0202 YLUJ | 2 .ON EUSSI
IDENTITY! RED BEAN PRESS
TABLE OF CONTENTS
03
04
06
08
Editor's Note
crossexamination
town names
genderqueer
by Molly
by Scout
by Anne
09
11
12
13
spring/summer 2020
not yours to take
gunpowder
kerosene
by Isa
by Isa
by Marta
by Asena
14
15
18
24
handwriting
choose today choose tommorrow
greatness, come undone
lessons for the fledgling adult
by Tris
by Anonymous
by Anonymous
by Glo
Editor's Note For our second issue, the editorial board has chosen the theme of identity, meant to highlight the many different facets of the writing community. Our theme requires you to look within yourself and asks, “What makes you you? How do you show that?” To all our readers, thank you for choosing to read the second issue of Red Bean Press! And to all of our wonderful writers, thank you for sharing your work in this month’s issue! We appreciate each and every one of you; we truly couldn’t have done this without you. We are constantly improving for you guys, so look forward to some new and exciting things in the coming weeks, including but not limited to: a new website, weekly newsletters, and a new board position! Again, thank you so much for your continued support. If you enjoyed this month’s issue, feel free to subscribe to our newsletter and follow our blog. We hope to see you next month with a new issue of the Red Bean Press! Sincerely,Red Bean Press Editorial Board Tris: Editor in Chief Reni: Assistant Managing Editor Lia: Content Managing Editor Rochelle: Layout Managing Editor
Cross-Examination By Anne
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nepeinthe
1. ARE YOU HAPPY TO BE WHERE YOU ARE RIGHT NOW? if this is meant to be an investigation somewhere deep into my soul & an inquiry into the fact that there may be still be dysfunction thrumming up seismic waves within it you are starting with the wrong question. i need an answer for what is left unsaid before i can speak the unknown and you are not explaining to me what everybody else seems to know. the others laughed when i told them that i wanted to end this year with another perfect score. told me this would be an open note test & that i needed to let go of my obsessions & that i should just close my eyes and stop thinking so hard about the future so i closed my eyes and stopped thinking so hard about the future and now i have woken up on the other side of an empty desk calendar in the middle of freedom & everyone else has walked down their own road into the wilderness like they were given instructions but i: i do not even know where it is i have been left— 1. WHAT DO YOU MISS THE MOST? this place is like nothing i have ever known. i miss the body i was boxed into. i miss the feeling of being safe even though safe was a social construct and it tasted bitter every time i swallowed it into the space between my lungs, breathing out the terror i told myself i didn’t have, breathing out the time i told myself i had. now i reach for the seventh rib like it is the last true thing in my
bone structure and pull on it tighter to straighten myself and the future that snarls from in front of me. the others rode the roller coaster and said the screaming was fear realizing it is afraid of itself & all i remember was the plunge after i said yes to something i would always have said no to before, the gobbling up of emptiness even though the only direction was down and all i did was pour it all away: i miss the emptiness, the sound of screaming is so much louder and i do not have ribs strong enough to support it all— 1. DO YOU REGRET THE CHOICE YOU MADE? i regret everything & nothing, i regret unearthing the ugly reality that the monster that is regret still exists, i regret that all i am now is a heretic, back turned to everything i was before. i thought that pouring myself empty to draw the world into perfection around me would settle the earthquake beneath my feet but instead all i have memorized is that entropy can only increase, i am only stitching my utopia back together one crack at a time and that is far too slow for me to finish construction before i die. the others say they do not feel regret for anything they have done but they are lying, i know it, i know it, i know it, even if i am the only soul who is lost i tell myself that i cannot possibly be the only soul who is looking back at the person they once were and wondering who they would have become if they chose the other job, the other boy, the other school, the other part of themselves they never dared to see: if i regret everything i have done but i do not regret the temple that i am worth today then what does that mean for me—
town names By Molly tulipteastudies tulipsarepunk
i am from the winds screaming above a sleeping-bag town, the houses-packed-likeegg-cartons town, from yarn shops with deadbeat radios, market newspapers, dove coos and a high-rise room floured with cigarette ash, flies fizzled and burned between double-glazing and red summer spots pricking my hands. i am from labourers and pot-smokers, men from work lines, farms, and vales, always with blistered hands and black earth beneath their fingernails. i am from the rain-whips lashing car doors and window panes, from sprigs of poppies around a memorial - “lest we forget” and the thunder of tuesday church bells, gunning down the air, and snuffing out the sleep of the anarchists. i could say i’m from a choral cathedral and moorland splashed violet, from clinging beach sand and trilling songbirds, or even from coffee sips, fresh-fried fish and oily fingers, and cream teas from above the bright estuary. or i am from a factory town. a market town. a do-it-yourself, don’t-get-hurt graffiti town, a pigeons-clustered-on-telephone-wires town. a hometown.
