1. Cher from Clueless and lowkey her brother???
2. Cynthia Erivo and Ariana Grande—just their fingies
3. Ralph Fiennes and Stanley Tucci in Conclave
4. Mama and a Girl Behind YOU
5. Ball and chain
6. John Updike and John Downdike
7. The Trolley Problem if you pull the lever and The Trolley Problem if you don’t
8. Pomegranate and grief
Dear Readers,
This past weekend, I flew home to California. I originally planned to fly back for a quick trip to attend the wedding of one of my childhood friends, who I’ve known for almost two decades. But, I ended up staying an extra couple days to accompany my mother through a scary surgery. Over the quick span of just a few days, I witnessed the beauty of everlasting love through a joyous celebration, before spending hours in a hospital waiting room, anxiously reflecting on the fragility of life. I can easily say it was an eventful weekend filled with duality—excitement and fear, all the good and all the bad.
A lot of this weekend was spent thinking about time. At the wedding, my friends and I talked about how weird your 20s are, watching your friends move through completely different stages of life and comparing timelines, always wondering if you’re moving too fast or too slow. Then, waiting rooms are never fun. Time seems to move impossibly slowly there, and all you can do is sit helplessly and twiddle your thumbs…so, you end up spending the time sitting and pondering—about how much you cherish the person you’re there waiting for, the time you’ve spent with them so far, and how you want to make the most of every moment you have with them moving
forward. While time in the waiting room may be moving like molasses, it dawns on you how time is also fleeting.
This week, our writers are also reflecting on how they spend their time and the times we live in today. In Feature, Ivy discusses her fascination with utopia and contrasts it with the dystopias we currently inhabit. In Narrative, Christina shares memories of traveling by car and train over the years, while Nina steps out of her body for a discussion on loneliness and solitude. In Arts & Culture, Chelsea talks about poet Ada Limón and the gendered portrayals of how we love in literature. Alternatively, Sofie shares her thoughts on cutting toxic people from your life, inspired by the song, “Cross You Out.” As a RUE student myself, I have to give a special shoutout to this week’s Lifestyle writers and fellow RUE students, Elaine and Merissa! Elaine takes us along on her tumultuous knitting journey, while Merissa tells how a recent haircut led to both self-reflection and a reflection on societal standards of what defines ‘pretty.’ After reading all of these wonderful introspective pieces, make sure to check out Dolma’s fall-themed crossword and Alayna’s interactive ‘choose-your-own-adventure’ postpourri article to help you decide how to spend your Halloween night! When big life events come our way, we tend to do a lot of reflecting—on time spent and all the ways we want to spend our time moving forward. Let this be your (and my) reminder to slow down, take a deep breath, and appreciate where you’re at. There is no need to compare timelines with your peers and stress about whether or not you’re on the right track. Instead, just try to cherish the time you have with your friends and family, and make the most of every experience. And, of course, if you’re looking for another great way to spend your time, make sure to read this week’s edition of post-.
Taking a moment to pause,
Jessica Lee Copy Chief
by IVY ROCKMORE Illustration by MINGLU DU @duminglu_ar
content warning: description of mass suicide, mentions of rape
Fifteen years from now, when I am thirtysix, I wonder if I will still be thinking about utopia. If, as Annie Dillard says, how we spend our days is how we spend our lives, my life will not be spent writing, but imagining. Utopian humanism swells in me while sitting at my desk, tapping its wooden surface with my nails; and while turtling along the Quiet Green, a melting strawberry-banana smoothie wetting my hand; or even while I let my ass drowse against a chair in a class in Sayles Hall, waiting for the ceiling to collapse into puzzle pieces that I can slide back together. It seems that everywhere I go, I wait for utopia to come. Perhaps a better explanation is that I wait for utopia to come together.
* I do not see utopia as all-consuming, cluttering my consciousness like used cardboard boxes. Utopia is not necessarily a daydream, even if I dream it, but rather a comfort, an attachment I believe in to keep myself going–the difference being that I recognize utopia is out of reach, because by definition it is unreachable, and somehow that dynamic atomizes it into something material, something that feels close to me.
* I continue reading confessional poetry and dystopian news articles past my bedtime. I consume what appears to be the collapse of most public institutions: Brown’s pausing of PhD cohorts in many humanities disciplines; the collapse of the F.D.A. under RFK; and the defunding of public media organizations like NPR come to mind. I write in my journal, concerned by what these changes mean for the ways we can conceptualize and imagine better worlds.
* What are my utopias?
For one, I am a college student, meaning I inhabit the bubble of all bubbles: the college campus, the insularity of its social and political sphere, and seeming liminality (even as it is fleeting). My muscles loosen up at the thought. In this vision, there is no outside world. I attend university to hone my craft, learn about the history of art and literature, and nibble on Caprese sandwiches with dear friends on sunny, peach-orange days. Some days, I feel so close to reaching this utopia that I wonder if it could be real.
The farthest dreams are those that enchant me more. I long for a world following the tenets of sympathy and spiritual equality, in the words
of the late poet Alice Notley, in the lineage of the second generation of the New York School of poets. There is, too, the utopia of the post-grad city, gliding on the 1 train downtown, clutching a bottle of Chardonnay in one hand and a romantic partner in the other. But most of all, I no longer want to exist between two worlds of cis and trans living. I envision a world free of the corruption and emotional statelessness of the cisheteronormative outerworld and the hopelessness of the trans underground. I close my eyes and see myself in harmony with all the other trans women of the world, in sisterhood, those who are not American especially. There are no borders and there is no gender violence, only escape.
* I apologize. I realize now it is impossible
to pinpoint these utopias; any such attempt would be incomplete. How can I know I want something without having lived it?
That is to say: How do I know if something is a utopia?
* Sometimes, I witness utopia's opposite, something so vile and true that it forces me to reconsider the very terms of utopian thinking. Not just what I long for, but how I imagine
getting there, destabilized into its black-holegalaxy: the fantasy that there is collectivity in suffering, that what binds us might also be what kills us.
I am an American trans woman. Though the U.S. is descending into an anti-trans frenzy, I still have safety and immense privilege compared to trans women in much of the world, and my imagination for responding to violence has been shaped by that safety.
* This month, I watched something that forced me to reckon with a different kind of collective action, one I could never have imagined from my position of relative safety. It happened to trans women I will never meet, in a city I've never been to.
24 trans women tried to commit mass suicide in Indore, India, after another trans woman in their city was raped. Two men had approached the woman, pretending to be journalists. When she called them out on their charade, they blackmailed her, dragged her to a nearby building, and assaulted her.
There is a video.
Through the grainy film of my phone screen, on Instagram reels, no less, I watch two dozen women sprint through busy streets, stampeding toward a house. In the close-quartered, locked home, the women consume phenyl, a floor cleaner. Though the media organization chose to blur the footage, the women’s coughs line the static audio, sickeningly. With time, I watch the women deflate, in the same way the advertising balloons do. Some clap their hands together, seemingly calling to some greater force. G-d, each other, the camera—there is no way to know. Half of them sprawl out on the floor, mouths agape. The footage resembles a stop-motion film, fights erupting in the streets between the remaining women who can still stand and police officers, chests puffed out. The brightness of ambulance cars jackknifing my vision. Footage of feet and painted toes tied to blue hospital beds.
I heart the video.
