Young Memory Anthology 2020

YOUNG MEMORY ANTHOLOGY 2 0 2 0

OUR MISSION We are obligated as citizens to understand the diverse perspectives of our nation. Our Shared Memory will bring young Americans together, recognize their perseverance and initiative, and present a unified narrative of hope for the public.

COVID-19 is the first pandemic that our generation has had to confront as young adults.

We are caught in a relentless whirlwind of changing circumstances and have little headspace to consider the experiences of others. That is fine and understandable. But when it comes time to reflect and consider how we can use this shared experience to improve health policies, social policies, and etc., we are obligated as citizens to understand the diverse perspectives of our nation.

To quote a Scientific American piece by Wilson Center associate Alex Long, “...when it comes time to commiserate on the shared memory of COVID-19 and create stronger and more flexible structures for pandemic preparedness, we may find that there are divergent narratives running on geographic and partisan lines.”

The Young Memory Anthology will contribute to the construction of a national sense of community by presenting a unified and empathetic narrative out of the diverse experiences of young thinkers and movers. The Young Memory Fellowship will unite a cohort of young leaders, inspire other American youth, and produce an object of some historic significance. We hope that the Our Shared Memory project will assist the development of national unity.

Other publications are already writing their human interest pieces. Our Shared Memory deliberately intersperses the profiles of young social entrepreneurs with creative pieces that express grief, anger, and resiliency. There is much that each can gain from understanding the other, be it hope, perspective, or inspiration. We aspire to bring together the voice of a generation, as best as we can, to foster national unity across disciplines and experiences.

TABLE OF CONTENTS Poetry "Sonnet for the Road..." by Jacob Baker ............................................... 8 "Embracing you..." by Madelyn Chen ................................................... 9 "in the red-violet dust..." by Michelle Dashevsky ................................. 10 "men waking" by Grace Gay ................................................................. 11 "Leaning" by Nora Geffen ..................................................................... 12 "Slaughterhouse 901" by Gabriella Graceffo ......................................... 13 "Bipolar / Pandemic" by Kaitlyn Graham .............................................. 14 "poem w/ no ghosts in it" by Sarah Harder ............................................ 15 "Reflections On Covid-19" by Graham Parsons .................................... 16 'Mall" by Emily Ponce De Leon ............................................................. 17

Prose "Back Into the Closet" by Grace Adams ................................................. 22 "Wait Where the Story Meets You" by Timilehin Alake ........................ 23 "Good Men" by Eli Elster ........................................................................ 25 "I Get Drunk, We Stay Sober" by George Hardy .................................... 27 "Rise and Repeat" by Rikki Li ................................................................. 28 "More Song than Scream..." by Kelsey Day Marlett ............................... 29 "Pans, Woks, Accordians" by Julie Pike .................................................. 31 "A Note to Gen Z" by Alexis Sanchez ..................................................... 32 "My First Real Fear" by Cain Schmitz ..................................................... 34 "Eyes" by Emma Tolliver ......................................................................... 35

Social Innovation Westside Farmers Market by Karlin Li .................................................... 40 Project PUSO by Trishabelle Manzano .................................................... 41 Static Arts Collective by Ise Henriques Sharp .......................................... 42

Acknowledgements ................................................................................... 44

POETRY

6

7

Jacob Baker University of Virginia Charlottesville, VA

Sonnet for the Road During an Apocalypse - Friday, March 2020

Parked outside the TA-Petro Christian Chapel off exit 195 and halfway through the slog up I-81, I am contemplating despair, seven in the morning and the panicked roads buzzing

and braindead. The truck stop lampposts are dying, the sky clouded and barely trying for blue. Inside you can buy cigarettes and condoms or have reheated sausage for breakfast

at the conjoined IHOP where truckers watch the news and leave the table, their routine pilgrimage to take an UltraCredit rewards shower or sit and pray for I don’t know what. The radio says 1,000 people have died in the US today,

or any day. I’m on my third cup of coffee and I have four hours left to drive, my hands weightless and slipping straight through the steering wheel. What I am trying to say is I am tired

of the world ending. What I am trying to say is I don’t know how to pray anymore. Back on the interstate, the smell of pancakes and diesel chases me for miles.

8

Madelyn Chen Harvard Law School San Francisco, CA

Embracing you as the world burns outside the window In the morning ellipsis before I reach for the newspaper beating bleating the death toll, more than a million cases trillion dollars aid half the states on lockdown schools closed the stock market crashed unemployment website smashed rationing toilet paper and packets of yeast only one per customer doctors begging for masks until they fall silent onto ventilators the homeless in chalk marked parking lots and the students shooed from their dorms like flies like flying back to the nest of childhood bedrooms while wearing paper masks that filter breath and saying a prayer for George Floyd who couldn’t breathe couldn’t as the policeman’s knee pressed his heart until it shattered like this country crying out for rebirth resistance viva la revolucion say viva even as the front page of the New York Times names the 100,000 dead in size ten font too large for people to find their grandmother’s name so they stop reading because seeing is believing and if even the white house doesn’t see the thousands marching in the open air demanding a change not confined to the stock market, do those rebels really exist or is it just a Netflix show made on an abandoned studio lot and maybe if we close our eyes we will—

Go back to the beginning of this poem, to where I am waking up and you are beside me another day out of our calendar months in quarantine in sickness in health. I kiss your cheek until you smile, wrapped up in blankets we feel invincible, waiting for some Hollywood host to pop out from under the bed and tell the audience that it was all a bad dream. But it’s just the two of us in your apartment, and after a while we get up to grind coffee beans into breakfast and login to our classes. During breaks, I walk the few feet to your desk and hug you from behind. And when our eyes meet, it feels like the end of the world is an afterthought.

9

Michelle Dashevsky University of Rochester Langhorne, PA

in the red-violet dust of an utter destruction: Where, to her, are reality’s slippery edges?

Fragments from my journal,

my grandmother offers my mother

written at Le Depanneur Cafe in the midst of

a question: Irochka, dochenka,

it all, on Friday, March 13, 2:54 pm:

why have you stopped coming to see me?

My mother is tired of this daily death:

Of sickness, of losses, of death—

“Mama, there is a virus,

I am afraid of it all

Mama, it’s for your own protection, Mama, how many times do I have to

my grandmother’s apartment is crimson

explain?”

intricacy, which, having bled into bitter nostalgia,

my grandmother offers only defeat: Oh. I

creates

see.

an intimacy that was never only hers to own,

No time for me. Burden,

and perhaps this is why

that I am.

she sleeps in the four walls of a boxed-up Soviet

I found out that they let a maskless patient

Union.

in the room with my mother, and I charred

her mind, has become:

my insides with

Ensnared — without permission,

a fumbling feverish silent self-igniting

in the murky “truth” clouds of those men

soliloquy of rage.

perpetually blaring from the Russian television.

Mama,

Enraptured— as if Putin has the answers

you knew suffering. Survivor.

to all of the questions

Teach me how to cradle my own

that her chest has been beating with

body out of love in this—

since the year that armchair there gained a ghost.

Then I found out that she had done this

Perhaps her disappearing began right then,

willingly, and I said enough: you,

with that impossible reckoning

my self-sacrificing patron saint of fire,

all those years ago.

this is not the time for martyrdom, please, you are a mother, please—

There seemed to be so much time…

I am a daughter too.

My mother offers my grandmother

Where is God?

Donald Trump’s signature at the bottom of a letter: Look, Mama, from the President.

and among all else,

My grandmother, who is ninety-two, flails

among all of this thundering chaos,

this crumpled excuse around warily,

Written, these words,

smiles shyly at it, and does not understand:

in the red-violet dust of

Madness and kindness cannot befriend one

my utter destruction:

another, she says, and shakes her head at this strange

Do I love him?

man, and wants to split the relief money.

Do I love him?