genderqueer By Scout
zelandiangelo
Someone asked me what masc feels like and I’m like man I don’t know, but when I saw h&m (or forever 21 or something, who cares?) selling replicas of Leonardo DiCaprio’s shirt from Romeo + Juliet I was like oh my god I can BE Romeo. I never wanted him, I just wanted to be him. I don’t know how to explain what masc feels like or what fem feels like but sometimes he sometimes she or sometimes they feels right, but queer always feels right.
Spring/Summer 2020 By Marta unseenarts
And when I thought that maybe I knew who I am, or at least could disappear in the crowd, I'm back here. And day by day I can feel it slip away, I can feel me dissolving back into what I was. What's the problem the mirror asks, you've missed it, you wanted to go back? But the thing is you can't go back, you're here at your old life, but it's not the you who lived those life. But you can't go forward either, at least not for now. You can't stay who you are, this is not how you survive, so everyday little by little you change back into what you were before, and it hurts, but it's the only way. And somewhere inside there's a voice, you know it's fake but it gives you hope that maybe if you're back there then you might fit into that life again. It would be beautiful to believe I must say, but the harsh truth is that the life you had doesn't fit into you, and probably never will again. So is all this pain for nothing? Will you have to learn how to grow again? Probably yes.
Not yours to take By Asena astralis-elysian
stole my life, stole my heart, stole my feelings, ruined me, and all you can say is ‘sorry’. that won’t give me myself back, won’t do me any good, all it proves is that you were never a good person. destroyed me, broke me down into nothing, and you expect me to pick up my broken pieces, as if you haven’t taken some of these pieces away from me too. look at me and listen, this is me we’re talking about, my heart you took away, my soul, what makes me me, you took what was never yours. my identity is not yours to take.it never was. never will be.
gunpowder By Isa
endymions
CW: descriptions/mentions of guns/bullets, gunshot wounds, mild body horror there’s a brand new bullet hole where your heart used to be. it collapsed inwards, forming iron and gunpowder and even the copper casing thrown to the side. the barrel of the gun and the clicked trigger is a girl recognizable in her unfamiliarity. perhaps it’s you-who-was, or you-who-is, or you-who-will-be. perhaps it’s, not you at all, but a ghost of the girl you wanted to be. she saw you and saw her and said there can only be one. so she became the trigger and the cartridge and the barrel of the gun that broke your own heart.
kerosene By Isa
endymions
CW: fire, body horror, repetition i drink the kerosene spill arson from my lips light the match between my teeth strike the matchbox over and over and over until there is no match there was no match there is only teeth rotting teeth broken teeth falling out of my head and my mouth and my soul teeth do you hear them like pennies as they drop tick tock tick tock do you see the words i held back behind them do you see them burn turn to ash disperse in the breath of prayers on my knees do you see do you see do you see all that i am that i was that i will be hidden behind the match stuck between my teeth
handwriting By Anonymous
I’ve always hated my handwriting and I thought maybe if I could convince myself not to, then I could stop hating one tiny part of myself. It always looked wrong - jagged, ugly - it didn’t feel like me. When I write something the words look wrong, twisted by the right curves in the wrong places. Something inside me never let it rest. But then I thought why can’t I just change the way I write? So I tried twisting my words to fit how I thought I was supposed to be. Everyone said it looked better but I felt worse. I still hate the way I write, I always go back to the way I was. Why did I try to take that away?
