THE WORLD WE ORDAINED IS DEAD, BURIED, AND BASTARDIZED. FROM THE RUINS COMES A WHISPER. DO YOU HEAR A WAR CRY, A WINGBEAT, OR AN ECHO? IN MEMORIAM: THE BEGINNINGS OF A SONG.
editor-in-chief ava jiang
managing director abhigna bagepally
layout director emmy chen
assistant layout director jazmin hernandez arceo
assistant layout director melissa huang
assistant layout director andy kang
assistant layout director john walton
co-graphic design director ariana perales
co-graphic design director paris yang
web development director gray suh
assistant web development director nicole garcia
senior print editor anjali krishna
associate print editor danielle yampuler
associate print editor ariel barley
associate print editor jennifer wang
associate print editor lorena tellez
senior web editor emily nuñez
assistant web editor abeera amer
creative director vani shah
assistant creative director travis duong
director of hmu kennedy ruhland
assistant director of hmu janhavi lalwani
assistant director of hmu nguyen pham
director of nail art isha manjunath
co-modeling director madilyn hernandez
co-modeling director anya gokul
director of photography tai cerulli
assistant photography director abby kerrigan
assistant photography director anthony nguyen
co-videography director belton gaar
co-videography director brandon porras
assistant videography director larry liu
assistant videography director madison ngo
director of styling andromeda rovillain
assistant styling director stella thomas
assistant styling director aidan vu
assistant styling director grecia del bosque
director of set styling clay keener
business director eric martinez
assistant business director evangelina yang
co-events director savannah hilliard
co-events director armaan noormohamed
marketing director mary ann shiju
assistant marketing director shreya ravi shankar
assistant marketing director adrian gomez
social media director lucia soldi
assistant social media director marissa sandoval
assistant social media director jasmine mata
staff
aleya abdullah, shivanshi acharya, sora ahmad, zyla alaniz, nasim aleem, kristina andresen, varenya bandaru, loralei barro, edgar benitez, john-anthony borsi, isabella braga, addison bundoc, julia bychowski, varshini byreddy, porter callender, dylan camille, ella grace carayanis, kaimana c, riley carroll, zoe cartwright, layla castro, srikha chaganti, hannah chen, ramya chintala, haru choi, hailey chuong, william coats, angelina conde, julia corzo, paola cotto, aidan crowl, mo dada, sarah david, dominic dayton, anisha desai, layla dieye, elle duhaime, jess duong, aiden facundo, gianina faelnar, jenny fan, parker ferguson, kenia gallegos, madison gamez, elaine gong, anaid gonzalez, dani goodlett, rhys grady, enrique graterol, joshua grenier, sabina guardado, karina gutierrez, jane hao, shawn hassanzei, cole hawkins, sara herbowy, alexa ximena hernandez, emmeline hurter, zina ibekaku, natalia iglesias, brianna ikwuemesi, jiali jaddangi, enoc jung, mia kaneda, kathya, alex leisk, alex lekhakul, aaliyah lenee, isabella leung, sam light, cameron lightfoot, adrianna liu, ameera malik, sal maner, katherine manz, sophia mao, danielle marin, sophia marquez, oli martinez, tori mcclung, kai melant, sierra mendez, andres menedez, claire millet, ginny montero, sophia morin, caleb morrow, samanvita nalla, jane nam, aidan nguyen, melinda nguyen, nikki nguyen, alyssa nguyenboston, amelia nickle, bethany nonhof, chelsea nyatenya, killari o’donnell, saniya oak, yoslin ochoa, tasmuna omar, toine orr, mason ousley, shravya palivela, anika pandit, daija peebles, taly peralta, lucas berio perez, emma pettiette, lucy phenix, joseph chunga pizarro, sophie quindara, laasya raju, adriana ramirez, miranda revilla, nick reyna, meadow riley, hana robson, joshua rush, mari salomão, sophie shapiro, anoushka sharma, evania, rylie shieh, jalynn shrepee, cheyenne skiles, karen solis, harshitha sriramoju, phyllis stockton, lilith stuart, ian sullivan, asiyah sultana, brian thai, caleb thomas, celeste tomberlin, amyan tran, diamond tran, franklin trinh, vy truong, mia-katherine tucker, kyla jae turner, aditi tyagi, madeline ursprung, carys valdez, addison van, hannah verdun, lux walker, maggie wang, ellis wesley, emily yao, helena yen, lauren yue, emily zamora
from the editor
Following the celebratory high of Issue No. 25: Jubilee, Requiem is our token of remembrance. Our chapters and their corresponding archetypes, FIGHT: The Warrior, FLIGHT: The Nomad, and FREEZE: The Archivist, study human response. How do we react in the face of devastation and life changing news? How do we live with change and transformation?
More than ever, our issue’s central questions resonate with me. Leaving SPARK — and college, as the two are deeply inextricable from one another — is devastating. But the reality of impending loss has yet to hit me; instead, this past semester has felt like a long goodbye.
Looking back while headed out the door, I feel a tender fondness and gratitude for every part of SPARK, even its less attractive sides: the tight turnarounds, scrappy operations, and Book Week all-nighters. How could I not? SPARK has been a catalyst for my personal, professional, and creative growth, an enduring testament to the value of creative expression, and the place where I’ve met my closest friends and collaborators.
Entering SPARK as a wide-eyed freshman designer, I was taken with the well-oiled machine of deadlines and processes and the volume of welldressed students. But above all, I was awed by the relentless focus on quality. Now, as Editor-inChief, I am honored to be a role model and mentor to others, to learn from my talented leadership team, and to be amongst people who share my almost pathological obsession with detail. Most of all, I’m proud to have been a part of producing a magazine that constantly tries to outdo itself semester after semester.
While I am sad to say goodbye to SPARK, I am grateful to leave it after a semester of unprecedented achievement. We planted the seeds for lasting relationships with local Austin businesses and their owners, Hannah Foy at Lau
Lau and Vico Tadeo Puentes at TOMO Magazines. For the first time in our history, SPARK Magazine is available on shelves, instore at TOMO. We chancely met the Editor-in-Chief of SPARK’s inaugural issue from 2014, Tiffany Chan, and were, once again, reminded of our roots. We also hosted our most exciting set of events and released our best merch to date.
Even though I don’t want to leave, I know it is time to welcome change into my life and into SPARK. I’ll reminisce on the last four years with the stack of eight magazines on my bookshelf — my tokens of remembrance.
Insatiably ravenous. Because our blood-slicked, grimfrocked feathers curl at the kill, we claw — rupturing songcords with keratin daggers, our coats kept clean. They imagine us as harbingers, a dyad of distant shadows: a dance stranded in history.
They are wrong.
We aren’t warnings — we are reckonings. At trembling sands and dying breaths, we descend. The dark is closer than they expect.
They utter SCAVENGER between their pearly whites as if it is an insult, but it is not. Swallowing histories of carcasses demands a toll. Thievery is art. Assimilation postulates competence. No one creates anymore — they consume. And their leftovers taste the same, fruitlessly purgatorial. When dust settles, rivers dry, and songs cease, it is us that waste the remnants. That is all they are to us — remnants.
Shallow facsimiles of something shaped like brilliance.
What happened to brilliance? What happened to visionaries? What happened to…
Wait.
Do you see that?
Between the crooked carcasses and the mycelium, the droughted roots and the tumbleweeds. Is that… scarlet? Not blood, nor viscera, nor the sacrilege of decay. That, right there, is scarlet. Ruby red ribbons. The blush of a lover. The carmine of a mystic. Is that our Darling? The heart that pumps this empty vessel — arteries carrying wanderlust. Never have we seen this much life, a crimson so brilliant.
To Darling, our desideratum. We await your inauguration. We will devour you, utterly. Before the anthrax steals your breath.
PEARL NECKLACE | Austin Creative Reuse
PEACOCK FEATHERS | Austin Creative Reuse
Tonight, I find myself inexplicably drawn to the dark. It’s a magnetic kind of mischief, a gravitational pull all too familiar with futile resistance. Seldom do I emerge after the sun’s run its course, but the after hours now seem an inopportune time for hibernation.
So now that I’ve descended upon this silent brook, where shall I turn my gaze? How does one orbit the unknowable? Though I’m renowned for my immediacy, slipping into crevices not designed for me, I can’t help but feel as though I’m intruding — every step sounds more like an interruption.
The leaves crackle and moan beneath me, as if they’re not intended for visitation. My gracefulness betrays itself; footsteps that were once nimble turn uncertain against relentless ivy.
But then, the emergence of a butterfly. Its color relieves me from the earliest etchings of a nightmare. Remembrance of who I am.
Daaaaaaaarling.
That’s right. I’m the darling.
Autonomous and evergreen, I’ve persisted where they’ve told me I shouldn’t. I am the immortal echo, a voice capable of resurrecting even detritus. Unfiltered imagination and soul. The touch of my hand rivals Midas, but even our collision wouldn’t be a fair fight. For I am far more than a one-trick pony; to try and constrain me is to defy the cosmos.
Oh, daaaaaaarlinggggg.
Speaking of forces...
Who dares raise their voice louder than mine?
These playing grounds may not be mine, but it’s only a matter of time before these woods grow accustomed to my song. Its convergence is obligatory. Only fools have asked me to retreat, and I’d hate for this lovely little place to suffer the same fate.
To the double-sided gremlin perched above, I know you’d much rather see me quiver, But I’ve never been one for hesitation Emerge from that crooked branch if you dare.
An irrevocable collision. Twentieth century westerns warned us about what happens when two battalions share the same space; nothing is destined to come out alive, not even the environment itself.
Allow me to paint the picture for you.
The whimsical stranger ventured cautiously into our wood before her footsteps quickened. I suppose she’d killed the seeds of doubt bubbling inside and made herself comfortable at will. She must have heard that our home engulfs you at the first sign of fear.
She must have heard the cries of our makeshift guillotine above her head.
So she’d readied herself for conflict, though she couldn’t have understood what she was going up against. Even in all her glamour, she is still mere flesh and bone. Ingredients to be dissembled and made whole again only inside the belly of the beast.
The vultures call it retaliation even when they deliver the first blow. Our defense is necessary, they insist. It’s what keeps the wood alive.
So they spent the night admiring our quickwitted tourist until they’d decided to pounce. Their mercilessness always follows this rhythm; imagining how the prey would taste on their tongues until it’s no longer necessary to imagine. Pretty little vibrant things stumble into the wood all the time, each naively believing that their vivacity can turn our twisted manor into something more animated.
It plays out the same with no surprises. I can’t remember the last time I’d been astonished — something so fresh it shakes me to my core, sheer audacity to make me anew.
So they pounced. Closing in on the wood’s freshest face, the vultures carelessly assumed tonight would be like any other. They weren’t equipped for the fairest fight of their lives.
It was an onslaught of ferocity, the vultures clawing with all their might at the resistant darling. Though bruises etched themselves across her face, I recall a tiny smirk emerging. She seemed to be aware of something the rest of the wood was not; the vultures couldn’t combat such unfiltered exuberance. Their usual prey was in the midst of decaying, so succumbing came as a natural conclusion. But this specific visitor rendered the vultures’ attacks useless. With every advance made, their frustration heightened.
The game only worked if the prey understood their role.
So, much to the surprise of all the wood’s frequenters, the vultures rose to great heights and fled far away. As their reign meets its conclusion, the wood starts anew. It’s taken on a vigor unrivaled by our entire past.
We are alive again. ■
At 8 years old, I learned that the world moved without asking me.
The ceiling fan spun in slow, perfect circles above my bed, cutting the air into even pieces. The refrigerator down the hall hummed, low and constant. Headlights slid across my bedroom wall and disappeared, slid across and disappeared, like something breathing. Everything moved with quiet certainty, as if it had been told what to do and had agreed to do it.
Even then, I suspected there were rules. Not rules like don’t run in the house or finish your homework, but older rules, quieter rules, rules everyone else seemed to follow without being told.
At school, I collapsed into myself, trying to take up less space; my God preferred quiet offerings. I folded into my chair, tucked my elbows in, kept my knees together — but I never knew where to put my hands. At my sides, they looked like they belonged to someone else. In my pockets, they felt like I was playing a character in a movie. Folded together, they made it look like I was begging.
So I watched other people constantly, studying the choreography: how they leaned against desks, how long they held eye contact, how they laughed, how wide they smiled. Everyone else seemed to understand something they silently agreed upon. I was wordless, breathless, trying to translate scripture no one had ever taught me. I began to understand that being human was a kind of ritual, and I had arrived without knowing the prayers.
I did not think being human would feel like this. I did not think it would feel like standing in a temple, terrified of doing something wrong.
It wasn’t that being a person hurt. It was that I didn’t know how to be one.
I wanted to be absorbed into them, into their rhythm, their certainty. I wanted to move the way they moved, as if guided by something invisible and kind. But I was afraid, too — afraid that if I opened myself completely, if I showed everything inside me, I would still be turned away. That I could lay myself on the altar and still be told I was the wrong kind of offering. That I could split myself open and say, Look, this is everything, this is all of me, and it still would not be right.
So I observed. I mimicked. I worshipped.
I tried on expressions the way other girls tried on clothes. I would pull my eyebrows together and then relax them. I would smile with my mouth closed, then with my teeth showing, then with my head tilted slightly to the side. I practiced laughing silently, then with sound, then covering my mouth with my hand. I watched my reflection carefully, waiting for the moment when something would look natural, when the face in the mirror would stop looking like someone pretending. If I could assemble the right expressions, the right reactions, the right timing, maybe it would become real. Maybe I would become real.
Sometimes I would hold one expression too long, and it would begin to look wrong, stretched and trembling at the edges. I would drop it quickly, my face falling blank like a stage after the lights go out.
I did this every night, just as fervently as other people prayed.
At middle school cheer practice, we rolled out eight blue mats across the cafeteria floor, taping them together so they would not slide apart. Stomp, stomp, clap. The sound echoed flatly against the walls. Stomp, stomp, clap. Our bodies moved in sync, feet striking the mat together, hands cutting through the air together. The sound filled the room in steady bursts, over and over, until it stopped sounding like noise and became something else.
One of the new girls, Autumn, kept losing the beat. Stomp, pause, stomp. Stomp, clap, pause. The others began to look at each other; small, quick looks, the kind that travel fast and settle heavily. The air in the cafeteria changed, and the room began to shrink, the edges pulling inward. A faint ringing started in my ears, so quiet at first I thought it was coming from the lights.
At that moment, Autumn stopped being just a girl messing up a chant. She became flesh and bone, just like me — a body in a room full of people who knew exactly where to put their hands.
Later, in the locker room, the team formed a circle, talking in low, excited voices.
“Oh my God, Autumn is so embarrassing,” one of them said, and the others laughed sharp, metallic laughter that seemed to bounce off the lockers and come back louder. The circle tightened slightly, shoulders brushing, heads leaning inward. I stood just outside the center of them and felt the familiar pressure in the room, the feeling that something was being decided.
The ringing in my ears grew louder. It filled my head until it was hard to hear anything else.
They laughed, and I laughed with them, my voice sliding into place half a second too late but close enough. In the mirror across the room, I caught a glimpse of myself under the fluorescent lights — shiny, polished, reflective. My face arranged correctly, my body angled just right, my hands moving when they were supposed to. The tension in the room dissolved. The frequency stilled. My God was pleased.
That night, I stood in the bathroom and tried to make that same face again, the one from the mirror, the one that had worked.
I practiced until my cheeks hurt.
Years passed of me sanding down every sharp edge, every wrong reaction, every expression that lasted too long or not long enough. I learned how to nod while someone was talking, how to laugh before the silence became uncomfortable, and how to say the right thing in the right tone. I built a version of myself that could move through rooms without disturbing anything, something smooth and quiet and acceptable.
One afternoon during online school, the screen went black as my classmates logged off one by one. Their faces disappeared into small gray rectangles until it was just my own reflection staring back at me. The house was silent. It was 3 p.m., and I decided to make my bed.
I pulled the sheets tight, folding the corners carefully, smoothing the fabric with the flat of my hand. The sheet had to be perfectly straight, perfectly flat, no wrinkles. I pulled harder, trying to get it smooth enough, tight enough, right enough.
The fabric tore.
The sound was small, but it split the world open. The sheet gave way in my hands, the tension releasing all at once, and suddenly I could feel everything — the weight of my arms, the feeling of my legs touching, the pressure of my chest rising and falling, the fact that I was a body, a living thing, a creature trapped inside skin. My hands stopped working properly, moving too fast or too slow, like they no longer belonged to me. I tried to smooth the sheet, to fix what I had torn, to make it flat again, but the fabric would not come back together.
The ringing came back, but this time it was deafening, a constant scream inside my head. My skin prickled, goosebumps rising like a warning. I felt like prey — like a small animal that suddenly realized it was being hunted, even if it could not see the predator.
Something inside me opened quietly, without spectacle, just a slow turning inside out. Everything I had been holding in place began to spill loose, and I did not know how to gather it again. I pressed my hands against my body as if I could keep something from falling out. I was no longer performing. I was no longer in control. It was grief without an object, fear without a name.
Later, my mom found me in the closet, curled in on myself, rocking back and forth like a much younger child. For years, I had survived by disconnecting from my body, from my fear, from the constant awareness of being alive. But my body had been keeping score the whole time, and it finally collected.
I was fifteen when the world ended, and no one noticed. The next morning, the sun still rose. Birds still screamed in the trees. Traffic still moved in long, impatient lines. People still laughed in hallways, raised their hands in class, and knew exactly what
to do with their hands. The world continued with the same quiet certainty, as if nothing had happened.
I still don’t always know where to put my hands, but they are here. Resting on desks, wrapped around coffee cups, and pressed into the pockets of my jacket. They are awkward and restless, and sometimes they shake, but they are mine.
I did not think being human would feel like this — this loud and bright and fragile all at once. There is a chaos to being alive, a constant awareness that there is no exit strategy, that the world will keep spinning and the ceiling fans will keep whirring and the birds will keep screaming, whether I understand any of it or not. But I know something now that I didn’t know then: being human is not a performance you perfect. It is something you agree to participate in, over and over again, without ever fully understanding it. There is no moment where you arrive and suddenly know exactly how to exist. There is only the constant, quiet decision to remain.
I am still learning the words. I am still learning where to stand. I am still learning what to do with my hands.
I am still here. ■
Shaped HeartBox
layout NICK REYNA photographer OLI MARTINEZ videographer JOSHUA GRENIER stylists DANI GOODLETT & SHREYA RAVI SHANKAR hmua HELENA YEN nails DIAMOND TRAN models TRAVIS DUONG & YOSLIN OCHOA
by DANIELLE YAMPULER
A myth like Kurt Cobain can play God forever. A woman like Courtney Love will never even be an angel.
In April of 1994, Kurt Cobain picks up a shotgun and becomes God. He flies higher and higher in the sky just to find that his wings cannot melt, so the sun swallows him whole.
The supernova of the world’s youngest and brightest star leaves behind an acute darkness. Kurt’s only been famous for three years, but he changes the world in his wake. He was the newly christened voice of a generation messiah of the outcasts. Five days after his death, thousands of fans gather for a vigil. Each holds a candle in their hand, attempting to recreate the light he emanated. A scratchy, congested voice plays from a speaker to the crowd. It’s a recording by Courtney Love, Cobain’s wife. She sounds like she’s been crying for days. She’s lying alone in the bed she and Kurt once shared, reading his note.