10

Grace Gay Northwestern University Scottsdale, AZ

men waking i. last night was red

which he hasn’t dreamed

in years. he’s learned to keep the blood quiet, studied it for years, handled the stop-gaps in death, and now he checks: his throat is fine, temperature normal.

he scrubs in later and wishes he were home instead with his wife, his stepchildren, all his children,

but the other surgeon is up on the third floor, wheezing.

ii. the children’s

father

hardly could be called that now

he wakes

already

s h

a k

y it used to take years

two hands clench the Budweiser now

the clock says are his

two months since he saw the children

who

and

that is not any pandemic’s fault but the one in his hand.

away they are deep in the breath of sleep

and he takes as deep

a breath

considering.

11

as he can,

Nora Geffen Northwestern University Newton, MA

Leaning Most of today I am thinking about ventilators.

Most of today I am thinking about empty beds and empty retirement funds and my grandparents alone at the breakfast table.

Most of today I am thinking about bruising on cheekbones.

But for twenty minutes of today, in the sterile brightness of early afternoon in my kitchen, I am thinking about leaning against someone’s chest.

Something I’ve done more times than I knew to count— trusting just a little of my weight to someone just a little taller than me with just slightly wider shoulders in a soft cotton t-shirt.

Not even talking to him, just leaning against him as I talked to someone else or took a sip or simply breathed and watched as the room spun softly around us like couples dancing on a sticky floor.

How many places of contact are there in that type of lean?

My shoulder blade against his chest, the back of my head resting lightly on his shoulder.

My ass, inevitably, against one of his legs.

Sometimes there was an arm, one of his, around my waist.

Fingers, maybe, in my hair.

I don’t remember.

I didn’t number these places of contact while they were happening, didn’t catalogue each one precisely, medically, to return to later, to assess as a tiny, unbelievable miracle.

Sometimes there must have been lips pressed quickly, gently, against the top of my head. They must have been precious, those few seconds of contact. I don’t remember them.

There must have been, on some occasions, breath against my ear.

And then in thinking about leaning I’m really thinking about all of it— about the gentle pressure of a hand in yours, about the orderly row of high-fives at the end of a little league game, about waltzing. Waltzing, and the feeling of your hand in his and your hand on his shoulder and your noses close together but mostly the feeling of his hand on the small of your back.

About fingers brushing when passing the salt and shoulders touching in a packed train and hair braided on the playground. About laughing after bumping feet under the table and about how intimate it is to touch someone’s cheek.

And in thinking about all of it I find I am praying.

Praying, softly, futile, insistently, to lean once more against someone’s chest.

In the mostly-dark of 3am, to inaudible music, in a crowded room with a steady, pulsing, collective heart beat, to lean against someone’s chest and for it not to be a miracle.

To feel a hand in mine without thinking to call it sacred.

12

Gabriella Graceffo University of Montana Dallas, TX

Slaughterhouse 901 Abattoir (n.): from the French abattre, to beat down, to slaughter, to descend upon cattle with stunner bolts, stapling vellum.

Down on the killing floor: a thrush of hot swill easing over tile as we chew the shells of our cheeks for hours, ignoring trolley hooks that wick blood like some old god stringing a rosary. Other hooks run through our throats, hidden in the pharynx. They thread us together, bodies greased in hair, sweat, and offal from the skinning cradles. Infection spreads: joint to joint, shoulder to shoulder, making cuts.

Kobe-style tenderloins shanked and laid in plastic will sell half-price at Kroger next Monday when rot sprouts in our throats.

No one speaks of it. Backs hunched over conveyor belts, new faces go unnoticed, parishioners dedicated to the quiet slaughter, quotas filled by fresh meat in the chute ready to be trussed with apron strings. By March, the slaughterhouse teems with flesh, our lungs begging to be unzipped, bulging at the ribs.

Ventilators will not be saved for us, white tubes already screwed into white bodies.

X-rays would bloom our edemas like sprays of yellow pollen on my father’s funeral rug, but instead we load zinc bolts, count chattel, and wonder when the next kill will come.

13

Kaitlyn Graham University of Virginia Woodbridge, VA

Bipolar / Pandemic In March the pharmacy closed. I emptied my lithium bottles onto the bed to order my pills, groups of three, counting down the days I had left of stability.

Sit on a dune and watch the sandcastles you built crumble at high tide. The ocean never stops coming.

March floods your moat defense and your castle is now a handful of shells scattered in wet sand.

I told my psychiatrist two lies over the course of our tele-visits. One was a lie of omission. I didn’t tell her I bit the doorframe in a manic episode I couldn’t feel coming. I screamed until it gagged me. Spit the paint scraped between my teeth in a saliva puddle on the carpet.

I told her I’m not too low, the castles we spent three years building were not in vain. I haven’t even seen the ocean.

I’m managing. I’m handling! I’m handling everything.

When we hang up the call I’m relieved we won’t speak for another three weeks. She’s not worried. I don’t like lying to her but I am terrified of the truth.

14

Sarah Harder University of South Florida Tampa, FL

poem w/ no ghosts in it after Claire Wahmanholm

instead, this poem is full of mangoes, ripened past soft into slop, skin uncoupled from its own shrunken body. mango that hangs heavy off branches slips its stalk, slams concrete, ruptured star -like on molded sidewalk and a child will paint their arms yellow with its stringed goop. mango held in palms, mango shredded from pit, mango plump, peelless. no one is dying and no one is dead because you can’t have dead people in poems without ghosts so instead everyone swallows mango slices, holds their silence like stones sucked against their tongues. of course there are mangos in this poem because it’s summer and i can’t not write about mangos in summer. there are mangos in this poem and no one is sick. no one mourns. and there are no ghosts.

15

Graham Parsons University of Iowa Houston, TX

Reflections On

It is May 12, 2020. I am on top of a parking

Covid-19

planes fly through the sky, showing support for

garage with my father. We are watching vintage

the medical workers in Houston. They look like toys lost in a great blue sea.

It is February 6, 2015. My father has taken me skiing, and the morning is cold. The mountains

On June 22, 2020, I iron the NYT’s newspaper

dwarf me, and I am wary of the danger.

for framing. Steam washes over my face; I cannot breathe. I think COVID must feel

On May 27, 2020, the NYT publishes an

similar. I try to imagine breathing steam for two

obituary of one thousand people, one percent of

weeks. I cannot.

the US deaths. I feel like I did on the mountain.

I keep it as a piece of history.

May 6, 2020. The Blue Angels fly over Houston, screaming low against the horizon. I

December 10, 2019, my birthday four days

catch but a glimpse of their wings in the sun. I

before. I read an article about a disease in

sneer: the fuel would be better spent in

Wuhan, China. I shrug off the news and

hospitals.

prepare for the holidays.

On June 26, 2020, I wake up from a dreamless It is July 11, 2020. I am walking around

sleep; the night has not refreshed me. I look to

downtown Houston with a camera. My mask is

the newspaper mounted on the wall and wonder

wet with sweat, but I do not remove it. The

what could’ve been done differently.

streets are devoid of people; the buildings impenetrable sheets of glass. I am dazed.

On July 29, 2020, the US passes 150,000 deaths. The hospitals are at max capacity, and

June 13, 2020. My family is fostering two

people are out protesting. I support their cause

kittens for a week. We call them Peach and

but I cannot join them.

Plum, and they are warm. They move to a different foster all too quickly.

It is March 20, 2020. My sister has a fever and a cough and has isolated in her room. I bake her

On July 21, 2020, I sit at my desk, a framed

a loaf of bread, wrap it, and give it to her. She

newspaper hanging above me. My lab sends

texts me and tells me she likes it. I hide my

me scans of the photos I took: they are angular,

anxiety with a smile.

cold, and angry. I am happy with the results.

August 1, 2020, four days before I write this It is January 28, 2020. A couple arrives in Rome. They

piece. I am walking in the Houston Medical

both develop coughs; three days later Italy suspends all

Center. The hospital fronts are clean and the

flights to and from

lobbies smell of Lysol.

China.