choose today choose tomorrow By Glo
surgicaldawns
I. A man somewhere hasn’t shaved in weeks. He feels older than he is and hasn’t seen his daughter in years. He’s trying not to think about what day it is, or how special. He grabs his coat and decides to get some fast food for lunch. Somewhere else a woman sprays perfume on her wrists and heads out to buy flowers. II. It wasn’t just a matter of tradition or meaning, this was the very reason why they existed. They were all born with the most beautiful spark, you could see it from afar. Then they started to burn out to nothing. It felt like a minute ago, they would say. A minute ago we were bright and now we are ash. They of course came in all different shapes and colors, but the purpose of their life was the same. It had been this way since the beginning and no one was foolish enough to dare question it. But then it was her turn to be. She was small, her skin a pale pink with a purple birthmark that ran along her side. She came from a family of twelve, and it was crammed in there, in that box others would call home. She didn’t like her family. They were all too similar, with their rules and their excuses, with their ideas of staying quiet, doing their job, and burning as slow as possible. There must be more to life than this, she always thought, more than to be set on fire just to see my light reflected in someone else’s eyes.
III. The woman returns home with the flowers. Everything is set and soon her daughter is gleeful, surrounded by her friends and eating treats. When, after the gifts, the cake arrives, the girl calls for her mom and points at that obvious mistake. Eleven. They both count again but the number doesn’t change. The woman laughs, jokes that maybe, unconsciously, she doesn’t want her little girl to grow up. That she wants her to stay the same age forever. Meanwhile the man finds a quiet spot and sits down with his tray. That’s when he notices. He wants to ask the young man behind the counter who just served him why there’s a pink candle on his cheeseburger. It doesn’t make sense. He was trying not to think about her; this is just cruel. “I will love you after the sun runs out.” He told his daughter once. “Runs out of what? Fire?” she asked. “Warmth.” She pondered for a second. “Aren’t those the same thing?” The man picks up the candle and stares at it, feeling the smooth and soft wax between his fingers. He carefully places it in his pocket, then begins to eat halfheartedly, just in time for the food to get cold.
greatness, come undone By Tris
atelierwriting
what is the HEART? [ a ] the organ that beats in your chest. it marches onward like the clockwork ticking of a windup toy. it simply exists. it simply is. put your fingers to your pulse point and you will hear the thousands and thousands of lives that have lived before you and you will hear the generations that wish to break free. [ b ] the heart is the mind is the body. the heart tells you where to go. you rise with the sun, and fall with the moon, and every step you are chasing the distant promise that your heart has whispered to you in the dark of night when you fall asleep. the heart is the mind is the body is everything you will ever need. [ c ] the heart is a reminder. [ d ] a part of the million-piece puzzle that you are. a single cog in the machinations of humanity. you wonder, vaguely, if this is some cruel joke that the gods are playing on you. and then you wonder, inevitably, whether those gods exist and who they are. [ e ] divine intervention in the form of impolite mockery. divine intervention takes you by the hand and promises a sleepover in your room, and you share a box of fruit loops and pass a bottle of nail polish between the two of you as you paint yin and yang on your thumbs and hold your fingers up to the muted light of the lamp your brother broke and giggle at the secrets you share. you are ALONE. YES or NO? [ a ] yes. [ b ] no. how do you HURT? [ a ] you feel the ache in your bones. it’s with you as you stand, as you go through the motions of the day. you are tired, so very tired, so weary and worn out and ready to lie down and stare at the popcorn ceiling of your apartment and ask yourself if this is truly the life that you wanted.