Kurt wrote of loving too much, of being too much. Of feeling that his music and performances no longer evoked anything in him. He wrote of not being able to handle his audience, their adoration for him. As she reads his note, Courtney begs with words that feel worn out, tired of pleading the same thing over and over to a man who won’t listen. She begs him to just step away from being a rock star, to enjoy what he has. She ridicules his inability to. It’s too late for him to hear it.
She’s angry, she’s sobbing, she feels as empty as she ever has. Their daughter, Frances, is in the other room. She’s barely 2 years old.
“And don’t remember this, cause this is a fucking lie!” she growls out, before reading the end of Kurt’s note. “It’s better to burn out than to fade away.”
Since her husband’s death, Courtney spends most of her time in bed. Kurt’s mother keeps her company. It is there that she rethinks every moment of her and Kurt’s life together, searching, scavenging for anything she could have done to prevent this.
Maybe she should have tried harder to get them both sober. Kurt figured out early that drugs were an easy way to numb the constant thoughts that raced through his head. He first started using heroin
“He flies higher and higher in the sky just to find that his wings cannot melt, so the sun swallows him
Whole.”
under the nose of his previous girlfriend. Courtney also used. Their mutual addiction made it hard for either to quit. The couple had checked themselves into separate rehab facilities, but he broke out. He died one week later, a bullet in his skull and a lethal dose of heroin in his veins.
Maybe she should have never left his side — not since he locked himself in a room with a gun and threatened to set it off. Not since he swallowed over 50 pills with a glass of champagne.
Maybe she should have never said a single fucking thing to that journalist. Vanity Fair’s 1992 article was, to an extent, the beginning of his end. The magazine quoted Courtney saying that she had used heroin early in her pregnancy. CPS temporarily removed their newborn daughter over the public outcry the story caused. Kurt and Courtney got their child back quickly, but the loss would linger. The couple became erratic, paranoid. They sent death threats to journalists. They refused most interviews. The media became a predator, one intent on ripping them limb from limb and sewing them into something they could no longer recognize. Their bodies were not their own. Their daughter was not their own.
Courtney tries to shake the thoughts out of her head, tries to quiet her mind enough to sleep. She rolls over in bed and stares at the sleeping form of Kurt’s mother. In the dark like this, she can believe her skinny frame is his instead. The deep ache in her chest sharpens.
Two days after the vigil, Courtney’s band Hole releases a new album, “Live Through This.” This shocks a public who expects her to drown in grief. The brevity of the couple’s four-year romance compounds the public’s suspicions: Courtney married Kurt too quickly, had his child too
quickly, and then he died too quickly. Rumors fly of a black widow who killed her husband for his estate and fame.
These rumors neglect that Courtney is simply grieving the way she does all things — loudly, publicly, whether others like it or not. Despite its recording the year prior to Cobain’s death, her new album is all about grief. Grief over the loss of her child, over her loss of control, over the slow loss of her husband. Everything had been taken from her, again and again, until she had to scream about it.
Four months after the album’s release, Courtney looks over a roaring crowd, every eye locked upon her. She looks just as she always does — her hair is messy, bleach-blonde, chopped to her shoulders. Her dress is vintage and torn. Her lips are red. This is her first performance since her husband died, and his ghost hangs over everything she does. The crowd feels it, and so does she. “They really want you, and I do too.” His absence is such a presence that he practically takes corporal form next to her.
The crowd wants to watch Courtney fall apart. Luckily for them, she has never tried to be puttogether. She self-identifies as an amalgamation of doll parts, like the ones her late husband collected. She is always ready to break apart. They should know this about her by now.
Kurt was obsessed with his image. He was known for thinking his words over, lest he said the wrong thing and was misinterpreted. Courtney lays everything out on the table. Her mouth is as quick as her brain. She starts fights with little intent to finish them. She’s brash, loud. Where Kurt always cared for how he was perceived, Courtney builds her brand on chaos. That was probably what he loved about her: her ability to verbalize the things he could never dream of saying.
When Courtney performs, it’s messy. She screams the things she sang on the album. She is all flesh and blood and never tries to act as though she is anything more than human. When she tells the audience, “Someday you will ache like I ache,” they can see her guts spill out onto the stage. Every performance of the “Live Through This” tour is a funeral for the one who didn’t.
“I want him! He’s all gone!” she screams, changing the lyrics of a song that she had previously written about losing her child. “Where is my baby? Who took my baby?”
She asks the question, but she knows the answer. As she looks out over the crowd, she knows that they took her daughter from her. They took Kurt from her. They’ll keep on taking, for as long as they’re allowed.
But “Live Through This” is not just about loss. It’s about waking up to a world that would take everything from you and facing it regardless.
In “Asking For It”, Courtney promises this: “If you live through this with me, I swear that I will die for you.” This line is the thesis of the album, and she repeats it, like a prayer. This refers to the media circus that surrounded their lives. Kurt’s voice is mixed into the backing vocals. He sings the line with her, but his voice is murky and hard to discern. They were making a promise to each other, one he broke when he died. For better or for worse, Courtney refuses to die for someone who can’t live for her.
A few years after Kurt’s death, Courtney still contemplates his final words. She still hates them. She writes down this lyric, a response of sorts: “It’s better to rise than fade away.” In words less eloquent, she is saying: I am not going to burn out for any fucking one of you. I’d rather live.
Maybe that’s the best thing a star can do: rise above it all. To refuse to give any more of yourself to a public that doesn’t know the difference between loving someone and killing them. In her refusal to burn out or fade away, Courtney remained distinctly human.
Coutney lives the rest of her life in the public eye, and some rightfully question whether she should have. She says unforgivable things to her fans. She has a knack for turning friends into enemies, and she assaults more than a couple of them. She continues her drug use throughout her daughter’s childhood, in Frances’s view. The woman, regardless of her pain, is infamous for a reason.
Kurt tied up his image neatly. He was a rock legend, and he died at the peak of his legacy, forever immortalizing himself as untouchable. No one has to question what Kurt would have been like in his old age, whether his voice would have continued to resonate with the youth of today. One could even wonder if his death was the best thing he ever did for himself.
To that, Courtney would respond: Fuck you. ■
“Everything had been taken from her, again and again, until she had to about it.” Scream
“A dress cannot just hang like a painting on the wall, or like a book remain intact and live a long and sheltered life. A dress has no life of its own unless it is worn, and as soon as this happens another personality takes over from you and animates it, or tries to, glorifies or destroys it, or makes it into a song of beauty.”
— Elsa Schiaparelli
just before a comeback
A Hollywood man asks Marilyn Monroe what she wears to bed.
Marilyn, a tactful woman, doesn’t necessarily want to disclose that she sleeps in the nude. So she smiles. Her golden curls bounce as she comes up with something clever. She thinks of her nightstand and of jasmine misting over her neck.
“Well, I wear Chanel No. 5.”
Months later, Coco Chanel sits at a desk chair in Switzerland, at Beau-Rivage Palace. This is where she has been in exile since the war, hiding from the truth of her German lover — a Nazi intelligence officer. She will be buried here, a few decades from now, under five stone lions that will watch her grave. Even later than that, in 2011, the world will find out she did more than just love a man for Nazi Germany. The House of Chanel will dissociate from its maker.
But in 1952, all is not yet lost. Pages slip between Chanel’s fingers. She reads the same interview, over and over again, a familiar spark settling in her gut. The culprit: LIFE Magazine — an interview with Marilyn Monroe herself. Chanel thumbs the square neck of her own personal bottle of Chanel No. 5. The edges of the stopper make pink imprints on her fingertips, and those same fingertips draw circles into her phone dial. Tucked under her desk is a sketchbook full of collarless tweed suits, a slap-in-the-face for Christian Dior and his restrictive New Look. She has to make a call. Chanel has never been one to waste an opportunity like this. ***
Late 1930s, just before
the second World War
The scene is a Parisian costume ball. Distinguished guests adorn masks and gloves and big shoes for making dancerly noises — as much noise
as possible. They sparkle, because they must in these times, and they speak in tittling whispers when Elsa Schiaparelli enters the hall dressed as a tree, illuminated by candlelight.
By design she ignites conversation. Her name brings a certain association — ”Schiap” is what they call her sometimes — ”shciap” like the sound of velcro teeth ripping apart. That name pinballs from guest to guest, wild hot gossip. If it weren’t a costume ball, people may have been discussing her daring outfit — the whorls of brown paint that form slabs of bark on her skin, blurring the line between dress and body — but today, they wonder if she’s heard who else was invited.
Coco Chanel chose not to dress up tonight.
Her own silhouette — a slinky skirt, sharp shoulders, a shape every distinguished woman will don come morning, after this foray into extravagance — is iconic enough. She cuts through the throngs of people with her practiced smile. This ball is business for her — hands locked with potential collaborators, lips brushing lightly over the cheeks of loyal and lavish customers. The elite gather naturally around her. They want to touch, to see, to dance with her. They wonder if her glamour will rub off onto them. A smudge of rosewood lipstick, a bit of her signature scent grabbing onto the fibers of their costumes and lingering. She will make them chic by association. She’s so…effortless, they think.
Schiaparelli pays Chanel no mind at first. She has her own rounds to make, her own charm to pour onto her own clientele. Schiaparelli’s girls come to her; she never seeks them out. They prod her with questions and wait for her outlandish responses. Her words demand eyes, and her hands command attention. Those hands are rugged from countless pins poking into them. They tell the story of her newly dyed furs at home — of the icy blues and shocking pinks she’s woven into her upcoming collection, bright against the drab of a looming war.
“She will be shocking, and she will turn wars into gloves because she is an artist.”
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“Elsa,” one of her girls indicates, pointing behind Schiaparelli. Mid-spiel, Schiaparelli turns around.
Chanel stands, all smooth hands, head cocked in an unspoken proposition. “Shall we dance?”
The hall holds its breath.
“Sure, hatmaker.”
Their dance is tight, practiced, one woman trying to lead the other. Sharp heels clack. Guests pretend not to watch. They are backing up, backing up, and —
A scream from outside their dance is their only warning. Schiaparelli has misstepped — or maybe it was Chanel. Either way, Schiaparelli falls into an ornate candelabra, and her dress is on fire.
An explosion of smells. The sea of guests condense around them and extinguish the fire with whatever they have on hand. Soda water seeps into Schiaparelli’s skin. Onlookers
mourn the destruction of her dress.
But Schiaparelli just stares at Chanel, at the twitchings of a red smile on her lips. Chanel is thinking: checkmate, and she wants Schiaparelli to hear it. Instead, her sentiment echoes through the guests, and later to the streets of Paris, over coffees and dinner: She pushed her. No, she didn’t. I saw it — no, I saw it!
But in that moment Schiaparelli does not speak. Instead she pictures a dress made of fire, wondering what fabric could capture the intensity of that brief luminescent explosion. What could make the sounds of the guests around them? Chiffon? Rayon? Cellophane? She thinks of construction, where seams will meet.
She’s in her own world, back in her studio, waiting to materialize this moment and then touch it a thousand times.
1937, just before Time Magazine’s first cover with a female fashion designer
At 21 Place Vendôme, everything is pink, and Elsa Schiaparelli sits in all of that pink, observing the fruits of her most recent collaboration.
Models slink by her, donning the combined work of her and surrealist artist Salvador Dalí. Schiaparelli met him by chance a handful of years ago on the streets of Paris, their early friendship culminating in a compact powder compartment shaped like a rotary phone dial. Now, they bask in what they are able to do together — the fact that their work gets people talking
A model stops in front of her, her hair blending seamlessly with a hat shaped like a shoe. Another wears a dress painted with the form of a lobster; Schiaparelli still feels that copper paint dried on her palms, sticky and cracking. A ribbon cinches the model’s waist, pulling the eye towards the point before the fabric swells.
Schiaparelli thinks of what that Coco Chanel calls her, in place of her name, to anyone who asks — press, other designers, Schiaparelli herself: that Italian artist who makes clothes. She turns it over in her head, and watches as a model breathes life into her dress. Or maybe the dress brings life into the model. Either way, it’s creation. She wonders: how could clothes be anything but art?
***
1903, just before her big break
Gabrielle Bonheur Chanel is almost twenty, and she kicks her legs high, face adorned in dark, thick makeup that will show up well under the bright lights of La Rotonde cafe. She is poseuse for today — the act sandwiched between the
main acts, and she can’t stand that thought. She is a seamstress on the days where she doesn’t dance, and she can’t stand that thought either
Chanel will not settle for mediocrity. She will be great — she is great. She just knows it. And so she sings, and she sews. Her lucky break will come soon, in the form of a rich man who will fund her first shop under her new name — a name given to her by the cabaret girls. There, she will sell elegant hats for elegant women, and her empire will blossom.
Until then, she sings, and she waits for her opening.
In Rome, Elsa Schiaparelli fancies herself ugly. Her sister is the natural beauty of their family, but that thought does not enrage her. Instead, as she travels with her father to Tunisia, she borrows beauty from the world around her and tucks it away for later, in sketchbooks and in the folds of her ever-rippling mind.
Tunisia is only the beginning. Schiaparelli will write over the next few years, because she cannot help but create. She will write poems of mythology and sex and love and call them Arethusa. Those images will later appear in her collections — in a button shaped like a bow or a painting of a nude woman on fabric. She will stun — her family, her friends, the world — she just knows it. She will be shocking, and she will turn wars into gloves because she is an artist.
A hatmaker and an artist. Clothes that comfort women and clothes that redefine them. The fashion world will chew you up and spit you out, merciless. It wants to — but for them, it waits. ■
ANISHA DESAI nails CHEYENNE SKILES model ANYA GOKUL
“So many scholars have spent so much time trying to establish whether Arthur ever existed at all that they have lost track of the single truth that he exists over and over.” – John Steinbeck
I found Excalibur lodged in the hood of a 1995 Ford F-150. Despite the rot that surrounded it, Excalibur remained pristine, untouched. Engraved on the side of the truck read a message: “to be recovered when Arthur returns — The Once and Future King.”
The Legend of King Arthur states that Arthur will return when his people need him the most. Society has clung onto this legend, reinventing it, reimagining it.
Arthur ages along generations kin, morphing into what his people need at that moment in time.
I stare at Excalibur sitting there with no marks along its side, no fingerprints on its helm. It seems as if nobody has seen it for a long time. Why me? Why this moment? I am brought back into a state of remembering — of contemplation. 1889, London, England. Victorian Age.
The museum looms tall, built with cobblestone and adorned with iron detailing. There are pointed, arched windows coupled with stained glass depictions of Knights, Kings, and Queens.
As she looks among the art displayed upon these walls, she notices elements of the Arthurian Romance seem to be displayed on almost every surface.
John William Waterhouse’s “The Lady of Shalott” sits before her, a shining example of Victorian engagement with the Middle Ages.
The solemnity of her expression plastered in the center of a luscious green landscape, her hair billowing in the wind. Though she isn’t a recognizable figure of Arthurian legend, the painting is recognized widely, and is often considered one of the most important pieces of art of the Victorian period.
Medieval Art provided a sense of comfort for the Victorians that she stood among. Whilst the changes caused by rapid Industrialization loomed outdoors, within the walls of Camelot, they were able to detach from the noise and the smog. The idealistic depiction of these romances created an escape from the perpetual sense of suffocation outside.
It seemed to her, too, that the ideas presented in these paintings had imbued themselves into other aspects of Victorian society. Queen Victoria herself was obsessed with the ideals of Chivalry that were established in Arthurian legend. The politics that governed society were dictated by people who clung onto an idealized depiction of the Middle Ages — of destiny, of Arthur.
The public, too, was just as engaged with the idyllic concept of Chivalry. It seemed that they clung onto the sense of justice, honor, and morality established in the Chivalric Code.
Medievalism reappears in times of strife
because society reflects on the Middle Ages as a time where justice, goodness, and values of camaraderie persevered — an unattainable ideal.
1981, Los Angeles, California.
As she steps into the halls of the movie theater, she looks at the posters that hang on the wall. It seems, to her, a small step ahead of the Victorians. Instead of King Arthur being portrayed by oil on a canvas, he was positioned on a large poster, with a guarantee that you could spend 90 minutes watching the rise and fall of Camelot.
Following the Vietnam War, society had become increasingly aware of the uncertainty and political unrest that surrounded them. With creative voices of the mid-century becoming more progressive, Arthurian legend has become widely regarded as a falsified myth of past idealization.
She sees films that completely satirize the stories that were once regarded as paragons. The romanticization of these myths are combatted through films like Monty Python and the Holy Grail, that poke fun at the behavior and expectations that the Middle Ages put upon Medieval society. It seems to her that filmmakers have started to argue that we should be moving forward as a society instead of clutching onto the past.
Excalibur sets the stage for fantasy epics of the future, creating both large scale battle scenes and tender, romantic moments. It creates visual landscape evocative of the Victorian Medieval Revival.
Still, so many people were desperate for an escape. So, like the Victorians, they clung onto a rose-tinted past, immersing themselves in the Legend of King Arthur once again. As she walked into a screening for Excalibur, she saw every seat filled, large
LACE TANK
crowds of people congregating to relive Arthur’s life — invest themselves in his triumphs and woes, and to detach from the strife they experience. Today.
Amidst the current state of our world, submerged in a perpetual state of confusion, grief, and unknowing. There
are always signs within a generation’s popular culture: the armor, the insistence on chivalric values.
Though, instead of the traditional retellings, filled with the conventional actors in the world of Camelot, modern Arthurianism has been taken by a new concept: that anyone can be King Arthur.
Despite the variety in perspectives, Arthur himself had never changed. His story remained the same: the sword, the knights, the fall of Camelot. However, with changing times, and changing cultures, people desired a new Arthur: one that represented everyone. Regardless of gender, of class, of your
station in society, anybody could be Arthur. And that concept within itself was a form of comfort.
Maybe now is the time. Now we may need Arthur more than ever. Though not in physical form, Arthur has returned time and time again — to teach, to console, and to represent the ideals of chivalry — ideas that we keep returning to. Centuries go by and we still desire a figure like Arthur. That must account for something. ■
by EMMA PETTIETTE
layout ELLIS WESLEY photographer PAOLA COTTO stylists SAL MANER, ANDROMEDA ROVILLAIN & EDGAR BENITEZ hmua NGUYEN PHAM nails
ANOUSHKA SHARMA & CHEYENNE SKILES models JULIA CORZO, ISABELLA BRAGA & CALEB THOMAS
MADISON NGO stylists EMILY MARTINEZ & LUCIA SOLDI set stylist EVANGELINA YANG hmua ABHIGNA BAGEPALLY nails ISHA
MANJUNATH model MIA-KATHERINE TUCKER
by ARIEL BARLEY
un ribbons snuck through her blinds and coaxed her awake that morning. It was a good, peaceful morning. Vanilla from yesterday’s nightly candle still hung in the air, grabbing onto the clothes haphazardly strewn on her floor — grabbing onto the little hairs in her nose, the pebbly taste buds on the tip of her tongue. She liked this time, this early morning, more than anything in the world. It was her marinade.
