The Invisible Hand by EM Mag

EM THE INVISIBLE HAND

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EDITOR-IN-CHIEF Eileen Polat

EDITORIAL DIRECTOR Matt McKinzie

MANAGING EDITOR Riddhima Dave

ASSISTANT MANAGING EDITOR Emily Curtis

PHOTO DIRECTOR Callie Kennedy

DIGITAL & PRINT DESIGN DIRECTOR Haley Brown

DIGITAL & PRINT DESIGN ASSISTANT Daria Shulga

DIGITAL & PRINT DESIGN ASSISTANT Sophia Boyce

VISUAL ARTS DIRECTOR Queenn McKend

STYLING DIRECTOR Serino Nakayama

STYLING ASSISTANT Gloria Cao

MARKETING MANAGER Jilly Townsen

MARKETING MANAGER Emily Curtis

EDITORIAL

Alyssa Lara Leah Heath Carlene McGoldrick Rory Willard Erin Christie Meredith Stisser Brittany Adames Jack Loney Sofia Olsson

PHOTO

Ellie Bonifant Eloise Parisi Ian Hamilton Carlene McGoldrick Gardener Reed Callie Kennedy Harry Li

BTS PHOTO Fay Ishac Thaler Bishop Yongze Wang Elizabeth Fuire

VISUAL

Kaitlyn Joyner Nadezhda Ryan Olivia Watry Jessica Cilvio

STYLING

Mike Figueriredo

TABLE OF CONTENTS

12 22 28 The Invisible Hand That Bags Your Groceries

Making Soup, And Other Fantasies

The True “True Love”

32 44 54 I Lost My Hand

Who Are We Hiding From?

For Ellen

64 72 78 Pen Pals

The Hand of God

Mourning A Deathless Body

Editor’s Note “[A] proud and unfeeling landlord views his extensive fields, and without a thought for the wants of his brethren, in imagination consumes himself the whole harvest … [Yet] the capacity of his stomach bears no proportion to the immensity of his desires … the rest he will be obliged to distribute among [the rest].”

—Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759)

The idea of the “Invisible Hand” refers, in human society, to “the unintended social benefits of an individual’s self-interested actions.” Through Smith’s underpinnings, people will be viewed and treated as “honorable beings” from the members of their community. Smith’s theory inhabits an optimistic worldview, in which individual action will result in the well-being of everyone. Of course, in our modern capitalist society, we see how individual and self-serving action has resulted in the affluence of a few and the suffering and exploitation of the proletariat majority. When was this theory reverted from genuinely acting for the needs of public interest? This question begs us to imagine the different, and better, world Smith once purported. We see small examples of the “invisible hand” — and in general, a community-minded “pay it forward” ethos — in our daily lives. Whether it be picking litter off the beach, or those nice folks who paid for your coffee in the drive-thru line: a chain of goodwill you uphold when you pay for the coffee of the person in line behind you.

How do we exercise the individual and collective “invisible hand” in other aspects? At school? In the art we make? In our current or prospective careers? In strengthening relationships with everyone from our past lovers to the gas station attendant we just met? Additionally, could we ever reach this romanticized state, or at the very least, collectively, adequately try? A society of communal well-being where everyone’s individual needs are met? Where we all, in a sense, and for each other, habitually “pay it forward?” Ultimately, how do we contextualize our lives, our work, and our actions in the individual and collective day-to-day? How do we operate as individuals in a communal setting? What do we do, at the end of the day, that won’t other others? Amid our current societal ills — police and state-sanctioned violence, the COVID-19 pandemic, gender reveal parties causing detrimental wildfires — there has never been a more important time to consider such a theory. In conjunction, this issue serves as our wistful time capsule. The “invisible hand” is open to interpretation. This semester on EM, we are examining Smith’s theory through the broadest possible lens, reflected and refracted through our own very unique and personal epistemologies and lived experiences.

October 28, 2020 WORDS Eileen Polat EDITOR Matt McKinzie VISUALS Callie Kennedy

Endnotes

Smith, Adam. The Theory of Moral Sentiments. London, A. Millar; A. Kincaid and J. Bell: Edinburgh, 1759.

The Invisible Hand That Bags Your Groceries

WORDS Sofia Olsson PHOTO Eloise Parisi MODEL Stephanie Cuomo PHOTO EDITOR Loren Yeung

My hands weren’t invisible for a long time.

I would often think about what my hands were going to look like and if other people would be looking at them. I scheduled the application of my CVS press-on nails around my work schedule, because I knew if I put them on at work, there was a good chance I would lose a nail in someone’s grocery bag. I was careful not to drop anything as I transferred groceries from the cart to the conveyor belt; my hands learned to not embarrass me. Fresh bread, peaches, cardboard egg cartons flimsy from refrigeration, the thin tinfoil coverings on individual yogurt cups — these are the items my hands were cautious of. The thousands of papercuts from the rough edges of paper bags — my hands were grateful for these, because at least they didn’t ask for plastic. They only disappeared for a moment, arranging, fixing, playing 3-D Tetris within the confines of the grocery bag, but once again my hands became visible to grab the next item.

I gave my legs a moment of rest as I gripped the handle of the shopping cart which soon became my makeshift mode of transportation. My grasp guided my direction, clutching to the weathered plastic because my feet, now off the ground, were useless. As I glided through the parking lot, I had time to stare at my hands. I noticed the dirt under my fingernails. But my hands weren’t invisible.

Until they were. My adolescent inclination for independence coupled with my need to raise a college fund lead to my position as a bagger at my local grocery store. Starting the summer after my sophomore year of high school, I

was immediately surprised at how much I enjoyed my work. I was performing such simple tasks: unloading carts, bagging groceries, helping customers out to their cars. All these key phrases, chock-full of active verbs that I made sure to include in my Common App activities section, actually brought me a sense of fulfillment. I found joy in these seemingly mundane actions because I was being useful. All at once, my hands were executing actions that made people’s lives a little bit easier, and at the same time, I was acting in my own self-interest. I reaped the benefits of a minimum wage paycheck while simultaneously relishing in the feeling that I was somehow contributing to society. Yet, while I can describe my work at a grocery store in myriad ways, I can confidently say that one of these descriptors is not “inspiring.” Every shift I worked served as a new opportunity to silently question if “the customer is always right.” Amidst the throes of small talk, many well-intentioned customers would bestow upon me the epithet of inspiring. Standing outside a customer’s car after I loaded their groceries into the back seat, I fidgeted with the ties of my apron in order to distract myself from the implications of the well-meaning statement. I flipped through the highlights reel of the conversation to try and determine what makes me so inspiring — is it that I was a high school student with a job, or that I was saving up for college? Or maybe I was inspiring because the customer could never see themselves working in my position? I felt uncomfortable with the praise because I knew I was not deserving of it. I was doing my job — it was not a noble act. I brushed off interactions like these and they became the subject of work-related anecdotes I could tell my friends and family.

But then, my hands became invisible.