I peer behind the buildings into the alleys: On April 9, 2020, I check my social media for

colorful plastic tents with heavy ventilation. I

the first time in two weeks. None of my friends

think they’re morgues. Exhausted – by heat and

are posting anything. We have nothing to say.

by life – I hurry home. I sleep like the dead.

16

Emily Ponce De Leon University of Florida Miami, FL

Mall After Ishion Hutchinson's "Station"

I talk loud to the few managers I can find, The mall food court is a desert.

Face veiled with cloth, a woman walks. I keep

our voices muffled but they understand me.

The way their heads oscillate left and right

my distance lets me know their answer: from her and the other few sparse figures around. "It’s so hot"

I mutter under my breath. It’s all fine though.

After four months, neither heat or

nose itch, will make me remove my mask,

it’s become my second skin by now.

I feel naked without its soft material,

unceasing protector, my synthetic fiber beast.

Along the mall’s concourse,

The empty kiosks and closed pearl gates of most stores

leave everyone wandering aimlessly,

searching, on the lookout for something,

like xerocoles on the search for an oasis.

It’s hard not to reminisce of times past, times where

the air seemed cleaner and people laughed

under lush live oaks, mere inches away in public,

not a care given to the 200 people in a bustling park.

17

There is no work, no I shouldn’t inquire later,

nothing will open up. Broke, hungry, college

student, who am I dejected outside the

mall’s automatic doors? The desert silence,

an eerie noise louder than when I entered.

18

19

PROSE

20

21

Grace Adams University of California, Davis Clyde, CA

Back Into The Closet On the thirteenth of March, when my mother and father brought me back to their house, I did not know what I would be returning to. I did not know that, a week later, when we went back to collect my belongings from my university, that I would be frantically messaging my roommate the whole ride up the highway. “The rainbow pins too, the ones on my wall,” I would tell her. “Hide them in the drawer with my flag.” To this day, I praise her for the job that she did, and for the initiative that she took to hide those that I had forgotten to mention. Love letters, stickers, postcards from exes hidden deep in my sock drawer, waiting to be stuffed into a box the moment that my parents were no longer looking—a box that has remained sealed since March… a box that now hides under my bed.

On that long ride up the highway, I sat with a pile of books in my lap. Their titles and covers were inconspicuous enough, I had hoped. I took no chances and had the one that I deemed most appropriate on top, a title by Alison Bechdel.

Below her hid the works of Stevenson and Ostertag. I prayed that no member of my family inquires about them. I was anxious to return the books to their rightful owners as I was only a borrower of the words that I clutched so close to my body. At the university, other books waited to be returned to me. The exchanges were made as quickly as possible as my mother watched over my shoulder. No time to say how much I had enjoyed them or elaborate on the impact that the characters had had on me. Only time to whisper, “Please return these to the rainbow library for me.”

I was not in a rush to unpack the boxes. When I eventually did, it was a slow process. It required calculation before execution. There needed to be a plan before I could begin. Items needed to have a place to go before they could leave the box. And everything had to be separated. I couldn’t keep all of my queer eggs in one basket. My pride flag found a new home, folded up in an old hatbox. My pins, donning various colors and pronouns, became buried in a drawer among the tangled wires of chargers and earbuds. Certain tee shirts were resigned to the furthest corners of the closet or shoved to the bottom of the laundry basket never to see the wash cycle. Everything else now lives in that little box under my bed. And there they will stay until I can leave this house once more.

It was not like this before. Before the pandemic. Before returning to this house. It was not like this. These things now living in only the darkest and most private corners of my bedroom were once displayed with pride. “They’re taking away our freedom,” I hear the people say. They’re talking about the mask mandates. About the social distancing guidelines.

About the lockdowns. Those people did not lose their freedom—I did. But that is something that they will never understand.

22

Timilehin Alake Texas Tech University Lubbock, TX

Wait Where the Story Meets You Pet Peeve: Food splatter stain in a microwave.

Spaghetti sauce clings to the white walls and the ceiling inside the microwave. Under the faint yellow light that serrated the vents, the small red dots resemble measles spots on a light-skinned person. I remember they always used the light-skinned children for this particular illustration in the popular biology textbooks I used back home in Nigeria. I grab a white towel and fold it carefully into a thick, handy, square, and squirt Clorox bleach on it. We’ve had the bottle before toilet-paper-armageddon and I look at the ceiling in thanks to whoever had the brilliant idea of stocking-up the house with disinfectants. I swipe straight in long, methodical lines as though nothing else mattered, over and over.

“I am sorry,” my roommate calls, stepping into the common area we share from his room. “I was gonna clean it this morning,” he assures. I didn’t doubt him. He is the cleanest out of the other three that share the apartment. I nod but I am not sure the gesture conveys my thought: that I trust him; that this is not typical of him.

“It’s cool,” I raise my head and say. “Good morning. Sleep well?” out of habit, I ask.

“Not really. I had weird dreams all night.”

I did not. At least not this night in particular. But my dreams have been crazy lately. Bugs, aliens, flying people, flying things, floods, floating houses with sharp teeth for doors and windows. I want to tell him that reports have said it is normal in a pandemic, that dreams stir to the surface of our consciousness, and like dust dances lightly on a ray of sunshine, they settle upon fears we didn’t even know were there.

“I am sorry man,” I say instead. “It was probably all that stress and tiredness from the drive. How was the drive?”

“It was pretty smooth. No worries at all.”

“Do you drive back to San Antonio in the morning?” I asked.

He had texted me days before. The message said: HEADS UP. I AM COMING TO GET MY THINGS. JUST WANTED TO LET YOU KNOW. I still am not sure then what he meant by “heads up.”

I am still wiping straight lines in the microwave when I feel his presence in the kitchen area and I almost jump.

HEADS UP. Why should I be afraid? He looks fine and well, but ordinary things, like welcoming back your roommate who has just returned from a trip, cannot be ordinary again. I run a map in my head of who he’s met with and where he’s been, what his hands have touched, what they are touching now, how close he is; how much distance is six feet again? He is waiting for me to respond to something he had just said.

“Yeah. Yeah,” I say, keeping my voice steady, pretending to have heard him.

“Everything just seems so insignificant,” he was saying. “…so, I’ll probably be here through my finals. See if I can focus better.”

I get an idea of what he was talking about even though I had not heard him.

“What’s the problem, is it just being home?”

“I guess, I mean, I would find out soon enough, but I just was not able to get anything done at home.”

Who would have thought studying online could be such a hassle? Like everyone’s, my single graduate seminar had gone online since everything went shut but I have been plagued by a deep lack of motivation. I know. What this essay should have been, waited in my room on my computer screen: a bad draft about how I learned storytelling through oral forms and folklores and how thinking consciously through that culture can translate into any writing as I have seen in some of Ursula LeGuin’s short stories, and how that can yield many ideas in terms of form for creative work.

“It’s been pretty much the same here, man,” I say, instead. “It has been really hard to find focus. This thing, the way it has brought down everything and everyone, anyone, has me thinking about how everything has become so meaningless. I feel small,” I say. I’ve had this feeling since the pandemic broke and saying it out loud startles me a bit. My roommate is a believer. His faith has him at the center of everything: a man with his God over all things. I imagine this is what he reckons with as I watch a small conflict on his face in reaction to what I said.

“It is really crazy,” he concedes. “Have you been getting some personal writing done aside from schoolwork, at least? Quiet times like this is what y’all always like.”

23

By “y’all” he means writers. I don’t understand why but I almost lie that I am crushing all the stories and essays I have been thinking through, that I am teeming with ideas as the world outside has grown as still and slow as a writer often begs it. That was not happening. I did not know how to explain how I had come to see the true nature of time and how its superfluity terrifies me when we are unable to punctuate it with our own agendas, with our small claim to relevance.