She spent the first minutes of her day staring at the hunchback shape of that vanilla candle wick, a nasty thing — charred and untrimmed and curled up like a witch-beckoning finger. She wanted it in her mouth, but knew that was silly. But she wanted it. She wondered if some meal from yesterday disagreed with her. Maybe that could justify this craving.
Her mother called her Taker, often. Because she would take babydolls and dandelions and pillbugs and run her very own drool on them until they were slick with coats of spit. Spitblankets, she called
them adoringly. The blankets meant they were hers. She turned them into gifts.
Her mother would hold these gifts and gag like a dog dying and say: “Taker, taker, taker.”
She didn’t mind Taker; it was a neutral, descriptive thing. And even though she wanted to take the wick-char like powdered pills, she got out of bed.
She had an appointment, a very important one. She couldn’t come to this appointment with char on her lips.
And so, she dressed and washed and brushed until she was appointmentready, and she kept as far away from the wick as she could, taking deep breaths as she shaped her body into her
outside-self. She was good about this type of self-regulation. About keeping away from lovely enticing wicks.
Her reflection greeted her in her by-the-door mirror as she was about to step outside.
“Your hair!” she said to herself, pleasantly surprised.
Her hair was long. Longer than she remembered it, and so shiny and good like bells. Long like when you haven’t noticed your own hair in a while. A pretty hair day, she thought, and it probably had something to do with the vanilla air from the vanilla candle, seeping into her hair follicles and making them pretty. She had vanilla shampoo, too, to match the vanilla candle. She would be needing more vanilla things soon — like vanilla macarons or vanilla lotion for her skin. This would help improve her marinade, she knew.
She thought of her marinade and passively of char as she walked to the rustic little coffee shop a few blocks from her apartment. She ordered a latte. The cashier rang her up slowly, and scrunched his nose all the while. She didn’t care. This was a good, peaceful morning. Normally she would ask him what his problem was, but not today.
He continued to leer as she slid into her favorite seat in the house: perched by a painting of a stained glass house. She licked this painting once, back when she came here for the first time.
The Interviewer walked in next, as if he was waiting for her to get settled. He was an ugly thing, but he smelled wonderful. She pulled her latte in closer. She still hadn’t taken a sip.
“What is that?” she asked. He hadn’t gotten a word out. It was like the question leapt from her chest.
“Pardon?” The Interviewer said. He seemed irked, but she just couldn’t help herself.
“That smell,” She asked again, leaning over. Her long, long hair dipped into her drink. The lovely ends clumped together.
“Vanilla,” said The Interviewer.
“I can practically see it coming off of you,” She said.
And she could, the way the light hit him now as the ribbon-sun
shifted. She saw gentle yarn-like vanilla wrapping all around his neck and between his thighs. She wanted that yarn tight around her tongue and slipped all the way into her stomach, a direct line to her gut.
The Interviewer began: “Where are you going? Why can’t you stay right here?”
She knew she should’ve been nervous. This man could kill her, could take his Interview and wrap it around her throat and tie it so, so tight.
She spat great globs of spit onto the man, determined now.
He did not move, or cry, or anything, and the spit began to harden into a softer, more solid substance. She couldn’t say how long she was there, spitting. Her mouth went dry occasionally, and she would go up to the cashier and order a small water with ice and drink it up. Each time the cashier handed it to her, his heart seemed to be beating faster than before — annoyingly fast, by the end.
She only stopped when the man was completely covered in this new substance, and looking at his new form made her so warm and happy that she could not contain the giggles that spilled out of her. Her ears became red with sheer joy. The final globs of spit hardened. She knocked on the substance.
“Look!” she told the cashier, still giggling, still knocking. Knock, knock. She held up the man. He was light like feathers now. “Look! Do you want him? He wanted to know where I was going!”
The cashier gagged, a horrible sound. It was the worst sound in the world, and it just kept coming as he cowered behind the register.
She didn’t care, though. Her joy was radiant, allconsuming, deeply personal. This was the best peaceful morning, and nothing could ruin it. If the cashier didn’t want this, someone would. If no one wanted this, she would take it easily.
Heat spread from chapped lips to dry eyeballs to her candle-wicking fingers, she was so happy. Overjoyed, she grabbed the cocoon she made and rubbed it against her face. She heard the spitblanketed man now, crying inside. That sweet, sweet vanilla came off and latched onto her cheek, salted with his crying.
“It’s okay,” she whispered, dabbing her shirt at a new wet spot on the cocoon.
As the cashier gagged, she thought of her marinade — and before she knew it, she was taking, taking, taking that cocoon all the way home and laying over it a blanket she made herself. Making and taking.
With black lips and a present, she was even higher than on top of the world — and it smelled damn good up there. She was taking, taking, taking it all in, all those silly vanilla things. ■
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AALIYAH LENEE & SAVANNAH HILLIARD
The weight of the world rests on her shoulders, and the ball in the air will determine her fate.
by HANA ROBSON
“The sheer determination she used to see burning in her eyes has been extinguished by her tears.”
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AUSTRALIAN OPEN, 2021
Women’s Finals: Japan’s NAOMI OSAKA vs U.S.’s JENNIFER BRADY
The voice of the announcer booms across the stadium, signifying the beginning of the game. The court and the stands are a deep shade of blue, creating a fishbowl effect. Jennifer Brady walks out first, wearing a pale blue tennis dress and granting the crowd a slight wave before she clutches the straps of her tennis bag and focuses in. From the opposite end of the arena, 23-year-old tennis phenom Naomi Osaka stands waiting. When her name is called, she emerges from the tunnel wearing her headphones. Both women place their bags on the sidelines and grab their racquets. They slowly make their way to their respective ends of the court. A ball is tossed to Naomi from the sidelines, and she bounces it one, two, three times before getting into serving position.
The game begins.
SET 1
Osaka tosses the ball high in the air where it stands weightless for a mere moment, just before being met with the brutal force of her racquet.
23 years earlier, Serena and Venus Williams stood side by side, preparing to face off in the 1999 French Open. From across the world in Osaka, Japan, Leonard Francois watches his television with bated breath. Life in Japan has not been easy for his family. He initially came to Japan as a college student to visit Hokkaido, but he soon fell in love with the radiant Tamaki Osaka. When Tamaki’s parents found out she was dating a Haitian immigrant, they refused to speak to her. Now, a few years later, Leonard watches the two sisters and sees Mari and Naomi. The girls share their mother’s last name, but soon they will share their father’s passion for tennis.
“Game one: Osaka.”
Long Island. The year is 2000, and Leonard has moved his small family back to the US to live with his parents. At three, Naomi begins training with her sister. The two spend their afternoons training, sweat beading across their foreheads, fluttering across the court. Naomi loses again and again, wiring her jaw shut with anger. No matter how hard she tries, she can’t beat Mari.
The second game begins with Brady’s serve, initially a fault. But on her second try, she hits the ball with a resounding THWACK, and
sends it hurling toward Osaka at 163 kilometers per hour.
“OUT!”
Brady initially gets to 30 points, but not before Osaka begins to break her serve. Eventually, they’re tied, 40-40.
“Deuce.” Then, “Advantage, Brady.”
The edge of Osaka’s racquet barely grazes the ball, sending it toward a sea of outstretched hands in the audience.
“Game two: Brady.”
At 12 years old, something remarkable happens to Naomi. She feels lighter, quicker on her feet. Dancing across the court, her wings begin to unfurl. She emerges from her chrysalis, and for the first time, she beats her sister in a game of tennis.
“Game three, Osaka.”
At 15, Naomi is offered a spot at the United States Tennis Association’s facility in Boca Raton, Florida. She politely declines. Etched in her memory is the sting of their rejection two years before. She pulls a legal pad from her father’s desk and furiously begins scratching at it with a pen. First Asian player to be ranked number 1, first Japanese person to win a grand slam title — she thinks of all the ways she can prove herself against the whispers of doubt.
“Game four, Osaka.”
By the fifth game, they are once again tied at 40-40, deuce. Osaka serves.
“Fault.”
She serves once more.
“Fault. Advantage: Brady.”
Osaka exhales, then bounces the ball a few more times before serving it directly into the net. The crowd gasps. On the sidelines, a ball girl sprints to retrieve before the next serve. Osaka serves once more, and the two volley the ball back and forth before Brady wins the game.
A few feet away from Naomi rests tennis royalty. She is the monarch of the court, her name synonymous with the sport itself: Serena. Both are competitors in the 2014 Stanford Classic, though not against each other. Not yet. Naomi worries that the reporters she’s gushed to about her admiration for Serena have made her seem like a fanatic, but Serena seeks her out anyway. Naomi’s heart
flutters as Serena leans in close to her, and a grin breaks across her face as the camera flashes.
“Osaka wins the first set.”
SET 2
Osaka serves and wins the first game. Brady serves, and Osaka breaks it to win the second game.
2018, U.S. Women’s Open. Serena exits the tunnel to thunderous applause. This match marks her return, an assertion that mothers can have it all. To win tonight will have her tied for the most Grand Slams ever won. Serena feels it shimmering in the air; this match is kismet. Naomi takes the lead. She is stoic, her racquet slicing through the air like a katana, controlling the game from the baseline. In the box, Serena’s coach begins to motion with his hands. The chair calls foul, once, twice, three times on Serena, citing a coaching violation, racquet abuse, and verbal abuse — all offenses male players seemingly never incur.
Serena defends herself, but the chair is determined to spite her, to make her small before the world. Naomi wins the match. As the match is called, Naomi stands at the center of the court, tilts her visor down to hide her eyes from the stands and begins to cry softly. She feels a strange emptiness as hot tears slide down her cheeks, a void that engulfs her as she registers the crowd’s jeers. Serena slides her arm around Naomi, attempting to shield her from the vitriol pouring from the stands. For the first time, Naomi is a champion.
The next two games follow closely to the first two, with Osaka serving to win and then consequently breaking Brady’s serve. Brady manages to get a point off of a faulty return from Osaka, but it is immediately followed by another deadly serve that has Osaka up by 25.
“Osaka, very simple technique on the backhand, plenty of power!”
Brady remains unfazed. She vaults the ball over the net and succeeds in scoring yet another point. The competition is fierce, with neither player showing any signs of defeat.
From across the net, tears well up in Coco Gauff’s eyes. She’s lost the 2019 U.S. Open to Naomi. She does her best to bottle the swell of disappointment in her chest as the stands rise to their feet. From across the net, Naomi watches Coco attempt to catch her breath and forgets where she is. Her heart sinks through the clay as Coco collects herself. She remembers the little girl she used to watch practice at the Polo Club after her training sessions. The sheer determination she used to see burning in her eyes has been extinguished by her tears. Naomi sprints to her side, and just like Serena, embraces her. She
shields her from the world, a silent reminder that she understands better than anyone. When she is met with a microphone, her soft-spoken voice fills the standium with nothing but praise for Coco and her work ethic. By the time the interview is finished, there is hardly a dry eye in the stands.
Osaka stands at the edge of the court, eyes cool and demeanor focused. She serves the ball to Brady, who initially returns it well, but slips on her second return. She is forced to dive for the ball, her racquet tilted awkwardly as the edge kisses the ball.
“OUT!”
Brady and Osaka are at Love-40 in the final game of the second set. A small grin flits across Osaka’s face in spite of herself. They have arrived at the championship point.
Opening of the second set. The court glistens before Naomi, a deep sea blue. She feels a soft brush against her leg. A monarch butterfly circles her, settling itself on the bridge of her nose. She asks for the game to be paused briefly. Whispers from the chair make their way back to her. Since her win against Serena three years ago, the media has become suffocating, a swarm that descends on every post-match interview, prepared to pick, poke, and parcel her every word into a soundbite. She has come to dread their presence, her stomach sinking as soon as a match ends. But for a moment, as she feels wings gently brush against her cheek, they are forgotten. She cups the creature in her hands, careful not to crush its lacey wings in her grasp. The world watches as Naomi carries the insect to safety on the sidelines. She extends her hand, and the butterfly stops for a second, resting itself on the tip of her finger as if to extend its thanks for her gentle kindness. Then, it flutters away into the great blue sky. Exhale. The third round of the Australian Open resumes.
The crowd whoops and whistles. With a serene sort of certainty, Osaka inhales, then raises her racquet high, serving her final ball.
“Osaka is champion in Australia for the second time!”
Naomi gleefully throws her hands in the air, smiling up at the sky, before bounding across the court to embrace Jennifer, the two congratulating each other on a match well played. ■
by ANJALI KRISHNA
All in All in good taste. good taste.
layout PARIS YANG photographer MIRANDA REVILLA videographer SOPHIE SHAPIRO
stylists PHYLLIS STOCKTON & AIDAN VU hmua JANHAVI LALWANI & SARAH DAVID
models VICTORIA NICOLAEVNA HALES, ISABELLA LEUNG & RAMYA CHINTALA
“Her taste speaks for itself.”
Over gin cocktails and French onion soup on the Upper East Side, three women start a revolution at lunchtime. They eat, drink, and laugh just a few blocks away from the Metropolitan Museum of Art on Central Park East, an institution simultaneously their enemy and their most cherished space in the city. In 1929, the Met sings the establishment tune, chasing at the heels of Ancient Greece, Rome, and Egypt. It begs for the artistic scraps of Caravaggio and Rembrandt, missing the movements of the city it inhabits.
While Europe ranges forward with Cubism, Impressionism, and pointillism, America’s foremost institution still hopes to deny the existence of the avant-garde. These women, seated at the best table in the restaurant, a view of the city before them, are its passionate champions and dearest collectors.
The Met, just blocks away, refuses to take their advice and their modern artwork. So they meet, on this sunny afternoon, to begin a revolution: The Museum of Modern Art.
10 West 54th Street — On the seventh floor of the tallest private home in New York City, Abby Aldrich Rockefeller keeps her secret.
Hidden away in what should be her children’s playroom is her sacred space. Where her husband cannot see, Abby keeps a secret collection of Matisse, Picasso, and Rivera. The pious, straightlaced John D. Rockefeller — whom she loves dearly for his solemnity as much as for his philanthropic impulse — thinks Cezanne too vulgar to be shown in public. He prefers history paintings, Chinese porcelains, and Botticelli, so Abby collects clandestinely. She calls this gallery, tucked on her home’s highest floors with grey Bakelite walls and metal settings, Topside
It is Abby who convened this meeting and Abby who orders for their group at lunch: smoked salmon and classic salads, veal in tomato sauce. She knows the chef here, as it seems she does everywhere, and she laughs at the waiter’s illtimed jokes with good humor. With savoir-faire like hers, it is no surprise that Abby is the richest woman at this table and her husband will be the richest man in the world when he inherits the Rockefeller fortune.
But even before she married a Rockefeller, Abby was an Aldrich. Her father, who grew up on a farm only to later become the most powerful
Republican in the Senate, knew the value of his daughters’ social education. Abby had her fortune read in Nice, sailed the Atlantic, and read voraciously: Emily Brontë, Henry James, Oliver Wendell Holmes. Abby is effervescent, intelligent, and unpredictable.
“I confess, if I had my way,” Abby wrote to one of her sons, in her festive manner, “I really think I should like to give a party every day.”
Amidst her Manhattan, of artists and galleries and parties, Abby finds something amiss. What is quickly becoming the greatest city in the world lacks a museum showing the art of both today and tomorrow.
She loves art, the modern kind — but she does not know how to reconcile that with her husband. John detests modernism. Where he is straight-laced, she is intuitive, where he has wit, she has whimsy. They share the desire to be generous, to give to others. But Abby attends this meeting in secret, unremarkably written into her calendar as lunch with friends. When Abby tells him of her plans for a museum of modern art, to create a center in Manhattan itself, he does not throw his immense financial power behind the project which most impassions his beloved wife. Instead, he funds the construction of Met Cloisters and the
renovation of Reims Cathedral. He throws his weight behind tradition while she questions it.
In the end, Abby finds the money herself. She becomes the MoMA’s treasurer.
1001 Park Avenue — Before she dies, Lillie P. Bliss demands that her personal papers be burned. She sets aflame what might have filled in the gaps of her piecemeal biography. In the factual remains of her story, Lillie is a spinster, a woman who lived with her mother for 60 years of life.
At lunch, Lillie’s table napkin folds carefully over her well-starched dress. It is rumored that she only has two outfits altogether, that she cares only for art as it hangs on her walls and touches her ears.
There are hints, in these remains, of secret affairs — perhaps with the Museum of Modern Art’s director Alfred H. Barr — but her one true love is art. Lillie is quieter than the other women, has just a few words, because she has spent few years coming into her own. She doesn’t talk like Abby — very few even can — but she has rid herself of the need to overexplain or justify. She is an early supporter of Arthur Davies’ paintings, who organized the Armory Show. She spins with him
“She sees herself in the abstractions,
through the Manhattan art world, where they define and redefine the value of flatness, line, and medium. Her taste speaks for itself.
Lillie buys Seurat, Renoir, and Degas, but she most ardently collects Cezanne, undeterred by negative reviews and accusations of his artistic amorality. She persuades the curators in her acquaintance to host Post-Impressionist shows, ignoring accusations that Gauguin is odiously Bolshevik. She likes what she likes, and it certainly doesn’t make her a Marxist — she drove herself to lunch, in fact, in a shiny Pierce Arrow limousine.
This Boston Brahmin spends her life intertwined with artists, attending concerts and theatre and gallery openings. Despite this, Lillie keeps her life private, much like her affluent father who refused on multiple occasions to run for office. She looks forward rather than inward.
At this lunch, she agrees to be the museum’s vice president. When she dies, Lillie gives 150 pieces to the MoMA, constituting the museum’s permanent collection.
Astoria, Queens — Mary Quinn Sullivan is more than a few minutes late to lunch. It surprises her, always, that her now-old friends are always sharp on time, yet they never fault her for constant lateness. Mary knows that she doesn’t belong on the Upper East Side. She has learned, at this point in her life, which of her phrases are Midwestern-charming and which are Indianapolis-poor. But she has not yet rid herself of the pang in her chest when she hears Abby’s sparkling laugh or sees Lillie’s knowing smile.
These women are kind, open, and generous. Yet Mary knows that she married into her money when she married Cornelius; that she went to Pratt to study art while they learned its history from private tutors; that she taught drawing at public school to pay for roomand-board while they started giving money away.
She is Queens to their Manhattan, but she makes up a third of their trio all the same. Like them, she loves art. Once, she stranded herself in Paris after spending every last bit of her coin on a Rouault and Segonzac. She knows Modigliani and Toulouse-Lautrec as well as Abby and Lillie, and she knows even better how these paintings came to be.
Mary is late because she was painting, a postImpressionist landscape that came to her. These days, it’s a lark. She spends less time with her own art than with others’. She likes it better, she thinks, but sometimes she catches a glimpse of a Redon or Manet and wants to begin again. There isn’t much time, regardless; Mary finds that being rich makes you busy, and responsible for more than just yourself. Her word as a wealthy patron means more to artists than it did when she was one of them. She sees herself in the abstractions, the theory splashed into paint and cracked open on a canvas.
When she married Cornelius, Mary left her work. But her legacy lives in the MoMA’s dedication to art education and accessibility. At their lunch, she vows to help the museum in whatever way she can.
