Raising Interest Rates

This week, the Nass gets its heart broken, writes fiction about disordered eating, and logs delirious entries in a Dream Journal.

The Nassau Weekly

Editors-in-Chief

Juju Lane Mina Quesen Publisher

Abigail Glickman Alumni Liasion Allie Matthias Managing Editors

A Trip to the Orangerie

Raising Interest Rates 4

By Tommy Goulding Designed by Benjamin Small

The Glass Cracked

By Lara Katz

Designed by Eman Ali, art by Hannah Mittleman

Jane’s Addiction

By Ceci McWilliams

Designed by Eman Ali, art by Emma Mohrmann

Cartoons and Art

By Hazel Flaherty and Hannah Mittleman Designed by Hannah Mittleman

Last Summer

By Sofiia Shapovalova

Designed by Synai Ferrell, art by Chas Brown

All My Dreams Wrapped Up in a Little Ball

By Frankie Duryea

Designed by Emily Yang, art by Hannah Mittleman

A Haibun for our Fallen Leaves

By Olivia Roslansky

Designed by Andrew White

Jane’s Addiction Read more on page 8.

Sam Bisno Sierra Stern Design Editor

Cathleen Weng Senior Editors

Lauren Aung Lara Katz

Junior Editors

Lucia Brown Kate Lee Anya Miller Charlie Nuermberger Alexandra Orbuch Art Director Emma Mohrmann Assistant Art Director Hannah Mittleman

Assistant Design Editors

Vera Ebong Hazel Flaherty

Head Copy Editor

Andrew White Copy Editors

Bethany Villaruz Noori Zubieta David Edgemon Teo Grosu

Events Editor

David Chmielewski

Audiovisual Editor

Christien Ayers Web Editor Jane Castleman Social Chair Kristiana Filipov

Social Media Manager Ellie Diamond

Mon

This

Tues Wed Thurs

11:00a JRR

Arabic Palaeography and Manuscript Reading Group

5:30p 185 Nassau

Fall 2022 VIS Open Studios

7:00p Green

UCHV Film Forum: Charles Burnett: Night john (1996)

7:30p 185 Nassau Reading by francine j. harris & Julie Otsuka

7:00p Coffee Club

Trans Week of Liberation Open Mic Night

4:30p Friend

Robert GoodingWilliams: Du Bois and ‘The Souls of White Folk’

8:00p Chapel Jazz Vespers

Fri Sat Sun

2:30p GSRC Feminist Friday: TERF Rhetoric

1:00p Art on Hulfish Open House | Samuel Fosso: Affirmative Acts

8:00p Richardson PPE Presents: Reverie

7:00p LCA

Sympoh Urban Arts Crew presents Bboy Loose Lee

4:00p LCA

Verse/Chorus: Songwriting Workshops with Kamara Thomas

4:00p LCA

A Playhouse Panoply: Beloved Stories, Reimagined

4:30p Frist

Vellai Mozhi: Frankly Speaking: An Indian Trans Woman’s Life Journey

Verbatim:

Overheard in an Uber Personalfinanceguru: “I might just sleep all day so I don’t have to pay for food.” SageLakersfan: “Mamba mentality.”

Overheard in New College West Exasperatedstudent: “I don’t party. I’m FSI.”

Overheard while studying Revolutionary: “I truly want to fuck the framework.”

Ally: “I thought you were ace, bro.” Revolutionary: “I meant fuck UP the framework!”

Got Events? Email David Chmielewski at dc70@princeton.edu with your event and why it should be featured.

Overheard while procrastinating Momfriend: “Okay, continue about your bike accident that I don’t care about.”

Overheard during the World Series CuriousCalifornian: “Hey Siri, what pronouns does the Philly Phanatic use?”

Overheard at a dorm postgame Riled-upinterrogator: “Name one semi-casual restaurant in Princeton that you’d take a friend-turned-lover to right now!”

Overheard on the way to Roma Girlonthephone: “Don’t get married right now!”

Overheard at late meal

Concernedfriend: “You’re gonna cry that day no matter what, so would you rather do it while having great sex, or alone in your room after a quasidate?”

Overheard in dining hall Studenteatingdinner: “I recognize the value in edging.”

Overheard in newspaper room Enlightenededitor: “If you want a man at this school, you gotta date lower.”

Overhead in lecture Inquiringprofessor: “Are any of you regular readers of ‘The Yacht Report’?”