Now adorned in latex gloves, they complimented my face mask rather well, but the plastic face shield is really what tied the whole pandemic-era ensemble together. I eventually abandoned my press-on nails because instead of breaking off into a customer’s grocery bag, they just broke off into my gloves. My hands were shielded from view, but now more than ever I felt that I was on display. The comments deeming me an “inspiration” multiplied and metamorphosed into customers telling me: “Thank you for your service.” Just because I was able to serve my community through my job did not make me a hero. Heroes are selfless and purposefully put others before themselves. I was not a hero. When a plastic face shield became a necessary part of my uniform, I spent my lunch break in tears. On top of the already inconvenient face mask, I now donned a thin sheet of plastic in front of my face that further complicated any form of verbal communication while also obscuring my vision. My angst was entirely self-centered — I was upset because the face shield was moderately uncomfortable, but I was much more emotionally distraught because of how stupid I felt wearing it. In 90-degree heat, as I schlepped cartloads of groceries into the cars of customers complaining about their masks, I was entirely concerned with myself and my own discomfort. As the warmth from my breath fogged up my faceshield, concealing my frustrated tears from view, it was incredibly clear to me that I was not someone worthy of grandiose celebration. I grew accustomed to the gloves and the face mask, but not the face shield and the words that painted me as some kind of hero.

The romanticization of my work as some noble or valiant effort confused me further, as I often received these remarks of gratitude from customers that had, seconds prior, detailed their most recent vacation. The primary reason that customers now viewed my work as heroic was because I was working during a pandemic, yet their own actions were aiding the spread of the virus. In the same breath, customers would recount their most recent instance of breaking social distancing protocol and then applaud me for my service. Many continued to act in blind self-interest, enjoying their vacations while they ignored the consequences of their actions.

But I, too, was acting in self interest. I continued to work through the pandemic because working continued to benefit me. The only difference was that my actions happened to result in positive externalities.

The reach of my own invisible hand continued to extend its grasp over the happenings of my local grocery store as my work responsibilities adapted to the pandemic culture and protocols. My primary job was no longer bagging groceries. Instead, I assumed my new post at the front entrance of the store, where I simultaneously sanitized shopping carts and acted as crowd control. In order to maintain social distancing, I managed the line of customers waiting to get into the store by allowing one customer to enter as soon as another exited. The limited authority I garnered from wearing a nametag and an apron embroidered with the storeâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s name allowed me to regulate the number of people in said store and manage the line of customers outside. Even though I was able to use my power to ensure the safety

of customers by forcing them to adhere to social distancing protocol, itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s important to note that my own self-interest did not care about the number of people inside. I created the line of people outside the store for the benefit of everyone inside the store. While braving a surprisingly rainy spring season and later enduring an expectedly toxic summer of heat waves and fires, I was made hyper aware of the fact that I was now working outside. I would not be affected if I exceeded the social distancing capacity of the store because I was not inside the store myself. Nonetheless, I put my self interests on the back burner and focused on ensuring the safety and wellbeing of others. I am confident that if I was not guarding my front entrance post, customers would abandon any semblance of caring about the greater good and instead fulfill their own desire of procuring groceries when they pleased.

It’s not that I have no faith in humanity, but rather that I have no faith in the “invisible hand.” Adam Smith described the concept of the “invisible hand” in his 1759 book The Wealth of Nations as the unintended social benefits of one’s self-interested actions. As with most things from the 18th century, the idea of the invisible hand is outdated, as it calls upon citizens to think only of themselves and essentially hope for the best. However, we must actively choose to benefit the public good and pursue positive change, because self-interest is not enough. If we all blindly acted this way, there wouldn’t be a face mask in sight. We don’t wear face masks for our own personal benefit; we wear them to protect others from our own potentially infectious respiratory droplets. Masks are ultimately a minor inconvenience we endure in order to mitigate the spread of disease in our community. We have to collectively set aside our own selfish desires and actively choose to think about others. It is up to us to decide if we want to positively impact the greater good; it is foolish to think that your selfishness will result in the betterment of the world. Yes, my self-interested actions happened, by coincidence, to help people. But the invisible hand works in mysterious ways. It is not an all-encompassing principle that governs the universe. My intention is not to place myself on a pedestal for working during a pandemic or claim a moral high ground for wearing a face mask. Rather, this is all to say that acting in self-interest is not enough and will never be enough. My experience bagging groceries was an exception to the rule. If we want positive change, we have to set ourselves, and the desires of our individual “invisible hands,” aside, in order to truly support and prioritize the health and well-being of our communities. 18

MAKING SOUP, AND OTHER FANTASIES

WORDS JACK LONEY VISUALS NADEZHDA RYAN

23 It’s Friday — it’s any Friday. I’m sitting in the wicker chair or the beat-up sofa on my friend’s back porch and we’re waiting for them to finish cooking dinner inside. Music plays from a phone speaker — maybe it’s my phone — and it’s mostly old jazz, or maybe it’s one of the playlists we’ve made together. It smells like root beer and roasted vegetables. Alika talks about their day at work and asks for a massage, which Foggy gives them in between poker hands. Amy brings cookies she made at home. And inside, in the kitchen, Hallah and Julian make dinner from the groceries we all picked up together. At some point I walk in and lean against the kitchen counter, listening to the conversation and the oil heat up in the pan. I fill tin cups up with water and bring them to my friends. When dinner is ready, we eat it together. I never understood why people settled down until I got a taste of it. I think a lot of things work like that — you don’t want them until you have them — but at any rate, I get it now. It’s impossible to explain the feeling of grocery shopping to someone else; you have to feel it yourself, the warmth in your stomach when you’re laughing in the produce aisle, and the comfort in knowing you’ll take the food home, and

cook it, and eat it with the people you love. And cooking. I used to hate it, but I spent most of my summer slicing cucumbers and beets in a restaurant kitchen and I’d never been happier. After my Friday shifts, I’d go ten miles over the speed limit the whole way home, just to make it back in time for dinner, for the chance to eat with other people. Domesticity shows up in a lot of spiritual practices: everyone has a holiday where the main event is preparing a meal, or cleaning the house, or sitting with the people you love in comfortable silence, reading or eating or playing cards. It shows up in movies: you can tell two characters have loved each other for a while when you can see them coexisting, fixing each other’s ties and vacuuming the carpet under the other’s feet. There’s something innately comforting about the idea of making a bed that you share every morning, then going to the kitchen to make breakfast, tiptoeing because the people you love are still sleeping. You see the longing for it everywhere, in love songs and children playing house. And you see that longing, especially now, when rent prices and the necessity of premade meals make it almost unattainable.

Domesticity has depreciated in the real world in the way many human ideals have, and taken sanctuary online. We have stopped playing house in favor of watching other people live in a hyper-edited domestic bliss. I live three thousand miles away from my dinner table now. The communal kitchens in the dorms are closed because of the pandemic. But on my feed, and my For You page, I watch other people bake bread from scratch and sew their clothes by hand. There’s this idea of “cottagecore”, of filling a house you built yourself with plants you raised yourself and spending your days baking treats for the people you love. You see a girl making soup with potatoes she dug up that morning, and through clever tricks of lighting and the smile on her face, she makes you feel like you’re sitting there in the kitchen with her. Like everything on the internet, it seems to be a reasonable replacement for the things we can’t afford. But it’s always missing something; it’s always lonely. I watch a girl on YouTube go through the motions of her evening routine and I’m alone. I see a cottagecore photoset on Tumblr, all hand-picked flowers and meals made to share, and I’m alone.

