Life in Color | Digital Collection

LIFE IN

DIGITAL

“Not So Love Letters” Grace Cady

“Break-Up” Gabrielle Chun

“Untitled” Bella Buelow

“Lie Down With Dogs And You’ll Get Fleas” Emma Strick

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“Dancing with No Music” Jackson Gross

“Layers”

Isabel Bonebrake

“Summer Mountains, Emotion, In your eyes” Molly Laird

“Waitressing” Amanda Zastrow

“Not So Love Letters”

Grace Cady

Show me the skeletons in your closet while you break my bones, break my heart, They were only ever yours to break anyway, Nothing that you could ever say would scare me, I’ve been more afraid of myself than I would ever be of you.

Tell me about all of the terrible things you do & I will tell you about how I love you anyway, How I forgive you, How you have my grace & patience, And that will characterize our relationship, Someone who loves a little too much, And another who knows just how to use that to their advantage.

You stood there tearing me to pieces, And I sprawled out across the floor trying to pick them all up, Trying not to cut myself on my shattered edges, And the funny thing is that I didn’t even really want to be fixed, I just wanted you to see me as whole.

Sometimes I get sick off my own sweetness, How can I let people hurt me this way & continue to love them?

It leaves a bad taste in my mouth and scars on my soul.

I cut the ties between us because I had to, Not like they were satin ribbons waiting for their breakaway, But more like a stubborn rope, I was clinging to until my hands bled, And now I know that our ‘someday’ will never come, And all that’s become of us is nothing more than we ever once were.

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Jackson Gross

“Dancing with No Music” I still remember the last dance we took; And it wasn’t in the ballroom of that white tent On the hard wooden dance floor With lights twinkling across the roof It was on the soft carpet of the basement.

Dancing with No Music, Just feeling your head rest on my shoulder, as we swayed back and forth And even though others were around Your face was the only one I saw, the only one I needed to see, the only one I wanted to see.

Your eyes the color of a dark walnut brown, and hair as soft as the couch we used to sit on.

Just being with you is all I needed to be whole And even when I couldn’t quite get the moves right, as I wobbled from side to side, Your laughs melted away my embarrassment, And all I could do was laugh and smile And look upon you with pure joy.

But, once we restarted, the dance with no music, Seemed further away, you seemed further away, Seemingly drifting into the abyss Until you were gone, and then I was left dancing on my own.

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“Break-Up”

Gabrielle Chun

“Could we have more bread, please?”

I stop and see a guy in a nice suit getting my attention. He’s accompanied by an attractive woman in a burgundy dress with lipstick to match. I nod and smile, saying I’ll grab some shortly.

Across the room, I notice my coworker Mindy holding a water pitcher and talking to a young woman alone in a booth. The woman looks like she just came off work at the hospital since she’s wearing navy-blue scrubs, but it’s her tear-stained cheeks that catch my attention.

She gestures wildly as she talks. I can’t hear what she’s saying, but it seems like she’s successfully gaining Mindy’s allegiance, Mindy’s face growing progressively more sympathetic.

I step into the bright kitchen to assemble a new breadbasket and decide to take a pitcher to refill their water glasses too. I duck back into the candle-lit seating area.

Glancing back at where Mindy is, I see the woman point a shaking finger across the room. I follow the direction to see the couple I’m heading towards. I bounce my eyes back to Mindy’s face painted in a fierce scowl as she marches over to the couple, the water in the pitcherthreatening to slosh over. Not that it matters since Mindy promptly pours the contents onto the top of the guy’s head, his date shrieking as some drops fly toward her.

The guy’s speechless as his date continues to make a scene, but Mindy doesn’t seem bothered as she strides away with a smirk on her face. I catch her throwing a wink toward the woman she was talking to earlier.

With a small smile, I approach the couple and tentatively hold out the breadbasket but hide the pitcher behind my back. “Would you still like your bread?”