[ b ] your mind feels stretched. you feel spread out too thin, like too little butter on too much bread. the food analogy makes you laugh a little bit, an empty sound in your abandoned dorm room. nobody is here. nobody will ever be here with you. [ c ] there are bruises on your knees and bruises on your elbows. you have fallen too many times, but you still get back up. next time, you tell yourself, i will be better. next time, i will not fall to this. and you don’t. but you still fall to something else. you will always fall down, and you can only hope that you will be able to get back up each time. [ d ] you do not hurt. you will never hurt. you cannot afford it. you slip on a mask as easily as if it is your true face and smile, because you do not know pain. SUNRISE or SUNSET? [ a ] sunrise. the promise of a new day. [ b ] sunset. the whispers of a new era. [ c ] sunrise. the beginnings and the endings and the threads of fate coming to a bitter, bitter end. [ d ] sunset. the endings and the beginnings and the pommel of a familiar sword, bloodied from war. [ e ] sunrise. the inevitability of ancestral ghosts calling you, clinging on like leeches. [ f ] sunset. the succumbing to the ancestral ghosts, reminding yourself that they are part of who you are. what is at the end of the RAINBOW? [ a ] legends tell of a pot of leprechaun’s gold, but how valuable is the gold of a trickster? a pound of feathers is the same weight as a pound of bricks, and a pound of flour is the same weight as a pound of silver. quantity is meaningless in the face of someone searching for more. quantity means nothing when it is pyrite.
[ b ] you see the end of the war you are fighting. in your dreams, you hear the voice of the dragon god of chinatown calling you. in your dreams, you hear the calls of a million ancestral gods telling you to fight for their cause, their ocean of endless fantasies and whims. you wonder if you are only meant to be their vessel, a life that they will simply throw away once you have outlived your use. but at least then, you think, you will be able to rest. [ c ] the rainbow is nothing but light. the end of the rainbow is nothing but the end of light. darkness swallows you up from the inside, hopeless and allconsuming and hungry. you are ALONE. YES or NO? [ a ] yes. you are lonely. loneliness is a yawning pit underneath the city that you can see if you peer through the cracks of the sidewalk. that’s why you don’t step on them, because you know that if you let them, the cracks will open wide and let you fall and fall and fall and [ b ] no. you are lonely. loneliness is a reminder that you are alive and that you still have enough wits with you to feel. loneliness is an ugly reminder of the endless maze you have locked yourself in, without ariadne’s thread to find your way out and without a minotaur to defeat because the only monsters in this labyrinth are of your own making. you are ALIVE. [ a ] and you carry the weight of the world on your shoulders. you carry the weight of a thousand past deeds in your heart. [ b ] and you look over your shoulder, wondering who will follow in your footsteps, before placing another seed in the dirt beneath your feet. the flowers will bloom when you are long gone on your journey, but perhaps the travelerwarrior-daughter who comes after you will find the beauty in it that you could not.
GREATNESS BEYOND HUMAN IMAGINATION a million lifetimes weigh you down. they whisper in your ears, reminding you of the things that they had failed to do and the wishes that they push onto you. they haunt your every footstep like friendly ghosts, but as you order your second cup of coffee of the day at the local coffeeshop down the street from your apartment you know that they are anything but that. they wear red masks, but if you look closely you can see the paint peeling to reveal the white underneath. red, you remember your mother telling you in her brief moments of lucidity, red for prosperity and good fortune. white, you remember your father telling you in his last moments, white for evil and the end of all things. you are destined for greatness, that much is certain, because what else would you be destined for with the weight of a thousand ancestors pressing you into the earth? you are destined for greatness, that much is certain, but greatness for who if not for yourself? OPEN YOUR EYES, the dragon god of chinatown booms. OPEN YOUR WORLD TO INCLUDE YOURSELF. GREATNESS WITHIN THE SOUL. the soul hungers for more. adventure, wealth, love, it crows impatiently as you flip through your textbook. the words on the pages don’t register to you in the way that they should. instead, they rearrange themselves on the paper, clamoring for your attention the same way your soul does. it is then that you remember that everything that you see is a manifestation of your soul, because you are trapped in an endless dream with an exit behind a locked door and a key that has been buried in the depths of a doomed heart. more! the soul proclaims. give me more! i will never be satisfied! bow to my power and heed my every whim! i am the greatest you will ever become and i am the greatness you desire. i am the greatness that is locked away within until you have finished your pointless quest. you are destined for greatness, and your soul has made it so, because what else does a great soul look like if not iron-clad and unforgettable?