*
I try to imagine the person I was before I saw the video. I scroll through my mutual friends who have liked or reposted the video, most of whom are trans girls my age living in New York City.
* (I have a fantasy that I live with them, any and all of these trans girls, waking up in a communal New York City apartment, drowning in linen sheets, tiptoeing through south-facing windows, where we will make banana bread and hard-boiled eggs for breakfast.)
* I call my mom; she is busy, on the phone with a relative. I turn my phone off and under my covers, my body heats like a kettle. Am I really that unable to hold their attempted deaths without immediately creating a fantasy? Why is my response to immense anger numbness, followed by a return to my utopian thinking? How American of me, how self-centered. What an awful thing: to absorb their despair before refusing it, tipping it like a dunk tank onto the street, where it will splatter in liquid form.
* This is my second apology. What are the ways in which I have come to conceptualize my dystopias?
* I am living my dystopia, in that I am directly impacted by the political, and subsequent cultural, shift to the right in day-to-day life, in ways that others may be able to turn a blind eye to. I am living my dystopia, in that I am quick to blame my peers, who are not at fault for this environment, and who, too, were born into it without consent. I am living my dystopia, in that the powers that be are stronger if I give in to this isolation, believe in seclusion, squeeze the blade of guilt so compact until my soft palms bleed, the blood trailing away, snakelike.
* Douglas Crimp writes in 1989: "There is no question but that we must fight the unspeakable violence we incur from the society in which we find ourselves. But if we understand that violence is able to reap its horrible rewards through the very psychic mechanisms that make us part of this society, then we may also be able to recognize—along with our rage—our terror, our guilt, and our profound sadness. Militancy, of course, then, but mourning too: mourning and militancy."
* I am living my dystopia, in that the trans girls are not really my friends. I will never meet most of them. Our connections are just as fragmented as the digital networks that link us.
* The women of Indore chose a different exit than I dream of. They manifested their anger and rage into reality. They attempted to create their own utopia, or rather a response to its opposite, an ultimate failure so impossible to hold in my mind that I can only understand it through the grainy footage on my phone.
* Third apology, but this time I will not apologize.
* What are the ways I have stopped dreaming?
What are the ways my classmates have stopped dreaming?
What are the ways you have stopped dreaming?
* And what, then, of my classmates?
There are some who watch and heart videos, if only to quell the circular pounding of their own organs. Others do not watch at all, which they consider emotionally moral or politically necessary, depending on who you speak to. A few strut along the Main Green with messenger bags flapping against their baggy pants, speaking about how we are just so fucking fucked. They scare me, only because they are truthful, which means they have learned not to believe in utopia. What I fear most are those with their Blue Room feta cheese salads who are exhausted into silence.
* I go back to my poetry notebook, where I try to make sense of how my day-to-day life has shifted. My eyes scrutinize the pages, and I scribble themes, little notes I imagine looking back on someday. A few of my gay guy friends are talking about wanting to give up and try out women, and they say it as a joke, but there's something weak in their giggles. Bunches of Lit Bros sit in the Rock, sliding copies of Nietzsche and post-modern novels like hockey pucks across tables, finding warmth in intellectual nihilism. It feels like everyone is scared to be even the smallest bit subversive.
* Whereas some of my classmates continue to try to forge their own utopias in spite of the dystopia, I wonder how they recreate dystopia in the process. Does cataloguing my classmates dilute my own complicity?
* WOKE IS UNDEAD AT BROWN, a sign on a pole by the Ratty declares, in neon pink text, in the final weeks of October. I do not know who put it up, but they have requested I COME CELEBRATE DURING HALLOWEEKEND.
* In the rain, the sign saturates, but remains nailed to the utility pole.
* I FaceTime a friend from LA, a selfdescribed transsexual. On the green, I scoop chickpeas into my mouth, chewing. Through my phone screen, I see her face while behind me a machine promises to send a message to my future self.
* I am mourning, but there has not been a militancy, not yet, not yet, not in me or at Brown, where everything supposedly is paradise. In class, I watch a video from 1992 of ACT UP activists throwing the ashes of those who died of AIDS on the White House lawn.
And then I walk through the No Kings Rally during Family Weekend, passing signs held mostly by Gen Xers yelling, THIS IS WHAT DEMOCRACY LOOKS LIKE.
* I hunch over in my bed, scribbling abstract language in my notebook—air & dust & particles, still. A breath, hoping the nonsense might manifest as coherence. I hear from a friend who does laps at the campus pool, freestyle, backstroke, hundreds of meters, swim cap permanently smelling of chlorine. They say the routine is nice. It does something for them.
Tourmaline, speaking about the trans elder Miss Major, who recently passed away, says: “As Miss Major says, sometimes you can’t go outside. Maybe there’s a heightened presence of people who will harass you or arrest you. Sometimes you just don’t have the energy to. But can you find pleasure and luxury in a cold drink of water?”
Their utopia is the pool. I am glad to know utopia still exists.
* At night, I pour myself valerian tea and knock myself out. In my dreams, language still hums, and I hear sentences, bits that enliven me, even while unconscious. And then I have breakfast with a friend, and I stuff a croissant in my mouth, and we hug each other and laugh about frivolous joys.
Maybe the possibilities are not in the future or the present or the past, but something in between, a place I can’t yet name or fit in the arc of history, if only because this cultural moment feels so shocking it registers as surreal.
* On an algae-green towel resting atop sand at RISD beach in Barrington, I let the sun smooth from my toes to my scalp. Soon after, in the water, waist-deep, a friend takes my hand, our thumbs brushing circles against each other’s palms.
* And what of the women of Indore? How can we honor them?
by christina li
Illustrated by Ellie Kang @cherryjasminetea
I.
Years ago—when I was still young enough to be half girl, half creature—my father would carry me out into the darkness, night after night. He sat me behind him (in the backseat). The vessel (2000 Honda Accord) was warm. He spun the globe (steering wheel) and pulled out of the station (garage).
The engine hummed. The asphalt bumped and jolted below. He never said a word. He let the quiet rhythm envelop the neighborhood, a microcosm, a single child. We travelled in loops (at a rapid five miles per hour), and the outside looped around us just the same. The trees— those ancient pines—cast long shadows of past lives and seasons lived. The same sleepy houses rolled by with every circle. There was that one house with the lovely blue shutters. The other house with the tree out front that bloomed wine-red.
Back then, even the moon must have been able to fit inside the rearview mirror. The stars must have interlaced and speckled my hair—a new kind of night sky, tangible enough to thread my fingers through, to be braided and woven. Their light ebbed across my cheeks as the night waned and spun, and I watched and felt and wondered and drifted somewhere toward that space between the sky and land (optimal for dreams).
It was the only way you would fall asleep, my father later said. No bedtime stories, no soft lullabies, no gentle rocking, just an abhorrent amount of gas burned per week. For 15 minutes each night, we made countless trips around this little world. I was probably thinking, but I don’t know what I was thinking about. I knew everything and nothing at this infinite point in time, least of all my own self (a thing of flesh? of sleep?).
Here I was, unknown to myself and the world. Here I was, amorphous yet absolute. Here I was, being and being and being.
Lifetimes later—or some months ago—I am no longer in the car. The wheels (there are more now) shake for a moment on the tracks, rocking the limbs of the train and all the bodies inside. I do not know who the driver is. I do not recognize the trees outside. I do not see the houses. It is colder. It is so, so much colder.