For advertisements, contact Abigail Glickman at alg4@princeton.edu.

Overheard on Witherspoon Romanticconsultantto anxiousroommate: “Think, but don’t overthink.”

Overheard on Nassau Street Sagaciousstudent: “I don’t need a soulmate. I’m B.S.E.”

Overheard on Instagram Dramaaficionado: “A little sense of drama makes any misfortune manageable.”

Overheard in a fight over astrology in Firestone

WanderingThetajunior: “I was conceived on 9/11, the day of America’s greatest tragedy.”

Submit to Verbatim Email thenassauweekly@gmail.com

The Nassau Weekly is Princeton University’s weekly news magazine and features news, op-eds, reviews, fiction, poetry and art submitted by students. Nassau Weekly is part of Princeton Broadcasting Service, the student-run operator of WPRB FM, the oldest college FM station in the country. There is no formal membership of the Nassau Weekly and all are en couraged to attend meetings and submit their writing and art.

Read us: Contact us: Join us:

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We meet on Mondays and Thursdays at 5pm in Bloomberg 044!

A Trip To The Orangerie

“In many ways my trip thus far had been haunted by Benjamin; every glimpse of the underground Metro lights, the carefully planned streets, the dimly lit bookstores brought some passage, some fragment of prose from his works to mind.”

By TOMMY GOULDING

It was around 2:00 p.m. when we decided to visit the Orangerie. One of Paris’s smaller major art museums, it sits in the Tuileries Gardens, rising above Parisian sunbath ers and cyclists. Admission was free, by some strange combina tion of our being students and it being the weekend that we didn’t quite understand when communicated to us in French, but we weren’t complaining. Inside, we knew, we would find some of the most famous works of 19th- and early 20th-century Impressionism in the world.

I’d come to Paris for a num ber of reasons: for a Princeton course, yes, but also on the trail of some of my favorite

writers and thinkers of the 19th and 20th centuries: James Joyce, Honore de Balzac, James Baldwin, and Walter Benjamin had all lived in the city, and through their writing in some way created Paris for me, what it could mean and what might await me there.

I’d been given some mon ey by Princeton to think and write about the work of Walter Benjamin, German philoso pher, literary translator, art crit ic, and radio star, as it relates to Paris. In many ways what had drawn me to Benjamin was his imagination of the city in the 19th Century, with its crook ed streets, conspiring revolu tionaries, primitive cameras, and wandering poets. The last decade of Benjamin’s life, the 1930s, was largely spent in the city of lights, and his great unfinished masterpiece, the Arcades Project, was an exten sive exploration of Parisian his tory, culture, technology, and art in the mid-19th Century. In many ways my trip thus far had been haunted by Benjamin; every glimpse of the under ground Metro lights, the care fully planned streets, the dimly

lit bookstores brought some passage, some fragment of prose from his works to mind.

The Orangerie was no ex ception. The museum was built in 1852 at the order of Napoleon III, the closest thing Benjamin’s Arcades Project has to a supervillain. Napoleon III was a reactionary conservative emperor, brought to power in a coup which squashed the fragile Second Republic and inaugurated a new empire, characterized by decadent expenditure, violent police crackdowns, and an exten sive network of Bonapartist spies which served to thwart revolutionary resistance. The Orangerie originally served to house the orange trees of the Tuileries garden in the Parisian winter; one of the ear liest greenhouses, Benjamin wrote of its “glass before its time, premature iron”, which in some way prefigured the gi ant structures of iron and glass that would define later urban topography. It’s a strange arti fact: a proto-dictator’s exotic escape within the city, the del icate natural cultivation of a clownish and brutal regime.

Walking into the museum, the Orangerie’s towering glass walls make the space airy and bright. It is a building uniquely suited to the housing of paint ings; as the poet Apollinaire said, “painting is a remarkable art whose light is boundless”; the play of reflected and refract ed sunlight across the works of Monet, Degas, Pissarro, and Renoir, painters who already delight in the dance of light and color, lends the works here a living quality, an of-the-mo ment vibrancy which dazzles the viewer.

The exception to this was Monet’s famous Nympheas, or waterlilies, housed in a windowless section of the museum’s interior. Stepping through the shrouded door way, it was at first like entering an aquarium. Arrayed along the entirety of the room’s walls, Monet’s ponds dwarfed the typical scale of portrait and still-life paintings. The scale of these Impressionist pond scapes seemed to prefigure the hulking and monumental displays of abstraction and experiment that would fill the

museums of the later 20th and 21st century, yet they recogniz ably belonged to the lost world of the 19th century, with its love of pastel colors and out door leisure.