There’s a paradox within the ever-growing world of online domesticity; we collectively fantasize about living a private life, about moving to the woods and never looking back. But we can do this because people have publicized their private lives. The only reason any of us know what our favorite vloggers do before they go to sleep is because they’ve filmed and edited themselves into a neat package, ready-made for us to romanticize. It’s not just that — they’ve filmed and edited their domestic lives so that they can sell us their domesticity. The girl getting ready for bed wants me to buy her pajamas. The people baking bread have a discount code for the flour they’re using. I’m tired of being sold things. Being queer, I’m especially tired of being sold a prepackaged intimacy. My whole life, an overwhelming amount of people have told me who to cook for and what to make them. Now that I’ve got the taste for it, I want to settle down more than ever, but I’m sick of worrying about whether my domesticity will make bystanders angry, or whether it’ll be good enough to publish on the internet. The only thing I want to care about is the person I’m making breakfast for.

“I wanna sleep in your brain / I wanna wake you up early / I wanna make you black coffee, if you like.” “Can I Sleep in Your Brain” by Ezra Furman

There’s a quote from my favorite love song, “Can I Sleep in Your Brain” by Ezra Furman, that reads: “I wanna sleep in your brain / I wanna wake you up early / I wanna make you black coffee, if you like.” I want to be known by someone, and I want to spend my mornings with them. That’s all. Domesticity is a deep, prolonged form of intimacy, where you know someone well enough to coexist with them, indefinitely. You know someone well enough to find comfort in cleaning the house you share, to find joy in something as simple as baking bread. For me and other queer people, knowing someone like that is hard-earned and it costs us friends or family. What is expected of other people is denied of us, and while it’s becoming easier, there are a lot of complications in the world of queer domestic bliss. So it is hard to be sold the glossy, fifteen-second version of something that comes at the end of a lot of sometimes-heartbreaking work.

Queer intimacy, queer domesticity, comes with bruises. We keep a white-knuckled grip on the grocery cart. I think someday I’ll sleep in someone’s brain; I’ll shut off my internet and put in the work that it will take for me to settle down. Someday it’ll be Friday — any Friday — and I’ll be cutting carrots while broth boils on the stove. The kitchen I share with the person I love will be small enough that we bump into each other when one of us walks to the sink. Our bed will be under the window. There will be plants that we water in the mornings, and a cat that we feed at night. Our friends will come over, and music will be playing from somewhere — maybe it’s my phone, and it’s mostly old jazz, or maybe it’s one of the playlists we’ve made together. It will smell like root beer and roasted vegetables. We will cook all the groceries we bought while laughing in the produce aisle. And finally, we’ll eat them. Together.

“True love.”

Those two words conjure images of poison apples, hand-holding, sharing tender kisses, romantic gestures, and, ultimately, an outpouring of emotions otherwise seldom shown. It’s a concept that’s been spoon-fed to the masses ever since corporations and other massive entities realized that they could capitalize on the innermost desires of the heart — the desire to feel wanted, cared for, and sought after; the desire to be loved unconditionally. Hence, in the name of what we desire, we participate in Valentine’s Day shenanigans, we watch Disney princess movies while longing for M a n y a prince charming of our own, and we dream have theorized on of one day finding “The One.” Despite the what “true love” really entails, from commonality of these love-lorn feelings, philosophers to psychologists to singerthough, what if “true love” as we know songwriters. As conceptualized by novelists and romit — the stories we’ve heard, the com screenwriters far and wide, “true love” is a supposed emotions we’ve grappled with — 1 genuine phenomenon that lies beyond consciousness. It is a were all part of a huge sham; pure, unselfish emotional experience; a destined fate for two lovers a dream we’ve clung to, but to become intertwined, to care for one another, and to be together in reality, the result of an forever. It isn’t restricted by any outside influences, nor motivated by impossible concept specific wants or needs from either party, whether in terms of physical that we have tricked appearance, disposition, background, or otherwise. In other words, it’s the ourselves into most ideal form of unconditional validation a person can experience, so it makes believing is out sense that such an idea has been romanticized. We, humans, are naturally social there? creatures — we thrive off of community and connection and we long to find our “place” in the world. Love ties directly into this longing, and feeling “true love” can help us feel as though we’re where we are meant to be. In relation to this, Plato theorized that we love in order to feel complete. In his Symposium,2 he wrote of a story told by playwright Aristophanes in which, after angering the Gods, humans (at this point, decked out with two faces, four legs, and four arms) were split in two, forcing them to spend their lives searching for a perfect match to make them feel, literally, whole again. Though Aristophanes’ tale is slightly ridiculous, it is rooted in truth: in more contemporary contexts, we spend our entire lives making relationships, some more meaningful than others, searching for a feeling of personal fulfillment to appease the ache of WORDS Erin Christie VISUALS Jessica Clivio

existential uncertainty, to feel emotionally complete. That said, feeling love, feeling loved in return, grounds us. It makes us feel seen and like we have value, and makes us feel as though we’ve accomplished an important step every successful person is meant to overcome — the one we’ve been taught to seek out ever since we began to emote. others (sometimes, at the same time) With this in mind, it seems as though love is a solution which absolutely affects our ability to in our search for meaning and an escape from our otherwise love. That said, maybe our prescribed lonely lives. With regard to the fact that, by these standards, definition of “true love” is flawed and needs we love with the intention of receiving something in return, to be adapted so as to fit the very essence of this brings into question the validity of “true” love, or love human nature. that simply exists, sincerely. In reference to the concept In support of this, Adam of the invisible hand — where we might, for example, do Smith’s theory of moral sentiments4 states good to feel good — do we love to feel loved? Do we love that our moral ideas and actions are the with selfish intentions, or do we love without preemptive product of our very nature as social creatures. action? And does this even matter, as long as the love He continues that, while we have the natural we’re feeling is real? tendency to look after ourselves (which can be English philosopher Gary Cox writes on this perceived as selfish), at the same time, we have exact predicament, claiming that an existentialist’s a natural sympathy and empathy for others. This view to love is that it is destined to fail, largely due means that, by our very nature, we are presented to its inherently selfish nature. As Cox writes, with a dual motivation in regard to feelings and “Although lovers may pretend to be a vast and noble actions such as love: we feel inclined to act with unselfishness — ‘I’ll be there if you find you ever our own best interest in mind — we love to be loved need me’ — they are nothing if not demanding.” 3 in return — but we also care for others at the same Said demand, he continues, stems from the fact time — we love simply out of concern and regard for that love is motivated by a want for completion others. By this standard, the motivation for loving — as touched on by Plato. By his standards, love can be either selfish or unselfish, but, regardless, it is simply the demand to be loved, which makes inherently has motivation according to our nature as it an inherently self-motivated experience, far humans. “True love,” with that said, might not exist from the authentic and unselfish “true love” as we know it (since it is said to be unmotivated), but we know from fairytales. This, to him, is what that doesn’t undermine feelings of real, strong, genuine makes it impossible for “true love” to exist. love as we experience it outside of romance novels. As In general, philosophers such as Smith’s theory supports: sure, to some extent, we might Cox and Plato certainly raise an interesting have selfish intentions when we love, but that doesn’t point regarding the nature of love and its make the love that we feel and express any less valid. motivations (whether in terms of validation, Generally speaking, love is a complicated topic. It’s a completion, or general content). However, part of the human condition that’s plagued with turmoil, what they fail to recognize is that we, as angst, and emotional upheaval — it can oftentimes be more people, are multifaceted, and can act out of a curse than a blessing. Regardless, when we do feel of both self-interest and with regard to what can only be described as the closest to “true love” we might ever experience — as in, when we get to love someone wholly, and care for every aspect of their being — that’s truly remarkable. Falling in love is always risky, but, while we search for our Aristophanean “other halves,” we should be allowed to feel how we do, and love how we do, once we find them.