Ruggles! Next station, Ruggles!
I jolt myself out of a momentary (eternal) stupor, fixing my eyes forward past the seats (there are also more of these now). Massachusetts materializes around me, somewhere between Providence and Boston. Voices float and dissipate through the air—a louder hum coupled with the periodic clang of metal on rail. I shove my earbuds in.
I am not in that car anymore, but then suddenly I am again, slowly fading in and out of slumber, the shapes of the houses more or less reminiscent of the old. I stare out the window and think and remember. This time, I can recall everything.
I think about that fold in the universe where my high school life lies, tucked away yet still in reach, like that box of sweets you purposefully hide but then use a ladder anyway to indulge yourself (because there is some destructive pleasure in reopening old wounds just to feel them again). The noise of it all echoes in my head, in hallways, in classrooms, in courtyards. When did the world get so loud? When did the world become so suffocating? It was something gradual— a cosmic tide slowly rising and lapping at the shore. The stars fell out of my hair when I ripped the strands out. I think about the universe fading, then expanding, then fading again. I think about escaping, grasping for any
road forward and any vehicle to take me there (anywhere). I think about the idea of Boston and New England colleges, the quiet desire to envision a life anew, a separate world from the one that had grown around me. I think about that desperate hope—maybe because a future me had foretold my arrival and my body already knew on its own.
The Boston skyline blurs past the window; high school me is dead. The city streets run parallel to the tracks as I reach for another old memory. I begin counting cars. Four intertwined rings: an Audi. An italic H: a Hyundai. A cluster
Sometime between now and before, I am awake. Dad is driving again, talking now, and I am both old and young enough to hear him from the backseat. He says, Do you see that truck? Yeah, I do. I’d like one someday, probably another Honda model. With that uppercase H logo? Mm. That truck is a new build. Do you know which brand? Well, that’s easy! The symbol literally says Ford. And that one? Chevrolet. And there? Lexus. There’s a Toyota behind it, and another Toyota. I don’t like those. Makes you feel like you’re driving a boat. How? It just does. You’ll know when you start driving
Centuries, decades, weeks, minutes ago— or now—I don’t know where I am. The car is different this time; the touchscreen glows pale white in the darkness. Ba (because that was his name after all) is silent, and the night roars by outside. We are on the way home. There are lives and lands all below me now (Virginia, Maryland, Connecticut), and I feel ancient. I am 19, but I have been 19 for so many years (but also too few increments of time). The loop has been so much longer this time around: more seasons passed, more trains ridden. I feel
expand and compress around me, descending and dreaming and flashing, one moment a girl fully-formed watching plain trees on a highway and another moment a creature still burgeoning with wonderment on how the universe mirrors itself. Why is it that high school feels like lifetimes ago, and those silent night drives of yesterday and today feel endless, as if I never truly woke up?
I am perpetually travelling through time, and time is travelling through me. The stars pull at my hair tonight as well, lulling me to sleep. I let my eyes shut. The window feels cold
by nina lidar
Illustrated by Sheryl Lee
It is easier, sometimes, to be outside of oneself. She sighs into the seat two rows behind the driver. Her profile shifts across the window. It leans back, forward, back again, it tilts up, then to the side; in the window are eyes couched in pouches and a pair of pressed lips; the eyes see their doubles on the dark pane; in the window, the eyes slip away, and her profile takes their place.
If she hadn’t observed the woman sidle into the row in front of her, she wouldn’t have known anyone was there. A hand crawls around on the ceiling and finds a vent. She watches the fingers scrabble against rigid plastic, searching; the hand retracts from its fool’s errand. She watches the gray seatback like it’s a powered-off television screen.
Voices clump and weave and dissipate, not distant, not close. And the oth-giving it to her tomor-close the blinds plea-no it’s open you can si-hospital for two more we-what she’s gonna do-not saying the gun was in the-funniest thinot really no. The voices layer over crinkling canvas, creaking plastic, air squeezing, hissing up, relaxing, whooshing out. Everywhere hangs an odor of onions. The tear cups her chin and drops onto her thigh. It was too crowded so-shot her in the-miss you all the-probably shouldn’t deci-getting tested on Tuesday
On Saturday, she was in a skirt and boots that pinched her toes. She had lipstick on. It was a white day. White shirts, white stripes of light on the pavement, white teeth, white underwings, white lettering on shop windows, white sky, white frosting, white hubcaps, white everywhere. All over the sidewalk dashed quick feet. Strollers veered around telephone poles and chairs; pedestrians veered around strollers. The walk sign was on when she arrived at the curb—three times in a row. Down and down and down the street, she stepped heel to toe, heel to toe, clip to clop, one spire meeting cement, then another, with her hair blowing, lifted on a breeze of her own making. She counted one, two, three babies smiling, all innocence.
Her eyes pulled at the corners when she accepted coffee from the man behind the counter, whose age she couldn’t tell; he appeared 30 and 50 years old all at once. It was something in the stubble that stretched up to his ears and gave way to a shiny dome. A circle of light glinted on the crown of his head. After she left the cafe, she recalled the space as it had been, cast in a veil of robin’s-egg blue, dappled with white lightbulbs.
A root distended the concrete; her foot hitched and a droplet of coffee smudged her skirt. She licked her finger and rubbed at the brown spot, then dug at it with her nail. The spot lightened but its edges blurred and the
pigment set. The skirt dropped from her fingers; ahead was a dog with flapping ears and tongue, flapping paws. The stain wisped from her thoughts. All that flapping could have been set to a carousel tune.
Her hair danced an inch above her back. She thought she might greet a stranger with a bright smile, maybe discover something delightful and profound in someone’s face.
Once, some summers before, she had seen a girl in the park whose beauty overcame her. She was sure she’d never seen a visage like that, not ever. But once the girl was gone, she couldn’t recall a single feature. For the rest of the day, she searched every passing face for a hint of her ephemeral muse to no avail. If she couldn’t remember what the girl had looked like, how could she hope to find her in anyone else? She had wanted to tell someone about her encounter—that she’d seen the most beautiful girl in the world—but she knew that once she said it aloud, it would no longer be true.
Some months later, she told a friend, and then all she could do was to tell the lie again and again, until she almost believed her own story.
A jolt—her heel snagged another
protrusion; the spot returned to her mind. The coffee cup in her hand was empty. Had she drunk it all already? She looked up: the street sign claimed she had walked fifteen blocks. No one on the sidewalk had yet met her eye. Her teeth hid behind impassive, flaccid lips. On all sides, bricks and brownstones came together densely, guarded by pointed ironworks, facades contoured by patches of shadow, warping and lengthening in the wind and lowering light.
Her right foot planted next to her left; she arrived at the doorstep where she remembered, now, she’d been headed. Behind the door
were people to whom she was supposed to be important and dear. She stepped over the threshold; her mouth worked the shape of greetings; she felt her cheeks tauten. Bodies thumped into each other and arms swung around shoulders like thick ropes. A reel of
butter onto her knife and let the velvet fat melt onto her tongue. It tasted of pleasure, illness, and childhood. She figured that this must really be the taste of growing older. The bill came out to 62 dollars, said the waitress with a placid face.
She had too many more blocks to walk in those shoes, and her head weighed more than usual, and blinking red and emerald blurred the inky streets. Groups of people roved and melded into each other, swarms of them, and at their edges, stragglers, and beyond, loners, vagabonds. She noted the vagabonds and in them found solace and threat.