The deep greens and blues of Monet’s pond were strangely illuminated as if from within, by a mastery of brushstroke, color, and perspective that we could not fully understand. The white and pink lilies, of ten delineated by three or four brushstrokes at the most, were like something from another world: angels drifting down toward earth, haunting yet gentle.

It was strange; I had been taught, by Benjamin and other critics, to consider art as reflec tive of its time, lending insights into the historical moment of its creation. Walking by por traits by Degas and Renoir, I had wanted to understand these melancholy black-coat ed men and piano-playing women of the 19th century as people belonging to France, an Empire, a social class, the painter’s social circle. Yet here,

in Monet’s lilies, was some thing that lent meaning to the word eternal; drawing as it did on one of the oldest relation ships in all of civilization, that between a man and his garden. Monet’s work seemed to tran scend its 19th-century origins. Impressionism was, of course, a movement that sought a new depiction of reality, in part a response to the rise of pho tographic technology, which threatened to make painting redundant. Yet what was on display here was not mere technique, not exemplary of the 19th century per se. It was a work of great sadness and darkness, yet ignited with the fire of Monet’s love for what he painted. I felt, for a moment, not like an academic observer of Monet, divided from him by an objective critical sensibility and the distance of the years, but like I understood the awe he felt in the gardens of his old age.

We left Monet’s water lil ies with a great appetite for Impressionist art. The rest of the museum more than obliged: we passed Degas’

leaping ballerinas in their ha loes of gas-light, always strain ing for something just out of reach, Renoir’s peaches, al most sickeningly colored in overly-sweet pinks, yellows, and oranges, which none theless managed to please, Manet’s rich reds and whites in floral still-lifes. But we always came back to Monet, who was to us the clear master of the group. For 5, 10 minutes we stood in front of his painting of a vase of flowers, with bright pinks, reds, yellows, and whites like something out of a dessert platter. It was so clearly paint ed from a sense of hope, and of abundance: abundance of color, beauty, and talent, and especially from a belief in the capacity of painting to repre sent and transform. Benjamin once wrote, “it is high time the beauties of the 19th century were discovered.” On this sum mer day in Paris, we were glad to do just that.

The Nassau Weekly felt, for a moment, not like an academic observer of Tommy Goulding, divided from him by an objective critical sensibility and the dis tance of the years.

The Glass Cracked

When the glass on a train cracks, strange and impossible things reveal themselves to the protagonist in this

dow. I only sit in window seats. I get nauseous.

Friday evenings the train is always louder. It’s not the people on the train. Some

But Sunday afternoons are different.

The train is tired. It’s been a good weekend, relaxing, but you know tomorrow’s Monday and

reason or maybe he’d come just for this purpose, either way— he threw himself off the plat form at a stop the train hadn’t planned to stop at.

A second after, the driver slammed on the brakes.

A second before, the au burn-graying-haired woman across from me slammed down her knitting and pressed the emergency button on the wall.

The little girl on her father’s lap across the aisle broke into a long, tragic wail.

The old man reading the Washington Examiner let out a wild sneeze.

The train screeched vio lently to a halt just as we came into the turn, and I watched as though in slow motion the woman who’d gotten up to press the emergency button fall sideways into the window, an oversized bag flying off the rack above my head right to wards hers—

“DUCK!” roared the old man with a cold, and the woman dropped like a parachute, too slowly for my comfort but fast enough to feel fast as the over sized bag smashed into the window over the head she cra dled in her hands.

The glass had cracked.

All of the sounds—the wom an gasping as she pushed the oversized bag off of her head, letting out a little cry when she saw her knitting torn in two; the old man wiping his nose and clearing his throat, picking up his fallen newspaper; the little girl sniffling after her un explained tantrum, her father wiping her wet eyes with a tis sue; and among it all, myself, and the fifty-odd other passen gers, sitting on the breathing, unmoving train, breathing— and now they weren’t. It was as though they had been zipped shut. Pulled into silence and yet still, I could sense them, more clearly than before.

The glass had cracked but was not yet broken.

The woman ran a finger over the crack that had thread ed its way down the window. A voice crackled on over the loudspeaker. “The doors are opening… please get off here and take another train to your ultimate destination, you may do so free of charge… there has been an accident.”