Upper East Side, Manhattan, 1929 — Unwantedly, the three women have a fourth guest at lunch as well, a last-minute addition to Abby’s congregation for modernism. Anson Conger Goodyear is another modernist patron, and it is he that becomes the first president of the Museum of Modern Art. When Abby brought Lillie and Mary together, she knew that they needed a man to front their ambitions and tastes. Goodyear as president was the right choice, an understanding that each woman swallowed with their gin.
Their names aren’t on the door, but the Museum of Modern Art begins from the words on their lips, the labor of their hands, and the vision of their minds. What they have cannot be bought. ■
the theory splashed into paint and cracked open on a canvas.”
I turn around to find every step 1’ve taken to remember in vain, every piece of dust I’ve held onto just dust.
by SOPHIA QUINDORA
layout ARMAAN NOORMOHAMED photographer TAI CERULLI videographers
BRANDON PORRAS & ANGELINA CONDE stylists GRECIA DEL BOSQUE & ZINA IBEKAKU set stylist
& VARENYA BANDARU nails KATHYA models SARA HERBOWY & ELAINE GONG
CHUNKY NECKLACE
good memory can be your saving grace, or the bane of your existence.
As for me — I can count the memories I have with my father on one hand.
1. The department store and the purple flower dress.
2. The heavy LeapFrog toy and the nosebleed, holding a towel to my face.
3. The X-box and the Our Song music video on repeat.
4. The hospital gift shop and the Big Sister t-shirt.
5. The dimly lit room and the forever goodbye.
My lapse in memory didn’t bother me until I was 12. He’d been gone exactly eight years, but the wound finally surfaced after lying latent for most of my childhood. I grew up feeling decades older than the kids I was surrounded by, but on that day, I was a little kid who missed her father. I cried for three people.
1. The girl who wasn’t old enough to know what death meant.
2. The girl walking down the aisle alone, 20 years from then.
3. The girl who wanted to miss someone she didn’t even know.
Memories are made in neural pathways, yet mine at age 4 couldn’t have predicted my hatred for their incompetence now. My grief turned to guilt. I felt small, trying to claim this sorrow when others knew him better and longer than I did. I missed this person who could have been my father without really knowing who he was.
My mind sought to punish me.
Its methods were painless at first: counting four pumps of soap when I washed my hands, finding pairs of punctuation marks. I was in control, and the routine was proof of that.
Slowly, my mind learned to develop its tactic, ever so slightly, so that I never registered a difference. Turning the faucet off two times, my alarms on four times, the lights off eight times. Some things doubled in quantity, others in duration, but my actions never crossed my mind for more than a second. Like blinking my eyes, my body acted to feel right — at peace with itself.
I found comfort in the numbers, because if I could recount every moment to a digit, I could know for certain it happened. It was deeper than routine — it was ritual, and I was the only performer. The guilt was my leader, the grief was my code, and the numbers were sacred text. I created a cult: loyal to compulsions, dedicated to obsessions. Forgetting meant I’d have to confront the wrongness inside me.
I wielded my grief like a double-edged sword. Each swing was a memory made to prove that I was capable. The knockback hit me in the heart, reminding me that no matter my actions now, I could never forge the memories I so desperately desired. I put the pieces I have of my father in a box. They’re concealed, but suspended. Nothing more is to be forgotten, but there’s nothing else to remember either.
I latched on to minute details: chemical formulas, the days when I re-wore outfits, my friend’s sister’s boyfriend’s cousin’s major — I pushed the capacity of my memory, finding meaning in every instance, because there was no telling what regrets I’d have in years to come. I replayed sequences in my head. I imprinted images into my eyelids. I didn’t want to feel the repentance of regret again. This was how I regulated myself. Everything was worth remembering.
My rituals evolved past just counting. I acted to feel a sense of completion — whether that be acknowledgement or repetition. I remembered what I wrote by making holes in thin paper where I pressed the tip of my pen. I remembered to obey the letters and numbers of road signs by burning them into my vision. I remembered the meanings of words when I synced my breathing to my reading. I had gotten so used to the sensation that I didn’t register it as pain.
had once resided. I was no longer compensating for my forgetfulness, I was overcompensating to punish myself.
I was losing control of my newfound grief. I thought it to be rigid and finite, but it turned out blurry and endless. It was a cycle in three steps:
1. I clung onto memories.
2. I acted to create memories.
3. I built my life around memories.
I told myself to live with it. More so, I had to live with it. The temporary discomfort was worth the confirmation that I was remembering anything, something, everything.
I was forgetful as a kid because memory didn’t matter. When I forgot to do my reading homework, I was punished with a silent lunch. I misplaced pieces of board games, my goggles after the swimming pool, the living room TV remote. Small mistakes and even smaller consequences.
In those moments, memory meant nothing to me.
Now, in between counting and repeating, I reminded myself that I wanted a way to grieve. I wanted the punishment. But as guilt clouded my grief, I used my memory as a motive. I asked myself: how desperately do I need to remember?
I let the rituals follow me everywhere. To school, to sleep, to socialize. To the doctor’s office, where sterile air and painted murals of oceans coerced a confession out of me before I knew what I was saying. There, I put my actions into words for the first time, vocalizing my fears, finally hitting my breaking point.
“My memory wouldn’t be the death of me, but it wouldn’t be the life of me either.”
Telling my doctor made me acutely aware of how I’d lost myself to the routine, unrecognizable compared to when I was ignorant. Whether or not I had wanted to reveal my practices, I did anyway, my mind’s last ditch effort to save me from itself.
In the same room I had sat a dozen times, I cried for three reasons:
1. I wouldn’t remember him.
2. I need not feel guilty.
3. I can live with grief.
I can count the memories I have with my father on one hand.
1. Special. We went shopping that day just the two of us.
2. Scared. It didn’t hurt, but his reaction told me it should have.
3. Excited. He said that we’d soon hear this song in real life.
4. Happy. Our family was growing, but I’d still have his attention.
5. Confused. This wasn’t like the last time we were just in the hospital.
The mental pictures I see pale in comparison to the emotion I once felt. I turn around to find every step I’ve taken to remember in vain, every piece of dust I’ve held onto just dust.
What matters when making memories isn’t their longevity or their quantity, it’s the emotion they
bring you. We don’t remember instances or pictures — we remember feelings.
I’ve held myself to a standard of remembering materiality. I quantify the memories themselves, like I’ve been keeping score, because I understood the feeling of correctness to be its own emotion.
So I taught myself to remember everything: log-in verification codes, my favorite coffee order, my to-do list each day. I remember the things I want to forget too — two sentence horror stories, failed test scores, the final pages of my favorite book.
It’s not because they’re memorable, but because the feeling is. The satisfaction, the fear, the pride, the anger.
I had been so consumed by my rituals that I let them isolate me and take away my liberty of emotion. The rightness of rituals decided for me what was worth remembering — but the power was ultimately mine. I decided what was worth my mental space, not the guilt that I had been using to dictate my grief; the action was painful enough without me inflicting more torment on myself. Even though I wouldn’t remember my father, I didn’t need guilt — or memory — to grieve.
My memory wouldn’t be the death of me, but it wouldn’t be the life of me either. ■
“SORRY TO BOTHER YOU. WE’RE TRYING TO LOCATE MRS. AURELIA MENJÍVAR. HAVE YOU SEEN HER RECENTLY?”
by SABINA GUARDADO layout JOHN WALTON
Recognize
Their house sits along a steep hill, pillared and well-groomed like all of its neighbors. Through the white trim of the front window, standing atop a pristinely maintained Afghan rug, she can envision the tantalizing American myth. She believes it, running a cloth over their crystal center table — the image is brutally compelling. The Prescotts are generous people; they smile with teeth when they hand her the check and opine about her precious ironing skills in front of guests. She’s family, they say. And she can pretend, on these days when she’s alone in the window, looking out at sun-soaked planters maintained weekly by a gardener, that she is one of them. But tonight they will eat her albóndigas with spaghetti and call it Meatball Monday.
Noon now, and she’s on her knees with the thin vacuum attachment that reaches under the frills of the couch. Her back whines, echoing the ache that used to follow a day of picking sugarcane in the fields back home. She would refuse to leave until her basket overflowed — a point of pride for her family. This new domestic labor is mercifully shielded from harsh sun and sticky air, but daily bleach fumes leave her longing for the smell of sweet earth.
The electric hum swells and ripples over the crown molding, extending her presence across the house. She’s under the 19th-century ottoman when the thud of a car door penetrates the vacuum’s noise. Her hands still. The whir spins to silence. She sits back on her heels to wait. The click of shoes on the brick walk-up rattles the door until a sharp knock shakes her.
A roll of fear gathers in her ribcage, prodding at her lungs. It releases painfully with the strike of the second knock — she might vomit. But the fist’s courtesy will be short-lived. So some deep instinct in her heart pulls a rag from her waist and ties it around her thick hair, curls tucked away under bleach-dried cloth, and she advances toward the door. Her hand reaches for the brass handle — just polished.
She has anticipated this moment for weeks. Practiced to exhaustion, wondering what her instincts might reveal when the time comes. It infects her daily life: reciting English words until she can no longer hear an imperfection, plagued by reminders at the dinner table as her sister speaks of the latest person to disappear. She lives in constant mental exodus, braced for disposal, ready to be earmarked and tossed in a truck — always one exhale away from upheaval. She holds her breath. The handle turns, and her eyes struggle to adjust to the bright light of day.
There they stand, tall and oriented in an imposing triangle. No details of their faces register, nor their first words — her brain is swollen with adrenaline.
“Good morning, ma’am.” The frontman steps forward. She resists the urge to step back. Her blood pulses in dense coils as if it will break and spill from her eyes. He pulls a paper from his pocket.
“Sorry to bother you. We’re trying to locate Mrs. Aurelia Menjívar. Have you seen her recently?”
The words roll over her forehead, and her eyes twitch as the man standing on the left takes a tissue from his back pocket and thrusts it into his nose, poking and prodding, smushing his skin up into a snout.
“Ma’am?”
Her heart restarts and she looks down at the picture in his hands.
And there she rests, looking up at herself — flattened and abstracted from a different time. How strange seeing her familiar face held by tense, white hands. The camera at the offices had made her skin darker. She was darker then, the tropic sun had saturated her skin with color. And she was fuller then too, living on plantain, fatty pork, and beans — food she loved the flavor of. Below her head she saw her name, printed by a machine and above, a big English word in red, capital letters.
“A
ROLL OF FEAR GATHERS IN HER RIBCAGE, PRODDING
“SHE LIVES IN CONSTANT MENTAL EXODUS, BRACED FOR DISPOSAL, READY TO BE EARMARKED AND TOSSED IN A TRUCK — ALWAYS ONE EXHALE AWAY
“
“THE
BRIEF WARMTH IN HIS EYES
IN RED LETTERS UNMAKES HER INTO OF THE BULB AND HER IMAGE BEGAN ITS DESCENT INTO THE DATABASE.”
A category.
She remembers the cameraman’s smile that day. His bureaucratic fingers had shaken her hand kindly and slotted her picture into a file. For a moment, she had believed the state saw something beautiful in her face. Maybe the cameraman was simply in a good mood, amused by her broken English. The brief warmth in his eyes had vanished with the flash of the bulb, and her image began its descent into the database, passed between unfamiliar hands wrapping her in red tape. That day, she renounced her being to them. The system distilled her. Itemized and dated for American expiration.
She looked so proud and alive against that grey backdrop — chest up, chin high. She would have had it framed if she could, but her naive face was slid into a folder, someone else took a seat, another flash went off, and her sister picked her up. She wonders how many fresh hearts in the office that day have since received the same knock. There is no comfort looking at this picture now, clenched by sweaty hands smudging the ink. The face on that paper does not breathe, work, or pray. Yet somehow it outranks the body that stands before it. A single stamped word in red letters unmakes her into a category. Absorbed into the bureaucracy, she can be sifted, assigned, disposed of.
The frontman’s voice shakes her, “Have you seen Mrs. Menjívar?”
She looks straight into his eyes, praying her voice won’t break. “No, sir, I have not seen her.”
Accented vowels slip on her rigid tongue, but her grammar is perfect. He nods with disinterest and turns to the man on his right. The right man is looking at her with pinched eyes, searching for something in her face. The frontman turns back. He puts her back in his pocket.
“If you see her, call this number. We need to locate her as soon as possible.”
“Yes, sir.” She forces her eyes to stay in contact with his as she takes his card, finally registering the wrinkles and dull tone of his face. The men turn to leave and shiny black shoes click away.
She remains standing on the welcome mat — frozen in a half-smile as they walk down the brick steps. The right man looks back once more and his attention scrapes her skin. She drops her half-smile as the door clicks shut. The rag’s stiff texture clings to her hair and pulls strands from her bun as she runs down the hall. She vomits in the downstairs half-bath and packs her purse. Her favorite perfume and book of prayers drown beneath spare clothes and rags as she stuffs the bag. She knows better than to be found here again ■
“ITEMIZED AND DATED FOR AMERICAN EXPIRATION.”
When I finally emptied the tub, strands of hair gathered at the grate, interrupting the water’s escape.
by ANIKA PANDIT
layout PARIS YANG photographer NATALIA IGLESIAS stylist EMILY MARTINEZ set stylists JESSICA DUONG & DANIELLE MARIN hmua VARSHINI BYREDDY nails ALYSSA NGUYEN-BOSTON model GRECIA DEL BOSQUE
Even detached, Something is always left behind.
Even removed, they stayed close enough they lingered. to touch.
The impulse to wash arrived before I understood what I was trying to clean.
It began with a pair of scissors hovering at my collarbones, their metallic snip a small, sharp punctuation in the silence of my bathroom. I cut my hair without a plan, watching dark clumps drift down into the sink. This was not a reinvention; I only wanted evidence that change was possible, a physical proof I could hold.
woke each morning with the same dull regret. But when the mirror stopped surprising me, nothing else shifted. My life closed back in and the hair stayed on the floor.
What was left on my scalp was choppy and wrong. The thought came quietly and without negotiation: You’ve ruined it.
I cut it after losing threads I thought were woven into me for good. Strands of myself, strands of others, all tangled so intricately I couldn't tell where they ended and I began. No one warns you about the quiet ache of a silence that just sits between you, the slow drift of outgrowing people, and outgrowing who you were beside them. They say cutting your hair is like starting over, and I was willing to try anything.
For a moment, it worked. I felt briefly untethered from the shadow who moved through the same routines and
So, I took a bath. Then two the next day. And another the morning after that. Hot water needled my collarbones, steam fogged the mirror into anonymity, and my fingertips pruned under the weight of repetition. I returned to the same motions, reaching for a version of myself lost alongside people I had once trusted to stay. I scrubbed as if I could abrade not just my skin but the memory of what it held, as if the body were a palimpsest and enough pressure could return it to blankness.
A rubber duck bobbed among the suds, tugging me toward childhood. Back then, we moved through the world unburdened, finding universes in small things, learning the heft of joy before we had a name for it. I used to spend
“The
impulse to
wash arrived before I understood what I was trying to clean.”
hours in the pool cutting through lanes, a body in motion with nowhere to go but the other wall. I loved how water held me, how it let me glide weightless and asked nothing besides continuation. But swimming was about arrival — the turn, the push-off, the next lap. Here, in the stillness of the tub, I was not trying to get anywhere. I was only trying to disappear into whatever held me.
The water glistened under the light like glitter, not reacting, but rather absorbing everything without comment. Bathing felt sterile and contained. No witnesses or evidence. Just a clean surface restored each time I pulled the drain.
When I finally emptied the tub, strands of hair gathered at the grate, interrupting the water’s escape. Even detached, they lingered. Even removed, they stayed close enough to touch.
Something is always left behind.
“One more shot! One more shot!”
Months later, I found myself sitting in the corner of a crowded living room, as music curled and dissolved in the
distance. Lucy Bedroque gave way to Blood Orange, a kineograph of sound that looped and frayed at the edges. Before me, scattered across the low table, lay the wreckage of hours: empty red cups, an array of lighters, and, beneath it all, restlessness that wore the mask of comfort.
“You should drink more,” Tai appeared beside me, her face catching the fuchsia lights.
Bodies moved and silhouettes swayed in rhythm. I remained in the corner, watching. My mind performed its familiar excavation, digging through the strata of nights exactly like this one. I had always loved celebration, always seeking out occasions to consecrate the ordinary fact of being alive. But tonight the room felt distant, as if I were observing it through glass.
Someone stumbled backward from the surge of the crowd, his elbow catching the edge of a red cup perched near me. It flew from the table and arced through the air before colliding with my lap, a cool shock blooming across my thighs. I looked down. The cup had tipped, spilling a cocktail of something illicit all over me. My stained skirt clung to my skin, a crimson Rorschach test staring back. It looked like an apple with a single bite taken out.
“Oh shit, I’m so sorry!”
Voices rose around me, but I was already standing, moving toward the bathroom.
I stumbled away from the careful architecture of my own isolation towards a new one. I moved through it all in the only way I knew, fighting the current, until the bathroom door clicked shut behind me and I was alone with the hum of the vent and my reflection. Something in the stillness of that moment slightly eased. I stood there, and for a breath, the sharp edges of myself felt less like something to brace against.
My hair was still choppy from months ago. I had theorized that to let go, one must cut it off. It seemed
logical at the time, or maybe it only wore the costume of logic while something less coherent thrashed beneath. Living alone, trying to inhabit the skin of an adult who should have long ago cultivated her own sense of purpose, I unraveled in every way.
I stripped off my skirt and held it under the faucet. Water ran over the fabric, the red stain dissolving slowly into pale pink streams that swirled down the drain.
For a moment, I stood there watching the color thin and disappear. The recognition arrived quietly, as if it had been waiting for me.
Life is cyclical. We pass through, we accumulate, we wash, and we begin again. Not because we are restored, but because continuation demands it. Cleaning becomes a rehearsal for survival, a return mistaken for renewal; yet return is never complete.
Something always resists being carried away. The body submits to the ritual without believing in erasure, allowing itself to be steadied while still holding what has passed through it.
I had aggressively scrubbed and washed my skirt, wringing it dry. The bitten apple from the drink had faded, but the stain had pooled into something else. Now it was the shape of a core, the rest of it gone.
Still, something is always left behind.
“Anika! Take off your shoes and wash your feet before you enter.”
My mother’s voice trailed behind me as I stood on the ledge of the temple entrance, the stone beneath my feet worn smooth by the bodies of centuries past. I
“But she remains.
peeled off my shoes and placed my feet beneath a faucet, bending to let water run over my ankles as dirt loosened and spilled away in thin streams. Standing there, the stone cool beneath me, I felt the old current slow.
I scrubbed my soles, thinking about where my shoes had been. Shoes touch everything: roads, floors, what is not meant to be carried inside.
My Crocs lay beside the faucet, dirty and caked with mud. Looking at them, I felt an unexpected sense of belonging for the first time in a while. All around me I saw fragments gathered from where we had been: the sound of my family’s laughter, the smell of burning incense, evidence of a life in motion. I felt safe being held in something larger than me.
I did not want to leave that behind, even if such motion lacked a specific direction. Even if I had no destination to arrive at.
The first time I had stood in India was 15 years ago. I loved how nobody cared about anything there. I could move through the heat and noise without being seen or measured. Everything had shifted since then: the world, my life, my understanding of what it meant to be an adult. I wanted to tell myself I had matured, but perhaps I had only grown older. Beneath it all, I am still that six-yearold girl, uncertain each morning how to meet the day. The sun will come up tomorrow, I thought as I stood under the stream. We all return.