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Isabel Bonebrake

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“Layers”

“Untitled”

Bella Buelow

i keep a picture of a dead man in my room. he is hugging me as we smile side by side towards my mother and her camera that still rots in that house even though a new family lives there now. i’ve forgotten the sound of his voice but i remember the details of his hair and the ants that crawled on his Stone my distant uncle called me weird when i noticed them but didn’t say it to my face. i ran into the same uncle years later and he asked me what i was doing i told him of plans that i won’t follow through and he told me that He would be proud of me and said that to my face. i pray the rosary that i taught myself my mother won’t step foot in a church since that Day even though she says she wants to and even though she chose a neighborhood with a Catholic church in the middle she takes the long way home to avoid the Stones and she won’t look me in the face because i remind her too much of Him. now my heart has a thousand ants crawling over it as i stare at this dead man’s picture in a room that he has never stepped foot in and never will i tell him that i love him and i say this to his face and i count my beads and cross my chest. aMen. aMen. aMen.

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“Summer Mountains, Emotion, In your eyes” Molly Laird

Summer MountainsEarly mornings and late nights they’re with you, An overwhelming beauty that accepts all.

Patiently present for those who wander to be found.

Memories created in elevated freedom, Whispers of life carried on different journeys, Offering new perspectives for the adventurous.

The ongoing climb persists with both challenges and triumphs, Discovering oneself and what inevitably lies ahead.

EmotionWho allows human nature to become so naïve to the thought of love?

Hearts broken from too much trust, Bodies taken advantage of, Minds left empty.

When does one become too vulnerable to the ideal of love?

Risking emotions, Wasting time, Desperate to be accepted.

Why is independence, self-love so underrated?

For the benefit of purpose, discovery, improvement, discipline.

Does society only care for the romanticized perfection between one another?

Justify and bring light to the broken and abandoned, Heal the shattered trust of the damaged to bring an end to their despair.

In your eyesGuard down, finding freedom in friendship, Spontaneous adventure, just us.

Vulnerable late nights without judgement, Walks in the dark, voices in quiet chaos.

Competing for your time, trying to keep up.

Slowly slipping away with unanswered questions, Loyalty has its limits, breaking under pressure.

A dream has become dread, dying from lack of honesty, Once my place of refuge, now I run toward rediscovering self-worth.

Reputation took my friend, not willing to defend or fight for me, Ashamed of a bond that wasn’t a meaningless joke.

Congratulations are in order at my loss of trust in a man’s word, Left abandoned here in disappointment and frustration, no longer believing in the good.

A broken realization arises, It was all time spent and wasted in your eyes.

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“Lie Down With Dogs And You’ll Get Fleas” Emma Strick

Yesterday, my roommate asked me if my dad was like my mom. My roommate knows my mom from when she came last week to move my TV into our apartment. She knows my dad from FaceTime calls. I didn’t know what to say.

Yes, in some ways. They’re both funny. But my dad’s sense of humor is full of effort, full of self-deprecation it’s obvious he believes. I’ve grown tired of it for that reason.

My mom’s sense of humor is a little off-the-wall, dirty, cleverer, smart. Outlined in an assurance of unshakable decency. It’s clear I prefer one. I don’t think I used to. Or I preferred my dad’s by default; he was the funny one.

Last year, when my conception of who my boyfriend (now ex-boyfriend) was began to fall away like shingles on a badly-built house, I was speaking to him about my parents’ relationship. I said that it felt like my mom’s whole personality as I knew it incorporated my father. I didn’t know who my mom was without him, and worst of all, I think she might be very different, maybe better without him. Not better. “My mom’s a hardass,” I said, “and I think she might not have had to be that way without my dad.”

Growing up, my mom said to my sisters and me, all the time, that “Other people are not responsible for your feelings.” I think she usually said this after one of us would say something like, “She made me yell!” or “You made me spill!” or “She made me mad, so I hit her!” so I guess maybe my mother meant that other people weren’t responsible for our reactions to our feelings. But what I remember hearing was that other people weren’t responsible for my feelings. This made sense to me only vaguely, because my sisters and I were precipitously, acutely aware of everybody else’s feelings and highly self-conscious.