ENDNOTES 1 Protasi, Sara. “True Love: The Normativity of A Passion.” University of Bologna, 2007. AS Dottorato Institutional Doctoral Theses Repository, amsdottorato.unibo.it/323/1/tesi_dottorato_sara_protasi.pdf. 2 Plato. “Symposium.” Translated by Benjamin Jowett, The Internet Classics Archive, MIT, classics.mit.edu/Plato/symposium.html.

Cox, Gary. “Love and Hate.” The Existentialist’s Guide To Death, the Universe, and Nothingness, Bloomsbury Publishing PLC, 2017, pp. 114–121.

4 Smith, Adam. “The Theory of Moral Sentiments.” Adam Smith Institute, www.adamsmith.org/the-theory-of-moral-sentiments.

I Lost My Hand WORDS Meredith Stisser PHOTOS Ian Hamilton STYLIST Serino Nakayama Gloria Cao Mike Figueriredo

In an Italian bakery in Brooklyn, Ronny Cammareri shovels coals into a bread oven. Sweat drips grittily from his brow. Loretta Castorini enters, delicately. She has come to invite Ronnie to her wedding — she’ll be marrying his brother, Johnny. The scene plays out: RONNY (to Loretta) Do you know about me? BARBARA Oh, Mr. Cammareri! RONNY Nothing is anybody’s fault, but things happen. (holds up his left hand to Loretta) Look.

He pulls off the glove. The hand is made of wood. RONNY It’s wood. It’s fake. Five years ago, I was engaged to be married. Johnny came in here, he ordered bread from me. I put it in the slicer and I talked with him and my hand got caught ‘cause I wasn’t paying attention. The slicer chewed off my hand. It’s funny, ‘cause when my fiancé saw that I was maimed, she left me for another man. LORETTA That’s the bad blood between you and Johnny? RONNY That’s it. LORETTA But that wasn’t Johnny’s fault. RONNY I don’t care! I ain’t no freakin’ monument to justice! I lost my hand, I lost my bride! Johnny has his hand, Johnny has his bride! You come in here and you want me to put away my heartbreak and forget?1

The above scene is from Moonstruck, the 1998 film that won Cher (Loretta) her first Academy Award and was praised for bringing the temperament of stage acting to the silver screen. Ronny, played by a young Nicolas Cage, is a baker. He trades his time for money. He feeds people. This is where his participation in the machinations of capitalism end. He is propelled by passion and believes that the human condition is to ruin ourselves and to love. He loves the opera and a woman he should not. Without a hand, Ronny embodies the rejection of the “invisible hand” as a central component of the human experience. He reclaims the “invisible hand.”

Capitalism is a socio-economic construction intended as an express train to fulfillment that has since broken down on the tracks, inhibiting the commute, yet still demanding that we arrive to work on time. It has crept in through the cracks in the windows of gentrified apartments, seeped through the ceiling of corporate offices, made slick the grounds on which our children play. Adam Smith’s theory of the “invisible hand” invites one to see the individual and the free market as the most effective way to allow an economy to run, yet this idea has become corrupted and mangled. The individual has become a tool in a system, a producer or a consumer first and a complex being second or third… or not at all. The invisible hand suggests that consumerism and competition are natural instincts. And so this, and the countless other assertions that capitalism and consumer culture are natural and undeniable, implant themselves in the collective unconscious. This allows for the exploitation of millions, the great profit of many, and a mass deadness within the soul of each human being. Economics is not inherent. It is an idea, a construction. It was built by humanity and can fall at those same hands should we decide it must.

Smith’s invisible hand and free-market capitalism need not be monsters, they need not be the violent sludge I have characterized them as or that American complacency has allowed them to become. The invisible hand can exist as a reminder of the impalpable urge of a person to pursue their “interests.” Let us redefine the economic theory in our own interests, not the interests of consumption or beating our neighbor. Let us appropriate the capitalist system’s demand for our obedience and addiction to profit and productivity into something more beautiful. Let us follow in the leather-soled footsteps of Ronny Cammareri and have our invisible hand compel us to seek fulfillment through artistry, compassion, and love.

This parallel, a man without a hand who exists outside of the standards of capitalist ideals of ableism, maximizing productivity, and corporate success, is a blueprint for the revolutionary actions that today’s youth generation is so desperately grasping for. We recognize the brokenness of our everyday. The racism in each aspect of American society is intolerable. The illusion of some sort of ultimate fulfillment of an “American Dream” has been shattered. Issues that the government continues to sweep under the rug have tripped the last of us. The piles of corruption beneath the carpet must be vacuumed out. The naive pursuit of virginal perfection as a member of society can now be seen as a thin veil over a busy fille de joie. As Audre Lorde advises, it is useless to try and dismantle the master’s house with his own tools. Human thought continues to evolve and human life complexifies — why should we continue to labor under systems that could have never imagined the changes that have taken place? Early philosophers, economists, and social theorists offer incredible insights into how to rationalize existence — but culturally, the dominating ideas of those in power seek to fulfill capital gain to the greatest extent, denying the intrinsic mysticism of being a flesh and bones human being. Ronny Cammareri articulates this flaw in a profession of love:

RONNY but love don’t make things nice — it ruins everything. It breaks your heart. It makes things a mess. We aren’t here to make things perfect. The snowflakes are perfect. The stars are perfect. Not us. Not us! We are here to ruin ourselves and to break our hearts and love the wrong people and die. The storybooks are bullshit!

Imagine the storybooks are textbooks, the narratives we’ve been told over and over and conditioned to accept. The human being cannot be a device of perfection. Nature is perfect, we are not. It is not nature that requires mass consumption, it is corrupted capitalism. It is the conflation of money as a standard through which one values a human life that has destroyed the lives of so many. We are here to love and pursue things that remind us of the blood that runs through our veins and the magic of being alive on this planet — a planet that grows our food from the ground and offers us the warm arms of lovers and friends. Yet, all that makes existence delightful must be pushed aside, as the first priority is always to work. So many confuse their identities with their profession. The capitalist ideas that a workweek should be 300 times longer than our “days of rest” has destroyed the capacity to experience the profundity of joy in living. On that, Ronny Cammareri calls bullshit. Ronny Cammareri lost his hand — a metaphor for shedding the chains of the invisible hand as an economic theory and replacing it with the necessity of the human being to pursue love. The books that bind us are dry and ready to be

used as kindling for the fires of revolution. Revolutionary actions are political, yes, but it is imperative to recognize political systems as a reflection of the conditions of its constituents. Let this revolution be one that prioritizes love and the connection between all human beings. Center passion and center love. When the sun burns out and our bodies decay, all that is left are the ephemeral memories of the way you felt when you loved life. When you loved the pain you felt, when you reveled in sadness within, when you rejoiced in intimacy with fellow human beings. Let us repudiate our life’s worth as enmeshed with money. Cut off your hands.