It was the driver’s voice, not some prerecord ed jingling peal of a woman’s voice, always a woman’s and lacking in all tone or humanity.

The doors rattled open and yet none of us moved. The woman continued to trace the cracked window and we all sat in si lence. Then the father and the little girl got to their feet and began to walk toward the open door.

“Stop!” the woman shouted.

The man froze, clutch ing his daughter. “Why?” he asked. He had the voice of a much older man but the eyes of one half his age. His face was quite striking, I thought.

The woman glared at him. “Did you see me push the emergency button?”

“Yes,” he said uncertainly.

“Do you know why pushed the button?” she asked. “Because… because the train stopped?” he asked, but even as he spoke it was dawning on him that he didn’t, in fact, know why she would have done that.

“Because of the man,” I broke in.

“What man?” the fa ther asked, his striking face beginning to contort with

Jane’s Addiction Jane’s Addiction

“She saw eyes that enjoyed staring, ears that indulged in eavesdropping, and a mind that ruthlessly analyzed what her senses discerned. She saw hands that took these findings and selected food accordingly, cut food accordingly, chewed food accordingly.”

By CECI MCWILLIAMS

CW: This story contains con tent related to disordered eating and body dysmorphia.

PROLOGUE

Jane’s grandparents were intellectual, rich, and simple. They had eyes that read several newspa pers cover-to-cover every day, minds that stored an archive of art and books, hands that whipped shamelessly buttered mashed potatoes and knead ed irresistible bread, feet that deftly negotiated museum ex hibits. They were well-adjusted to the realities of the times but stuck in their ways. Christmas was made by Hallmark for grandparents and grandchil dren, so Francine and Henry, unwilling to surrender to such a cliché, refused to indulge in the holiday’s commercialized traditions. Instead, they would

wander downstairs on Jesus’s birthday at ten a.m. and slide each member of Gen Z a sizable check under a cylindrical wire sculpture that hung from the ceiling like a lame holiday tree. The act was satirically allusive to a normal custom. It epito mized Francine and Henry’s general attitude about life.

Jane’s Addiction

Jane woke up hours before the official happy birthday Lord moment: the placement of the checks. She opened her eyes knowing it was December 25th but did not realize it was Christmas day until minutes later, after she sprung out of bed like a lit match. She was aware of the time passing by,

growing less susceptible each minute to her abuse through rules and runs, metrics and mundaneness. She put on her carefully folded running clothes. She did not need to peek downstairs to know that her parents were by no means scrambling to stuff presents under a tree. Her parents, like the rest of the house, were also, God bless their souls, sacked out.

But in the sweeping lawns outside, the holiday spirit was blindingly bright. Reindeer with illuminated noses danced around large fake firs cluttered with thousands of ornaments. Lights covered the oaks, the twinkling branches extending over the street like tentacles. Christ did not re quire Francine and Henry’s blessing—He was already whipping like a sprite past the fellow mansions, blowing out candles with holy gust. The lack of tangible cheer inside, in contrast with the blare of it outside, reminded her that it was CHRISTMAS. Fucking Christmas. Laces in dou ble-knots, glass of water down the hatch, and she was off into the great, humid outdoors. A Texas December indeed.

The Houston air had not shifted since Jane arrived five days prior. Not even when she exhibited enough of what ever it was—dedication or antics or both—that got her

up before the sun every morn ing and charging out of the air-conditioned container of modern art, did the weather make a move. The air was as heavy as an arm numbed un der a sleeping body. Jane felt immobilized by the weight of that air, and so she ran angry, in protest. She was stubborn and did this often, making herself immune to the effects of things independent of her control.

After several tedious loops past the quiet, dewy lawns, absent of their usual yard and construction workers, she hoisted her legs, like limp doz ing toddlers, back onto Henry and Francine’s porch. “Run” could now be crossed off her to-do list. Armadillos scurried beneath the wooden planks, hearing Jane taking off her sneakers for the fifth day in the row. She tip-toed inside, sealing the door shut behind her with deliberate silence.