For our ninth birthday, my twin sister and I brought Dilly Bars into our classes. Half of the ice cream bars were chocolate, a quarter cherry, and the other quarter blue raspberry–I remember deciding this ratio a few nights earlier. Maddie chose and ate a blue raspberry one before class, I ate chocolate. When we were passing them out to our classmates, I rode the high of everyone’s excitement–not only were we the first to bring in Dilly Bars, we had flavors. The last boy in the class to receive one was a likable but decidedly high-drama boy named Seth. He asked if we had blue raspberry, and my heart sank. No, we only had chocolate left. He didn’t hide his disappointment and instead said, “Oh. I won’t have one, then.” This so affected me that I felt sick the rest of the day and even now I remember the ache in my chest. I remember wishing I could go back in time and tell Maddie not to eat the blue raspberry one, so Seth could have one, or even further back and getting all blue raspberry for the class. And I resented Seth for declining the chocolate Dilly Bar, when I’d rather have died than do the same to somebody else.

If other people weren’t responsible for our feelings, why did I feel so responsible for others’?

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To me now, it seems that my mom gave that advice to us, as if she saw parenting us as fixing my father, whose moods seem extremely dependent on other people’s actions. Us being so aware of others was the influence that she had on us, maybe subconsciously—that’s how she treated Dad, like his moods, though unfixable, could somehow be mitigated by her being perfect. But she couldn’t let herself be affected by his actions because she’d crumble.

I tried to communicate this, feeling shrill, dramatic, overlarge under my ex’s calculating eyes. He listened but it seemed he was out of his depth with this. I had the impression that I was throwing some small, heavy fruit at a Plexiglass barrier. He observed, either this time or another time, that I never mentioned all this about my parents’ relationship when we first started out. I know that I only told him this story once I started fearing and feeling us headed the same way.

The summer after this conversation, and after our break-up, I spent a month in a study abroad program in Ireland. I had a fantastic time, reading Irish literature and developing friendships with girls from my college that were in majors I’d never interacted with before. I met people and felt more interesting than I’d felt in a long time. I realized a lot about myself in love and realized more fully than ever the ways that my relationship had been horrible, and reflected a lot on the ways that my parents’ relationship had set me up for it. After the 3-credit course I was taking ended, my mom flew to Ireland to visit me. I was going to take her around Dublin and show her the sights.

My entire extended family and I had visited Ireland a few years previously, so my mom wasn’t completely new to it all. She loves the dense brown soda bread pubs are famous for serving, usually with stew, so our first night there I took her to my professor’s favorite spot, the Hairy Lemon. Sitting outside, we talked, and I told her about my trip and all the things I’d done. I felt a distance between us, an expected one. I’d had a few romantic experiences in Ireland and telling my mom about them made my mom’s not mentioning Dad more conspicuous.

After we’d been at dinner for about an hour, I asked my mom about her and my father’s trip to Denver.

He’d bought her tickets to Old Dominion, her favorite band, for Christmas. He’d called me beforehand, anxious about her liking them, asking my opinion about which level of seat was best. It was sweet. I knew she’d love the idea of them going to Denver together to listen to music like that, which “made her heart hurt,” she always said.

A pained expression etched itself into her face at the question. Lines above the eyebrows, lines around her mouth, lines by her eyes. She started into it right away. It hit me in the gut, the ways he hurt her, the ways he wasn’t enough, flowed out of her, at the first question.

She told me about how he’d spent the whole trip angry, upset, anxious, generally unenthused. The seats weren’t as good as he’d thought, and they were in the sun. My mom didn’t mind, but he complained about it non-stop, and when the music started and my mom was up and dancing, he just sat there. He barely enjoyed it, she said. He barely enjoyed her Christmas gift. For the rest of the trip, he treated her as about as neutrally as their mutual friend from high school they were staying with.