I once believed growing up meant leaving earlier versions of myself behind. I’ve realized now this cannot be true. When I finished washing my feet, the dirt was gone but the lines carved into my soles were not.
Not to be made new, only to be made ready. ■ Some fragment of her always will.”
What I have come to understand is this: erasure never comes. Cleaning, then, is not a correction. It is preparation, a small ritual before the next movement forward. For a long time I believed growing meant outgrowing, that I had to scrub away the girl who needed too much, who loved too intensely, who came undone beneath fluorescent light. But she remains. Some fragment of her always will.
I stepped forward, the stone cool and steady beneath me.
Iwent to the recital because the decision had already been made. That was safer. When plans existed before I could interfere, I couldn’t spend hours testing alternatives — leaving earlier, leaving later, walking a different route, sitting in a different row — and imagining how each change might quietly ruin the night. The program sat folded on my desk all afternoon, its edge aligned with the corner of the wood. Each time I passed it, I nudged it back into place, as if small acts of precision could keep the rest of the evening from slipping out of control. By the time I left, the crease had softened under my thumb. I flattened it anyway, knowing the gesture was mostly a delay, a way to hold the day still a little longer.
Outside, I followed the walking pattern I had built over months. My right foot stepped over cracks in the sidewalk; my left corrected when I missed. The pattern wasn’t really about the pavement. It gave me something definite to succeed at. If I reached the building without breaking the rhythm, the night could begin cleanly. A man brushed past me halfway down the block and broke the sequence. I stopped at the corner and started again. The light changed twice before I crossed. I counted to eight between breaths and entered the auditorium on the eighth, telling myself that if I arrived intact, I might remain intact.
Inside, the auditorium steadied me. The room had rules. Rows held bodies in straight lines. The aisles cut predictable paths through the crowd. Even the ceiling lights formed a grid that repeated itself perfectly overhead. It calmed me to sit inside something arranged so carefully. If everything around me stayed in place, maybe my mind would too. My roommate slid into the seat
beside me and whispered something warm into my ear. I nodded, grateful for the steadiness of a voice I already knew how to answer. I folded the program into eighths until it fit squarely in my palm.
Under the stage lights, a piano waited, its black lid reflecting the room without a trace of fingerprints.
The earlier pieces moved exactly as expected. Musicians walked on, bowed, played cleanly, and left. Applause arrived at the correct moment each time. I matched my breathing to the rhythm of it and counted the ceiling fixtures — six across, six back — believing for a while that this was all the night would require: attention without risk.
Then the pianist walked out.
The room stilled in a different way. She looked smaller than the instrument, almost absorbed by it. She adjusted the bench in two careful motions and hovered above the keys. The silence before the first note stretched thin, and I felt an unfamiliar fear: not of disorder, but of something arriving whole and undoing me. I braced automatically for the order of the room to continue.
Instead, the melody slipped.
The first phrase landed slightly off-center. A note bent downward and didn’t quite recover. My shoulders tightened immediately, waiting for the correction that usually follows a mistake. It didn’t come. She kept going. The piece moved forward along a narrow edge, and each phrase wobbled slightly before finding the next one. Another pianist might have hidden the unevenness or forced the rhythm back into place, but she didn’t.
LEOPARD DRESS | Leopard Lounge
SHAWL | Sassy Threads
She let the missteps remain. Gradually it became clear that the instability wasn’t a failure she was trying to fix. It was the point of the performance.
The music sounded fragile, almost exposed. Each time the melody threatened to fall apart, she carried it forward anyway. What mattered wasn’t that the notes landed perfectly. What mattered was that she stayed with them after they slipped.
I realized then that everyone in the room had leaned forward without noticing. The small imperfections made us listen harder. Each uneven measure felt like it might be the one where the piece finally collapsed, and because of that, every note that survived mattered more. My counting loosened and then vanished entirely. The grid of ceiling lights stopped meaning anything. All my attention followed the line of sound she kept drawing through the air, uncertain and stubborn.
The melody returned again and again, never exactly the same. It frayed at the edges and then gathered itself. Somewhere in the middle of the piece I noticed my breath matching the rise and fall of her hands. I had spent most of the evening trying to control every small moment so nothing would slip away. Listening to her play, I began to understand something else: the music was moving toward its ending the entire time, and the reason it felt so beautiful was precisely because it could fall apart at any second.
That was when the grief crept in. Not suddenly, but gradually, as the piece continued. I could hear the shape of its ending long before it arrived. Each measure felt temporary. I found myself trying to hold onto the sound even while it was still unfolding, as if attention alone could keep it from disappearing.
She reached the final chord and pressed fully into it. The sound opened, rang out across the auditorium, and slowly thinned. No one clapped
right away. We listened as the note faded into the room and then into nothing.
The silence that followed felt dense, physical.
Applause came late and uneven. She bowed quickly and left the stage. The piano sat alone again under the lights, suddenly ordinary, and I felt the sharp, private loss of something I hadn’t known I needed until it ended.
We stood with the rest of the crowd. My roommate touched my sleeve and said something I barely heard. I nodded. The city moved as it always did — buses exhaling, doors slamming, laughter breaking open and shutting — but everything felt muffled, wrapped in gauze. Each sound carried a shadow of that silence inside it, a hollow center I could not fill. The aisle swarmed with bodies shifting toward the exit. I walked carefully, afraid that one careless step might break the fragile quiet still lingering in my chest, afraid that once it shattered I would return completely to myself.
The lobby lights felt too bright. Conversations sparked around us. I smiled where it seemed appropriate, performing the version of myself that moved easily through public spaces. When we stepped outside, the night air rushed in.
My feet hit the pavement without pattern.
I noticed immediately. For a second I waited for the familiar urge to correct it — to restart the sequence, to repair the break before it counted as failure. Instead I kept walking. The absence of correction echoed louder than the recital itself.
At the crosswalk, I checked the signal once. Then again. The old logic pressed hard against my ribs:
“The asphalt met my shoe with the same dull certainty as always,
Scan for AFTER THE MUSIC video.
and that terrified me more than failure ever had.”
tanding between earth and heaven, and in [her] hand a drawn sword stretched out...”
At 14 years old I was a depressed romantic.
I would walk around the house dazed, haunting the rooms. I thought of myself as this once-in-a-lifetime dreamer. I had excuse to sit up in the clouds as life passed on under me. I had decided my reality was not desirable. There were no great acts of love, no magical moments saved just for me.
Romanticization is a curse. I would spend hours as a child reading novels — Pride and Prejudice, Emma, Song of Achilles, Sleeping Beauty — searching for the promised love story in every other book I read, putting them down if I couldn’t get my fill of love. I didn’t have many friends as a child, and even less people to really talk to. I spent hours putting myself into the place of different characters — wondering when I was going to get swept away. It was easier to live in their places. The only way to interact with the world, I decided, was vicariously.
I locked myself into that rule. I existed as a lump of laundry, half-opened makeup, and dishes piled up — an immovable object surrounded by half-heartedly taped up posters and stringy fairy lights. My interactions were limited to the ones I could experience through my laptop.
I felt like the girls I read about online, the ones who would become someone else entirely when the sun set. They would set out to meet lovers, or fight exhausting battles
“At 14 years old I was a depressed romantic.” “
against villains, or leave to go find some blood for dinner. I felt like part of a coalition of alter egos. I was also setting out to my double life; I let life flow through me once the house went quiet, and nobody was there to hear me.
I spent hours on my laptop, my one true love. I rarely felt seen, but the grainy screen of my laptop and my return clicks on my keyboard felt like a comforting hug after a long day. As a depressed romantic, I thought there was something mysteriously enticing about being a creature of the night.
One night, I decided to take a risk on a sketchy video-chatting website. I thought it would be a silly meet-cute if I met someone on it. In the midst of the voyeuristic old men and smarmy little boys, I met a girl.
As I leaned down to grab my charger, hidden away from the camera, I heard a soft voice.
“Hello?”
I straightened my back immediately and focused on the grainy screen. Her hair was choppy, short, and her eyes were huge. I still remember how she got close to the camera, sticking an eye out as if she was inspecting me, and then — a smile.
I felt a flash of white light pierce through my heart in that moment, connecting me to the girl on the other side of the screen. I could feel her movements through my laptop; I could sense her breaths in the buzzes.
I thought it fitting that my one true love had a beautiful girl filling up its screen. She introduced herself as Ava.
I saw her as my savior, this manifestation of my desires. We didn’t talk much at first, but whenever she would reply, I’d feel a jolt of electricity prick me through the screen. Eventually, our correspondence grew more frequent.
If I was a solid, immovable object, she was the opposite — plush, languid, and ever moving. There was a sweetness to her, a softness I’d never felt in my life before. Her laugh was melodic. I would listen to her and feel my heart zizz under my chest.
I fell head-first into her. She was everything I obsessed over, a beautiful girl with a seemingly assured sense of self — reflective in her clothing and mannerisms. Everything about her seemed to come together so cleanly, like a clear-cut characterization. Even her hometown, small and located on a mountain, made her even more enticing.
She resurrected me from the half-dead existence I had taken up. Our connection didn’t need physical closeness. When I opened my laptop and spoke with her, I would feel the lights around me flicker to life. I was completely enraptured by my screen when she was on it. I spent hours and hours on calls with her that felt lik liminal spaces to co-exist in. She was a virtual angel on the other side of the line, and the computer’s glow was her halo.
I couldn’t talk to people in the “real-world” and yet, talking to her on my short-circuiting laptop felt freeing. She was separated from those in my life I tried desperately to keep out. I just wanted to be in my room, alone. She fit my narrative, existing only in my room, allowing me to be alone where I was safe.
What I didn’t know, though, is I was the same escape for her as she was for me. Where my world was contained on purpose, hers was small. She once told me about how “cool” she thought I was, how I was so blatantly myself with my dyed hair, lacy tops, and seemingly growing eyeliner. She didn’t grow up in a community that had normalized the look I had. I realized all my time boarded up in my room made me forget about what the outside thought of certain things.
As she spoke, I realized I’d let my romantics get the better of me.
I had crowned her as my saving grace, combining the girl with my image of the Angel. The buzzing heartbeat under my chest sped up, and as the little halo faded off her pixelated face, I got close to the camera. I stuck an eye out, as if to inspect her, and smiled. Her room looked dark, and her eyes looked tired. I started to notice little things, like the uncapped eyeliner sitting on her desk, the discarded clothing on her floor — she was just like me. She shot back a hopeful smile, watched me as I realized that she was still a girl — a girl who was looking for someone willing to understand her, just as I did. She was still as beautiful as an angel.
I always thought she was merely my virtual angel, the darling that made my days that much brighter, but we were each others’. I imagined myself as an immovable object, and I once thought she wasn’t. We stand somewhere in between, a combination of the two. The divinity of our love for one another moved me.
At 17, I was hopeful — driving through rolling mountains in northern California, miles from my room. My heart was humming under my chest, like a monitor whirring awake. My world had never felt so large.
It felt like a fairytale, a moment being written out in front of me, the excitement of a long awaited meeting — my hands itched to write about it.
It happened quickly — I threw my car door open and rushed towards the girl waiting on the front lawn, crushing her into the tightest embrace. I could feel her heartbeat moving just as fast as mine — our parents smiling fondly from their respective spots.
I pulled away for a moment and took her in. Her hair was longer, and the shirt she was wearing suited her; purple always had. The camera didn’t show the sharpness of her cheekbones, or how her face glowed when she was truly happy. I felt like I was looking at her for the first time. Between the half-laughs and half-sobs, she took a hard look at me and said between tears:
“You’re not as short as I thought you’d be.” ■
Scan for VIRTUAL ANGEL video.
“She was a virtual angel on the other side of the line, and the computer’s glow was her halo.”
by ENRIQUE GRATEROL
layout MELINDA NGUYEN photographer ADRIAN GOMEZ videographer IAN SULLIVAN stylists EMMELINE HURTER hmua KAREN SOLIS nails ALYSSA NGUYENBOSTON models ANDRES MENENDEZ & MIA-KATHERINE TUCKER
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My last morning in London started like every other day of my trip: with coffee, pastries, and a long walk. Today’s particular goal, however, was to walk through Kensington Gardens in search of my perfect tree. I was close to the end of my well-worn copy of Mrs. Dalloway and determined to finish it before leaving for that night’s showing of “Evita”. It didn’t take long for me to find the perfect place to rest, an imposing oak tree at least 100 years old with sturdy boughs and a trunk that nestled my back just so, almost as if Mother Nature carved it for me. Staring out at the mirrored lake, I wondered how many people had sat under this very tree with their own book in hand, finding themselves in the water.
The day could not have been more beautiful, and the park was crowded with thousands of people delighting in the same experience. Still, we would never interact. Amidst a sea of strangers, it hit me that the last moments of this trip were slipping through my fingers just as I had started to experience them. Try as I might to slow it down, time kept marching on at its own chosen pace. I saved a mental image of the ballet of swans skating along the brilliant surface of the water before returning to the last moments of Clarissa Dalloway’s most fateful day. The world around me melted away for what seemed like minutes but before I knew it, it was time to leave my swans and my tree for the next lonely reader.
As I made my way to the West End, I rejected my instinct to reach for my earbuds, choosing to listen to the symphony of the city instead. I tried to catalog all of it for later just as I had done at the park, even though I knew it was an impossible task: the cars, the birds, and the tourists from all over speaking in their mother tongues blending together. I knew the moments
I was currently living in were ones I would one day long for. That feeling of nostalgia in real time followed me all the way to the Palladium Theater. While this time spent traveling alone had shown me the beauty of solitude and pushed me out of my comfort zone, I began to miss my friends and family nearing the trip’s end. When I arrived at the venue, I presented my ticket at the door and was quickly ushered upstairs.
By the time I reached the top of the lengthy ascent, I was sure the air had started to thin. My trusty guide opened a heavy wooden door to the crimson glow of a charming theater slightly past its prime. Red velvet seats, warm lights, and ornate cream and gold plaster doused every inch of the atrium with a touch of old Hollywood glamour and 1950s luxury. Regardless of its current state, the spirit of the place came alive as the audience began to fill in, and by the time they dimmed the lights, every seat was full, and the crowd buzzed with anticipation.
After two weeks of traveling alone on the other side of the world, I was desperate for connection. When the first intermission arrived, I turned to my left and decided to strike up a conversation with the girl sitting next to me. Heaven, as she introduced herself to me, felt refreshingly relatable — effervescent, engaging, and easy to talk to. She met me with an inviting smile and spoke in an accent that instantly betrayed the fact she was not a Londoner but, in fact, visiting from Birmingham.
Luckily for me, she was just as happy to chat. But from our very first exchange, we knew our friendship was destined to end. Not because of any failing of hers or mine, but rather a conflict of circumstance. We started off as actors, like those in the play in front of us, presenting the most palatable versions of ourselves. The shiny veneers
wore off quickly as our conversation delved into our hopes and desires for the future. I told her about my family and friends back home and what university life was like back in the States. She told me that she was an aspiring actress here in England who would be starring in a local production of West Side Story a few months later. Heaven also confided in me that she had not seen the original version of the musical we were watching, but Rachel Zegler as the lead was enough of a draw to warrant her trip. We had both grown up singing in choirs. We were both older siblings. And it was both of our last nights in London.
Looking back, I’m honestly not sure why we clicked so well. In that moment, all that mattered was that we did, and that we were both willing to try. For all I know, she could have been lying about everything, but saying vulnerable words becomes infinitely easier when their impact evaporates the moment they leave your mouth.
The fifteen minutes of intermission were up, and the show had to go on.
When the show ended, my new friend and future starlet insisted our theater experience would not be complete without a visit to the stage door. Our friendship emerged from a facsimile of 1940s Buenos Aires onto the freshly rain-soaked streets of a very real modern-day London. I realized the sun had set hours ago and each breath I took filled my lungs with colder air than the last, another reminder of what little time I had left in this city. A small crowd of theater fanatics eager to get their paraphernalia signed told us we were in the right place, and once we found a spot to wait, conversation flowed again.
As we stood there, a few of the supporting cast members made their rounds and we could not help but notice the crazed obsession of the women
fighting to get in front of us for a signature. I would not have imagined professional theatre could incite this sort of fanfare, and it even got to the point that a bodyguard had to hold someone back, which made us both laugh. In the eyes of everyone around us, Heaven and I probably seemed like two best friends — and in a way we were, for the time being.
Our hasty replica of friendship was evidently built on a house of cards, missing the foundational years of shared experiences and inside jokes that would normally keep it upright. But on this night, on this street, the air was seemingly still enough for our wavering structure to stand. Even if just for a few more hours.
We continued to talk about everything under the sun until a very tired looking Miss Zegler finally came out and joined us. After a few moments of clamor and the opportunity to say a quick thank you for tonight’s performance, Heaven and I watched her tinted black Escalade drive into the distance, and the magic of the moment began to dissolve. The hourglass was down to its last grains of sand and we would soon head our separate ways, back to real life. We slowly walked from the theater to the train station and said goodbye for what we both knew would be the first and last time. As soon as she turned the corner, I started to wonder if I had imagined the whole experience.
If we both lived different lives in different places, I’m sure we would have been great friends. But in this reality, she exists solely as a mirage in my memory, our night relegated to the depths of my own recollection. Whenever I think back on this evening, the memory morphs a little, some spots blurrier than others, but each remembrance is just as real as the last. Even though the details might fade with time, sometimes a moment of connection can be just as valuable as a lifetime of friendship. ■
“For all I know, she could have been lying about everything, but saying vulnerable words becomes infinitely easier
instinctIt’sinour ;
grandfatherlike , fatherlike , daughterlike . ,
whenleaveyouwith you take me
by JENNIFER WANG
“Without even realizing it, I’d grown my roots into the pavements of the city.”
It’s 1949 in Mainland China. My grandpa is a teenage boy who stands in front of a flyer tacked to a rusting metal pole. He should be in class, but the schools have been closed for a while. In times of war, children do not learn to read — they learn to survive.
The ground beneath his feet no longer roots him as it once did. The streets are haunted with an unnerving uncertainty.
The boy cranes his head at the flyer to read the characters printed on the thin parchment:
為國家生存而戰！【FIGHT FOR THE SURVIVAL OF THIS DEMOCRACY!】
The force of communism had slithered through each province of a war-torn China like a snake, and the democratic Republic of China feared every scale on its back. There are whispers exchanged between the neighbors — the democratic forces have been losing ground. Staring up at the flyer, the boy feels it flutter in his heart: a tender flame of hope. He turns to face the military recruitment stand. The officers there raise their eyebrows at him, silently asking him the question they all had to ask themselves:
Will you sacrifice your youth to the tides of war?
It only takes a few strokes of a pen detailing his signature to completely rewrite his fate.
They usher him into a temporary camp within a few days. They place him on a boat within a week. There is no warning, no correspondence allowed — he isn’t permitted to write a single word about his departure to his family.
The boat’s large, metal body rumbles as the anchor groans on its way up. As they set sail, he sets his eyes on the abyss of blue, dancing by in waves. The ocean is beautiful, and its tides sway like the paddy fields back home. His siblings should be tending to them right now, he thinks.
Home.
He wonders if it will ever be his again.
I feel it on a rough Thursday evening.
