bearing the heft of remembering
by Jedidiah Davis
Illustrated by Chase Wu
In the basement of my house are stacks of boxes full of my family’s precious photo albums. These cardboard treasure chests contain records that chronicle the histories of my parents, my siblings, and me, yet I’m not privy to them. They’ve remained sealed away, safe but untouched, for as long as I can remember, though I’m not sure why. I suppose after moving houses so often growing up, we simply got used to leaving some things unopened. After the second or third move, unpacking became akin to reopening a wound. As a child, slicing open a box made the pain of leaving friends and a home behind roar back as fresh as the first time. Setting down the weight of the past, separating ourselves from reminders of what was and what could’ve been, gave us time to catch our breath. After all, the present on its own is so much to take in, never mind decades of photos—what has and could’ve been. Whenever I’m home for break, my parents suggest we bring the boxes up to look through the photos, but we either get too busy or it slips our minds. We’ve never gotten to it. Maybe we still don’t have enough space to hold it. ***
The weight of memory accumulates relentlessly with every passing day, and I find myself desperately trying to manage it all. I’m a scrupulous journaler, resolute with my pen on recapturing the events and joyous minutiae of each day. I take photos digitally and on film, attempting to preserve pieces of the present. I’ve given myself this mission in order to safeguard my memories, but with every week comes new experiences, thoughts, and emotions, and I’m running out of storage to hold them. Even Google regularly sends me a reminder, considerately punctuated with a yellow triangle warning sign, reading,
Your Gmail storage is 100% full.
So I take the time each week to organize my Google account, lest I risk my emails, files, and photo backup getting frozen. I cull spam and email promos (holding onto a few Domino’s coupons for safekeeping) and expunge old files and “Untitled document”’s from my Drive. The real beast to conquer is Google Photos, my main memory cache, taking up a whopping 14 of my 15 free gigabytes. When I open the app, Google warns me that my photos and videos will be lost if something happens to my phone. Unrecoverable. Gone. The same question pops up on-screen each time: Continue without storage?
It’s a simple question, but each time, I find myself at a precipice, met with an ultimatum: choose things to delete, or risk losing everything. Some choices are easy; there are blurry photos, screenshots of my many daily alarms going off, and screen recordings I no longer need. Most choices are not. As I scroll through the years-long log of photos and videos, I stumble across long-lost memories that had been shoved to the dusty unlit corners of my mind to make space for the demands of the present.
I’m five years old at a petting zoo. My dad towers behind me, and I lean into him, his embrace shielding me from the herd of lambs crowding around us. We’re smiling.
I’m eight years old. Early in the morning, we’re at the ER, but it’s a celebratory occasion—my little brother has just entered the world. My dad centers the camera on his three children: my sister’s gaze is transfixed on the baby in her arms, my hand is stretched out to gingerly rest on his little head of hair, and my brother’s mouth is open, mid-yawn.
A video. We’re at an outlet mall on a hot Georgia summer day. My little brother, now five years old, has climbed onto a short, cylindrical bollard. The wind whips his mop of wavy brown hair into his eyes as he reaches blindly for my hand, afraid to jump to the next platform alone. Filming with one hand, my free hand takes his, and he finds the courage to hop down the line of bollards. “You can do it by yourself,” I say. He whimpers and shakes his head, and I groan, “Ugh, fine.” I help him across another gap and then step away. “Okay, now jump off. You can jump off.” “Okay!” He sticks the landing.
As I sort through these records of my life, I know that I can’t bear to part with them, so I download them in the tens, sometimes hundreds, and compress them into zip files where they’ll find their new home on a flash drive. Once downloaded, I’m free to delete them from Google Photos, clearing storage space. But now they only exist as compressed bits of data, and my mind is still not at ease. I’ve seen it enough times—corrupted files, compression issues, and lost devices. I think of my dad holding his head in his hands when his floppy disk refused to read try after try. I think about my mom’s locked iPad sitting in her desk drawer, a buried trove of childhood photos and videos inside. When I asked her why she hasn’t just reset it, she half-heartedly said, “Maybe I’ll be able to get back inside.” She, like me, is holding on in the ways she can. I am infamous amongst my friends for losing things: earplugs, wallets, jackets—the list goes on. To lose these flash drives and their precious stored memories would be devastating, but I don’t have confidence in the caprice of memory to hold everything that I want to on my own. To leave to
chance what I remember and what I lose, probably never to be regained, is a terrifying thought. So, I have no choice but to put my faith in these little keys to my life and hope that they’ll last long and true. And so, each week, I do my exhausting, beautiful, fearful little ritual—revisiting the versions of myself that I’ve grown through and hoping that all my efforts to archive them will not be in vain. By the end, once I’ve whittled my storage down by a few gigabytes, I am weary from bearing the heft of remembering.