RONNY Everything seems like nothing to me now, ‘cause I want you in my bed. I don’t care if I burn in hell. I don’t care if you burn in hell. The past and the future is a joke to me now. I see that they’re nothing. I see they ain’t here. The only thing that’s here is you... and me.

ENDNOTES Shanley, Cher, Nicolas Cage, Vincent Gardenia, Olympia Dukakis, and Danny Aiello. Moonstruck. Santa Monica, CA: MGM Home Entertainment, 1998.

Who Are We Hiding From?

WORDS Leah Heath VISUALS Ellie Bonifant

Personally, I have a negative reaction to the word “discipline.” It activates a tension in my shoulders. Discipline is one of the darker things needed in the world, so the light can also be. Technically, you cannot have one without the other. Alternatively, Michel Foucault, a philosopher, structuralist, and known literary critic, shows us the difference between Discipline and Punish[ment]. Foucault’s book on imprisonment takes us from the outside of the prison system to the inside and back out again. It shows us surveillance, and not in a “the government is tracking us” type of way, but rather, a more reflective version of discipline. It’s the entrenchment of habits that may or may not affect you. Not to get political — but not all humans are humane. Humanity is a value that is achieved and not freely given. Humanity can simply be an act towards social goodness, the actions you do to then create less labor or toil for another person. That got me thinking about benefiting human society: do I, as a person, benefit other humans? Not in the way that “adulting” has prescribed positive contributions towards others into our routinized filings of taxes and, in general, our conditioned committal to capitalism (you know, the things no one teaches you). Rather, it’s the metaphorical bicycle that Mrs. Cook, my second grade teacher, was always trying to get our attention to stay seated upon. If one of my fellow classmates didn’t do their classroom duty, it would then lead to that job being passed on to a person that already had a task.

Now, onto one of my favorite anecdotes, The Grocery Cart Theory. It is 2:39 pm, you’re walking out into the Walmart parking lot towards your car, parked in row four, somewhere in the middle. You pop open the trunk of your car and load the groceries inside. Self-disciplined, you would then take the cart to the nearest cart rack, walk back to your car, and go home to unload the groceries. Or you might leave the empty cart slightly off to the side of your car, enough so you can back out of your parking spot. You think somebody will eventually pick it up. The latter scenario is gears in a bicycle that don’t help the pedals turn. It causes other areas or people (like the cart retriever) more work. In a way, nothing bad comes out of an undisciplined action. Odds are you won’t be around for the consequences, and by scientific standards, there is no such thing as “karma.” The air won’t suddenly turn sour, clouds will not close up — nothing happens. It might lead to a molehill of problems for someone else, sure. An undisciplined person lacks the foresight of humanity. The “values” of humanity are a very optimistic way to function because it assumes the goodness in people. It is actively working with respect for other humans and valuing their work and time. When looking through the lens of this “humanity,” we are supposed to see peace, harmony — an oasis. Let’s circle back to Foucault’s work now, regarding surveillance. “Visibility is a trap.” 1 Once you are perceived, you have the conscious ability to cater your actions to the perceiver. It’s a cat and mouse power trip, where you are always the mouse, and the cat is never seen. It raises a lot of concerns on the idea of privacy, but I also think it incites a defensive tactic we harbor within ourselves.

One might think the solution to the entrapment of being perceived is solitude. We hide, close doors, and close the blinds. We do this all with the idea that our neighbors are spying on us. But why? Aren’t they closing the blinds in their rooms as well? My grandfather goes around the house every night, like clockwork, and closes the blinds. It scares me. Who are we hiding from? I ask. The answer is no one. And now I think, that can’t possibly be true, because if there’s no one, why close the blinds? I think it scares me because he’s gotten so comfortable with the idea that he now treats it as a duty. I feel like we are locking ourselves away. Solitary confinement is one of the worst punishments a human can receive. It takes a lot of self-discipline to come out on the other end in one piece. Contrarily, isolation is something our harsh societal realities have forced most of us to become comfortable with. I’ve found that, unknowingly, society has often been a mirror for me. I see someone being productive and then later I, too, will finish some tasks. But when I’m alone, I feel like a raw, pure form of myself — undiluted. I know I am not going to

see people, and so, all of my actions feel even more as if they are my own. I have no eyes watching me to see what clothes I choose, food I eat, or things I do. The performance simply stops. We then enter the stages of The Panopticon, being seen without the see-er. In my own little box, I have to pull my body up and do something… anything. Without the mirror of others, a person can lose track of their ingrained, disciplined measures. It’s easy. We discipline ourselves enough to not do what we are afraid will have repercussions. The decisions we make are the effects of our fears, of the things we see around us. But the beauty of community is that we strive for humanity.

ENDNOTES 1 Foucault, Michel. Discipline And Punish: the Birth of the Prison. New York: Pantheon Books, 1977.

For For For For For For For For For For

Ellen Ellen Ellen Ellen Ellen Ellen Ellen Ellen Ellen Ellen

Words Carlene McGoldrick Photo Carlene McGoldrick Creative Direction Gardner Reed

Ellen died on my twentieth birthday.

It was a mild, temperate July day, celebrated with blueberry pancakes in the morning, the tearing open of a few small gifts in the afternoon, and culminating in a surprise banana split bar that my mom and older sister had put together on the dining room table.

The congratulatory texts and calls rolled in throughout the day; some from close friends, some from long-lost acquaintances, some from estranged aunts and uncles, and a few from my half-senile, 94-year-old grandfather. He called and sung to me twice, though I neglected to tell him that. 57 As the hours passed and the red-orange Ohio sun dipped just below the stretch of pine trees in my parents’ backyard, the air turned a crisp, unnatural cool. Adulthood loomed ahead, and still no word from Ellen. No worries, I thought. She’s probably busy.

Four days later, I found out that Ellen had died in her sleep in the early hours of my birthday. I hadn’t responded to the last text she’d sent me.

I’m staring at her obituary now, as the blue light from my laptop screen burns holes into my skull. Ellen Marie Hickey, age 21, a senior at the University of Toledo, died at home on July 2nd, 2020 of no apparent cause.

I can’t stop reading it.

Of no apparent cause. My eyes trail back, and then forward again. Died at home on July 2nd, 2020 of no apparent cause.

Bullshit. I’d known Ellen for eight years. We met on my first day at the Catholic girls’ school at which I’d later waste my adolescence, though my overwhelming disdain for my secondary school is mostly unrelated. I’m telling you about Ellen. When I met Ellen, I was the new kid. I had transferred to this private shit-hole from the comfort of my suburb’s mostly rich, mostly white, mostly conservative public school in seventh grade, with a head of scraggly, bile-brown hair and ineradicable clusters of chin acne. I was a mess, innocent to a fault, and still under the extremely-middle-school impression that I could become whoever I wanted to be if I just tried hard enough. Ellen was in eighth grade, liked cool music, wore brightly colored earrings and bracelets, and was always laughing when I saw her. So, I tried to be like her.

From afar, I loved her.