you are destined for greatness, and your soul has made it so, but greatness for what if not the freedom of corruption? TAKE A REST, the dragon god of chinatown booms. YOU CANNOT KEEP CLIMBING IF YOU CANNOT WATCH OUT FOR YOURSELF. GREATNESS OF THE HEART. divine intervention knocks on your door when you turned six in the form of your dearest friend. divine intervention takes you through the streets of a ghost town in your dreams and hands you a sword to fend off the demons of someone else’s nightmare. divine intervention smiles when you ask what you are doing this for and tells you that you are doing this because you are kind. because you are good. because you want to save other people. because you are the pictureperfect image of what everybody wants to become but cannot. divine intervention raises you up onto a pedestal not unlike the classical greek and roman statues you see on museum pamphlets. you are destined for greatness, and it cannot be taken away from you because what else does divinity want from you if not to martyr you for its purposes? you are destined for greatness, and it cannot be taken away from you, but greatness for what if not something you yourself can envision? TAKE HEART, the dragon god of chinatown booms. THE FUTURE IS YOURS TO MAKE AND YOURS TO TAKE.
lessons for the fledgling adult By Anonymous
CW: allusions to mental illness Imagine me at eighteen, falling over the line into adulthood, wide eyed curiosity trained intently on the horizon of possibilities. The summer before college pans out in the distance, vibrant in its sky blue hues, cloudless afternoons and intense heat. Somewhere between trips to Ikea and nostalgia visits to the coffee shop in town with pastries that taste of the peculiar brand of nostalgia used to describe mediocre things tinted with the memory of childhood, I chop the majority of my hair off in my bathroom sink. I tell myself it is because my hair has thinned out too much from an illness. That’s true. But like many people, I also do it because I want to reinvent myself. I am a new person, I tell the startled halfstranger that owlishly blinks back at me from the mirror. I am a new person. Imagine me now, slightly older, sitting here across from you in this nebulously defined universe, imparting onto you advice that I may not be qualified to give, because I am still something incomplete and imperfect and searching. If you read this out loud, imagine my voice as the all knowing soothing melody of the cosmos: expansive, deep as the oceans, and resonating through your soul. But also imagine it as it really is: quiet and awkward. Both are necessary for realism. This advice may not be for you for many reasons. Perhaps you’ll find it all inane and obvious. But I learned these things and survived, so it must be worth something.
ONE. You discover the wonders of junk food your very first day living alone. Your puritanical mother would be horrified to see you punch numbers into a vending machine and come out with an artificially sweetened prize packaged into an all too brightly colored plastic bag. You bite into that first Dorito chip with confused apprehension. Pause. Take another bite. Another chip. Five minutes later you’ll have somehow plowed your way through two whole bags. You think, somehow, your mother will round the corner and find you standing there, cheeks full of everything you were forbidden, and scream. She doesn’t. Not when you nearly vomit from three bags of Dorito dust. Not when you go to McDonalds for the first time outside of a family road trip and order something beside a bland filet-o-fish under her watchful eye. You’re free. You’re free you’re free you’re free you’re — TWO. Trapped. What? You really thought this would all be so easy, didn’t you? You were always the ‘genius’ in school: wore the label of prodigy like it was an oversized sash presented at the Miss America pageant. Every subject molded itself like putty at your fingertips. You took pride in that. Maybe a little too much pride. But here’s the ugly truth you’ll have to grapple with: everyone around you now? They’re also geniuses. Worse yet, they’re geniuses who actually understand hard work and perseverance. You on the other hand? You’re empty. You have your natural intelligence but nothing else. You’re starting to understand why your parents kept you on such a short leash. You’ve never really worked for anything. Give your brain a little shake. What are you besides a series of dubiously deserved A’s littered on a high school quarterly report card? You’re stunned when your first midterm in any class comes back with a fat 62 circled in angry red at the top of the page. A slap in the face. What went wrong? You studied, same as you did in high school. You did everything you did before. That worked before. Is something wrong with you? Are you broken?