The feeling starts in my fingertips. The nausea of homesickness, creeping up from my nails into my arms, infects my veins and swims its way through my body until it finally settles in the middle of my chest.
It’s a heavy, sorrowful weight. It drags me down with every heartbeat, until even standing feels like an impossible task.
I throw myself onto my bed, holding onto the one constant
I’ve had since birth — a stuffed animal of a pink dog. I hold her crumpled body to my nose and inhale. Despite how many years it’s been, she still smells familiar, like a place that’s been waiting for me.
I miss home — not home as in Frisco, Dallas, where my family is undoubtedly in our house, gathering around the dinner table at this moment — I miss the idea of a home I once had, 8,229 miles across the sea.
My family spent most of my childhood following my father’s job prospects; eventually, that led us to a developing coastal city in the south of Mainland China: Shenzhen. My parents always thought we’d eventually move again, but what they thought was a temporary stop quickly turned into 13 years.
Without even realizing it, I’d grown my roots into the pavements of the city. When I left, it carved a permanent scar into the concrete in the shape of an 18-year-old girl.
People who grew up with nothing have to hold on to everything.
He boarded that boat to Taiwan empty-handed, with nothing to his name. He’s given a stipend once in a while — it’s not much, but he thinks eventually it might be. He has food to eat and a bed to sleep in, and in the night, dreams of democracy flood his head.
One day, his commanders finally give him the green light; he’s allowed to write to his family.
He’s not sure where to start, the absurdity of it all finally hitting him — he’s miles away from his quaint hometown, where his siblings believe he’s still with his uncle in the city. How does he begin to tell them he’s been shipped to an island overseas?
As the pen moves, so do his tears. He writes of his decision, of his dreams to contribute to the battle for freedom. He writes of his naivety, of his ignorance about what sort of a life his dreams entailed. He writes of uncertainty, of the fact that he may not see them again for a long, long time. He bids the house that he grew up in as much safety and peace as war will allow.
He grabs a pair of stationary scissors, holding it up to his head with quivering hands, arms still sore from training earlier that day. With a snip, a chunk of hair falls perfectly into his palm. He tucks it away into the envelope. With this piece, he makes himself holdable. He makes himself real.
That night, he lies in bed, praying to whoever is listening that the family is alive to receive his letter.
***
Leaving the city for good feels both like heartbreak and a sigh of relief.
I know I will not miss the people — years of small town gossip has drained whatever affection I had left for them. But the motions of packing softens my resolve to leave without emotion. It’s harder to let go of the smaller things.
Two weeks before our flight, my mom invites her best friends over and gives away some of her favorite china. She smiles at them, reassures them that it’s okay to take. She tells them it won’t survive the flight over anyway, but I see the way her smile drops with every piece that leaves her fingers.
We sort through the shoes we’ve collected over the years, and she tells me the story behind each one.
“This is the first pair of shoes your grandparents bought for you!” she grins as she holds up a pair of pink sneakers that are barely bigger than her palm.
We decide to keep them, for memories’ sake.
In the study room, my dad cracks a joke about our evergrowing shoe collection. He’s sorting through an entire shelf of books he’s never touched. I roll my eyes and tell him we’ll stop collecting our shoes when he starts reading his books.
“Fair enough,” he shrugs.
Our entire life is eventually packed into seventy-something boxes. A lot of things were thrown out or given away in the process. I find it strange that I’m missing the objects more than the people.
The night before my flight, I float through the rooms like a phantom. My graduation flowers sit rotting at the foot of my bed. The moonlight filters through the window of our living room — no, the living room — devoid of furniture. It’s not ours anymore. It won’t be ours ever again.
From the balcony, I can see the skyline. The lights pulse quietly, reminiscent of the city’s heartbeat. It lives, it breathes, and I watch — breathing with it as a girl who belongs to it, one last time.
The war never truly ended. But the battles eventually did.
His son grows up curious. He tells the boy stories of where he’s from, of how he got to the life he’s settled into. He teaches him the history of the fight for freedom that never truly ended. He feeds him books and magazines to quench his thirst for knowledge. He is so proud of his son, and there is nothing in the world that would stop him from giving him everything he wanted.
He is a frugal archivist, a sentimentalist, and it translates into the way he lives. He stashes coins in empty film canisters and sturdy, plastic pill bottles. He accumulates newspaper clippings in towers, until his wife berates him for it. He collects the propaganda booklets they pass out at his workplace, counting them as proof that his dream isn’t dead yet.
When he dies, his son lays down a flag of the Republic of China and one of the booklets next to his chest to be cremated with him.
Even in death, he holds on to his dreams. ***
My grandpa died when I was two, and I have no memory of him to hold.
Sometimes, my dad finds me failing to purge items from my room.
“You are just like him,” he’ll laugh.
I used to get defensive at that statement. I didn’t want to be labelled as a hoarder because a hoarder meant someone who had too much junk. My things weren’t junk; everything I kept, I kept for a reason.
There are oddities sprinkled all around my new room in Texas: snippets of ribbon, stacks of polaroids, letters from people I talk to less and less. On my bed, there’s that stuffed pink dog I’ve had since birth. Somewhere in a box, there are princess gowns I adored as a five-year-old. On my dresser, my dad’s old camcorder sits, unused for years. I’ve made it my mission to revive it someday.
Now, I know my dad never meant any harm by comparing me to his father. He is the same — the unread books he packed from China are still in his study, just sitting on a new shelf. When I look at him, I see the silhouette of my grandpa in a younger body.
After he’s out of the military, my grandpa settles down in Taiwan. He is no longer a teenager. He goes years without knowing whether his family survived. They won’t let him return, not even to visit. He doesn’t want his life back in Mainland China anyway, but he’d like to see his siblings at least one more time.
One day, he meets a woman. They get married and eventually, they have a son.
We hold on to our things, our dreams, our hopes and aspirations. We hold on to our things, and in that way, we hold on to each other.
It’s in our blood; like grandfather, like father, like daughter. ■
“We hold on to and, in that way, we hold on to each other.”
our things,
Parasite Parasite Parasite Parasite Parasite
by EMILY NUÑEZ
layout MELISSA HUANG creative director AIDAN VU photographer ANTHONY NGUYEN videographer BRANDON PORRAS stylist ANDROMEDA ROVILLAIN set stylist CLAY KEENER
hmua KENNEDY RUHLAND, BETHANY NONHOF & JALYNN SHREPEE nails HAILEY CHUONG models VICTORIA NICOLAEVNA HALES, ANDRES MENENDEZ, GRECIA DEL BOSQUE & TASMUNA OMAR
A rebel crouches low in the mountain’s misty vegetation,
broad-leafed palms and dense brush the only means The standoff calls for utter stillness and silence, tyranny.
The rebel inhales a steady, profound breath of fertile soil and warm dew, wishing to slow time and linger just a moment longer upon the earth.
The sheer necessity of the sacrifice is not. With a trembling exhale,
EYEPATCH | Andromeda Rovillain
of occlusion from the enemy in distant sight.
To die for a history in the making is the closest to eternity one can pray for. Survival is uncertain.
he sinks into perfect precision and tugs the trigger,
Rebel ancestors, mares of the indigenous Earth, beaten by man over the ages, someday broken into blinders and horse tack till the descendant herd found themselves trained and abiding, only a fragment of the promise of glory. We interact with their historic archives to little avail, perhaps moved toward a fascination with those degraded voices, not yet urged to take up their defense.
Iron hands construct offshore from the rubble of massacred nations, trying to emulate their former greatness, forever falling short, yet winning over the illusioned along the way: exodized godchildren of revolution who accept elite machinations and proceed as sterile utensils to the oppressive order: purchasing material contentment, consuming the spoils of distant labor, paying fabricated debts, idolizing feigned righteousness, worshipping the mystic and disdaining the creator because it is pleasant to imagine things come to exist from thin air.
We’ve been tricked into believing we have too much to lose. Meanwhile, our backs are already to the wall, all our lives but a favor on borrowed time, mere invasive species to their eugenic landscape.
Witnessing rampant atrocities in passing has turned us ill.
Aghast at the violence and desensitized to it at once, we feel defenseless against those parasites that writhe through our ears and eyes.
These worms feed off the state’s infanticide, mutilation of its children made casual, treasons against humanity the stories read just before sleep, breeding grounds for our disabling infirmity.
The communal stasis that follows each tragedy sends us further into disarray. Duty drifts beyond us as we watch our sovereignty wither, and let the parasites gnaw tenaciously away at our coherence, in constant bargain with all the reasons not to resist. The horrors fog every path, any way out somehow spiraling back to the center.
As state-sanctioned abuses follow the exodus overseas, hunting the racialized wherever they run, seeds of doubt sprout again in the injured Latin American psyche.
The resistance is generations behind the rebel’s kin, surviving as an inherited memory nearing religiosity in its powerful effect.
A young descendant, long removed from the island, treks down an urban road lined by dozens of shops. It is a quiet, brisk afternoon; a few idle subjects and many buzzing signs at war for their attention. For years she has grown restless with her still life of relative comfort, her impression of peace rapidly distorting into truth with each global tragedy exposed. Saddened by this routine — now constant — contemplation, she pauses in her unhurried footsteps and looks up from the colorless pavement for the first time in several blocks. She hesitates beside a storefront — any storefront, the distinctions between the countless soon dissolving into nothing — and might have wandered inside were she not so selfaware of the irony of petty shopping in a world as cruel as this. She had been frozen, asleep, all this time ¡while the state martyred her own blood at any attempt to resuscitate the fight! How she winces now at the tremendous loss, and gazes around the consumerist purgatory in spite.
The parasites paralyze their host, and thus inaction is the state of equilibrium.
Yet deep in our anima, tejido a nuestra alma, is a tendency to revolt.
If we could only take from our own disease, let the momentous rage erupt and consume our encompassing system.
Devour the rich and their habitat, and at last remake it our own.
The ancestors fought vigorously at every occupation. Our history commands us to react.
As civilization arrives again at the crucial moment, so does the countdown on our stagnation begin. ■
by SOPHIE SHAPIRO
layout JENNY FAN photographer LUCAS BERIO PEREZ videographer IAN SULLIVAN stylists HANNAH VERDUN & STELLA THOMAS set stylists JANE NAM & HARU CHOI hmua AIDEN FACUNDO models ENOC JUNG & TASMUNA OMAR
acking is supposed to be temporary. Boxes suggest continuity, what leaves will return. They promise that this is only a pause, that everything will find its place again. But sometimes, rooms don’t come back together. Sometimes, they are packed up for the last time. I learned this twice.
Once, slowly, with my Nonnie who had Alzheimer’s.
Once, suddenly, with my Ganny, who left before any of us were ready.
With Alzheimer’s, nothing felt urgent at first. She still lived in her house. She still brewed her pot of coffee that sat warming on the counter as she sipped it throughout the afternoon, the smell drifting through the house. She still smiled when we walked in.
We told ourselves we had time. We believed there would always be another visit, another conversation, another memory she could share with us. She forgot here and there, and we believed we could forget about the white matter spreading across her brain. But it’s hard to ignore someone losing a grasp on their own history.
Some days, she understood. Other days, she didn’t. She would ask where she was. She would talk about her mother as if she were still alive. She would forget our names and then laugh apologetically.
And then, one day, we were packing up her home.
Not because we wanted to, but because it was time for her to live with us.
Every object became a decision. What stays close? What gets carried somewhere new? Whose life will it become a part of now?
One trip after another back to Louisiana, it became increasingly difficult to be in her home. My parents would send me and my brothers photos of items that held memories, asking if we wanted them. There was the yellow couch we once shared, its cushions gently sunken where we always gathered. The kitchen table that had seen messy batches of lemon squares, powdered sugar still caked in the corners. The wooden vanity that was my mother’s when she was young, its mirror clouded with age. Recipes written in her familiar cursive on worn index cards softened at the edges. Each of these was a small piece of a life that had once been full of her and her warmth. Holding them in my hands, something in me understood what my mind wasn’t ready to admit.
The body reacts before the mind does. Before the feeling has a name, your throat tightens, and your chest grows heavy. Grief lives within muscle memory, in the way your stomach drops when a room feels different, and the way your breathing shifts when you realize something is ending. My mind clung to the logic of Nonnie being alive and having time, but my body reacted to the absence of her memories. The body recognizes change as danger, while the mind creates a delusion of normality. Long before you say goodbye, your body has already begun to mourn.
As I picked pieces of her that I’d want to keep close, I started to feel that familiar ache behind my eyes. It was always over small things that held more importance than they ever had in the past. Objects that were once ordinary suddenly felt heavy with the weight of a childhood that was coming to an end.
The house changed slowly. Furniture left. Drawers emptied. Light filled new spaces and draped the rooms differently, reaching places it never had before. What once felt warm and contained now felt open and fragile. Light no longer filtered through the softness of
“ The same windows, the same ,nus tub prehtuohtiw ser e nce
thel i ght didn’t know wh ere
”.dnalot
ni v i sibl e it is to
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gri e f koolnac morf
eht edistuo anyone who isn’tin t heroom with you. ”
fabric or the clutter of a life being lived. It felt too exposed and honest as it no longer had furniture to house or photos to illuminate, but instead blank walls with outlines of what used to be. The same windows, the same sun, but without her presence the light didn’t know where to land.
Choosing the things of Ganny’s that I wanted to keep, mostly her paintings to hang on my walls, carried a different weight. Her belongings hadn’t been gradually sorted or softened by time. They remained where she had left them, each object still holding the imprint of her last day and the shape of the moment it had last been touched.
In Ganny’s house, the light hadn’t changed at all. It fell through the windows the same way it must have the day before, stretching across the floor and warming the walls of her studio. It grazed the edges of unfinished canvases and got caught in the glass jars of cloudy paint water. Nothing about it suggested that anything had ended. The room held the same afternoon it always had. After all, the sunlight didn’t know she was gone.
After the house was empty, I drove past it. It was the first time I had ever been there by myself. I parked across the street and looked from afar. I peeked through the curtains waiting for Nonnie to unlock the many bolts on her back door, but knew she never would again. I sat and thought about how nothing would return to the way it once was, but knowing so made the memories that much more cherishable.
As tears formed in my eyes while staring at the house, I found it hard to believe that so much life used to fit inside.
The rooms within Nonnie’s house emptied slowly, the goodbye to an ongoing pain.
Every object under the unchanging sun was precious. A nightgown she often wore was still soft from years of washing. An open tab on her studio computer indicating her next creative endeavor. A stack of paintings she was planning to sell carefully leaning against each other along the wall.
I ran my fingers lightly across the ridges of dried paint on each canvas, the texture catching against my fingertips. She had been the last one to touch them.
Other rooms stay full of a life that has already ended, leaving those left behind to learn how to stand in it.
At one point I stepped outside for air. The afternoon was ordinary, cars passed down the street, a lawnmower whirred in the distance, birds moved through the trees. It was strange how normal everything felt beyond the walls of the house. The world carried on with its routine, while inside, every room was filled with silence. Standing there, I realized how small the space of grief can look from the outside and how invisible it is to anyone who isn’t in the room with you.
When my family and Ganny’s husband, my PawPaw, entered their house after she passed, it felt like stepping into a paused moment. The air inside was thick with stillness, the house itself holding its breath. Her recliner sat there with no one to sit in it. Her book was still open on her nightstand, glasses upright beside it. A painting that she never signed sat in her studio. Half-finished tasks were around the house, waiting for her to return.
But she wouldn’t.
Two grandmothers. Two kinds of goodbyes.
Rooms cleared with care. Belongings placed where they will be looked after. Lives folded gently into boxes and carried forward.
Memory doesn’t disappear, it changes shape. Love doesn’t end, it finds new places to live.
And sometimes, letting go looks a lot like holding on. ■
layout IAN SULLIVAN photographer MEADOW RILEY videographer SOPHIE SHAPIRO stylist DANI GOODLET set stylist MASON OUSLEY hmua JALYNN SHREPEE models LAUREN YUE & JOHN-ANTHONY BORSI
by CELESTE TOMBERLIN
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There is a house in the suburbs of East-Central Texas. It is only 20 years old, a mediumsized home tucked into a medium-sized town. The floor is glistening gray tile, even under the feet of a teenage boy and two small dogs. The carpet is soft and freshly vacuumed, beds neatly made with silk sheets and a plush green comforter. The open space echoes with emptiness — but there are remnants. Pieces of a home from across the country, from a time so long ago that memories are buried beneath thoughts of meetings and paperwork.
A man will come to this house at night, a house that is quiet and clean. He will shuffle down a dark hallway full of artifacts, his bedroom at the end. His grandmother’s thimble is framed on the wall, worn so deeply that the tip is in tatters. Black and white photographs of an uncle holding a fish, an old woman holding a baby. Fragments of a lifetime poles apart from this one.
When he climbs into bed and closes his eyes, he will float through the darkness. Burrowed deep into the back of his mind, he is still in the tobacco fields, lost between the stalks. Small bed in a small house. His big brother snoring nearby, the sound filling the room already thick with summer heat. He dreams of the pretty girl a few blocks over, dreams of fuzzy moments from the afternoon before, dreams of bicycling to the department store, dreams of the owner, Mr. Charles, peering through his dirty windows.
This place is Ocilla, Georgia. 2,500 people nestled in between fields of corn, cotton, and peanuts. Three hours south of Atlanta, one hour north of the Florida line. Everyone is connected here, pickup trucks kicking up orange clouds into the air as they fly down dirt roads, old women talking quietly in each other’s ears as they gossip in the produce aisle. There are no strangers. There are no secrets.
Skin tan and glistening, he soaks up the Georgia sun. It is mid-June, and the summer is just beginning. He is with his friends in a field of watermelon, rummaging through the foliage to cut the fruit free from the earth. Ocilla is an agricultural town. When they are not bicycling down its unpaved streets, they are tending to its soil.
Sweat dripping into his eyes, his body tenses with effort as he catches a melon tossed his way. The green shell splinters, and he is suddenly covered in mush. His friends double over in laughter — the fruit is rotten. Sticky from sweat and watermelon rot, he grins and throws the sweet-smelling guts in their direction. This is his world: crooked-tooth laughter and dirty fingernails. His heart is a warm Georgia summer.
Wincing, he picks at a splinter rooted in his palm. He is tucked high between the branches of rich green pine, a fort constructed by him and his buddies. It stretches across a collection of trees, their fortress away from their labor, away from the whispers of their neighbors and the laughter of their drunk uncles.
Gritting his teeth, he pulls the wood free from his calloused hand. It is eerily quiet, his friends asleep next to him. Even at night, he is sweating, the moisture a constant coat worn close.
He is thinking of his brother, tall, smooth-skinned, teeth straight and pearly white. They talked over dinner earlier that evening, a simple conversation about whether he should challenge himself educationally. His teacher advised against it. His brother did not.
“Don’t be like me,” he said. “Set your mind and don’t look back.”
Don’t be like me. A sentence so plain, so straightforward. But to be different from his brother is to reject Ocilla. His brother is magnetic.
He slipped into friendships easily, conversation absorbing him without any question, held gently by an intimate community. Held gently by a town bound together by generations, the son of a son of a son.
Here, hidden high in the trees, the memory of his brother’s words pull him from a daze. His friends are asleep beside him, huddled together, sweaty skin sticking to skin. He looks at where the splinter was, an angry red mark, and he feels it. Stowed away in the forest, he is still too close to his smalltown bubble. And it is suffocating.