Of all of the milling bodies, only those belonging to the peripheral solitary onlookers were assuredly real. The vagabonds dangled cigarettes between lips and fingers; smoke broke and diffused against walls. They picked at their nails and pulled their jackets close around their chests. And all around, the groups emitted wordless chatter and blinked with unseeing eyes. She passed through them like vapor. She was the only one going anywhere. Everyone else walked aimlessly. And she was only going somewhere so as not to be here, yet here had no end, no
inquisitions, of tell me how you’ve been-what are you enjoying about-are you still doing-what are your plans for-how long has it been? rolled over her. She heard laughter chirp from her voice box. Everywhere she looked, she saw hands, some gesticulating over words, others hanging limp; she thought about marionettes. She thought about the stain on her skirt. For hours, she nodded and did not know what she talked about. By evening, she was tired. She had eaten a salad and drunk a glass of sauvignon blanc. The rest of her stomach she had filled with small rounds of bread slathered with butter, and when the bread ran out, she scooped dollops of
When she awoke Sunday morning, the tears from the night before had dried beneath her eyelids. She pressed her hand to them and felt that the swollen skin put up buoyant resistance against the pressure of her fingertips. She considered that her enjoyment of the sensation might be a funny thing. Though she supposed she had heard once that the physical act of smiling deceived the brain into releasing dopamine, and perhaps this was not all that different.
She had heard once that there existed a Polynesian language with no conditional tense. No words to express could have, would have, wish I had, if only I had, should have done. She heard that the speakers of this language lived in a state of unparalleled contentment because they did not have any way of conceptualizing regret.
Another time, she had heard that the real David and Goliath were unfairly matched opposite to the biblical story’s convention. David was an expert shot. Meanwhile, Goliath suffered from a disease that caused him to grow to a size so immense that he suffered crushing joint pain. His disease incited the growth of a tumor against his optic nerve, rendering him partially blind. Yet Goliath’s defeat was celebrated as a remarkable triumph of weak over strong.
She once gave three dollars to a homeless man on the sidewalk. When she strode by him the following week, he called out to her, asking for money. She crossed the street and brushed her hair over her face to stop him from recognizing her. She only looked back when, his voice garbled by wind and running engines, she heard him issue his plea to someone new. A bus stopped in front of his post, obscuring from view whether this time he was met with an almsgiver or bypassed once again.
Now the tears were rolling down her cheeks thick and fast. The salt tasted good. Outside, the sunlight broke through the clouds in blue bands. It doused marble walls and windowpanes and sweatered arms in a bright, shimmering chill. Everything was cold to the touch: doorknobs, duvets, keys, toothbrushes, hands, noses, cheeks. This was a shadowless light. A tender pink rimmed her eyes. Her irises shone like glass. Her skin was a clear, light gray, the same tint as the walls, the pavement, the underbellies of the clouds.
Soon, the leaves would begin to fall and curl into husks of themselves. They would crumble underfoot, little pieces of them lifted on breezes that would ebb and return them to the ground, where new feet would press them into dust. The children, as she once did, would toe from husk to husk, in happy pursuit of the brittlest one, that sharpest crackle. She had not been close to a child in a very long time. She watched them from afar these days, watched them until they rounded a bend and were gone.
The bus trundles down long stretches. The profile in the window turns again; the face’s eyes do not meet their reflection; they look out past the pane.
The trees slide by. The lakes slide by. The ferns slide by. The housing compounds, the graffitied walls, the exit signs, the billboards, overpasses, wires, fences, poles, tires, pigeons— they all slide by. She sees these things yet cannot touch them. She sits and yet she is moving. She is moving past towns where three restaurants shut down in the same week and a boy is in the newspaper for winning a spelling bee and a sewer line broke and a man found a dog from a missing poster. She is moving across county lines and state lines. The bus rolls onward, onward.
It will take the same route tomorrow.
by CHELSEA LONG
Illustrated by SELENA ZHU
Instagram: @ 109sel
Sometimes a poem makes you feel happy. Sometimes a poem makes you feel sad. Sometimes a poem makes you feel viscerally upset for no discernible reason. This happened to me a few years ago, when I first read a fragment of “Accident Report in the Tall, Tall Weeds” by former United States Poet Laureate Ada Limón.
In the section I read—a screenshot somewhere on Instagram, or maybe a quote on a stranger’s blog—the speaker describes a friend “obsessed with plane crashes,” who memorizes flights, locations, details of the wreckage. He recounts what he knows to the speaker, and years later, she learns that “his brother was a pilot.” Notice the past tense there, how it critically recontextualizes the friend’s quirky interest in plane crashes as an expression of grief, of familial devotion, of a love that outlasts death. It’s a devastating story. You’re supposed to be devastated.
Then, I reached the last line, where the speaker concludes, almost confessionally: “I can’t help it, / I love the way men love.” And instead of being devastated, I was indescribably annoyed. It’s hard to say why. Even now, writing this sentence, I can’t figure out exactly what bothers me about that line. When I read it, I feel bad. I can’t think of a better word.
I guess I feel like Limón’s speaker is buying into something I don’t want her to buy into. I get what makes the poem tragic and beautiful— the picture of a plane crash; the painstaking act of memorization; the wordless, unspoken love for a lost sibling. But there’s something about the way the speaker praises this form of love while also describing it as explicitly masculine that gets to me. And of course, it is masculine— the stoicism of it, the silence. I guess I don’t like the way the female speaker stares up exaltingly at “the way men love.” I guess I don’t like the
way a poem about siblings turns into one about brothers.
Love is gendered. There are girl ways to love and boy ways to love, everyone knows this. Women don’t open jars or kill spiders, don’t stand outside windows with boomboxes on their shoulders. Husbands don’t buy Christmas gifts for the in-laws.
Men’s love, especially in a romantic context, is usually configured as active. He gives you flowers. He gets in a fight over you. He saves you from the tower. Women’s love is quieter, smaller. Think about Penelope from the Odyssey, waiting 20 years for her husband to come home. He fights monsters; he drags himself back to her. She waits.
I’m a big fan of Twelfth Night (said every gay English major ever). It’s the Shakespeare play where the heroine, Viola, pretends to be a man and falls in love with a duke, who’s in love with a noblewoman, who’s in love with Viola. Many things happen as a result of this situation. In the end, everyone gets straight-married and the world is beautiful.
There’s a scene near the middle of the play where Orsino, the duke, declares the superiority of men’s love to women’s:. “There is no woman’s sides / Ccan bide the beating of so strong a passion / Aas love doth give my heart,” he announces. “No woman’s heart / Sso big, to hold so much.”
(I’m reminded of another poem by Limón, “How to Triumph Like a Girl,” that easily dismantles the sexist ideas in Orsino’s speech. “I like the lady horses best,” she writes, and, later: “...somewhere inside the delicate / skin of my body, there pumps / an 8-pound female horse heart, / giant with power, heavy with blood.” And I remember, also, finding out in high school
biology that my heart is, and always will be, physically smaller than that of a cisgender man, and I remember feeling hopelessly sad.).
Some productions will have Viola looking stunned, offended, or even angry as Orsino goes on. She eventually interrupts him to defend “what love women to men may owe” with a story of a made-up sister of hers who loved a man but never told him. This sister “pined in thought / And with a green and yellow melancholy / She sat like patience on a monument / Smiling at grief.”