Ellen was funny. Her giggle was contagious. She had the prettiest smile I’d ever seen. Her hair was long and blonde and frizzy and almost always unwashed, and the apples of her cheeks often seemed to leap out from her face. Her black, rectangular-rimmed glasses were always smudged and frequently slipped down towards the tip of her rounded nose, and I admired the pluck with which she’d stare our ruthless nunteachers dead in the eyes as she pushed them back into place with her middle finger. She was soft, kind, energetic, and silly, and she always seemed to make the right joke at the right time. She was smart, though I don’t think she ever thought that about herself.

I don’t remember what color her eyes were, and it hurts to look at photos of her right now, so I’ll tell you later. Please remind me to tell you. We wore uniforms at our Catholic girls’ school, so I rarely saw Ellen in anything other than our signature pleated blue-grey plaid skirts and piss-yellow polo shirts. She wore Docksiders like everyone else, though hers were a distinctive shade of navy blue. Her long fingernails were always painted over with black, despite the fact that our dress code didn’t allow polish of any kind. They were constantly chipped, too, and our math teacher, Sister Colleen, would complain of the little black bits of polymer left scattered on her desk and around the carpet after third period. I remember the way Ellen would pick at them during class, whenever she didn’t know how to factor the problem on the board.

I don’t know how to factor anything anymore.

Ellen and I bonded over our hatred for Sister Colleen, our apathy for math and science, and our preoccupation with watching the Tim and Eric Awesome Show on our school-issued iPads during study hall. I eventually made her a friendship bracelet for Christmas, which she wore as an anklet until the end of the school year. Per our dress code, anklets weren’t allowed, but Ellen didn’t care. She took the demerits with pride. After a year, Ellen left me. She transferred to a different, co-ed Catholic high school at the beginning of ninth grade. Sister Colleen ruined my life, she said the night of eighth grade graduation. I’m so happy to be getting the hell out of here.

Sister Colleen was ruining my life, too, but my parents would have never let me transfer. I stuck it out for another year of middle school and then moved onto high school where I bought blue Docksiders and wore them until I graduated. I’m in college for documentary filmmaking now. I made my first documentary at fourteen, and it was about Ellen. She was fifteen, and it was supposed to consist of interviews with young individuals who had received counseling or some other kind of treatment for mental health issues. For whatever reason, I only interviewed Ellen. I must’ve gotten lazy. We shot her interview on a Wednesday afternoon after her mom dropped her off in a beige, rusted-out minivan with a broken automatic sliding door at the back entrance of our once-shared Catholic girls’ school. I snuck her into the light booth at the rear of the auditorium, set up the camera, and talked to her about her experience with clinical depression. I don’t remember anything she said, though I do remember the way that the incandescent bulb haphazardly screwed into the ceiling kept shining in her eyes and flickering, spooking her. I remember her nervous laughter whenever she couldn’t come up with an answer to a question, and I remember her chipped nail polish. To be fifteen, depressed, and feeling like you have to impart some wisdom about the stigmatization of mental illness to a wideeyed fourteen-year-old with a video camera. I feel odd about the whole thing to this day. I think the documentary got deleted along with my high school email account. When Ellen died, I hadn’t seen her for years. She started at the University of Toledo a year before I started at a moderatelypretentious liberal arts college in New England. We lost touch for a while. I think she took a semester off at some point, though I was too consumed by my ostentatious Thoreau novels and meandering walks along the Charles River to keep tabs on her life. I feel like a different person now. I remember that she lived with her parents until saving enough cash from her waitressing job to afford rent in a shitty apartment complex on the south side of Toledo, though I never got to see the place. We always meant to get together, but didn’t. We were becoming new people. Still, I thought, Why didn’t she call me on my birthday?

The last time I saw Ellen was at my high school graduation party. She came just as it was ending and spent about a half-hour chatting with my mom about the tomato plants in my dad’s garden, and how they were so much taller than the one’s she’d been trying to grow in a little plot outside of her apartment. She wore a floral dress and had smudged eyeliner and looked like she had just smoked a massive bowl of pot, but I don’t remember caring. Her hair was chopped short and dyed black. I remember seeing those blonde roots peeking through. It was July 1st, 2018. She’d be dead two years and a day later. I didn’t go to her funeral. A friend texted me late one night, a few days before Ellen’s visitation and funeral mass, and asked if I was planning to go. I can’t, I said. I wasn’t busy. I just couldn’t.

So I didn’t. Even now, I don’t know what to make of that. I feel awful.

I wonder if Ellen would care that I didn’t go to her funeral. I don’t think she would, but I know that I would be upset if she didn’t come to my funeral, but I guess that doesn’t matter anymore because she’s dead and can’t come to my funeral when I die anyway. I don’t know. I really don’t know.

I miss her. Does it seem like I miss her?

You don’t have to answer that.

Pen Pals

65 Words: Rory Willard Illustration: Olivia Watry

August 28th, 2020 Dear To I’m not sure how to start this off. Hey girl I’m not sure how to address you anymore?

Hi! I hope this letter finds you well, and I hope my handwriting has gotten better over the years. It’s only been a few years. Right? If I’m being honest, I lose more faith in my calendar with every passing day. It’s been a lifetime — that’s the only word that comes close to capturing how it feels. It’s not the nostalgic “lifetime” that ties itself up gracefully at some point. It is a “lifetime” that tears my memory to shreds. God, I feel nauseous every time your name comes up at the dinner table. Even when — especially when — I hear mention of your zodiac sign. We were born on opposite sides of the same cusp. 67 It feels like it’s been forever It’s been forever

It’s been a while. And I’m so sorry that I You know how I am with communication, and I guess life has gotten busy on my end since college. I moved away in high school, and that was it. I can’t help but feel guilty for it, ‘cause things were never the same between us after. I know neither of us were at fault; I was stuck in Utah (f***ing Utah), falling off the grid. You were stuck surrounded by people who only cared to acknowledge you when an opportunity to berate you presented itself. They say they love and care for you behind your back, you know. I never told you, but I spent a little time in Colorado after high school. Got my first job, dyed my hair, got my nose pierced. I was insecure; I know you were, too. Someone told me that we got rid of our nose rings around the same time. I don’t know what to do with news like that anymore I don’t like to remember that I might not be your best friend anymore

I thought of you when the needle was sticking through my nose and I was holding back tears. Just ten years ago, we were getting our ears pierced at the Claire’s in the strip mall. You’ll be proud to hear that I’m not afraid of needles anymore!

Are you?

So much has happened since we’ve last seen each other. I bet you’ve been busy, too How are you doing with How are you

What’s new with you? I’m so sorry that I I wish I could’ve at least told you this stuff when it was happening, but I I never knew how to reach you, so I just thought I feel so weird doing this in a letter. I feel so weird doing this at all. Not that I don’t want to, of course Also, sorry if the

By the way, I hope a letter doesn’t feel too formal. Just felt like giving you something handwritten! 68 That, and I haven’t been able to consistently reach you by literally any other means, so And I guess you can’t text me back for whatever reason Not to be rude, but you keep ignoring Funny how I’m still just as passive aggressive as I was when we were kids. It scares me to think It almost feels like I’m writing this as some sort of formality. Some sort of transaction. What’s worse, I feel that I’m imposing. Guilting you back into purity. Or harming you by reaching out at all. I know your parents (and mine) have tried to hijack what little communication we’ve had over the years. Should I be worried? Am I a pawn in some kind of sting operation? I know how the surveillance upsets you. And ever since they all saw what you kept in your pockets, that tension has risen to extremes. I am scared that I will upset you. I risk shattering what little connection we have left every time I reach out to you. I hope you’re not mad that I keep doing it I know you’ve got a lot on your plate right now

I bet you’re probably busy, so don’t feel pressured to respond.