Tall grass tickles his calves as heat radiates from the bonfire in front of him. Beer bottle cold in his hand, he peers past the growing flames and squints at the commotion in the distance.
But he did.
He may have left, he may have set his mind to it, but Ocilla follows him in waves. An evening where the sunset is particularly orange, a song on the radio, the smell of fried catfish, the voice of an old woman. For a moment, he’s there. Creaking floors, running water, a thin layer of sweat that is always lingering. It’s not something he can just forget, not something he can simply leave behind with no consequence. Just like the sweat that dampens his clothes every hot Georgia summer, it will always be with him. It will always be his home.
Even now, 40 years later, he holds everything close. The bitterness, the encouragement, the resentment, the smothering amount of love — it’s all become fuzzy. But it is still there. He acknowledges it when he can. Telling a story to his children over supper. Posting on Facebook, “Thinking of you, Ocilla, Georgia,” with a song attached. Visiting his mom, who lives in a new house in a suburban neighborhood. But even to reach her, to pull into her clean, pale concrete driveway, he has to drive by the fields of corn, cotton, and tobacco. He has to relive memories of sweat dripping down his back as he drinks cold water from the spigot, memories of pickup trucks flying down dirt roads, kicking up clouds of orange dust. ■
“Catch,” he yells, and then “throw,” and at finality he points at the first baseman like a grand conductor and tells him to catch the ball and end the World Series, and so he does.
layout NICK REYNA
by KATHERINE MANZ
1974 finds him in sawdust.
The hands jerk, crone-like, up over the head, as they always have, the body drops to the right-angled knee, and the shoulders pivot to facilitate the long diagonal sling of the arm. He pitches with his eyes shut, open, narrowed; from second base, from the outfield, halfway to home. He paints the corners out-of-hand for hours. And then again the moment the man steps into the batter’s box the ball becomes obstinate and awful, a screamer for blood.
Steve Blass learned to throw like any kid. He went to the park or he threw at a wall or at his friend, trying for the ever-faster dip and dive that makes a perfect pitch.
Today, 20 or a hundred wild pitches later, the coach says I don’t think this is working. Steve drives home, sits on the porch for two hours next to a warm beer. Then he goes to sleep and dreams a long dream.
The dream finds him childish again, a tall kid in baggy stockings throwing on instinct. The ball like a pureblood dove in his hand, flying home. Then everything shifts and the boy is a beaming young man in yellow and black, transplanted a decade to October 1971, where he’ll pitch the Pittsburgh Pirates to a World Series Championship.
To play baseball is to believe in oneself. More specifically, to play baseball is to believe you are better than him (the batter or pitcher), that motherfucker, and the infielders too, that you can poke a rolling single through the gap or con the batter into swinging through a high fastball, not just once, but again and again.
It takes 27 outs to win a baseball game. In Game seven, with 26 down, Blass wafts a slider outside that is hit hard down the
middle to the shortstop. “Catch,” he yells, and then “throw,” and at finality he points at the first baseman like a grand conductor and tells him to catch the ball and end the World Series, and so he does.
For several weeks he doesn’t stop smiling. He goes back to his hometown in rural Connecticut, where the leaves are vivid yellows and oranges. He smiles through the stage, the hand-shaking, the parade (just for him!), the huge unclouded sky above, and the delighted laughter of children.
He is near-perfect the next season, winning 19 games and dropping eight, allowing under 2.5 runs per nine innings. Blass’s skill is not in throwing hard. Under his tutelage, the ball will dip suddenly to draw the swing-and-miss, swerve toward the strike zone, or seem to slow as it approaches the batter, who can’t keep up. He swings too quickly; his bat goes flying. On the mound, the boy-pitcher turns and shakes out his legs, holding glove over face to mask a ridiculous smile.
The alarm goes off. The dream ends.
Steve turns his face into the pillow. It feels like a good day, arm beautifully unsore from the previous day’s beating. On a perfect day just like this, two years ago, he woke up and found that the pinpoint control he had built his pitching career on was gone.
In between that time and now are countless items thrown and broken, batters hit. Hypnotists, therapists, transcendental meditation, looser underwear, tipped and untipped baseball caps. Grief counseling. Nights at the bar. None of it explains what people now delicately call his “condition”: the overnight transformation from nine spectacular innings to win the World Series into a pitcher no one writes about except to pity, afflicted with the absolute and incurable inability to throw a strike.
“Bad day,” he said the first week, and then “bad month,” and then eventually he stopped talking at all, except to cut short any suggestion of giving up: “I love baseball,” he says, “It’s my life; I don’t know what I’d do without it.”
So it’s to the field again. Another 40 pitches to get the arm loose. He knows what a baseball looks like, has seen one every day since the genesis of his memory, and this is a good one — beat-up just enough to take a good grip. When he’s throwing it, he remembers what pitching used to feel like, and he’s in the prime of his life still, and he feels it in the clear ease of his joints. If he can figure it out, he can be a majorleaguer for another decade.
He always feels good at the start of the session. Tunnel vision, straight and true, the pitches bounding playfully into the catcher’s mitt. Today the coach turns to this kid Miguel, who’s trying to make it up in Pittsburgh, and tells him to get in there. He used to hide behind trees to get off Blass duty, but he’s here now in his uniform and helmet with his jaw set, a bruise barely visible past the tape on his wrist. Steve, who has just now thrown 40 major-league quality pitches, winds up and lets the ball go. He can tell before it leaves his hand that it’s going to get the kid on the ribs.
There is a dark pinhole you might peer into when a loved one is getting old and losing the function of their fingers or when a football player has taken too many collisions — a space where knowledge used to be. Here, 93 miles an hour skids sideways or down, exploding more dust into the air. The much-loved baseball looks curiously like a black hole.
At the end of the session, Miguel lets out a long breath and gets out of there. Steve sits in the bullpen for a long time, turning a too-big baseball in his hand, suppressing the childish urge to say IT’S NOT FAIR.
In February of 1975, two years after his pitching first betrayed him, Steve starts a spring training game against the Chicago White Sox. After he walks eight batters in three innings, after the manager comes to take him out, after the Sox
“His mind’s eye
finds it again: the single dandelion, yellow sunshine, wilting a little in the wind. Steve opens his eyes, and he sets, and he throws.”
manager calls it the saddest thing he’s ever seen in baseball, Steve will head to the manager’s office, and there he will give it up for good.
He will walk out of the ballpark hand-in-hand with his family, but he’ll drive to the cabin alone. That is where he’ll stay and drink and keep drinking, thinking about a major leaguer’s life and throwing a complete game and useless memories-become-dreams of winning the World Series, a leap of exultation, history. He’ll consider and reconsider his mechanics. He’ll never quit doing it; a year later he’s a class ring salesman, but he can’t help sometimes calling his high school pitching coach and saying, “Do you mind if I come over and try again?”
He’s just 33. The catcher’s mitt retains the ball’s hollow like a fond smile — I remember you — the smell of leather — the crisp spring sunset. With the same mechanics as he had at 15, Steve reaches back, steps forward, and throws.
The ball hits the high-school bat boy, crumples him, cradling his wrist. He yelps, “I’m okay!”
Jesus fucking Christ. The kid pities him.
Steve doesn’t wait until it’s dark this time. He hands the ball over, the motion now practiced, and he says, “I’m done.”
These five years of agony, of course, mean nothing; baseball isn’t done with him. Steve becomes an announcer, learns to work in media boxes and talk baseball in broad strokes. Three decades on, a short, friendly man trots across the field towards him and says, “Hi. I’m Richard Crowley. I’m a sports psychologist.”
It takes 90 minutes of replacing bad images with the good — red awful hushed silence batter jumping out of the way, screaming — becomes daffodil, becomes children tossing underhand — it takes 90 minutes, and he can throw again. He can’t stand how easy it is. At 56, he considers trying out for an Independent League team. He doesn’t. But he could.
But someday he is in his rocking chair in sunnier weather in clean Arizona. The paint is flaking. The picture they still look at — Steve Blass, winning pitcher, in absolute inexplicable clean-nosed jubilation — is up on the wall, and these days he can even stand it.
All the years pouring by like dirty water. Today, at 83, he stands up to pitch. His mind’s eye finds it again: the single dandelion, yellow sunshine, wilting a little in the wind. Steve opens his eyes, and he sets, and he throws. ■
by KATHERINE PAGE
layout GIANINA FAELNAR photographer JOSEPH CHUNGA PIZARRO
videographer COLE HAWKINS stylists AIDAN CROWL & SORA AHMAD
set stylist EMILY ZAMORA hmua KAREN SOLIS nails KATHYA
models CHELSEA NYATENYA, ISABELLA BRAGA & KAIMANA C
Acamera pans to a blond man standing in a Roman bath, gazing upon a graffiticovered wall. He is wrapped in a dirt colored chiton. He is talking to himself. Encolpius. He is talking about his lost lover, Giton. Another man enters. Ascyltus. He is hiding in the shadows, drenched in sweat, rolling around in the dirt, and recalling the tale of how he stole Giton out from under Encolpius. The two encounter each other upon a large stone staircase. They immediately exchange blows.
When imagining Rome, there is a specific image that has likely been forced into the mind: white polished stone, marble columns, statues with expressive, vivid faces, men huddled together in a Senate room, clad in togas. In the center, one man speaks with booming, senatorial authority. An idea of Western exceptionalism. A learned society. A romanticized version, to appease the lovers of the “past.”
In reality, the zeitgeist of Rome could best be described with the scene of Encolpius and Giton. Two men. Encolpius and Ascyltus. Sweaty. Angry. They scream and yell, exchanging blows amidst a bathroom of naked men. The sound of slapping skin reverberates in the room. Ascyltus locks his opponent’s neck in the crook of his elbow. Encolpius breaks free. They grapple with each other, shove each other, landing on the floor in a wrathful, raving heap: all over their shared “lover,” Giton, a young boy who
can best be described as a sex slave.
This scene, and the context of it, feels suffocating. It is suffocating physically. The sequence is too close, too loud, and too sensual. The lack of distance and the focus on skin make the audience feel dirty. It replaces the clean, intellectual idea of Rome. The men dirty themselves over the honor of owning a boy. It reflects their position as citizens. In starting his movie this way, Fellini pushes against the idea of order and pristine marble representing Rome. He exposes its friction through the friction of the struggle.
Giton is introduced to the audience only a couple of minutes after the fight. Encolpius finds out he was sold to an actor, and then discovers his “lover” performing in the Emperor’s Miracle — a play. An uneasy fanfare drowns the scene as this actor, Vernacchio, appears.
His backdrop is an eerie stone slab, with cracks engulfing it. Vernacchio is clad in a swinish, pink costume. He is a pig — uncomfortably pink. He has on pink blush, a pink mask, a swishing tale. He places a fly on his tongue and eats it. Another curtain is drawn, a mime appears, and a prostitute enters the room, offering herself to the crowd. The men in the crowd bark at her. They are dogs. The camera immediately cuts back to the stage, abandoning the story of the lupa. A slave enters the stage, Vernacchio chops his hand off with an axe, and replaces it with a fake golden one.
Finally, finally, Giton enters. Fake clouds part a reveal the young boy. He is dressed as Eros — Cupid — with a gold wreath, gold bow, and a clean, pristine white toga.
What is startling about this scene, beyond the
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purposeful shock value, is that the director of Satyricon, Fellini, completely fabricated it. The original version of Satyricon was written in the first century AD by Gaius Petronius, a courtier in the Roman court. In his version, there is no such thing as the Emperor’s Miracle There is no Vernacchio. There is no dismemberment. Giton is not costumed as Eros. In fact, in the original, Giton is not even suggested to be a slave or even to lack autonomy. Despite being a boy and his lover a man, the inherent power structures between them are hardly acknowledged in the original version. Yet Fellini is obsessed with it.
Fellini lived in Rome for all of his adult life, from the 1930s to his death in the 1990s. In all likelihood, he visited Roman ruins, or he encountered them in his day-to-day. An old Italian man, cigarette in hand, looking at the brokendown stone through Western society’s picturesque lens. The way that we are all taught to think of the city of Rome.
Fellini can hear the wind as it whips through the columns. The forum in the afternoon is equally quiet and loud. Tourists meander about thoughtlessly, talking and laughing in hushed tones as if the ruins were a museum. The plastic plaques make it seem like one, standing out against the limestone and tufa. The chain-linked boundaries — the ones that separate you from the more fragile areas — are juxtaposed against the gravel and dust. Fellini notices this contrast. He sees the space’s fragmentary nature. The ruins inundate a false sense of understanding. They fill the visitor’s heads with halfbaked, incomplete stories of the past. They only show the best of the best — the parts of Roman society that were deliberate enough to be preserved
Fellini, then, is forced to fill the gaps of history. He can piece together a narrative from Petronius — his version is fragmented too — but so much has been lost. And thus, the cracks in Rome we fill with pristine white marble. In the director’s chair, he fabricates a new scene of Rome: a labyrinth.
Encolpius is back on screen. He has lost Giton again. He enters the Labryinth,
aiming to play the hero. He will slay the gladiator, meant to represent the Minotaur, and appease the gods. The scene is composed of beige walls that extend endlessly down a forboding path. The place feels suffocated and obscured as Encolpius kicks up dust during his trek. Narrow halls engulf the man. He moves cautiously through the space, gripping onto his source of light.
Eventually, Encolpius does meet the gladiator who is clad in a large, horned helmet. He will not win this fight. He is scrawny and pathetic. As Encolpius begs for his life, the gladiator is moved by his eloquence in speech, deciding to spare him.
“This is the speech of an educated young man,” he says. “I won’t kill him.”
Swiftly, the crowd erupts into laughter — satiated — and gifts Encolpius a young woman to lie with. He does.
The Labryinth scene feels almost comforting. Or, at least, it does when juxtaposed with the fly-eating pig man. The narrative is more “correct” and better fits our contemporary understanding of Rome. Encolpius is a hero through learnedness, despite being unable to fight. His actions are rewarded with a beautiful woman. He is the paradigm of the Western ideal. Power through education. Power through status.
Fellini asks the viewer to lean into the heroic myth. But he also asks us to lean into the chaos. The oscillation is intentional. A chaotic feeling that takes advantage of idealization. This is how Fellini wants Rome to exist. This is likely how it actually existed. Satyricon forces its viewer to face theatrical reality, to be a witness to this intervention, and understand Rome as we imagine it as an invention. We imagine senators where there were bodies. Philosophy where there was hunger. Order where there was noise, panem, et circenses. ■
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Scan for SATYRICON video.
layout EMMY CHEN
by ASIYAH SULTANA
An unstoppable force cannot coexist with an immovable object. One must give.
When a nuclear reactor explodes, a horrific scene unfolds. Firestorm blossoms bright against darkness, streaks of electric blue light snaking through the sky. Radioactivity penetrates the surrounding areas, contaminating hometowns.
Within days, the bordering neighborhoods are evacuated. Families say goodbyes to the homes that held late-night laughter and proof of love. Routines of playing in backyards and exchanging small talk over dinner will be cemented into history. It will not be long until these cities are ghost towns. Vacant ferris wheels and playgrounds suspended in time forever, the only proof of the humanity that once resided there.
The tragedy is etched into memory: the explosion and the aftermath, the evacuation and the emptiness. It is the closing chapter to a once beautiful story, residents leaving behind the community they loved.
The force of radiation is unstoppable; it wins. It has destroyed hometowns, and humans have no option but to move.
That is the end; it cannot be rewritten.
I do not dread saying goodbye to home.
I spent my childhood excitedly counting down the days until college move-in day, the deadline that would save me. I was exhausted by the criticisms that echoed throughout my house: my personality was too loud for dinner parties, my clumsiness improper. My religiosity was too unstable instead of strong, my clothing too colorful instead of modest. My parents did not approve of my lovers, and my heart closed each time I walked through the front door.
Home was too small to hold me, so I relished in visions of a new place. When that day did come, blazing August heat beating on me as I hauled
belongings to my dorm, I thought I had finally gotten it right. I did not mind the strain in my arms or the ache of my sunbaked skin. Instead, with each box I picked up, I felt lighter and lighter.
And yet, mere months later, the heartache found me again. It sank back in as the bus neared my hometown, taking me back for the holidays. It was my first time returning. Until then, it had not occurred to me that I was not truly free of home’s force.
I pressed my head to the cold glass of the window as the same sight greeted me: my balmy suburb tucked halfway between the airport and amusement park, every coffee shop and motel the same as it was five years ago. I watched the same streets flash through my vision in streaks of muted color, and suddenly I felt the same as I did five years ago too.
I closed my eyes and tried to picture small droplets of joy — walks around the cul-de-sac after dinner, my neighbors’ Christmas lights pressing color into the early night. Skinned knees and popsicle stains dotting curbsides, evenings tinted tangerine orange, childhood friends, the remnants of radiance, disintegrated permanently now.
The memories were beautiful, yet they offered no comfort. They were contaminated by trauma and conflict and despite what I told myself, I knew coming back would never change circumstances.
The bus halted to a stop, and I began to worry. Was this my fate? The house I grew up in, the family I feel like an imposter around. Perhaps I would die with it all. I ached to leave it for good, but that felt unthinkable.
My past called me back, and I was powerless against it. I had to answer it.
Weeks after the evacuation, a handful of older women do the unthinkable: return. They walk defiantly back to the villages that protected them, push back against the bars of barbed wire and the urges of government officials. These women self-settle in the exclusion zone.
“Ten years living in safety is worth less than three years living close to what fuels the heart.”
They do not see it as the grounds of the world’s worst nuclear disaster, something to be afraid of. They peer through the contamination and recognize the same charm of their ancestral ties, the motherland that nurtured them.
Outside, the rest of the world buzzes on. They pay no mind to the women thriving through radiating rainfall. Authorities give up on forcing them out and formulate a deal: that they will leave the women alone as long as they are above child-bearing age. The women get to stay.
Risk is subjective, and no danger measures up to the charm of home. Ten years living in safety is worth less than three years living close to what fuels the heart.
This past winter, years after the first return, I did not cry when I walked through the front door. I slipped into my old bed and finally did not feel 15 again.
Over dinner one night, my mom made a throwaway comment about my lack of religiosity. Her words were barely a whisper and yet, it revealed to me a truth I had been too scared to face. This place would only continue to cage me. It would never match who I wanted to be. I had to chase that person myself.
With that finality, I felt a new blaze in my bones. I did not respond to her, but a new promise bloomed in my mind, that my visits back home would dwindle down, fewer and far between. Someday, I will never have to return to this Texas suburb.
I passed that summer scrolling stock images of dazzling cities, each one burning brighter than the last. Nights brought dreams in colorful flashes, visions of wandering the world, no longer tied down by this house.
For too long, it threatened to stand in my way, but I
will not let it be immovable. I will not let it rewrite my destiny.
I could never identify whether bravery lied in staying or running, if it is more admirable to leave or return. As I piece together my future, I find it is neither. I see the greatest strength in persistence, in defiance in the face of being told where to go.
That persistence drives humanity, and I find it again when working on the first major grade of my spring semester, a report on the disaster of Chernobyl. In my frantic research on technological failure, I stumbled across a quiet fragment of history: a documentary about elderly women that returned. Motherland called to them in the face of chaos. It is their revolution, their personal resistance.