Lately, everything had become so singular, night melds into day, Monday feels like Saturday and there is no pretend joy for Friday anymore. My breath flutters sometimes and I am suddenly unsure of how to breathe; I am swallowing air fast as though it would soon finish; I am thrown into a frenzy, searching the internet for symptoms, feeling my stomach and neck with the back of my hands for my own warmth; I am ashamed to be this fearful; and more so, I feel sinful, that I cannot keep hold of time when it seems to stretch endlessly in front of me.

“It’s been hard, man,” I manage, “But I am trying.”

I finish wiping the microwave and forget to warm water for tea. I return to my room; the screen remains and stares back but there are no dirty microwaves to clean anymore. I take a shower instead and decide to take a walk as I have begun to do lately. The fresh air is supposed to help with the paranoia—a report said that, too. It is quiet outside. The rose bushes around my apartment building have bloomed thick and beautiful. I take a picture for a friend who loves flowers and make a note to send them to her. I have done this many a time before, but it feels different this time. I look at the flowers again and they are vibrant in royal purple. I try to remember if they’d always grown so wild and stunning or if perhaps, I was the one who now saw them differently.

A bee drones closely to my watch, it dances freely as though it knows I would not be there long, that I could not. I take offense at its insolent dance, but I do nothing because I am afraid of bees. News on my Youtube feed said that there is an outbreak of “giant murder hornets” that likes to attack bees and tear open their thorax from their head. It was their signature kill move; the news feed has said. It is said they can be as long as an adult’s pinky and their sting can sometimes be fatal to humans. I am afraid of hornets, too. I make my way inside and sit back in front of my computer. I look at the essay I should be writing, but instead, I write this one where the world has gone so quiet I can hear the delicate curvature of rose petals. It’s been hard but I will forgive myself for this. You should, too.

24

Eli Elster University of California, Davis Walnut Creek, CA

Good Men I deliver groceries to the elderly around our neighborhood because it seems like a good thing to do. Other students sent home from school help out on their streets—my brother runs errands for a woman with black-dyed hair, who says she’s very lonely and loves him for it. We offer to a few other neighbors. Mike with the long beard and a rusty shotgun leaning against the front door smiles and says No, I’ll do it myself.

One who says yes is Stuart across town, in a wheelchair with a kindly Vietnamese attendant. He is eighty. He thinks my name is Taylor because at first, when he saw our ad, he texted my girlfriend’s phone number. But she lived too far away, so now I go to Safeway every Thursday and buy protein drinks and beans and sometimes ice cream.

Stuart’s attendant mostly lets me in through the garage. The first time, while waiting for him, I see a picture framed on the wall, with Stuart, like Superman, tearing his beige collared shirt and keen brown suit in two. A speech box bubbling from a cartoon Jimmy Olsen reads Gee, it’s really him! Stuartman! And he’s fifty years old! Signatures along the edges say Happy birthday, Stu, we love you, here’s to fifty more. Then Stuart opens the door and he has less hair than in the photograph. He isn’t wearing a mask so his attendant rushes out and straps one over his mouth and nose. It is blue.

Sorry, Taylor! Stuart says in an English accent. His bathrobe is red and stained. I don’t correct him.

I place the groceries down by his feet. While lifting them up to his lap, he says something I can’t make out through the mask, and I almost lean forward to hear until I remember leaning forward to hear is a dangerous thing to do now. Instead I say, What’s that? and he asks where I go to school, what I study, what I’m doing now. I say Davis, English, and reading and sometimes writing. He smiles through the fabric again and says, Well, we can always use more books, can’t we?

Absolutely, I reply. Stuart nods and turns his chair and closes the door. Five bills of varied amounts rest on the doormat. I pick them up. He left me a tip even though I told him not to.

A week later I walk up to his house past a small garden in the front, full of rock sculptures and pink-flower bushes and little signs he must have built when he could walk and crouch, and I realize I’ve forgotten my mask in the car. Before I can grab it Stuart opens the front door, maskless, and yells across the porch, Don’t worry, we’ll just hold our breath. He looks me in the eyes and puffs out his cheeks like a child mid-tantrum. I inhale and hold tight. He doesn’t break eye contact.

When I hand him the bags I hear him breathing slightly through his nose.

On one occasion he asks me if I’ve finished a book recently. I tell him Ray Bradbury, The Martian Chronicles.

Whether it’s a test of some sort or he likes the book or both he gives a thumbs-up and says, Good man. From then on he asks every time.

Over the weeks I say Kerouac, The Dharma Bums; Snyder, Cold Mountain Poems; Melville, Billy Budd and Other Collected Tales. Stuart says, always, Good man! I start to think he hasn’t read the books and is just happy to hear the answers.

Another month passes and the days grow hotter. Whitman, Tolkien, Heinlein, Asimov; Good man, Good man, Good man, Good man. There is a week when because of final papers I read nothing at all. I tell Stuart I finished a book about birds.

In late April I forget Stuart’s food. He texts me at 9 PM asking, Taylor! Will you be coming by today? I text back, So so sorry, it completely slipped my mind. I’ll have everything to you first thing tomorrow. I promise to be more responsible in the future. No answer. All the stores have closed for the day. I take a shower and think about the Superman picture. I wonder if he’s hungry.

June comes. Stuart needs someone to drive him to the doctor for a physical. His attendant will be out of town. He texts to ask if I can do it. I can. He writes back, Great! I’ll sit in the back. We can both wear masks. If you wouldn’t mind sanitizing the seats, that would be good as well. Thank you, Taylor! I sanitize the seats.

Thursday afternoon. He looks down at me from the ramp leading out his door, to where I’m standing by the car. He nods but doesn’t smile beneath his mask. As I shift his legs onto the seat he grunts softly. He is wearing a brown suit.

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I try making small talk on the way but either Stuart can’t hear me or doesn’t feel like hearing me. So I stay quiet and drive carefully.

Just before we turn into the parking lot he asks, How’s the reading going? I say, good. Just finished another Bradbury collection. I can’t see Stuart’s face but I can picture it. Great author, he says. You’ve read him? I ask. Yes, in school, he says. I would have loved to write like that. Me too. Well, you seem like the writing type. I tell him that that’s a very nice thing of him to say, and I mean it.

I help him out of the car then wait for an hour, listening to the radio and hoping the doctors don’t hurt him too much.

He emerges looking tired, and we drive home. I drop him off and hold the door. His attendant isn’t back yet and I can’t imagine how he’ll take off the suit, or how he put it on in the first place. At the door Stuart turns and tells me he won’t be needing groceries anymore. I want to know why but I don’t ask. His flower bushes are wilting a little. I ask him to let me know if anything changes. He says I will, thank you.

In the evening I wonder if he’s hungry, and try to imagine what the picture in his garage looks like at night. It’s Friday. I’m going through my bookshelf looking for duplicates. I find two editions of the same Bradbury novel. After wiping down one copy I drive to Stuart’s house, where I leave it on his porch without ringing the doorbell.

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George Hardy University of Denver Cincinatti, OH

I Get Drunk, We Stay Sober “I’m George and I’m an alcoholic” is something I haven’t been able to say in a poorly lit church basement in months.

When COVID-19 broke out, and the Colorado stay at home order went into place, the first thing I did was go to the grocery store and buy too much toilet paper. I waited in long lines of like-minded people, checking my watch, anxious to get home in time to walk to my favorite AA meeting down the street. I was excited to seek guidance on navigating spring break as a clean and sober college student and talk about how crazy it was at the grocery store earlier. I got home and tried to figure out where to store a 48 pack of toilet paper in a four hundred square foot studio apartment. I quickly settled on under the coffee table, rushed out the door, up the stairs, onto the sidewalk, halfway down the block, briefly wondered how long the stay at home order and virus would last, and stopped. I stood in the middle of the sidewalk, people attempting to pass at a safe distance on either side, trying to reconcile my mental health needs with the risks of the coronavirus. Finally, I decided that an AA meeting would not be completely essential.