I hope that soon I won’t have to constantly lie through my teeth I hope that soon we can stop pretending we don’t know what’s been going on

Just know that I miss you. I guess you forgot, but

Today is my 20th birthday! I wish I could be spending it with you. Just like every year up until This year’s not the same

We couldn’t go out to dinner like usual, but my family and I got takeout from Red Robin tonight. Your favorite We thought that you might We spent the entire evening pretending that maybe you’d fill the seat we saved for you. You didn’t, and I get why. The sting operation would launch into effect: before you could say “Happy Birthday,” you’d be face-to-face with an interventionist, getting clasped in a pair of handcuffs. We missed you! 69

I missed you.

Other than that, the celebration was It was a weird night I know you don’t know it, but everything kind of crumbled when you disappeared. You’re the sole topic of conversation at every holiday party. But lately, it’s like we’re talking about a myth rather than a person. I wish you knew what you meant I begin to fade out of the room when you’re not there. Seeing you would have been the greatest gift I could’ve received — it always has been, every single year. I know it shouldn’t have, but that pissed me off. Why do you have to be so reckless? How could you even think to keep this from me? Is it possible that I imagined you?

Wish I could see you more. Sting or not, everyone is counting on me as the last remaining link to you. That’s why this feels so wrong. I myself have no ulterior motive; I want to do this on my own terms. But I can only go so far; I can only put your health out of my mind for so long. I’m not even sure this will reach a real house or apartment I’m not even sure you are living under a roof anymore

I’m not sure this will reach you, but I hope it does. If we never speak to each other, hang out like friends, or celebrate birthdays together again, that’s okay. I’m serious! At this point, what hurts most is not knowing if you’re still alive. I want to remember I want to know what you look like. And sound like. I want to see you walking around at the grocery store, or filling your car up with gas. I want to see your face before it’s completely pale, and surrounded by lilies in a silk-lined casket. 70

If you’d ever like to stop by or hang out together again, please, please tell me I will be there in a heartbeat

let me know. I’m not sure how to end this, either. Miss you Miss ya! Call me Text me or something See you Hope I see you Best wishes Warm regards Sincerely, Luv u ILY Love ya Love you

I love you.

THE HAND OF GOD WORDS Alyssa Lara VISUALS Kaitlyn Joyner

I would say I’m spiritual, but not religious.

What that means to me is: I hate the institution of the Catholic Church, but I still fucking love Jesus Christ. The thing that gets me about him is that he knew Judas was going to betray him, and he let him kiss him in the garden anyway. It’s about betrayal. But it’s also about love and sacrifice and the relentless burden of making a choice. Jesus made the choice to let Judas kiss him, so that he could be arrested, trialed, and hung on a cross. He knew his demise and made the conscious decision to no longer make any decisions. Jesus was heavy metal.

I would say I’m spiritual, but not religious.

There is a distinction between both. Religion depends on the communal, while spirituality depends on the individual. Both deal with journeys of finding purpose: why are we alive? What are we doing here?

We create a narrative for our lives, based on the stories we are told. I could easily claim the belief that Jesus doesn’t exist. That he is not the son of God. That he is not born from a virgin. But every part of me says this is a love story. God is just a metaphor for enlightenment, and Jesus Christ was the Chosen One because he made the active choice to be one with God, so he became synonymous with God. There is no separating where Jesus ends and God begins. And while I don’t believe in a God, I could never claim that God is not real, when the God is supposed to be just... you.

Hi there. I know what you’re made of.

On August 24th, 2019,

Elijah McClain died at the hands of the Aurora, Colorado Police.

On March 13th, 2020, 74

Breonna Taylor died at the hands of the Louisville, Kentucky Police.

On May 25th, 2020,

George Floyd died at the hands of the Minneapolis, Minnesota Police.

I mourned these Black lives that were so far away from me. For the very first time in my twenty-one years of age, I viscerally realized how life and death are inevitably politicized when you are not white. As a Filipino-American woman, how I lived would represent how a Filipino-American woman lived, and how I would die would represent how a Filipino-American woman would die. This binary of life and death hit me when I tripped on shrooms for the first time. We were in Boston for the first time in months. In the middle of this past, eternal summer, we were reminded of life out there that might be too hostile, too harsh. One night, we went through a McDonald’s drive-thru in the South End and watched a man shoot heroin in front of us, while the police station sat just across the street. We were high and quiet in the car, watching a spectacle we did not mean to see, yet did. When I tripped on shrooms later that week, I first violently vomited in a bush. But then, a consciousness came over me, in which I executed exactly what my body had dictated itself to do, so if I wanted to raise my hand, I would. If I wanted to spin, I would. I listened to the same song on repeat. I sat very still. I went into a dark bedroom and recorded myself talking about what I had been thinking about. I felt gratitude. I Facetimed my friend and she showed me a rainbow that was happening in Long Island, New York. I couldn’t stop talking about boys I hadn’t spoken to in months. There was a tenderness I felt in being vulnerable. All the good and bad — I was the perfect equivalent of them. I wasn’t necessarily happy, but I wasn’t necessarily sad. And I was perfectly okay with not being able to change a single thing and carrying this weight. The very privilege that my parents set out to give me by immigrating to the United States, to invest in this so-called “American Dream,” is the same privilege that allows me to trip on recreational psychedelic drugs during global pandemics. And even though I had been stuck in my childhood home in New Jersey for the entire summer, unemployed, and unable to create the art I had wanted, I felt a gratitude for the things I did have, which was a mind, a body, a heart. There is privilege in choosing how one can live and how one can die. This privilege is not distributed equally, but it is the very thing we seek so that the ways we choose how to live and die do not have to be politicized, and we can just exist as is.

Newtonian physics offers a fixed perspective on relativity. Here are all Newton’s laws of motion: if I do X + Y, it will always equal Z. But quantum physics does not depend on application. Rather, it is about probability. If I do X + Y, it might equal Z, but it could also equal A, or maybe B. Essentially, quantum physics explains all of the weird intricacies of the world.

When I was in fifth grade, I thought that if I prayed to God every night, a boy would like me. When he didn’t, I stopped believing in God. In the tenth grade, our paths crossed again. I still didn’t believe in God, but I believed in a higher power that prophesied that coincidences do not exist. Everything is derived from an equation. But that equation never had to be simple. I understand why people rely on astrology or tarot cards or chakra healing or aura readings to explain unexplained nuances of the world. In his book Nothing to Be Frightened Of, Julian Barnes opens with: “I don’t believe in God, but I miss Him.”1 There is a nostalgia for worshipping something other than religion because the fanatical sensation of 76

finding meaning is exhilarating. All these pseudosciences perfectly balance the belief of the scientific and the belief of a higher power that gives our lives structure. In his essay “This is Water,” David Foster Wallace claims that “you get to decide what to worship. The only choice we get is what to worship.”2 And so we pick and choose what to believe in and for others it is love or beauty or art, and for others it is life or death. Sometimes we worship people or things. More often, we worship ego. When we lose everything, we must ask ourselves what we have left. I struggled with that question because I thought I could be nothing without places to travel, friends to see, Instagram posts to post. The perception of life I had was lost, and I was left with myself, which is disgusting, imperfect, and miniscule compared to this world. Through this “nothing,” I became everything I needed. I let go of the ego. I was just a girl in a house, patiently waiting for the meaning of life. And one day, it just came. To be one with God is to know yourself as the other entity that is God, which is everything and nothing to do with ego.