THREE. Wawa is a lifesaver. It doesn’t matter that it’s 2am. It doesn’t matter that the October night is freezing cold and the air nips sharply at your skin in contempt. The man behind the counter still serves you mac and cheese in a stark white paper container and bids you to ‘have a good one’ with a smile (a smile that you might have returned, but you’re not sure). It doesn’t matter that the food is vaguely bland and more than a little soggy once you spoon it into your mouth, or that the container is so thin the heat threatens to scald your fingertips. You sit there on the steps leading up to the convenience store, fluorescent lights flooding from the windows behind you, and you start crying. FOUR. Talking to others isn’t easier for the “new” you. Your blunt “cool girl” bob (which falls flat on you anyways) doesn’t impart onto you the sort of effortless ease in conversing with strangers you’ve always hoped. You’re not effortlessly charming and verbose, and you don’t draw people in. Your amiability, while sincere, has been and always will be tinged with an awkwardness that’s often misconstrued as aloofness. You’re as much an alien as you’ve always been, watching people and wondering why you don’t blend in with them despite the fact that you seem, outwardly, exactly like them. You thought you’d reinvent yourself systematically. A house being torn down and rebuilt brick by carefully placed brick. Only for you, there’s no fundamental building block to tear down and build back up again. Your cells aren’t yours to disassemble and rearrange. You instead try to pretend you have hobbies you never did. You want to sing. You want to dance. You want to be involved on the boards of student organizations.
Although your interest is sincere, you don’t want these things out of passion or love: you want them because the people who seem cool in your eyes are involved in them. Needless to say, your desires fall on deaf ears. FIVE. Here’s the thing: it gets better. The sentiment feels contrite and unrealistic, a useless band aid plastered over a gaping wound. But it’s true. You start noticing that there’s pleasure in figuring out little things: you learn to crack an egg with one hand, you figure out how to load a washing machine properly, and you get good, very good, at folding clothes quickly. At first, you’re embarrassed by this: embarrassed by the fact you didn’t know these things before, embarrassed by the fact that you can find some sort of comfort in something so seemingly trivial. Your classmates are probably doing far greater things, meaningful things, and you’re here celebrating the accomplishment of a basic life skill while watching Chinese reality shows. And while you can’t quite convince yourself that you aren’t falling spectacularly behind, you also can’t ignore the fact that you’re actually doing something. Successfully. You slide your stuffed dresser drawer closed. Maybe tomorrow, you’ll set your sights on some greater goals. SIX The people that occupy the greatest portions of your fragile and confused world are not the ones you’ve actively sought out or tried to impress. You meet them in completely random, innocuous little moments. One on a field when the leaves are changing color from peaceful green to vibrant orange, offering you some water because you look tired from jogging. Another when she asks to sit next to you in a lecture halfway through the semester, and you pull your backpack aside,
watch as she slips into the seat next to yours, and listen as she proceeds to chat your ear off before the professor walks in. A third is a friend of your roommate’s, bright eyed and perceptive and maybe a little too good at cutting to the heart of any matter. There are a few more too: chance encounters that just mysteriously take root and blossom. You’ve never been great at making friends, but you’re grateful for the ones that have somehow swam through the confusing, murky waters of the universe to find you. Or maybe you, floundering and drowning, found them. Whatever the case, they’re with you all the same, and you know there’s at least one thing in your life that is real and sincere and true. SEVEN. Some days you run through the world as if weightless, Hermes’ winged sandals themselves strapped to your feet. Other days you open your eyes, stare at the ceiling of your dorm room with its weirdly shaped stain that vaguely resembles a horse arrested in mid-gallop, and you wonder if there’s any sense at all to this meandering world. Both types of days are a fundamental part of you. EIGHT. You come to a startling realization one day, as winter shakes loose snow from its mighty coat over the rolling hills of campus, that you are still here. You haven’t faded out. You remember that night at Wawa, convenience store light illuminating you, hands grasped so tightly around the container. You took an odd sort of comfort in knowing that you still casted a shadow and your grip was solid. Because you thought that perhaps, in that moment, you were fading out of existence as you realized you were no longer tied down to the one thing that had defined you for so many years: your perfect grades. And yet, despite that realization, the world hasn’t come apart at its seams. No great tear in the fabric of reality. No aghast God or Goddess above.