I am still in search of that everlasting, persisting thing. I burn to find it, to live a life that calls me so strongly I defy every other force to hold on to it.
Years after destruction struck Chernobyl, this remains, the spirit of a scattered sisterhood. The immovable objects: old women throwing together meals from welltended farmland, humming the same stories and songs under their breath.
They took extraordinary measures to carry on with their ordinary lives, aware yet not frightful that they linger on contaminated Earth. Their husbands die off; their old neighbors wander through a new world they will never encounter and still, they persist.
Radiation is terrifying, but not worse than dying with the wrong fate.
They were told this place was unsafe to ever return to, but they did not listen to law. Against such a powerful force, they remained immovable. They crafted their own destiny. ■
layout ARMAAN NOORMOHAMED creative director VANI SHAH
photographer TAI CERULLI stylist AIDAN VU hmua JANHAVI
LALWANI model GAIL CHOVAN
by JENNIFER WANG
She is a builder. and the world is her workshop.
“It is continuing, it is remaining. Maybe the present doesn’t remain, but the objectcan remain.”
When Gail Chovan said she always wanted to be a forest ranger, it sounded like a non-sequitur.
I’m sitting across from a woman (metaphorically, through my computer screen) who has a tattoo in French, multiple master’s degrees, and a sewing studio in a 19th century farmhouse on the outskirts of Paris, France. A forest ranger? But then she explained: she’s always been one to climb trees, build sheds, and make something out of nature. She’s a builder in every sense of the word, and it’s something she takes pride in.
“I consider myself a builder,” she said as a correction when the word “designer” was brought up. “I always say I want to make or to construct beauty.”
For Gail, that distinction matters — anyone can design a T-shirt, she said. But not everyone can make clothing that resembles art. To her, creating fashion is no less rigorous than cooking. Just as chefs make their dishes from a recipe, she starts her pieces with raw material and works forward, one decision at a time.
“Clothing, food, shelter are three things we as humans need — and somehow we reduce clothing to being almost trivial,” she said. “I think there is a recipe for it.”
Gail grew up in New Jersey during the ‘60s and ‘70s as a kid who didn’t believe in limitations to creativity. She drew cells and frogs by hand, briefly certain she’d become a medical illustrator. She picked French as her required foreign language, confident in her own abilities to master what others deemed as the hardest of the options.
“I really like the game of a language, just like I like the game of putting together clothing,” she said. “So always kind of a constructivist approach to things.”
In high school, her French teacher took their class on a trip to Paris. It was there when Gail truly fell in love with the language. “I liked the way my brain worked when I was there,” she said.
Her infatuation eventually parlayed into her undergraduate studies, where she pursued a degree in French literature in Paris. Between the language and the city, she started considering fashion as a career.
“I thought, ‘I can do this. I can teach myself to sew,’” she said, shrugging as if it wasn’t a complete pivot from her original studies. “I moved back from Paris and got a sewing machine and just started teaching myself.”
Gail had decided early on there were no bounds to what she couldn’t do. A few years later, she found herself back in Paris — this time for a degree in apparel design. She stayed for years, showed her own line, before returning to the United States to understand the business side of things.
In 2003, Gail founded her first and only boutique on South Congress of Austin, Texas: Blackmail. The defining feature of her shop was obvious to anyone who walked through its doors — everything the boutique carried on its racks was black. On the walls, there is a quote by the French poet Paul Valéry: the dark is not so dark.
The quote also lives on the skin of Gail’s two forearms as tattoos; one arm in the original French, another in the translated English. The French words rolled smoothly off her practiced tongue as she explained its significance to me: she put up the quote in her shop long before her daughter was born blind and autistic, but afterward, the quote bore new weight.
“She’ll tell you she sees everything,” she said. “The dark is not so dark.”
It was Gail’s daughter who inspired her to pursue her most recent degree: a master’s in museum studies at Harvard, with a focus on multisensory approaches to fashion exhibitions. She wanted to understand the tangibility of art for her daughter, and it was what inspired one of her favorite installations: No Trace of Now Will Remain.
No Trace of Now Will Remain is mounted at Women & Their Work, an Austin art gallery that had never exhibited fashion before. Gail’s installation defies conventionality in everything from its visual impressions
“I decided I would only make work when I was ready to express myself. Notonacalendar.”
to its material composition; there are humanoid arms sprawled out from under ballgowns and tufts of human hair hanging from bodices. To make this, Gail not only created garments, but also painted chairs white, took locks of her son’s hair, and even buried a straitjacket in the mud of her front yard.
“The name of No Trace of Now Will Remain is kind of ironic because of course, it’s material culture,” she said, laughing. “It is continuing, it is remaining. Maybe the present doesn’t remain, but the object can remain.”
And Gail carries that sentiment with her in all aspects of her life. She shut down Blackmail after 21 years after she took a teaching job at UT, just before the COVID-19 pandemic hit. Between being a mother, a shopkeeper, a designer, and professor, there was just too much on her plate. But she doesn’t see it as a loss — she saw herself breaking free from the constraints of seasonal fashion.
“I needed to take a break,” she said. “And I decided I would only make work when I was ready to express myself. Not on a calendar.”
Her next show is already mapped out: a collection launching in October 2027, built entirely from only two pattern pieces. Every garment in the collection (approximately 20 variations) will be sewn from the same shapes, folded or altered or embellished differently, in different fabrics, at different lengths. The garment will shift with whoever is wearing it, yet at the end of the day it all exists from the same two patterns.
“We are all more the same than different,” she said, nodding as she considered her artistic message. “It’s a trick.”
This summer, Gail is spending three months in France for her new project: a two week fashion residency at her home outside Paris, a 19th century house where she has converted the attic into a sewing workshop. Seven students will travel with her, make work, and stage a show in the village by the end of it.
When she returns, she wants to drop a studio pod in the backyard. Her husband, who is a neon sign builder, will probably build it. (“We both make patterns,” she said, explaining how they understand each other. “We figured that out very early on.”)
She has no regrets. Not about closing the shop, or her many degrees — which she jokes she’ll combine one day in a cocktail shaker and pour out as a doctorate. Not about the decades-long detour through language and literature before she settled on picking up the needle. If anything, her winding path is proof of her stubborn drive to make the world hers. She is a builder, and the world is her workshop.
“Keep creating,” she says, when asked what she’d tell her younger self. Then, with a smile tugging at the corners of her lips: “And never give up on fighting the patriarchy.” ■
by SRIKHA CHAGANTI
layout ANDY KANG photographer ANTHONY NGUYEN stylists
TALY PERALTA & ANDROMEDA ROVILLAIN hmua SRIKHA
CHAGANTI model FRANKLIN TRINH spark
By the end of the hour, I’m not sure if there is truly something special about that chair, or really any chair I’ve sat in thus far, but they have each taught me how to think.
As I walk on the extreme downhill that is the path to the math building from my apartment, excitement seeps into my veins. It is Wednesday, and I’m meeting with my thesis advisor. The 10th floor, where her office sits, is exponentially quieter than the lower parts of the building. There aren’t many people here, but the hallway is lined with open office doors, each projecting quiet murmurs that graze my ears as I walk past. At around 11:02 a.m., I watch a PhD student with glowing eyes, a stack of paper, and a coffee cup walk out of her door.
I take his seat and it feels like there’s something special about that chair. The cracking faux leather ignites something within me that I have been chasing all week. Her office is cluttered and rainbow, but it’s impossible to get distracted. It’s because it doesn’t matter what lies around us — I know I’m going to have fun regardless. We tug and scratch at the loose pile of copy paper on the discussion table, feeling animalistic but calm. Like every other awry door on the floor, we too become filled to the brim with thought, overspilling just barely into the hallway.
My thesis is on knot theory, a subject that studies circles tangled in ways that are often impossible in our three dimensions. I think about the different papers I read that week, each written as a result of a thought experiment similar to our current one. My questions and explanations slide down from my brain and spill
off my tongue. She replies, pulling her answers from pure reasoning. We’re working only with what we know and understand, and it’s exhilarating.
At times, it feels like I’m stuck. She draws a whirlwind representation of something incomprehensible and probes my understanding. I tap my foot on the tile faster, and honestly, I wish I could ask for the answer. But there isn’t anywhere to look. The questions are still open, and the hypotheticals we’ve proposed are abstract in their entirety. This does feel like the beauty of it all, though; there is nobody waiting for the answer. Our subject is immortal, because it lives on soundly in our minds. I smile at the thought.
The time passes quickly. My backpack is untouched, and her tea, as always, is full and now cold. By the end of the hour, I’m not sure if there is truly something special about that chair, or really any chair I’ve sat in thus far, but they have each taught me how to think. I don’t feel ready to leave.
After the meeting is over, I walk out of the building, bracing myself for what the weather will bring. It is finally my turn to cross the street and I pedal up the now-uphill path, reminiscing. That conversation is a regular game we play, and the Hagoromo chalk dust on my fingers stays as a reminder. Each thing we make sense of, each point we score, feels strong.
“We too become filled to the brim with thought, overspilling just barely into the hallway.”
I want to tell my girlfriend about the math I learned. I know not much will come across apart from my eagerness. I also know she will listen anyway. Unable to resist the urge, I still text her at the next red light, knowing it’s more or less useless to her. “meeting was so awesome today.” I so desperately want to share. But I know that in these sessions, the problems we work on offer no immediate practicality to anyone but ourselves. In fact, they reside in a universe created by the subject itself. Still, they strike a satisfaction that only something entirely crafted by human ingenuity can reach.
I leave the bike and walk with a certainty to my steps. There is a dominance that reaches to the balls of your feet and your fingertips when you realize you’ve done something yourself. Regardless of how difficult it was or how long it took, it’s untouchable. No matter how far someone else stretches, muscles contorting and spine cracking, they can’t pull it away.
***
I reach my apartment and kick my shoes off. My clothes form a pile on the bathroom floor.
I’m taking a shower, and I turn the knob as far left as it will go. It is unnecessarily hot, and definitely bad for my skin. My Wednesdays are always swimming in motivation, post noon. The water turns to steam as soon as it hits my back, but the morning has given me so much to think about, I don’t realize. More important than the mathematics that were discussed is the sudden increase in consciousness I seem to gain each week. Like a regularly recorded mile time, I can evaluate my mental performance. I know so much more, but I’m stupider than I was last year. At least it feels that way. Not in a selfdeprecating way, but staring at the water running down my legs, I realize how much I don’t know. I don’t know quantum physics or capital markets, but I also don’t know everything I want out of my life. It doesn’t upset me. I wash the lavender chamomile shower gel off with a sense of satisfaction and turn the water off for the sake of the environment.
As I step out of the shower, my reflection is no longer visible in the mirror. I step over the pile of clothes I left on the ground. My forearm wipes away the fog hiding my face. I stare into my own eyes. Sometimes, it feels like my increasing awareness of my unintelligence should hinder the extent to which I dream. This time, instead of the faux leather black chair, I sit on the edge of my bed. I still think of all the chances I want, and people I long for, and places I dream of. And I realize I still have control, in the same way I have control over my intangible math problems from this morning.
I’ve heard that some drugs make people feel like the king of the world. The feeling I get when I remember this is only second to that, probably. I feel like the king of my life. Maybe not a good king, maybe a struggling king, but a king that can’t be overthrown. A confident monarch, who knows everything is up to him. Still on the edge of my bed, I kick my feet, willing the hair stuck to my neck to dry faster.
Wrapped in my extra large towel, I think about what I need to finish today. I’m meant to go home this weekend. Only for a few days, but that means three days of work needs to be done today. Nothing gets done at home.
At home (home-home this weekend, with my parents), there are lots of different chairs. Downstairs, there are the six wooden chairs lining the dining table and the white fabric couch. There are all the different desk chairs, some with wheels. Upstairs, there are the movie room recliners, and finally the orange suede rocking chairs with no legs. With so many places to sit and think, you would think I would get more of that done there. Instead, they spark uncertainty and doubt. Sure, they aren’t that black leather chair, surrounded by chalkboards and motivation. But
they are chairs, regardless. If I feel like myself in the shower, on the edge of my bed, in random campus chairs, what could possibly be different about home?
It wasn’t until this trip home that I began to realize why — I’ve spent the few days essentially unconscious. I am out of practice. I feel like an athlete on the decline. I feel like a corrupt king controlled by puppeteers. Rocking back and forth on the legless chairs, I force myself to do something selfmade. I look at the title of a paper I’ve been meaning to read for the last week, and I can’t make sense of it for the third time. “On Conway mutation and link homology.” After a five day break turning my mind off, it suddenly feels like sprinting up that uphill. I try to journal, but I haven’t noticed anything new about myself. I really want to stop, or I want it to feel powerful again; I’m longing for the faux leather chair from my advisor’s office again.
With any agency I had seemingly gone, I feel frustrated how easily it slipped from my grasp. I realize what each of the places I’ve sat offered me, and the importance of exercising and creating with my mind. With the ruin of everything else, I could still go back to myself. I pick up my pen and will it to come back. ■
esdropper
by CALEB MORROW
layout MELISSA HUANG photographer RHYS GRADY videographers
hmua ANISHA DESAI & SARAH DAVID nails DIAMOND TRAN models AMYAN TRAN, CARYS VALDEZ & MIA-KATHERINE TUCKER
“There are times when life gives me no choice but to give
It was a day we were determined to keep ourselves together, so we went to a place where there were bound to be dogs. To the left and to the right and behind and all around us, tails wagged carelessly. We could be alright in a place like that. We could manage.
Before we’d sat down on the grass patch, everything that day had gone wrong. I angered easily at the littlest things, thought it was one of those times where you just needed to eat, but that was too lazy a remedy. I wouldn’t be able to quite point out what was frustrating me in an interrogation room. Hell, it could’ve been anything.
Then, sunlight pierced through mid-January. It was the calm before the annual ice storm, when everything shuts down for 24 hours, permitting everyone to do their best impression of cozy. A single beach volleyball was left unattended. I text Bashar that it’s waiting for us; he tells me his initial instinct is to say I’m OK, but on second thought, this year is supposed to be our year of Yes. Dogs had determined they could confide in me, at least for today, and I learned from easygoing, middle-aged men that their puppies’ names are Murphy, Charles, etc. One of the dogs plays fetch with me, scooting the ball closer towards me with uncertainty before retreating strategically, waiting to pounce. That dog’s name I never learned.
Occasionally, someone would catch me looking at them and smile. I note something down in my journal, probably about how the dogs’ owners seem to be looking to socialize just as much as their pets are. Bashar asks if he can read it; he sees his name. I laugh a little shyly and close the journal. The dog is eager to fetch again.
This moment is airy, carefree. I’m reminded of Clairo giggling in the back of “Second Nature.”
The unnerved feeling that’s lingered all day finally subsides. There are times when life gives me no choice but to give in, wave the
white flag and let the ambience settle itself around me. I’d be an amateur not to surrender.
II. It felt less like a student film showcase and more like a chance to listen in on other people’s dreams. The first student film came on — about a future where Earth found itself out of time and humanity stumbled upon another planet with the potential to sustain life. It was a worldaltering animated short, only three minutes long. It felt as though I was the only person in the theater to fully grasp what the director had just pulled off. The project was quickly swept away as other waves pulled in. A sentimental short about a director’s mother and grandmother, who had been at odds for a couple of years. Next, a film about an Uber Eats delivery man, a familiar face to any West Campus frequenter.
Realities merged and overlapped for an hour until the showcase ended. My friend and I left feeling bittersweet; it’s sensational what our peers can do, but why haven’t we come up with something to call our own yet? When would we invite people into our world rather than intrude on the ideations of others?
I don’t mind if it’s not yet our turn. The films in tandem brought me out of myself, and what more can a mere observer ask for?
in, wave the white flag and let the ambience settle itself around me. I’d be an amateur not to surrender.”
The place we all find ourselves most frequently is in our heads. Reality has a way of unraveling and looking more ambiguous than usual if our minds are too self-centered to etch out life’s bigger picture. We’re only able to make sense of ourselves when we reflect on where we stand against a wider backdrop.
So I will continue eavesdropping on the stories other people tell. Listening, after all, is a surefire way to feel whole again.
“We’re only able to make sense of ourselves
when we reflect on where we stand against a wider backdrop.”
III. Sunday, my roommate’s kitten, sits on the windowsill. This is the place I find myself pitying her the most. Look, but don’t touch. How dreary it must be to not touch, I think initially. But then I remember how mesmerizing it is to simply observe, and then I don’t feel so bad anymore.
IV. This is the busiest I’ve ever seen the place, and rightfully so, I think. It is such a beautiful day that later, I impulsively go on an eight mile run and stop to take a picture of a graffitied pigeon urging all trailgoers to show themselves some kindness. “Doses and Mimosas” is playing from a faraway frat house. A party underneath me plays a Team 10 song, from the YouTube era where brother was pitted against brother. From here, the neighborhood’s every murmur is amplified. Presumably a frat guy is on the phone next to me. He seems earnest in his attempt to understand some academic material. It’s only the second week of the semester, and he already sounds exasperated. I wonder if he is made angrier at the fact that Logan Paul’s voice is echoing beneath him while his brothers unwind poolside. He leaves.
Two girls come up, and one takes a picture of the other. The girl whose photo was taken declares she must get that photo immediately, that this is the best picture you’ve ever taken of me! It is not hyperbole, I decide. My current favorite picture of myself was also on this rooftop; it was my first picture on Tinder during my short-lived attempt to dabble in vulnerability. The two girls leave as quickly as they appeared.
“Look, but don‘t
Three guys come up next, and I zone out to the sound of their conversation. I jot down in my notebook how I love the way sunlight feels on my legs, how I’m basically wearing something paparazzi would catch Paul Mescal in when he’s out for a run. The guys talk about their body counts, loud enough where I can hear every number perfectly. I think it’s wonderful that I either seem harmless or distracted enough to permit such noise, or maybe they simply do not care at all. Whatever the reality, I let myself feel special.
There has always been a magic about this place, which would explain why both the girl and I had the best picture of ourselves taken up here. It would also explain why once, on this very rooftop, two strangers lay flat on their backs, their heads touching, blindfolded, performing some kind of giggly ritual. I look over and see that one of them has brought a book up with them, and I’m able to make out the letters M-A-G–I-C-I-A. When the guys talking about their body counts first came up here, one of them yelped about a chair’s static stinging him. He says that when he comes up here, he’s always electrified. I struggle to find a better way of describing the sensation.
No matter how electric it may have been, magic has the tendency to end abruptly, with no warning at all. By now, I know better than to argue with magic. I accept the sensation when it’s willing to reveal itself and simply wait for it to make its rounds again. The guys start to call women bitches; they obstruct their own momentum. I feel enchantment dissipate between my fingers. One must always wager the risk of being exasperated by the environment they initially wished to eavesdrop on. One of the boys calls his friends goons, perhaps in a last ditch effort to save himself from the eavesdroppers’ wrath. I get ready to leave. Even the happiest fairytales have to end. ■
layout EMMY CHEN creative director VANI SHAH photographer TRAVIS DUONG videographer LARRY LIU stylists AIDAN VU & GRECIA DEL BOSQUE hmua ISHA MANJUNATH nails ISHA MANJUNATH