Two weeks without a meeting would not be detrimental to my recovery, and was not worth risking my life or the lives of others. I turned around, walked home, sat on the couch, and rested my feet on my newly toilet-paper-reinforced coffee table. Two weeks passed and it did not seem like there would be in-person meetings any time soon. Months later, I still haven’t been back to a meeting. I regularly attend meetings over zoom, but it’s not the same. So much of twelve step recovery is based around fellowship and human interaction, and it is nearly impossible to replicate without risking the spread of COVID. Most meetings have even done away with the timeless cliché of going around the room and introducing yourself as an alcoholic. If you’re not sitting in a circle on folding chairs, no one knows when it’s their turn. This is just one of many important rituals made impossible by the virus. When you walk through the door of a meeting, there is someone there to shake your hand, greet you by name, and tell you they’re glad you’re there. When you reach a milestone, there is someone there to hand you a coin marking your time in sobriety and give you a hug. At the end of the meeting, you hold hands with the people around you and pray for serenity. After leaving the meeting, you go and sit down at a diner with your sober friends for “the meeting after the meeting”. Meeting in person with other recovering alcoholics is one of the pillars of twelve step recovery.

Additionally, meeting in person makes it extremely hard for court-mandated attendees, people dragged there by sober friends, and reluctant alcoholics to fly under the radar. Old-timers can smell them from a mile away, and make a point of introducing themselves and showing kindness to alcoholics who haven’t experienced it in a long time. When meeting virtually, none of the ritual or human interaction of AA is possible. I am almost two years sober, and I routinely sit through online meetings looking at my phone. Staying clean and sober is a life and death situation for most alcoholics and addicts, especially ones who only have a few days or weeks between them and the lowest points of their lives. When I got sober, I stood up to rush out of meetings as soon as they were over. I figured I had gotten my dose of AA and it was time to go home. Every time, without fail, someone would offer me a cigarette or a cup of coffee or a ride home on my way out. I dreaded it at the time, but most of my friendships with sober people started this way, and my entire support system in sobriety is made up of those friends.

The coronavirus presents an enormous obstacle to recovery from alcoholism and drug addiction, especially among those who can’t afford inpatient treatment. My recovery feels more fragile than it did before COVID, and I can only imagine what it’s like to start recovery at a time like this. I wouldn’t need to imagine if I could sit down at a diner with the people living through it. It breaks my heart that people like me—people who, without a program of recovery, drink liquor at three in the morning to calm their panic and fall back asleep—only have virtual meetings to turn to. Quitting drinking is the hardest thing I’ve ever done, and I don’t know if I would have been able to do it if I didn’t have face to face interactions with people who understood what I was going through.

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Rikki Li Northwestern University Audubon, PA

Rise and Repeat When I’m feeling lonely, I’ll bake bread. It’s an activity that takes at least four hours from start to finish, depending on the recipe. Since quarantine began, I’ve built my days around my oven, keeping track of the week by loaves: Monday meant milk toast, Wednesday, biscuits, and Sunday meant my father’s scallion buns. As a child I used to watch him knead the pale dough, the steady rocking motion of his wrists, over and over like a bobbing wave until he had a glossy, elastic mound.

With the last third of flour left in the pantry, I spend a Friday afternoon tending to a batch of focaccia. The bread aisle at my local grocery has been barren for weeks, raked clean along with other pantry staples. In my apartment, I have saved two cups of rice in a plastic bag and stashed it behind a box of saltines and a single can of plum tomatoes. My mother always said that as long as I had rice, there was a meal to eat.

Before scraping out the flour, I pour a spoonful of yeast into honeyed water and watch it bloom. Action, reaction.

Online, the recipe says to wait ten minutes. I snack on my last yogurt and read the nutrition label. I remind myself that, within every package lives cultures of bacteria I can’t pronounce. I know somewhere, there is a spider behind my fridge who pays her rent by staying out of sight. The pothos plant on my windowsill has grown outside its pot, leaves tilted toward the sun.

I add the remaining ingredients: flour, salt, oil, rosemary. The steps are familiar. Stir, then knead, rise, and repeat. I want to keep my hands busy. I tie up the trash, too full, sulfurous and sweet from the batch of muffins that started molding before I could finish them. There’s three-day old chocolate ganache in the fridge and oatmeal raisin cookies in the freezer. I have yet to learn that most of my favorite recipes are too much for one person. All over my Facebook feed, I see people posting photos of their banana bread, joking that this is their third, fourth, fifth batch. But perhaps with every loaf, we are reminded that things grow and change if we wait long enough. That there are outcomes we can create and hold in the palm of our hands.

Hours later, when the focaccia is done, I arrange it on a plate and snap a photo for my parents, who are still asleep over in Shanghai. “Are you okay,” my mother had texted the night before, paired with an image of tea and coconut tart.

“Yes, feeling healthy, don’t worry,” I reply, then cut a sliver of bread to nibble on the browned edge. It’s salty, fragrant, and still hot.

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Kelsey Day Marlett Emerson College Boone, NC

More Song than Scream: My Grandmother, a Coal Mine, and COVID-19 She told me, first, of birds that could fit in your hand, drowning in the bottom of Colorado coal mines. The air, hot and acrid, swarms down the bird’s tiny lungs, and its body bursts into one final sound, more song than scream, warning the miners that they have to run. I was five, maybe six years old. She came to my kindergarten class to tell more stories, but she didn’t tell that one. Some stories, my grandmother saved for me.

When she came to my classroom, a guest speaker, a storyteller from all the way out west, I felt like I could die with pride. That was my grandmother, my grandmother, holding a whole room of kindergarteners hostage with her words. When she was done, she asked if anyone had a question. I shot my hand in the air. But I didn’t have a question. I just wanted her attention, to steal it away from my classmates, to remind everyone there that she was mine–and when she called on me, I didn’t have anything to say, and so in a burst of panic I just said, “I love you.”

On the other side of the world, perhaps in that same breath, an explosion ripped through a coal mine 276 miles northeast of Beijing. It killed over 200 miners and trapped a dozen more underground. But the canaries were still only stories, to me.

“I love you,” I said. In front of everyone, the alphabet carpet, the duty-free lunch sign-up sheet. The teachers liked that. I think my grandmother did, too. I blushed ferociously, but it didn’t matter. I’d made my point.

My grandmother knows how to make a point. It’s what most people don’t like about her–she will stop at nothing to get her argument across. She told me about cancer early on. But it was a toothless, quiet thing, just another story. Something to worry about, later.

In the meantime, she taught me to knit. Crooked, laughing stitches, fumbling between the needles. When she went back west, I spent my Tuesday nights at a yarn shop with four ancient women, practicing my stitches. The store manager taught me the pearl stitch between her frequent smoke breaks. Scarfs. Headbands. Muscle memory. I was learning how to knit hats when they finally booted me.

“It’s a liability issue,” the manager said on my way out. Her breath smelled like smoke. “When your grandma comes back into town, y’all can come here together. But from now on, you’ve gotta have an adult with you.”

I began to email my grandmother stories. She sent them back, the pages flooded in red. Comma, here. No, here.

Sentence fragment. Where is the plot? Tell me the truth. Give me a reason to keep reading. I was eleven by then. 500 more people died in Chinese coal mines that year. I don’t know how many birds that translates to. In my own country, 39,520 women died from breast cancer.

I kept writing stories. She drizzled red ink into my palms, and I drank deeply. I licked my knuckles clean.

When I got old enough to write about things that hurt, I stopped sending her my stories. She read my poetry book, my book of secrets, but we didn’t talk about the parts that bled. It was better if I could still be that kindergartener, the kid who raised her hand just to say, “I love you.”

She paid for me to go to college in the city. Eighteen years old, squinting between buildings, I wrote her emails on the weekends. I told her about the staggered buildings, the bright-eyed professors. I didn’t tell her about my girlfriend. But I suspected she knew.

I forgot about birds, for a little while. The next time I returned to Colorado, the news was on fire. An excerpt from my journal, in March 2020: Humans are in a bit of a situation. There is a disease, and it targets those of us who have lived the longest. It targets those of us who most want to breathe.