Your grades still suck, but you tell yourself - or perhaps your therapist tells you that this is to be expected. That you are learning now what others learned many years ago about working for the things that actually motivate and inspire you. That confronting this fact does not mean you are ‘slow’ or ‘behind’ but rather that you simply took another path to reach the same road. That there’s distance left to cover, and plenty of time to adjust. Your self-worth is now defined by something else. What exactly that is, you don’t know. The shape of it in the dark of your mind is looming and unfamiliar, but you don’t feel any fear in tracing your fingers against its grooves and edges as you grapple for a name. NINE. You are a roaring flame that torches through your available kindling too fast. Too hungry. There are things you want, that you desire and burn for, but the universe rebukes you for being too intense, too quick. There are steps, reminds the voice of the woman you speak to every week (when she isn’t a physical human form positioned in the couch across from you in that cheerfully bright room, she’s a discombobulated fragment of your conscience, spouting sentences that you’re unsure are actually recollections of her words or simply other things you’ve heard that you unconsciously believe she would say as well). You have to take everything slowly. Set goals. Then set tinier goals in between: stepping stones. Don’t leap toward the sun only to fall short and plummet the thousands of feet back down. You have to actively remind yourself, every single day as you slave through coursework that you don’t quite understand and attempt to step a little bit out of your comfort zone during social gatherings, that your days of feeling like you were ‘automatically good’ at whatever you tried are probably long past.
Your life in high school was simpler, well defined and thrust onto you by someone else. Now you’re setting out and making your own decidedly nebulous goals, taking the reins of your own future, walking at your own pace. You can’t see very far down the road, but you remind yourself that no one else can either. And they find it within them to walk with confidence. So chin up. Keep going. TEN. You walk out of the automatic sliding doors of your college house on a far too humid morning in mid-May, blinking sleep from your disoriented eyes and rolling your suitcase down the ramp in front of you. You say goodbye to your friends and promise to FaceTime them once everyone’s settled. You go home to another summer. You spend more afternoons indulging in the highly dubious nostalgia of your childhood, and you realize, somewhere between bites of mediocre ice cream and disinterested wandering around the local mall, that you’re different. Truly different now. You didn’t accomplish any of the illdefined goals you set out with. You’re not the manifestation of the scribbles you wrote down on an August evening a lifetime ago and marked in big looping calligraphy as ‘COLLEGE GOALS’. In the mirror last summer, you were half a stranger. Now you’re a full stranger. The nine month old ghost of your reflection stares inquiringly at you, wondering who you are: you don’t major in what you intended. You didn’t join the clubs you thought you would. Your once perfect academic record is in shambles. But you’ll also realize, slowly but surely, that none of this is a bad thing. You learned. You grew. You’re not the person you thought you would become, but the you that currently exists deserves its own acknowledgment. And believe me when I say that’s enough.
credits! We would like to thank all our writers for contributing their pieces to the zine. All written content is owned by the writer credited within the piece. Please do check out all our featured authors at their respective social media accounts. Images are freely usable images sourced from Unsplash and Canva. Thank you once again for reading!