It’s worth noting that Viola isn’t disputing the idea that men and women love differently. Rather, she’s arguing that women’s love is equal to men’s—maybe even that it counts as love at all. “Was not this love indeed?” she asks, and you can hear the question tear itself out of her. The position of stillness, of waiting, of sitting at a window and watching the seas for your husband’s return is, to Viola, just as meaningful as men’s acts of love, worthy of the same exaltation and admiration. She’s saying women’s love is love. She has to say it because not everyone knows.
My friend Nora thinks a lot about horses and girls. She uses repetition in her work better than anyone else I know. Last August, in a poem for Denverse Magazine, she wrote that “girls don’t suffer like poets; they suffer like girls.”
Poetry, literature, the way we tell stories— they’re built on an ancient foundation that often presupposes a male speaker, author, and reader. It took me years of reading “Howl” to realize that when Allen Ginsburg says “the best minds of my generation,” he’s talking about only men.
The Poppy War by R.F. Kuang is a series about war and violence and crimes against
humanity. It’s also about love.
The central relationship of the trilogy is between Rin—a peasant orphan from nowhere, who rises meteorically through a series of increasingly unlikely roles: army soldier, rebel leader, mentally unstable fire magician, girl Mao, savior or destroyer of the known world— and her boy best friend Kitay. In the first book, Rin and Katay arethey’re classmates at an elite military academy; by the last, they’re jaded strategists who only really trust each other. Rin has a number of romantic relationships throughout the series, but none come with the same narrative weight and fervent loyalty as her friendship with Kitay. The final book describes them as “a pair against the world.”
What’s interesting about Rin and Kitay is the way traditional gender roles are reversed in their relationship. Rin goes to war. She fights gods. She wins battles by burning everything in a fifty-yard radius. Kitay sits in an office somewhere and draws up tactical plans for her. Though neither character is explicitly described as queer, I would argue that there’s something compelling and deeply nonheteronormative about how the text allows Rin and Kitay to love each other in ways that don’t align with expectations for their respective genders. When Rin thinks about Kitay, she thinks about conventionally masculine acts of love—she wants to protect him, to rescue him from danger. She loves him the way men love.
The Poppy War is a military fantasy series— the main character has to fight battles and win wars; it’s ordained by the genre. A story that puts a woman in this traditionally masculine narrative role is already doing something transgressive and interesting, but I wonder if it’s possible to tell stories centered on traditionally feminine narrative roles as well. Can we imagine a story that follows Rin’s classmate Niang,
a soft-spoken girl who chooses to become a medic rather than a soldier? Is this story more sexist—in that its protagonist is constrained to a conventionally feminine path in life? Or less so—in that it gives this feminine path a rarelyachieved narrative focus? What does this do to the book’s plot, to its genre?
There’s a scene in the last book of the series, where Rin is going off to yet another battle against gods and ancient monsters. Kitay isn’t going with her; he’s staying at camp where it’s safe. Before she goes, he tells her: “Come back to me.” It’s the kind of thing a girl says to a boy.
I know a story has to follow the action. I know Odysseus’s journey is factually more interesting than the static picture of Penelope sitting at her loom. I love what The Poppy War does with gender, how Rin’s girlness coexists with her anger, her power, her narrative role. And still, every time I read this scene, I want a story whose protagonist says “Come back to me,” instead of hearing it. I want a story that cares about the way women love.
For a long time, whenever I came across that fragment of the Ada Limón poem, I assumed it was the whole thing. It’s self-contained; there’s a beginning, middle, and end. “I love the way men love” feels like a conclusion.
But it’s not the poem’s last line. The entire section is just one part of a longer poem, describing the speaker’s feelings about love, nature, and her former romantic partners. The whole poem does more than celebrate “the way men love,” going on to offer a complicated perspective on the speaker’s relationship with her own gender and the nature of romantic partnerships. “Why are we forced into such small spaces together?” she asks. I read this as a question both about the claustrophobia that comes with romantic relationships—the way
closeness can be at once beautiful and terrible— but also about the rigidity of gender roles within these relationships—one of you has to love like a boy, the other like a girl. Small spaces.
I ultimately think there are two important ways we as writers can make these small spaces wider. Firstly, by allowing for fluidity in our definitions of who can express masculine and feminine love. We can tell stories like The Poppy War, stories where women save, rescue, protect, stories where men wait for their wives to come home, and we can further explore how queer genders and sexualities relate to this fluidity.
Secondly, we need to valorize women’s love in the same way men’s love has been valorized for centuries. We need more poems, plays, and novels that look outside the conventional boundaries of narrative to the women at the margins—the sailor’s wife, the wrinkled crone, the kidnapped daughter, the perfect mother, the weird girl, the cool girl, the girl who takes off her glasses and turns beautiful. The confinements these characters experience within the narrative—voicelessness, stillness, a lack of agency—reflect the real-world confinements placed upon women and girls. What does it mean to experience these restrictions? What does it mean to live within them and love anyway? If women’s love is “love indeed,” let’s tell stories that prove it.
I still can’t stand “I love the way men love.” But I like the poem better after reading the rest of it. There’s a complexity to it that I hadn’t seen before, a nervousness, a sadness. “I imagine the insides of myself sometimes,” says the speaker, “part female, part male, part terrible dragon.” It’s almost the kind of text I’ve been looking for—one that asks what it means to love like a girl.
on cutting out toxic people from your life
by Sofie Zeruto
Illustrated by LILA VIANNA
Instagram: @jademademoon_art
The age-old adage, “Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me,” appears to have been forgotten by our generation.
Frequently, in conversations with my peers, we obsess over why somebody behaves toxically toward us. It should not come as a surprise that a generation of self-proclaimed “empaths” seeks the altruistic good in everyone. Among modern teens and young adults, justifications for another’s cruel behavior dominate conversations and “debriefs,” and are received with a chorus of sympathetic hums and nods. From mental illness to childhood trauma to mere everyday stress, we accept rationales for toxicity instead of demanding accountability.
Charli xcx and Sky Ferreira’s collaboration on the track “Cross You Out” has been peppered throughout my playlists since my teenage years. The anthem addresses conflicting feelings of grief and euphoria that follow eliminating a
“He was always so generous.”
The past tense can be an alluring temptress, where the context of the present has no place, and everything is as it once was. After all, if somebody exhibited certain positive behaviors at one point in time, why can’t they do so again? Melt me down / One piece at a time
I do not think the issue is that we tend to think of people as good or evil, black or white, all or nothing. I believe most people would agree, or say when asked, that people are gray. However, this often seems to me to be yet another excuse—a blanket assessment of all people as equally prone to good or bad behavior—that ignores the fact that some people are, in fact, dark gray or light gray. Some people consistently prioritize their own feelings above those of their loved ones. Perhaps they leave stinging comments intended to wound when in a bad mood. Perhaps they talk behind your back or exclude you from social circles or give you the silent treatment. And then, when the rain clouds have dissipated from above their head, they greet you with a warm glow, embrace you, and confide in you once again. Emotionally mature individuals, on the other hand, might instead interpret a bad mood to mean it's time to go on a walk, take a break, distance themselves from others until their breathing evens out. When they come back, they apologize if they slipped up, take accountability, and move on, having learned a lesson.