The coal mines seethed with a new sickness–a type that even the birds couldn’t sense. Days later, my grandmother was diagnosed with stage four breast cancer. I showed up on her doorstep, wearing a mask made from a cut-up T-shirt. She didn’t hug me. We sat on the front porch, six feet apart.

“I don’t want to die bitter,” she said.

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The windchimes clattered, scrambled and clanged in the wind. She winced. I studied my knees. She used to love that sound.

“I am angry,” she said. “But I don’t want to die angry. I am angry because life is good. I am angry because I love living.”

If cancer can learn from its host, it learned a relentless honesty from my grandmother. The cancer never pretended to be anything other than what it was. It never pretended to be a story.

“I know,” I said.

I wondered about the birds that died mid-song. I wondered if they drew that final breath with her same sacred anger.

If such a breath can produce music.

My throat burned. The windchimes crackled and seized. I remembered that day in the classroom, my stubborn insistence on getting her attention, on telling her the truth. No embarrassment. No audience, now.

“I love you,” I said.

And I thought about how coal mines erupt and how birds sing right before their hearts explode, how the cancer knitted into my grandmother’s skin like the stitches she taught me, but the coal mines were not stories anymore. The story of cancer had shed its baby teeth, the same way I shed mine. My grandmother was dying. And I couldn’t even hug her.

We ate Neapolitan ice cream on her porch. She cut the ice cream with a steak knife, into perfect triangles, the way she did when I was a kid. We ate it with forks. I used to beg my mother to cut our ice cream the same way my grandmother did, but Mom never could do it right.

“I love you, too,” my grandmother said. “I love your spirit.”

No red lines. No corrections.

“Getting old is terrible,” she said. “But it’s terrible because what I have here is so good.”

I imagine that in the moment before my grandmother dies, she will not scream. She will not cry. She will not spit bitter at the feet of the earth she loves. I imagine that, like the birds in the mines who realize they have one final breath to warn, to scream, to demand escape–that she will sing.

I finished the ice cream. We told stories until the sun went down.

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Julie Pike Boston University Brooklyn, NY

Pans, Woks, and Accordians It’s March. The WHO has declared a pandemic but still the woman across from me on the subway wears a soft camel coat and red lipstick and beautiful gold earrings made of metal bent in the shape of eyes. There is a man with a silver skull ring on his middle finger standing over his razor scooter, holding onto the subway pole. Yesterday was Purim and I walked through Bed Stuy past Orthodox Jewish men in sparkly hats and little Orthodox kids dressed like Snow White, like pilots and cops and doctors. A truck drove by blasting music and Orthodox men danced out the back of it, lay down in the street and laughed as cars honked their way past them.A woman in a shiny red coat is laughing on the other side of the subway car and I’m off to buy pants that will be my last in-person purchase for months.

Every night at 7 p.m. we stand on our stoop and clap and whoop and smack pans together to thank doctors and nurses and all essential workers. We live on a dead-end street with twelve houses and a big brick wall at one end. There is a doctor in one house across the street, a nurse a few doors down. Each of us has a noise-maker of choice. My mother and sister both favor the clap-and-cheer method. My father smashes pot lids together like cymbals. I beat a sauce pan with one of those wooden kitchen implements I don’t know the name for, sort of like a spoon that’s gotten a bad, blunt haircut. My boyfriend has chosen the wok. Every day at 6:58 he fetches it from its cabinet and beats it proudly with a spoon.

“I’ll never not think of you when I see that wok,” my father says.

The first night we do it, we are the only people on our street out at 7:00. At 7:01, the neighbor directly across from us appears with a pan, a few more people peek their heads out of their doors and clap. Over the wall at the end of the street there is a set of gated-off apartment buildings. There’s a shockingly big drop on the other side of the wall—on our side, the wall is maybe eight feet high, but if you stand up on the base of the streetlamp against the wall and peer over, you see that the drop is maybe thirty feet down into the parking lot between the apartment buildings. Once, years ago, a pair of boys appeared over the wall from the apartment side, breathing heavy, triumphant. They high-fived, leapt off the wall on our side, and jogged off down our street. I’ve never been inside the gates of the apartment buildings over the wall, but we can see the top few floors of the buildings, and the roof.

That first day at 7:00, there’s one woman on the furthest roof of the apartments, a tiny figure with a halo of blond hair banging on a pan. We wave to us and she waves back. The next night, more people appear at 7:00—the pale, seemingly nocturnal boy across the street looms behind his parents as they clap; our one neighbor who has a voice like an air raid siren and who wears leggings under his jean shorts brings out a drum and bangs on it while standing on his porch (a redemption arc!); the Reverend who lives on the street perpendicular to ours slow-claps from his porch and shouts “yeah!” every thirty seconds. Two figures appear on the corner, a mom and a little boy who’s probably two years old. She holds a pan and he smacks it with a wooden spoon and jumps up and down. I start calling him Quarantine Baby, and we look for him every evening at 7:00.

One day it’s raining and my boyfriend and I are sitting on the couch reading when horns start beeping outside. I think it’s just one car honking, that it will pass, but more horns join it. Just as I’m standing up to investigate, my sister comes in from a walk.

“It’s Quarantine Baby’s birthday!” she says, beaming.

Of course Quarantine Baby is thriving in quarantine, he’s a Taurus, I think to myself as I stand and pull on my jacket.

Four cars are parked in front of Quarantine Baby’s house, their windows rolled down and signs hanging from their occupants’ hands. They are calling “happy birthday!” and beeping their horns. Quarantine Baby and his mom stand on the street, and his dad stands behind them on the stoop. One person comes out of a car to drop a present on the curb, and Quarantine Baby hops up and down.

“He’s so confused!” his mother says, and he jumps faster.

“Happy birthday!” we call as we walk back to our house.

In Sicily, neighbors in quarantine are playing music from their balconies, accordion and tambourine and a lone jolly voice ringing out across the courtyard at sunset.

Every night, more people appear on the street to clap and cheer and bang on pots and pans.

We are horrible to each other much of the time, I cannot help thinking, but we are good, too. God, sometimes, we are

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so good.

Alexis Sanchez University of California, Los Angeles Los Angeles, CA

A Note to Gen Z I recently saw an article arguing that Millennials are the Unluckiest Generation. I have never been a fan of this type of generational categorization, mostly because it’s only truly useful to marketers and data brokers who have gathered more than enough intel from me. Yet, I found myself inexplicably angry at this article, knowing what many Gen Zers are enduring. Here is my argument on how my generation is pretty unlucky. Being young for us is canceled, and never really was a thing.

Despite some exceptions, most of our parents lost their jobs during the 2008 recession. We lost our homes and our sense of stability. Unlike millennials, our cynicism towards American institutions was shattered early on. We were never disappointed because there was no hope to begin with. We had Obama as our president. This gave a lot of us a false sense of progress, which was soon shattered by the 2016 election. If you are a BIPOC like me, this might not have been a shock but felt like a ticking time bomb you wish someone would’ve dismantled by now. However, we didn't stay silent. This is not our modus operandi. The fragility of our social structures is the engine that drives us. Drives us to work harder; to shout louder.

As we type furiously on our computers to submit just one more cover letter to one of the few jobs available right now, we can hear our institutions shatter. We hear the police sirens outside.

We are not only digital natives; we’re digital junkies. It’s an addiction at the expense of acquiring basic social skills.

If you have ever wondered why ordering a pizza over the phone practically gives us a heart attack, this is why. We don’t say “excuse me,” we wait for the person in front of us to move. When someone we don’t like pursues us, we don’t tell them “no,” we ghost. We were already socially impaired, lonely, and anxious because we never truly existed in the world.

Quarantine only worsens this. I am not offended that my friends seldom reach out to me because I know they just “don’t want to bother me” or “don’t want to seem like too much.”