This litany of heart-battering deeds didn’t surprise me; my dad has left my mom to dance by herself in front of my sisters and I more than I think is humane for three daughters to see. What hurt newly, however, was my resonating with it. When my ex-boyfriend had said and done crushing things which left me feeling hollow and misplaced, I too went to my family members and friends and gave them an urgent, aching, excuseless depiction of it, and they’d told me bluntly that I didn’t deserve it. Eventually, after too long, I left. That was after about six months of dating 10

My mom—she’s been in this her whole marriage. She is a glowing person, always fighting to be good, and my dad sat there complaining about the heat at the concert he’d brought her to for Christmas.

A few nights later, my dad called my mom. I was in our hotel room’s bathroom, face to face with myself in the mirror. I heard my dad speak to my mom in a biting tone of voice over something completely innocuous (a question about the credit union, or something). My mom’s phone was on speaker.

Hearing him, I was enraged. I stormed out of the bathroom, knelt next to my mom on the bed, and said something to him. All I remember for sure was I said “I’m not going to let you talk to my mom like that!” and feeling stupid, because I’d heard it a million times before, and let him talk to my mom like that a million times before.

He said something. We hung up on him. My mom flew into a consequential rage, and I nodded along–I wanted her to get this out, I wanted something concrete to be said, something unforgettable. She chucked her phone angrily across the bed, like a skipping stone, and it sailed over the edge and cracked against either the desk leg or the floor. She got up, still yelling at the man who couldn’t hear. She picked up the phone, I saw her see it was broken, but we didn’t acknowledge it out loud. Her yelling continued seamlessly. I nodded along steadily. Like a needle in a sewing machine.

He apologized the next day. He sent a long text message that I listened to my mom read out loud. I heard something like forgiveness or the deep want to forgive already settling into her voice. You know, I don’t want divorced parents. I don’t want to be left with the decision of how to manage a relationship with my dad, the way his brothers (both divorced) have had to do with their kids. I don’t want him to be completely miserable. But I don’t want to believe that love is begging and hoping and praying for somebody to be who you want them to be, and waving around any shred of their progress like a victory flag. I don’t want to see my mom stuck in a relationship that should have ended when she was eighteen, and I don’t want her to leave because I told her to.

We stayed up, I think, until four in the morning the night she threw her phone. We slept in late into the afternoon, and for the rest of the trip we wavered between this honesty about him and a determination to have fun–which we did have, plenty of it. We went for a walk in Phoenix Park and found the herd of deer and read next to them for hours, we scrolled through the guy I’d kissed in a club’s entire Instagram, we invented our own pub crawl route. We heard a song in a bar called Flashback Polaroid, and we love it together, though it means different things to each of us. We drank Cosmopolitans and espresso martinis. She tried to physically fight a vending machine for salt-and-vinegar chips and alarmed the hotel receptionist. We spilled hot tea all over ourselves. We heard people scream obscenities outside of our second-story window. She finished reading Where the Crawdads Sing one night while we couldn’t sleep and I read over her shoulder, and then we saw the movie too. We tried restaurants perched at the tops of long narrow staircases and I showed her how to use the buses, and I took her to a play I’d seen.

On our flight home, we watched Mamma Mia and she cried at the scene where Donna helps Sophie get ready for her wedding. We never watched Mamma Mia when I was a kid, but it’s been a recent favorite of ours. She drew a picture in my journal. We made jokes, disgusting and hilarious, that no one else on the plane would understand. She told me for the millionth time that she loves being my mom.

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Amanda Zastrow

“Waitressing”

There are so many factors that go into making sure that a night is successful. Successful in waitressing… well, you’d think I’m talking money. That is why we’re there. We’re there to get paid. I’m there to make sure that I can buy food when I’m hungry (which is so conveniently whenever I walk down the street past Yao’s Grand Dragon and can’t get the image of ever-so-tasty sushi out of my mind), that I can fuel up my car to get to school and back daily, and that when I go to the mall and feel like buying a ridiculously priced pair of jeans, I can do that.