Giving grace for these instances might be, as “Cross You Out” purports, like holding a candle as it melts down to the wick. You can allot wax to each person to burn—to some, you might be able to give more; to others, you might have less tolerance. A burn on the hand can be prevented by the wax for only so long until the flame reaches you. Then, the only thing you can do is get away from the fire.
When you’re not around / I’ll finally cross you out
Key to the emotional maturity of “Cross You Out” is the condition in the repeating lyrics of its chorus. “Crossing someone out” can only occur when they are not around, or, rather, you do not cross someone out and then kick them out of your life. To me, the message of the song is that peace can only come with distance.
Distance can be easier said than done for either party. Sometimes, we are surprised by how easily another person accepts our distance, and we feel compelled to return, to remind them that we are significant in their life. Other times, distancing yourself from another person,
especially a selfish person, can feel like ripping off a bloodsucking leech or a decapitated cockroach, somehow holding onto life and scuttling back.
There is a permeating sentiment in our online generation that we must be constantly connected—a sentiment made all the worse by the confines of a college campus. You text your closest friends during class, who are also your roommates. You follow everyone on Instagram and see the inner workings of their lives through their daily stories. Every Partiful invite lists just slightly different conglomerations of the same 80 names and faces. It has never been easier for a toxic force to cling to you in this day and age, and even more so at this time in our lives. They spam your texts, they’re in your living room, they subtweet you online, they RSVPed to X, Y, and Z weekend events. Today, a new and sizable bulk of the onus to “cross someone out” is on the crosser-outer to go beyond just distance in its literal sense—it is to mute Instagram stories, to have the strength to ignore the chemical pull of notifications, to rise against the dread of inevitable confrontation. It is exhausting. It is, nevertheless, essential.
I’ve become someone better / Now I look in the mirror / And I learn myself better
Throughout our years at Brown, my close friends and I have frequently circled back to philosophizing on the meaning of forgiveness. I have always felt that the phrase “forgive and forget” is an oxymoron; rather, the saying should be “forgive or forget.” To some of my friends, forgiveness is a personal matter of letting go, reflecting on a wrong that someone committed against you, and not letting it bother you anymore.
I have reached that internal point of letting go with several people in my life, though I am not so sure that I would call it forgiveness. This article may make it seem otherwise, but I do believe in forgiveness. In fact, the act of “crossing someone out,” for me, is the only way to set the stage for forgiveness. An old loved one’s candle whittles down and burns your hand—instinctually, you have to get away. That is not to say that a new candle cannot be cast and molded. Yet, in the spirit of fairness—of the relative equality of effort that must mark any relationship—the other must ultimately take the initiative to re-shape the wax and cultivate the flame. But, unless that happens, keep your distance and hold fast to your principles. Don’t keep your hand burning under a hot flame. You’ll become someone better.
by Merissa Underwood Illustrated by Rhea Hu
My move to Providence in August of this year began with a humbling initiation: the worst haircut I’ve ever received. My fine hair has always been one of my biggest insecurities, second only to the persistent hormonal acne that’s more indecisive and temperamental than an angsty teenager. Thanks to years of consistent deep conditioning treatments and the abolition of hot tools from my routine, my hair finally grew past my shoulders and has, at times, even held a moderate shine.
Just days before Brown’s orientation, and on the day after my birthday, I decided to treat myself to a polished new cut, eager to feel fresh and pretty for my first steps onto campus. But, after a hurried snip, the stylist at a hip downtown Providence salon spun me around, yanked off the cutting cape, and ushered me out like a pageant contestant who’d been announced as first runner-up after an unimpressive response to an on-stage question. I barely had time to catch a glimpse of myself in a distant mirror. Oh…oh no! I paid, forced a smile, and rushed to my car, clutching the ends of my newly guillotined locks.
I avoided the car mirror the whole drive home, unwilling to face whatever disaster awaited me. When I finally looked, my heart crumbled. Six inches shorter, uneven, and as dry as stale bread. My worst fear was realized. I looked…ugly. With tear-filled eyes, I tried to twist, curl, and straighten my way back to pretty, and repeatedly failed. I felt hideous. I spent the next few weeks in either a high ponytail or a slick bun to conceal my embarrassment. My identity, so often wrapped up in my appearance to others, hung in the balance of my asymmetrical tresses. As my confidence shrank with every uneven strand, I began to wonder why my sense of self-worth was so entangled with something as superficial as hair.
Why did feeling “pretty” hold such power over how I moved through the world?
That question lingered weeks later as I scrolled through coverage of two glossy
cultural comebacks: the return of the Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show and the latest Miss USA competition—a stage I once sought to conquer. Victoria’s Secret, disgraced by cultural jurors, disappeared from the limelight to reinvent itself and appease a highly critical audience. Similarly, Miss USA has been mired in scandal after scandal, desperately clinging to relevancy. The revived VS Fashion Show promised to represent all women, showcasing a diverse ensemble on its glittery pink runway. After the show, discourse spitfired as think pieces sprouted in every corner of the digital landscape. Enthusiasts ooh-ed and ahh-ed as cynics picked and prodded. Pop culture analysts at home on their keyboards volleyed assessments weighing the pros and cons of supporting the revitalization of a brand that historically upheld the idea that there was one universal standard of beauty. A nonbeliever called out their distaste for the fashion show in a comment under a video featuring the ultimate archangel, Candice Swanepoel: “We can’t forget that this is just capitalism that positions beauty as the ultimate goal.” This comment received hundreds of likes. A sharp retort fired back: “What’s so wrong with being pretty?”
Initially, I agreed with the cynics. The VS Fashion Show does profit off of women’s bodies in crude ways, embedding a certain idea of beauty and desirability into the minds of girls and women of all ages. What we see on TV shapes our worlds and our minds; like any corporation, VS should be held responsible and acknowledge the ways in which they have distorted women’s self-images with the pressure to conform to a size zero. Both the VS Fashion Show and Miss USA have sought to rebrand and reimagine their identities and what it means to be beautiful in 2025. It feels natural, then, to pose the question: Have they succeeded? But I itch to ask another. Can industries anchored in unrealistic standards of beauty ever be…better?
On these stages, is there room for tangible improvement, or should glamorous parades of women once displayed on TV be consigned to the archives of old YouTube videos and VHS recordings of early fashion shows and pageant runways? Miss USA’s social media posts pair heavily edited photos with lyrical captions such as “Empowering the new era of beauty queen” or “More than just a pretty face.” Modern pageants claim to be creating a new future for aspirational and driven women. But the prerequisite remains: You must be beautiful. As a former Miss USA contestant, I can assure you that the notion of empowerment is a ruse.
The organization touts a mission to uplift the next generation of women. In truth, their efforts revolve around physical beauty, thinness, and glamour. They lean on the notion that the swimsuit contest is about health and wellness, only to feed contestants pizza and chicken tenders throughout the competition. Contestants dedicate hours to their physical presentation, adhering to one standard of beauty, only to perform on stage for less than three minutes total, speaking for even less. The winning formula is simple: Smile at the judges; apply vaseline on your teeth if needed to maintain said smile. Hit a sharp T-pose at the end of the runway; if you feel like you’re about to fall, squeeze your butt! And above all else, be pretty. Like, really pretty. If you’re not, you don’t stand a chance—but they want you to believe that you do. They’ll tell you that you as you are is enough. It’s not.