We listen to the Rachel Maddow Show podcast before we get out of bed. We cry our mascara off and have a panic attack before noon. We find cyber girlfriends on tinder to feel anything. To feel real. This is a common phrase used among us because we are practically cyborgs at this point. We are living in someone’s apocalyptic fever dream, and it’s not fun.

Our crumbling democracy, the recent episode of 90-day fiance, images of a possible trump regime all flood my memory at night. I google: What does it mean to live under a dictatorship? How to stop comparing yourself to others?

Miley Cyrus, age? How to fall asleep? I found an article that advised reading a book before bed is an insomniac’s cure. I search through my bookcase at 2 a.m. to look for my 20th-century Literature anthology, assuming that perhaps the Lost Generation might provide me with some insight during these times. I decide to read T.S. Elliot’s Wasteland. A horrible choice. This only worsened my existential dread.

It seems like there is no time to compare to this time. Of course, there were similar times, but America is facing something far different. I know this because I talk to old people frequently. I usually find solace in the fact that elders have gone through similar situations, or much worse experiences, than whatever I’m going through at any given moment. Older people also always have very strong opinions on practically anything you ask them. Try it. Ask an older person something.

Trust me, they won’t shut up. Yet, for the first time in my life, I have heard many elders utter the words, “I don’t know.”

When I look at the future now, I see a void. I see only whispers of hopeful predictions from optimistic establishment democrats, and my worst nightmares nearing. I am in an incredibly lucky position. I go to school. I have a job that allows me to work remotely. I have a roof over my head. I eat my grandma’s food every day, and if someone annoys me these days, I can simply block them with one click. Though I refuse to indulge in any sort of self-pity, I am still a young person whose life was altered considerably by this pandemic.

This past fall before the pandemic hit, I finally transferred to my dream school after climbing my way up the miserable academic ladder, at community college. I was finally surrounded by people my age, I lived on a beautiful campus, and turned 21. Spring term was going to be my hoe phase, and then I got the email. The announcement that all of the Spring quarter was going to be entirely remote. I met a friend at the dining hall, unknowingly for the last time, to panic eat with her.

Suddenly, we were not allowed to grab the plates in the dining hall ourselves. The usual crowdedness now looked like a health hazard, yet in the morning I nonchalantly stepped over some frat boy’s vomit. “It’s like we entered into an alternate

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dimension,” says my friend. Not long after, a revolution broke out. A surprising result: My white friends who very clearly just discovered James Baldwin a week ago are now yelling at me about race on Instagram. Despite my cynicism towards internet activism, this became my chief act of resistance since I live with an elder. When you live with an auto-immune compromised elder, there are certain things you can’t do. Except for the essentials, I have pretty much been inside for the past six months now. This might seem excessive, but I’d rather feel bored than regretful. The upside is that, as my very extroverted grandma grows increasingly restless, she is now telling me stories that she otherwise would be too shy to tell me before.

Two martinis and a bet were the reason my grandma asked my grandpa to dance. She was the youngest of nine children, so by the time she was a teenager, her mom was older and used a hearing aid, which my grandma would hide under a mattress to sneak boys into the house. It’s amusing, yet I strangely feel a bit of anger at the same time. I can hear the nagging child inside me pout as I realize that I will never enjoy this age-appropriate carelessness. This perhaps explains my slight irritation with the argument that millennials are the unluckiest generation. They got to be messy. They got to be slutty.

They got to be outside and throw up outside a bar without worrying they were going to kill their grandma. Or feel guilty for messaging girls under their very Christian grandmother’s roof during the quarantine. I’m no sage, but what I do know is that this type of carelessness is now deadly.

Although the word hope isn’t typical in my vocabulary, I truly hope we really are generation change. In the meantime, keep shouting, keep sharing resources, keep fighting for our postal service, and keep making post-apocalyptic themed playlists on Spotify. They’re a treat.

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Cain Schmitz Marquette University Cudahy, WI

My First Real Fear I’ve always been a paranoid person. It comes with the psychotic disorder. There’s always someone or something trying to watch me, trying to follow me, trying to hurt me. There’s always something evil right at my back, every person on the street wants to grab me and drag me into a car and make sure I never see my family again.

People make fun of me. They say I’m scared of nothing. And I am. I’m scared of empty hallways and silent streets at night, because when I’m alone bad things can happen. People make fun of me. They say I’m scared of everything. And I am. I’m scared of my loved ones and people I have known for years. I’m scared of the microwave exploding in my face and I’m scared of the elevator in my apartment taking me to a floor that doesn’t exist and I’m scared of the ground falling out from under me.

I at least know that most of my fears are of unreal things. There isn’t anything at my back. Most people on the street are good, or at least good enough to not kidnap me. I know that the microwave won’t combust and I know there are only eight floors in my building and I know the earth is sturdy and won’t crumble from my weight. It’s kind of strange, then, to suddenly be afraid of something very real.

The wind has always been there for me. When I’m scared, I go outside. I sit, and I breathe. I breathe in deep. I like windy days because the wind pushes at my back and reminds me that I’m real, and I’m part of the world, which is also real.

I picture the wind as arms wrapping around me, running through my hair, pushing me in some direction and telling me, “Go, go live.”

Now there’s disease in the wind. At least that’s what some are saying. I remember back in spring, when the virus was new and we knew even less than we do now, my first time stepping outside to buy groceries. And I was surrounded by everything and nothing. The streets were empty, and when you’re alone, that’s when bad things happen to you.

The air wasn’t still that day. The wind wrapped itself around me, ran through my hair, pushed me. And I hid my face in my sweater, because it was no longer safe. More than the threat of the people or the elevator or the cracks in the sidewalk, I was afraid of the wind and the real possibility of death she brought with her.

This is my first time being afraid of facts and figures. I can’t soothe myself by saying it won’t happen, it’s not possible, it’s very unlikely. Because that’s just not true.

The wind who used to remind me of the fact that I’m safe and alive has become a horseman of the apocalypse. She brings plague with her to every corner of the world. I’m afraid to go outside. I’m afraid to touch anything. I’m afraid to breathe. For the first time, all of my fears are founded.

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Emma Tolliver University of California, Davis Lathrop, CA

Eyes When I exit my car, the desire to have a mask that covers my entire face is consuming. It would allow me to play pretend, like a child hiding under a blanket from their monsters.

Unfortunately, I’m not a child anymore. I lack the bewilderment I experienced as a child when comparing the big, bright eyes of my white friends to the dark slits my Korean parents and I had instead. I lack the confusion-but not the shame-I felt when a boy I didn’t know called out to me and pulled his eyes back, earning laughs from those nearby. I lack the misunderstanding that made me kneel on Sundays at Mass, close my eyes, and pray to God for Him to please give me pretty blue eyes like the beautiful protagonists of movies, only to say amen and see nothing changed.

Of course, now I understand, and all too well. It’s this understanding that creates the tension that runs across my shoulders. It’s why my steps fall quick and nervous and soft. It’s why I feel like sinking with the knowledge that there is no place for me to hide, not even behind my mask. It is why it is with great reluctance that I enter the grocery store.

With a focus that I only adopted since the beginning of the pandemic, I quickly head to the produce section to scan for tomatoes, and, when I find the display, approach it swiftly. The less time spent shopping, the better.

I’m not so fast, though, that I miss the eyes of a young boy staring at me. He wasn’t older than seven, wearing a mask and holding onto the leg of his mother, a fair woman with lengthy blonde hair. When our eyes meet, I smile politely at the boy and, feeling my face move behind my mask, drop the smile and look away. Although this may be considered the new normal, it is still jarringly new.

When I stop beside the tomatoes, I hear an insistent "Mom, Mom," from the boy. The mother hums in response. I don't intend to stare, but my gaze lingers on him when I see his pointer finger, stubby and defiantly accusatory, aimed at me.

He says, with all the boldness only a child can have, "She has the virus." Only then I realize he's not pointing at me: he's pointing at my eyes.