I am left with a sobering thought when I put my flash drive away. Here I am, with over 50 gigabytes of photos and videos in the palm of my hand, but now what? It’s like the boxes of albums at my house. Decades logged into hundreds of laminated pages, and yet, apparently, I’ve never felt moved enough to dive into the trove of memories I’ve been sitting on top of at home. What makes me think I’ll do anything different with these flash drives?
No matter how I may wish to remember everything, neither pen nor lens will be able to capture every moment—late-night talks, school days, hearty meals, mistakes, impassioned words, sore throats, warm glances, and held hands will inevitably dissolve into the ether. Memories make up who we are, but their power stems just as much from their ephemerality as from their integrality to our beings. Each of us will, after all, become merely memories. Whatever form that memory takes—a feeling, a photo, a heartfelt sentence, a passing mention— has power simply in its existence. We existed. These moments existed. They stood on the grand stage of the universe, and however long or short their part was, they played it beautifully. Though sequestered in these flash drives, I can see myself making the investment to print these photos out and seal them into physical albums in the future. I’ll lovingly organize them and lay them to rest in boxes. They may start collecting dust, lingering in space like those same boxes in my basement right now, but they’ll be there. Who knows when I’ll wish to call on them again, but maybe just living day-by-day, knowing that my memories are close at hand, is all I need.
POST-POURRI
BEFOR E YOU GO
Nice Try
by Emmanuel Chery
by Emilie Guan
try /trī/
1. an effort to accomplish something; an attempt.
2. (rugby) an act of touching the ball down behind the opposing goal line, scoring points and entitling the scoring side to a goal kick.
As a child, a diva-in-the-making, I was drafted into every sport, all to no avail. Between soccer, basketball, tennis, and baseball (t-ball), I seemed to have no passion for sports—the pride and joy of every other little boy I knew. So, I spent the first 18 years of my life sportless, coping by scoffing at men who sought validation from sports and excelled in them. Perhaps though, there lay a dormant thrum, a hidden pang, a whispered thrill that rushed through me, longing to shed my queerness and join what I believed to be manhood. I wanted to be a part of this collective, this space from which men derived their deepest, reddest rages, and the most exuberant, yellowest jovialities.
Entering college, my dearest friend challenged me to “try something you aren’t good at” —a lesson I would impart on any first-year. From my point of view, I was already far enough out of my comfort zone in a foreign land (Rhode Island) with a foreign people (WASPs), all while navigating an archaic ecosystem (wealthbased sociality). Nevertheless, I hatched a plan: What was something technically novel, yet familiar, that would also be a great way to stay (become) slim in college and fend off the freshman 15? My dear old friend: organized sports, of course. But not just any
sport—for what was more familiar to me than the school sport of my high school?
With the power of my one masculine trait (male arrogance), I decided to join rugby.
If you told me that you had no clue what exactly rugby is, I would begin by telling you that it is 1. perhaps (after wrestling), the most homoerotic sport a man can play and 2. a hybrid of soccer and football that came out less exotic than a fetishist might have wanted. What was soon in store for me, though, was a whole new field of difficulties far beyond the diet rugby we had played in gym class, which had no physical contact and omitted half of the rules.
The collegiate immersion began just as queerly as it would be for the entire semester. I walked through the club fair, searched for the rugby table, and finally spotted it. My approach towards what would become my personal Tartarus triggered a metamorphosis: my shoulders broadened and squared, my posture straightened, my buttocks clenched. My strides were rigid and parallel as I approached the table and said, in an unconvincing voice with as much masculinity as I could muster, “Is this the rugby table?” lower in tone and volume than ever before. As the semester proceeded, I learned to stay silent unless I absolutely had to speak, caging the extroverted person I usually was. I thought this behavioral adaptation was part of the challenge, that the discomfort was part of the newness, and that it would subside.