The divine is you. ENDNOTES 1 Barnes, Julian. Nothing to Be Frightened Of. Vintage Books, 2009. 2 Wallace, David Foster. This Is Water: Some Thoughts, Delivered on a Significant Occasion About Living a Compassionate Life. Little, Brown and Company, 2009.

Mourning a Deathless Body 78

WORDS Brittany Adames VISUALS Harry Li

From time to time, metaphorizing a lived experience is often the only control I feel, which is to say, I am obsessed with becoming. Selfhood is more grief than joy, though the possibility of impermanence brings calm to the wreckage. In my scattered years of therapy, I was often told that my depression stems from my own idealism. I didn’t see anything inherently wrong with this. It just meant I was extremely methodical about paving my own life. If I planted the seeds for a triumphant future, then I would irrevocably find a way to live in the present, so long as that present is stable. With this logic, I was steering headfirst into what would be a culmination of heartache, paranoia, and confusion. And so when a campus-wide conversation broke out about the mishandling of sexual abuse cases at Emerson, I catapulted into a dayslong depressive episode. My own brain reinvented a violence I thought was long buried. Only this time, I was merely the spectator. My seventeen-year-old self became the subject, tethered to me only by name. Writing about sexual trauma made me feel like I was polluting my own persona. Who is this I, really, and why is she so fucking sad? It was never a matter of “getting over it.” It was always a matter of not letting the maggots fester for too long.

We’ll call him Simon. He was my first kiss. An avowed photographer, he asked me to be the subject of a shoot he was doing to complete his portfolio. I agreed. We met at a river downtown — the memory awash in literal gray in my mind — where he wouldn’t stop commenting on how short I was. We hung out a few more times after. It occurred on several instances, spanning a couple months in winter 2017: being forcibly shoved onto his lap, his fingers splayed out with what I now remember as a sort of falseness; me, ruddied-cheeked and trembling; him, a thick, wet smile; me, head cushioned between a duvet cover and pain; him, throwing out I love yous and you’re a prude in the same breath. I never spoke about it in person. When I told my best friend at the time, she did not care. The rev of her car’s engine was the only testimony to our silence. Shortly after, in the cold seat of my AP Government class, I experienced my first panic attack. It felt like a rope had tightened around my chest. My heart beat explosively and my breathing funneled into an unmetered shoot. And then, by some unexplained phenomena, my brain replicated Simon’s exact smell. As if he were right there, standing absently in a space he meant to hold with as much vigor as possible. It was the most suffocating ten minutes of my life. I was sniffing the air maniacally, trying to make sense of it all. By the end of it, my hands were dampened with sweat and I was physically exhausted.

It was weird claiming that agency that makes you vulnerable to the entire public. It was weird seeing myself as a small ripple in this psycho-emotional landscape and yet having others consider me “brave” and “strong.” It was weird seeing others digest my trauma, seeing them follow the stories from the outskirts of what I can only describe as loneliness. That is also the only way I can describe having to write an in-depth incident report for the district’s sexual assault unit, where there is a case being built up by a lawyer one girl, who was also harassed by Simon, had hired. How do you heal when your trauma feels like punching through a fog that won’t evaporate?

I know now this was caused by an activation in the amygdala, which serves as the brain’s fear center. My body’s stress response stimulated a cascade of nerve impulses that triggered a panic attack. I can imagine that this, perhaps, was proverbial. I understood, then, what he had done. This was a fissure that would take years to bridge back together, if ever. During winter of my freshman year of college, I began receiving a series of menacing texts from an unknown number. I swiftly blocked them but they’d keep coming back — referencing specific details from my time with Simon. This was an on-andoff occasion, eventually becoming so overwhelming that I had to change my phone number. It stopped. But to fit this into the sequence of beginning, middle, and end is asking for a lot. When I logged onto Twitter one day in early August, I saw photos of Simon and his current girlfriend plastered in everyone’s status updates. Warnings were being issued to the general public about the two, who were exposed for soliciting sexual favors from over 200 girls, including minors, and attempting to form a sex trafficking ring. Countless girls were coming out, sharing screenshots of their own interactions with the couple. I ultimately chose to publish my own experience with Simon, which garnered a lot of traction.

In a conversation with the remarkable Ilya Kaminsky, poet Danez Smith spoke about the collaborative nature of the arts. “When I sit down to conjure a poem up, I’m sitting down with poets I’ve known, read, and heard, sitting down with what my grandma said last week and eight years ago, I’m sitting down with the news and my friends and my neighbors whose mere existence sneaks its way into the poems without me looking,” they said. “I want my poems to be filled with language that reflects the communities that make me possible.” 1 When I decided to read the first poem I wrote after the assault at an open mic night for the Cherry Tree Young Writers Conference, I was terrified. I mulled over the words, scared as hell over the clammy silence that would

possibly follow after. But the audience was receptive in a way that made me cling onto that poem with a sort of warmth. That was the shift that made me realize that poetry can wake the world, too. Poetry is more than simple truisms. It is realizing that what you are attempting to put to rest is, in fact, something you are continually laying claim to. When I imagine my own community of language, I think of Safia Elhillo, Aria Aber, and Zaina Alsous. I think of Luther Hughes, Mary Oliver, Audre Lorde, and so many others. How wonderful it is to bring shape to the conditional body when poetry comes into the equation. How wonderful it is to mop the spittle from your own mouth. There is nothing left for survivors but a reconciliatory gesture toward ourselves. The space between doing and undoing still needs to be tended, though there is space for us to uplift one another through the collective work of grief. In moments of numbness there is a poem, and thus, a community, to find glory in. It took me a while to realize that those who choose to write poetry are often learning to not devastate themselves. 84

It’s true that the passage of time is unforgiving, though I would argue that the stability of it is even more so. Many moments blurred due to trauma sometimes arrive with painful clarity once they are written about. With every poem jotted, I have learned to properly grieve for my body while honoring it at the same time. Publication is less about self-gratification than it is about preserving a community of words for both yourself and the world. I understand what it means to be intimate with a boy too overindulgent to love. I know Simon did not love me. I do not forgive him for what he did to me. I prefer to memorialize him the only way I know how: poetry. He lives a life of his own in these pages, though I also have the power to reckon with how much control he has over me. As much as I can bring him alive through poetry, I can also kill him. And I think that is what I am doing in writing this. I am trying to discover speech that will intervene pain in a way that doesn’t dwell on it. It will take me a bit to relinquish trauma, but no longer am I indebted to a man in conceptualizing my own body.

This vessel will be beautiful from now on.

ENDNOTES 1 Kaminsky, Ilya. “Short Conversations With Poets: Danez Smith.” McSweeney’s, McSweeney’s Publishing LLC, 29 September 2020, https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/danez-smith.

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