I don’t have time to tell them about how responsibly I take the pandemic, how I haven’t seen my family in months to protect them and myself, and how I most certainly do not have the virus. The mother has already grabbed the boy’s hand, though, and pulled it down. “Stop it. You can’t say that about people just because they’re-” the woman stops to look at me.

The eyes of the woman do not feel any less accusatory. If anything, they are unapologetic and unwavering in their aggression.

The unspoken word is, at best, “asian.” At worst, it’s a slur. I try not to dwell on it, but I fail. Months from now, that woman won’t think of or even remember the word she almost said, but I will. It’s a privilege and a luxury to never experience the agony of a single, unspoken word.

The woman turns back to her son and I turn back to the tomato display. I’m about as red as one, hot underneath my mask. I stare at the tomatoes and try not to think about how difficult it is to shop when I feel unsafe all the time. I don’t want to think about that news article that has continued to haunt me whenever I step outside: the one about that woman from a city a few hundred miles away that was assaulted just because she possesses Asian features, like I do. I especially don’t want to think about how the virus may not even be the most immediate threat to my health.

It wouldn’t be until much later that I would think about grocery shopping and realize that I forgot to get tomatoes.

I try very hard to move on and finish my shopping. I tell myself that I’m not terribly troubled. I insist upon it; I purposefully ignore my hands and the way they’re shaking, so I have plausible deniability. I’m not scared: I’m just abundantly cautious and careful, and that’s all.

I tell myself that, but I know the truth. What I don't know is how much more of this I can take. I don’t know much more I can bear to witness with my own two eyes.

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SOCIAL INNOVATION

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Karlin Li University of Rochester Acton, MA

Empowering the Westside Farmers Market Project Overview Reviving small businesses in the Westside Farmers Market amongst COVID restrictions.

Background and Motivation Social distancing, safety concerns, and a lack of summer students would seriously threaten the financial and cultural positions of small businesses in the Rochester community. I participated in my school’s Coronavirus Challenge, a 10-day entrepreneurship event where I competed against 140+ participants to design and execute an original plan to help the Westside Farmers Market. I really enjoyed feeling like part of my local community at my local farmers market as a kid, so I wanted to remind people that they are still part of their communities despite social distancing.

Leadership in Action The Market had two main issues: recreating their fun and lively atmosphere and maintaining its community of customers.

So, I decided to bring the fun Market atmosphere to the homes of customers. I created virtual competitions that encapsulates the Market’s quirky personality, with themes ranging from guessing the number of kettle corn pieces in a jar to creating recipes featuring produce from local farms. I also worked to spread awareness about customer safety, creating a short film that walks potential customers through the Market’s strict safety procedures.

Most importantly, I contacted the City of Rochester’s Bureau of Communications, establishing a new media partnership between Rochester and the Market. This collaboration allows the Market to use the City’s social media platform to bring in customers and build a virtual community.

My solution won 2nd place in the Coronavirus Challenge, and I have been working with the Market to implement my recommendations. Even before the pandemic, its number of weekly customers has decreasing each year, from a peak of 435 people in 2013 to a peak of 286 people in 2019. This year, its weekly peak had dropped to 240 people. I hope that my work preserves this institution so that it can keep providing great memories for everyone, like mine did for me.

Reflections and Next Steps From here, I plan on starting a delivery service for the Market that will let volunteers drop off the orders that customers make online. I’m also reaching out to local high schools to bolster the Market’s small team with students looking to volunteer and build their resumes. The best ideas stem from sitting down with someone, understanding their concerns, and taking inspiration from your own past experiences. Similar to my experiences in medicine, I enjoyed collecting background information from my daily zoom calls with Market representatives, stepping out into the community, and continuously revising my plans to craft the best solution for the Market.

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Trishabelle Manzano Middlebury College Los Angeles, CA

Project PUSO - The Heart of Pilipinx Empowerment Project Overview Project PUSO empowers the Pilipinx-American community against anti-Asian racism.

Background and Motivation With many individuals quarantined at home, they must adjust to a new digital age with an exacerbated need for social connection. Witnessing growing anti-Asian racism in the United States and the authoritarian Anti-Terror Law in the Philippines, I felt as if I had no network to depend on and to discuss my fears. Project PUSO was born to connect and uplift Pilipinx American individuals and communities through Unity, Solidarity, and Outreach.

Leadership in Action Project PUSO leads individuals through a self-reflection of their experiences to create community through resilience and learning about our shared “invisible” history. I worked with two close friends to discuss realistic ways to engage and connect individuals across different time zones and levels of cultural affinity. To empower leaders that identify as Pilipinx, we figured there was no better way to do so than to develop an organization focused on discussion of our shared narratives, and we quickly built a social media presence to 300+ followers.

We then organized and executed our first event, a virtual weekend conference with 129 registered attendees. We not only reached out to academics, but also scoured Instagram and our personal networks for people we felt could speak on the FilAm experience. Our event received positive feedback, from appreciation for the existence of a space that feels like home to appreciation for facilitating a supportive and affirming community.

Having realized that our mission was too much for our small founding team, I began scaling our organization. I onboarded two volunteers who approached me to help with outreach, and we are now considering organizational structures like a board of directors and a membership system.

Reflections and Next Steps As I continue to grow this startup nonprofit organization, I will keep learning to mobilize individuals toward building community strength and resilience, and to effectively implement feedback and criticism. I want to maximize the amount of support Pilipinx can provide each other, particularly for those of us who do not have the privilege of a Pilipinx community nearby.

I believe in the strength of reflection as a process of healing and learning: It is important to educate each other to help us build our future. I hope that Project PUSO will grow to become a self-sustaining national organization that continues to empower and support Pilipinx-Americans.

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Ise Henriques Sharp Pomona College New York City, NY

Static Arts Collective Project Overview The Static Arts Collective empowers the disempowered through a virtual arts platform.

Background and Motivation In the span of a couple weeks, I saw young artists lose income, housing, and access to materials while attempting to process the pains of a changing world. But they also explored new mediums and delved into new topics, seeking to understand a society that they are both part of and distanced from. I had previously worked with friends to set up in-person student exhibitions in downtown Manhattan. This summer, we decided to create a virtual exhibition for young artists.

Leadership in Action Not wanting this exhibition to be a one-time event, we established the Static Arts Collective. After the murder of George Floyd, we postponed our exhibition, instead organizing a fundraising variety show. Organized by-and-for college students in under two weeks, we raised $6,000 split evenly between Black Table Arts and The National Bailout Fund. This demonstrated the impact of the arts as a mode for social change and the feasibility of fundraising via virtual exhibition.

Our next step was to launch another virtual exhibition fundraising for young artists. We received submissions from 100+ artists at 38 US and UK schools. Responses ranged from visual and performing arts – including short films, fiber art and sculpture – to prose, poetry and music. Receiving 400 individual pieces of work, we selected at least one piece from each artist. Wanting viewers to take time with each piece, we simulated the physical gallery experience with curated rooms that present the works in an organized and manageable fashion.

Donations continue coming into our exhibition and are split evenly between The Soze Agency’s Artist and Activist Relief Fund, which provides direct grants to artists and activists who have been impacted by COVID-19, and the Black Art Futures Fund, which provides grants to non-profit Black-led arts organizations. The Static Arts Collective has had great success fundraising, providing artistic relief, and connecting creatives to collaborate o n and share each other's work.

Reflections and Next Steps Leading the Static Arts Collective empowered me to recognize that my abilities can reach beyond in-person art therapy. I will continue to create platforms for others to heal, connect, and fundraise. Through the Static Arts Collective, my next initiative is to create a series of artists' talks around the theme of healing through art, which will be made available on our website. My hope is that my work will inspire others who may be experiencing loss or pain to create as an outlet and method of healing, regardless of their prior experience or abilities.

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Fellowship Speakers Nomita Divi Ending Pandemics Rachel Galvin University of Chicago E.J. Reedy Polsky Center Dr. John Wilkinson University of Chicago Dr. Taylor Winkleman NextGen

Advisors Rachel Galvin University of Chicago Alex Long Wilson Center

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