When beauty becomes a prerequisite, every woman’s worth is placed on a fragile foundation. Any deviation from the ideal—a bad haircut, not being a size zero—can feel like failure. I have lived that stomach drop in front of the mirror, at Miss USA and here in Providence, mistaking aesthetic disappointment for personal defeat. But the pressure to be pretty is not just individual, it is systemic. It governs who gets attention, opportunity, even credibility. Pretty becomes the password to social status and ultimately, belonging. When we keep rewarding beauty above all else, we teach girls and women that being seen matters more than being heard.
The newly crowned Miss USA, Audrey Eckert, is a young woman from Nebraska. She is a former NCAA Division 1 athlete and a marketing coordinator for a Certified B Corp fashion company. The top comment below her crowning photo reads: “Miss USA is boring now, they only crown ugly women.” Ugly has become the ultimate insult. It's more harmful than uneducated, unkind, or unsuccessful. But maybe it is only when we stop fearing it that we can begin to be free of the shackles of pretty. Audrey is not ugly. But even if she were, what’s so wrong with ugly?
by Elaine Rand Illustrated by Ariana R. Jimenez Instagram: @arican.draw
During my recent re-entry into full-time schooling after eight years as a professional ballet dancer, I’ve been greeted by many small culture shocks: new slang I missed while spending my days in the studio, the looming presence of AI, the casual nihilism that comes with classmates who can’t remember the world without extreme political tumult. What shouldn’t have surprised me is how occupied every student seems to be.
Sure enough, the pressure to multitask is alive and well at Brown. I’m trying my best not to let that pressure take over, but it’s hard to do with the steady inundation of academic work and extracurricular business. Where’s the time for introspection? Absorbed in my studies, I sometimes lose sight of the breadth of life. But through my rapidly piling papers and filling inbox, I’ve seen the specter of a solution.
Enter: knitting. Knitting has been my on-again, off-again hobby for the past seven years. It’s a good way to keep the hands busy— it’s almost meditative, better than scrolling the phone or biting the nails or scratching the scalp. It quiets my mind; it gives me something to solve.
For me, knitting is a seasonal pursuit. When the air chills, I know I’ll want to sink my hands into soft wool and wind it around
unyielding needles. I first started knitting during a slick-sidewalked Seattle winter while performing in a production of The Sleeping Beauty. Save for a couple of walkon acting moments, my fellow trainees and I were sequestered to our dim dressing room and the theater’s cramped wings. One of my roommates brought in a ball of yarn and a pair of circular needles to pass the time between acts. Soon enough, we were all clacking our needles to the pulse of the orchestra and taking the 32 bus to Michael’s for yarn on our rare days off. We could have started a niche Etsy shop; I’m sure there’s a market for dancer-knit winterwear in today’s post-balletcore landscape.
Beauty closed, but there were new shows to understudy, new patterns to try. Then the summer rolled around, and I found myself not in the wings but out onstage. I let my yarn get dusty. Even now that my summer dancing days have waned, I try to avoid knitting when it’s muggy out—my sweat seeps into the yarn, and the filaments stick to my fingers. It’s getting cool again, and I’m back to being a tepid knitter, wishing I could generate some heat.
But on those rare weeks when my needles and I start to build up momentum, I face my fear of imperfection, of creating funky stitches or toolong rows or ending up with work that’s just plain ugly. Much of my homemade knitwear has turned out this way: uneven, lumpy, or, perhaps worst of all, unfinished.
My body of knitwork includes:
• a long, thin grey scarf (given to my dad),
• a longer, thicker red scarf (given to my mom),
• an intentionally holey, multicolored scarf (given to my childhood best friend),
• a short, maroon anklewarmer (worn obsessively when I broke my foot several years ago),
• several pairs of armwarmers (rudimentary fingerless gloves, chunky tubes with a small hole on the side meant for a thumb),
• a couple of green-grey hats that I gathered at the top in a little puckered smoochshape (who knows where these went off to),
• the bones of a navy-blue wool sweater, yet to fuse (I realize now that this is the first
project I’m making for myself),
• and a colorful myriad of works in progress.
The true reason I neglect my projects for months on end? I’m not a very good knitter. I drop stitches without realizing and weave them back in clumsily. I make holes between rows of stocking stitch without knowing how they got there. Sometimes I add an extra loop of yarn around the needle by accident and end up widening my project out of proportion. I’ve sunk days of my life into knitting work that has never seen the light of day because I’m too intimidated to attempt fixes. I knit obsessively for a few days or weeks, but once my ball of yarn gets knotty? Time to put down my work—see you never, half-made scarf. Momentum hides from me on the top shelf of my craft supplies, seemingly out of reach.
For me, it’s less about what I’m creating and more about the movement the creation brings. The tactility of knitting satisfies something in me, maybe an ancestral urge to become an artisan or scoop my hands into the earth. The movement doesn’t even have to be technically correct to be gratifying—it just needs to be happening. Once I get on a roll, my fingers twist and loop and pinch, and the yarn forms whorl after whorl like a fingerprint. And trust that each project is like a fingerprint too—no two stitches are exactly the same because I don’t care about forcing each one to be identical. It wouldn’t be fun anymore if I did.
Since starting at Brown this fall, I’ve noticed that some folks aren’t afraid to whip out their yarn during class time, mostly to crochet. For some, it may be an accessibility accommodation; for others, it may replace another fidget behavior. Or perhaps my peers just want to make the most of their time (Ye Olde Multitask) and create something during lecture. I find the muted sounds of the twirling yarn against the crochet hook soothing, but I don’t think I’ll be taking up classroom crafting anytime soon. I fear the tangled abominations I’d create if I tried to knit while keeping my eyes on the professor or the slides. Mostly, I’m impressed with the intricate patterns I see my peers crocheting. Is their technique easily harnessed, or is it perfectionism’s pressure that keeps their stitches in check?
My friend Bridget tried to teach me how to crochet last year. They showed me how to circle my wrist to best work the hook as we sat on the couch. Bridget finished up the last few patches of a floral granny square sweater, all gorgeous pale blues and yellows with a few white petals. I cranked out a single crocheted chain of dark green acrylic yarn before giving up and turning my attention to the episode of Drag Race we’d put on in the background. They have long since sewn up their sweater; I have not returned to the green acrylic. (If anyone’s giving private lessons and up for a particularly beginner pupil, send me your availability—I do want to learn!)
For all my self-deprecation, I don’t think I’m a lost cause. Early this month, my girlfriend’s mother came to visit. Her name is Gretchen. She’s an expert knitter with an enviable yarn collection and an eye for detail. I solicited her help on the crewneck sweater I’ve been working on for the better part of two years, though I have yet to even finish the back panel. I set down the sweater back in March when I hit a snag: I lost count of the number of rows I was
working with. It sounds like there’s a simple fix for that—counting—but believe me, the thick dark wool was impossible to read. Gretchen smoothed my stitches and assessed the damage.
“Honey, there’s a measurement in the pattern. You don’t need to follow it exactly, just get to 13 inches, like it says, and then move on to the next step.”
Oh. It was that simple, huh?
“Just make sure you end on an odd row number. The long tail’s got to be opposite your working yarn.”
I knew there was a catch.