Shanna is there because she has three kids who constantly need THINGS. Lots and lots of things – things, not solely objects, that you wouldn’t think that kids should need. Like cataract surgery, which it seems should be an ailment that only plagues those of an older generation. Not a little girl, although she has apparently lived her six years of life seeing out of one eye – and just noticed this recently. Of course, there are superficial things, too.

Like Culvers and videogames and bikes.

Bridget is there, so she can pay her bills. Same with Eileen. Eileen wouldn’t be there unless she had to be. Trust me. And Steven… uhh, none of us are really sure why he is there. It’s like he was hired and now, almost ten years later, he is just realizing that he has spent almost TEN years working in this PLACE, and he doesn’t know why, and none of us can help him with the reason either. It’ll do that to you, I guess. Fast – good – money.

Highly addictive. I wouldn’t recommend it. Ahh, well, maybe I would.

Anyway I wasn’t meaning money. Money is important and is the reason that we are employed where we are employed. We think we can make better money there than at other gigs. And most of the time we can. And most of the time I am so grateful for my job. But it comes at a price. And that price is the real indication of whether or not we’re all having a successful night.

Take the beginning of the night. Afternoon, really. Opening at 5 o’clock, we all arrive around quarter to four. That is one nice thing about my job. Quarter to four can mean four o’clock. It can mean five after four. There really isn’t any reprimand for those tardy folks who can’t, or decide they’d rather not, be to work by 3:45. On the other hand, I tend to get to work anywhere between 3:40 and 3:50. I try to be punctual.

So, for the first hour everyone is calm and gets along perfectly with each other. I mean no sarcasm - we really do get along. Everyone regales each other with tales of the previous evening. Possibly Bridget and I (and if not the two of us, for sure then just Bridget) went to the bar the night before, and we tell of the “exciting” adventures that the local taverns provided us with for the evening. Shanna will tell of her escapades in the garden.

I swear she weeds and waters her vegetables daily and all day long. So we all nod politely at the incredibly dull, mediocre, and country-ness of the stories she has for us every afternoon.

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And after listening to all of our tales, and all of us attempting (at this point in the evening we really are attempting) to care about what each other is saying, Eileen interjects with

an extremely spiritual or mystical explanation as to why all of this has happened to us in the last 24 hours, since we have last seen each other. Perhaps Mercury is in retrograde, which I learned apparently causes mechanical failure. Apparently. Or the stars are crossing at just the right angle that that 80-yearold man at the Domino last night was given the courage to approach Bridget and tell her that he really loved her tie – the tie with the huge hole resulting from fallen wax that Bridget can only still wear to work because it tucks into her apron just so, and in the dark fine-dining atmosphere, no one can see of the accident that happened while we were all in such a rush to clear candles and table cloths and get the heck out-of-dodge one late night earlier that year.

5 o’clock rolls around, however, and suddenly it’s as if the air pressure in the restaurant changes. We all stand a little straighter, push our hair back in just the right way – professional looking yet attractive as well… looking pretty never hurts tips. At least when Arlene (the female half of the restaurant ownership) walks by, we try to look busy. If we don’t have any people in the place, then we are expected to be cleaning. Cleaning the chairs and table legs with a damp cloth, in my mind’s eye, is quite possibly the most awful task I ever been asked to do; therefore, I jump at filling salt and pepper shakers, restocking sugar caddies, wiping menus – anything that is not the dreadful assignment of washing the dining room’s furniture.

All in all, each of us is hoping that we get a few tables relatively soon because there is nothing quite like biding away two hours (at three dollars an hour) in a restaurant that is realistically spotless. Spotless to a tee. Every inch is cleaned on a weekly basis. Our cleaning of the place is a tad like washing a car that an hour earlier had been professionally detailed by the makers of Lamborghini.