It did not. Practice was on Monday and Wednesday evenings, after a long day of classes and before my favorite part of the day, dinner. I carried a
Illustrated
sickness in my stomach as I swapped my shoes for new cleats (which I’ll never wear again) and popped in my mouthguard that guarded my real voice. Practice ended either with “team dinners” (perhaps the most uniting) or with me leaving early (by electric scooter), either way caked in dirt and mud. Lowest on the totem pole, I was a part of the “developmental group.”And develop we did, or at least the other men in my cohort did. We began with passing (never forward) and worked up to skills like scrums, trys, rucks, lineouts, mauls (all a foreign language). I didn’t quite take to it. My lagging improvement became discouraging, a pulsating pressure as my ineptitude rendered itself more visible. I only seemed to excel in contact or tackling (thank you freshman 15), which I guess is what one would expect a queer’s favorite part of the sport would be.
The intimacy of each position, entangled with or between the limbs of other men tightly gripping or interlocking one another, left a wellspring of entertainment and opportunity for jokes to arise. The insinuation of perverse pleasure or even a satirized mock persona of the pervert himself was taken up by the most jocular of the bunch to chase around their peers; I left each practice more reserved and more committed to my alter ego. Yet my meekness was of little armor, for the same men I would run drills with, lift and grope and wrestle down, would see me that same weekend in a full face of makeup, maybe in a crop top, surrounded by a flock of women for different reasons than they would be. Hiding from their view, I began to feel shame creep into my complexion, coloring my every move.
What was I so afraid of? At some point, I’d been there long enough, and the anticipated isolation I had concocted in my nightmares had never arrived; though, neither did the comradery, the fraternity that I believed made sports so alluring to men. In all fairness, I was only there a short time, yet in that blip a fully woven homosociality seemed established. I had begun to wave to a
couple of people off the field, but for the most part I felt unintegrated; this was not a feeling I alone held, for the few men I had befriended expressed similar feelings of separation. The closest we ever stood as a collective was in caricature, huddled together at the end of every practice, fists raised, chanting the name of our school: a declaration of a unity I felt inauthentic and performed.
Part of my inspiration in joining a sports team in the first place had been my first-year roommate, who was both a D1 athlete and queer; I had thought of his success and talent alone as a dismantling of my previous decisiveness about where a gay man belonged. I came to realize that I had approached the experience, the trying of something new, with an age-old attitude, expecting rejection and welcoming it with a confirmation bias.
My rugby journey ended the day of a tournament towards the end of first-year fall, and to my surprise, I had a lot of fun. For the perhaps 10 minutes total I spent playing, I found a thrill and an exhilaration in the game, an admittance I had been secretly fighting. Though I broke my finger in the second game, I played, in true male fashion, two more games, because I liked what I was a part of. Looking back, I believe I left the sport with lessons learned, perhaps not in how to catch balls better, but in the importance of facing novelty with neutrality, opposed to negativity.
Though my brief stint in athletics continues to be a source of great hilarity to those who know me, it remains now, as much as it was then, something I hold with gravitas, for tackling the unknown, or trying the far-fetched, needn’t be selfdisparaging. I may never again enter a male-dominated space if I can help it, but I will take with me the lesson that, though not everything is for me, the reason isn’t necessarily some innate disposition. For is it not equality, growth, progress, and representation, when we can have not only queer excellence, but queer mediocrity and inferiority too?
Good Luck Babe!
post- mini crossword by
Lily Coffman
Illustrated by
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7 1 4 7 8 6 Across Orifice that aptly rhymes with jaw Posed on a chair in an artist's studio Lucky People
Creator of the pantsless Pooh
Saint celebrated on March 17, informally
“I’ll tell my son that every mile his grandparents traveled, they shed more of their skin, sanded down more of their corners, became so small in the soul that they could carry it all in a suitcase, taking with them only their language.”
— Daniel Hu, “Chinese Summer, American Camp” 03.10.23
“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.”
— Lynn Nguyen, “Eureka Euphoria” 03.14.24
Menounos of pre-movie fame 1
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Failed to be Hip hop track by 2 Guyz N the Parque ft. Candace Partner to them 4 2 3 5
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