Albeit an easy one. I hit the length requirement and moved on, looping each pair of knit stitches together to shorten the row with surprising ease. Gretchen and I sat together, listening to the tick of my needles.
As I started on my next row, I noticed it: a hole. Some time ago (in February, perhaps), I must have dropped a stitch, or put the working yarn over instead of under, or committed another knitting sin that I’m not proficient enough to diagnose. The little gap was shaped like the mouth of Munch’s screamer and was just as haunting. I considered letting the sting of shame take over and putting my work away until it wore off.
“Okay, Gretchen, how are we gonna fix this?” I said, offering her my work.
Gretchen put her glasses back on and brought the material close.
“That little hole? Oh, no one’s gonna notice that. The material is so bulky you can barely see it.”
She put the needles back in my hands and patted my work. “Knitters make mistakes all the time,” she said. “If anyone’s looking that closely, they need to get a life!”
eve will you survive the spookiest night of the year?
by Alayna Chen | Illustrated by Isabelle Wang
Let’s go on a Halloween adventure!
First, get dressed! Pick a number between 1 and 10 to reveal your costume!
1. A witch. Who could go wrong with this classic, allblack ensemble?
2. An inflatable dinosaur. You’ll spend the rest of your night bumping into everyone, but at least they’ll compliment you.
3. A suit. I’m not really sure who or what you are, and you aren’t either. Men In Black? Lex Luthor? James Bond? Corporate America?
4. A vampire. Plastic teeth that you have to talk around in a horrific accent was a bad choice. Unless you decided to go the sparkly route.
5. A ghost. Let’s be honest, you ran out of time with this one. And wait, is that your roommate’s sheet?
6. A cat. Just because your headband has ears doesn’t mean you’re wearing a costume.
7. Nothing. There’s last-minute, barely-there costumes, and then there’s you. If someone asks, just choose someone from your favorite TV show.
8. A fairy. Stunning. No notes.
9. A pirate. Wherever you go, someone’s wallet mysteriously disappears.
10. Mariah Carey. Sing “All I Want for Christmas Is You” every time someone tries to talk to you. Who says Halloween is the only thing stopping Christmas?
What are your plans for the night? Your favorite season = your activity!
Spring: Movies with friends. Snack on some popcorn and press play. Whether you’re in a movie theater, classroom, or just hanging out in your dorm, anything from horror classics to new thrillers to witchy comedies is fair game. Suddenly, those creaks and shadows in your room seem a lot more sinister…
Summer: Trick-or-treating. Don’t let the haters get you down—who says you’re too old for free candy? It’s time to team up and terrorize the neighborhood. You didn’t hear it from me, but someone’s giving out full-size candy bars.
Fall: Pumpkin carving competition. No guts, no glory. Roll up your sleeves and get to work. At the end, munch on some baked pumpkin seeds and light it up with an LED tealight (or that scented candle you’re hiding from ResLife).
Winter: Haunted house. Whichever one you go to won’t beat JCA’s, but it’s always fun to turn a corner and find absolute darkness or a figure drenched in blood. Pro tip: Put your bravest friend at the front of the group so that you know where the jump scares are and can pretend you aren’t scared at all.
And now for the real highlight of the night: the midnight organ concert. Did you make it in? Your favorite color = your experience!
Red: There’s no way you’re missing this. Three hours early? Child’s play. You’ve been here since the dawn of time. Congratulations, you’re the first person inside.
Orange: By the time you got to Sayles, the line was so long that you decided you had no shot of getting in and walked right back to your dorm. You’ll livestream it from there. You’ve got better things to be doing anyway.
Yellow: Passing the hours with a deck of cards and a group of friends, you’re definitely not close to the front of the line, but you’re near enough that there’s hope. Poker, Egyptian War, Blackjack, Crazy 8’s—you’ve played them all. Right when you’re about to resort to Go Fish, you step through the doors.
Green: Why wait in that line for the chance to get inside when you could just listen on the Main Green? You’ve already set up your picnic blanket in the perfect spot, settled in and ready to go. The best part? You can enjoy all the snacks you want.
Blue: You cut in line to join your friend who’s been waiting for a couple of hours now. It’s chill. But when they hand out tickets, you get one, and your friend doesn’t. You make it in, but at what cost?
Purple/Pink: You’ve been waiting in line for a while, but honestly? It’s just not really your thing. A friend texts you about a party they’re heading to, and you walk away without looking back.
Black: This is your moment. You’ve made it into the concert every year, and you’re not breaking that streak now. Costumes, wait time, snacks, pillows—you have it all down to a science. You saunter through the doors, the possibility of not making it in never having crossed your mind.
White: You were taking forever to get ready, but it’s not your fault that your costume ripped while you were trying to put it on. Some tape, a couple pins, and a whole lot of faith later, you’re standing in line with your friends, the final piece to your elaborate group costume. It’s a little uncomfortable, but hey, at least you made it in.
Other: While in line, you’ve been chatting with the strangers around you. None of you get in, but you’ve just found your new best friends, and you spend the rest of the night watching the livestream and partying until dawn.
Whether you celebrate with ghosts in a graveyard or the friend who is definitely a vampire, have a happy Halloween!
4
post- mini crossword by
Dolma Arow
2 3
6 5 7
8
Across Down
1. Color to wear for Breast Cancer Awareness Month
4. Time period in history
5. Activity with pumpkin
8. Soothe a baby
9. Mine, not yours
1. Tree nut used in pies
2. Stands for retirement account in the USA
3. Prefix that can mean sleep/ numbness
6. To promise
7. Long, long time
Thank you for reading magazine. New issues every week.
— AJ Wu, “american myth in motion”
“When my grandma sits down and tells me something from her past it feels like a charm to add to my own life bracelet. Like the ones we used to make with glass beads, Grandma, do you remember? When we sat on your heavily mattressed four-poster bed with the black columns, counted beads to string together, and measured our wrists with a corner store fishing line. ”
EDITOR-IN-CHIEF
Emilie Guan
FEATURE
Managing Editor
Elaina Bayard
Section Editors
Anika Kotapally
Chloe Costa Baker
ARTS & CULTURE
Managing Editor
AJ Wu
Section Editors
Lizzy Bazldjoo
Sasha Gordon
NARRATIVE
Managing Editor
Gabi Yuan
Section Editors
Chelsea Long
Lesa Jae “ Here’s what I’ve jotted down so far as tenets of American mythology: the open road, outlaws à la Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, the anxiety and appeal of motion, the salt flats in Utah, dustred handprints on the walls of a dried and ancient canyon, and dangerous nostalgia for a nonexistent better time.”
— Nélari Figueroa-Torres, “recording scriptures of glory” 10.26.23
Maxwell Zhang
LIFESTYLE
Managing Editor
Daniella Coyle
Section Editors
Hallel Abrams
Gerber
Nahye Lee
POST-POURRI
Managing Editor
Michelle Bi
Section Editor
Tarini Malhotra
HEAD ILLUSTRATORS
Junyue Ma
COPY CHIEF
Jessica Lee
Copy Editors
Indigo Mudbhary
Lindsey Nguyen
Rebecca Sanchez
Tatiana von Bothmer
LAYOUT CHIEF
Amber Zhao
Layout Designers
Emma Scneider
Emma Vachal
James Farrington
Tiffany Tsan
SOCIAL MEDIA
Rebecca Sanchez
Yana Giannoutsos
Yeonjai Song