Another reason, though, that we all hope for tables is because at half past five or six o’clock-ish (“ish” because when you’re the feared, technically first-in-command of the restaurant, there’s nothing that stops you from coming to work at whatever time you deem acceptable or self-deserving, and from arriving in your pajamas and slippers) George arrives. Someone’s been standing guard. Most likely Steven, with his almost ten years of experience. “Don’t stand by the door, guys,” he says. “George is here.” We’ve just been given the heads-up that George, in his Eddie Bauer-interiorized Cadillac Escalade with all the bells and whistles, has pulled up, and that for our sakes, we probably want to look busy. Regardless of the fact that the restaurant really doesn’t need to be cleaned for another month or that we’re waiting… and will continue waiting… for a frickin’ table, we’re advised not to let him see us wasting away the server-minimum-wage he is paying us as we stand and stare into space and chat.

Some nights, rather than hope for people to walk through the door, we may have been better off asking for a night of pure deadness. Two tables a piece tops, send home half the staff, and close at nine o’clock.

But when the season’s just so and the ever so rich and prominent feel like strutting their stuff, we get a rush. Nineteen tables in the restaurant, nine on the patio for a combined total of anywhere around a hundred people in a night. We make bank, but at what risk to our health?

The night might be going great. All of us in tune with each other. Communicating … God forbid we communicate (we’ve been told before that the best atmosphere for everyone to ultimately do their job to their highest of abilities is a silent floor) … and all the tables getting the service they deserve. But maybe the wind slightly swaying the string of lights around the outside of the patio is just a bit north-east when it would have served us better to be north-west. Or maybe there are only two cheeseballs left in the cup of snacks sitting on the bar after the most current rush of customers has taken their seats in the dining room, and it would’ve suited us servers (suited our sanity and our safety) that there were five left instead. Odd versus even numbers? None of us know. But something sets him off.

George will start surveying the dining room. Peering through his squinted eyes, hands on his hips, his

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decades-old beer gut jutting out, covered by the formal apron he finally decided to don in place of his Packer sweatpants. Go team go!

Go team go! is what I’m thinking as I watch the drama unfold. Come on, guys. There are way too many customers in the place now, and none of them want to see a free show. Not this kind of show.

Next, he begins to pace down the aisles of the rooms. Walking quickly, his hands folded behind his back.

We can just tell – he’s looking for something to flip his lid about. Maybe he grabs an empty plate off a table. I say “an” empty plate, mind you, because the likelihood that that plate sat there for more than thirty seconds is ridiculously low. We know our stuff. We’ve all been doing this long enough to know what sets him off. We don’t leave a table un-bussed. We don’t leave an empty glass. We don’t leave an empty plate.

We don’t leave an empty salad dressing cup. Whatever the reason, he storms behind the bar. Wait for it, I think, as my ears perk, and I glance in George’s general direction. Bridget passes me in the aisle. She can see the look on my face. She knows this crap scares me.

We meet at the wait’s computer station – out of sight from the guests, the kitchen crew, and most importantly, George. I’m about to mumble something about how we have a full house and no one needs to hear George’s screaming when we hear a massive crash from behind the bar. Shattering glass, we know, is the culprit, as we attempt to get a quick, unnoticed look around the corner. “Um, there are people sitting there. In the bar. Steven … this isn’t good.” Steve, who’s standing next us, knows even better than us.

“I’ll go talk to Arlene,” he says.

Arlene, George’s slightly calmer better half (I say better meaning overall. She certainly has her days, too.) may be able to calm him down. Or just kick him out until he has calmed down. Several seconds later we see her storm past, into the bar. “Are we sure that’s a good idea?” I whisper to Bridget. But we have tables to wait on. The show must go on. Despite the attempts the owner of the restaurant is making at causing his entire staff to have breakdowns.

Five minutes later we all hear the news. George has left the building. For the night. We can all resume as normal. And I mean as normal as can be expected, I suppose, when your boss is a tyrant and causes fear and worry in all his employees that he rules over.

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