Upstairs, she made her twin-sized bed, folding hospi tal corners like origami, and confirmed that her broth er was asleep. His face was swollen and molded into the pillow. A master of rest. She proceeded to the bathroom, cranked the shower knob to its maximum heat, and ex amined herself in the mirror. She saw eyes that enjoyed staring, ears that indulged in eavesdropping, and a mind

that ruthlessly analyzed what her senses discerned. She saw hands that took these findings and selected food accordingly, cut food accordingly, chewed food accordingly. She saw feet that navigated a buffet with the discipline of a training Olympian. And she saw every thing in between: a neck that widened her to the stature of a football player, arms that grew porcupine spines, calves that bulged in a masculine way, thighs that begged for more personal space. She stared at her bellybutton, the center of her disgust. She scolded her outie. It recoiled into an in nie. The mirror steamed up and she faded into a lean blur just before seeing the disturb ing image of her relaxed ab dominals. She stepped into the shower and felt the hard water pressure hit her like an exhalation.

Downstairs, Henry re turned from his third trip to the cupboard that morning, this time with a bowl of ber ries and a mound of granola. He pulled back a chair from the dining table to make room for his big belly. Meanwhile, Francine was busy at the stove. She heated up a tortilla with a slice of butter and put it on a plate, put the plate on a tray, and put the tray on the table. Christmas day had begun.

The following hours would entail a series of small tests,

which Jane had meticulous ly planned to pass with dis tinction. She spent that day devoted to her agenda, and fell asleep that night content with her achievements: the deliberate serving of the sal ad, the modest scooping of the goopy, flaky chicken pot pie, the avoidance of the po lenta cake. She perfected the self-control of an ascetic; the practice seemed essential to her sanity. The end of each day, especially a celebratory day, was a relief, a liberation from her self-imposed bur dens. Before burrowing under her blanket and succumbing to its weight, she remem bered her clothes sitting in the washing machine, abandoned from that morning. She tossed them into the dryer and won dered if she tossed herself in the dryer would she herself shrink and come out crisp and light? Instead of waiting for an answer, she slept.

She felt tremendously re lieved upon waking up. The day after Christmas, and she was still clean, guilt-free. The Lord’s birthday (thank the Lord), full of its cookies and gifts and relatives and rejoic ing had come and gone. She headed downstairs to find her family doing what her family did. Her older brother

Mittleman

Hannah

Hazel Flaherty

Last Summer

“Fairy tales like this weren’t supposed to be true. He felt that if he didn’t say anything, then none of it was real. And if it wasn’t real, it couldn’t possibly be taken away from him.”

By SOFIIA SHAPOVALOVA

He could still recall their last summer. Countless strolls along the Thames every morning before they both headed off to work for the day. He’d bring her a brew of the strongest black tea each time without fail. Tea, not coffee. He liked that about her. How she was one of those few remaining souls who rec ognized the superiority of the humble tea leaf over the main stream coffee bean. She knew her tea too, and he liked that he could talk to her about how the Assam’s malty and bitter taste worked in harmony with the Ceylon’s piney and sour, the Kenyan’s fruity and floral, and the Keemun’s citric and smoky to create a beautiful concoction with layers of deli cately powerful flavor. He liked seeing her take that first sip of warmth and watch as the drink coursed through her system, rousing her body from the le thargic morning fatigue. He’d

have a sip of his own cup then too, eager to join in her delight but always reserving the first taste for her.

There were many mornings when the notori ously rainy climate of London would catch up to them before they could make their way to the office. But the showers nev er fazed her. She laughed in the rain, and he laughed along with her. Together, they were part of the minority population that firmly believed that the rain was beautiful. Whenever it would start to rain, they’d move away from the road that ran alongside the river to take the path that led through a nearby park sheltered by the tender cover of trees. Together, they’d hear the sweet noise of the leaves drinking in the rain. He liked that she saw only the good in the rain, never once uttering a complaint about its cool touch or how sometimes a drop would sneak into her cup of English breakfast and dilute the meticulously crafted beverage.

Other mornings they would sit down in the grass, not far from the clock tower. Those mornings, it felt like their fa vorite guest was joining them for tea. Like a much beloved uncle whom they knew they could always count on, but nev er got around to chatting much

with. Big Ben was that kind of guest. Never imposing and only serving to amplify the satisfac tion one receives from having company. He liked how she’d raise her cup as if to toast Ben when the clock struck eight in the morning. In those mo ments, he wanted to tell her how happy he was that they had met.

But underneath it all he had a fear.

He was irrationally afraid that if he dared to share how much he truly cherished her, she’d evaporate right be fore his eyes. Fairy tales like this weren’t supposed to be true. He felt that if he didn’t say anything, then none of it was real. And if it wasn’t real, it couldn’t possibly be taken away from him.

So he took his chance, see ing where this story led him. They’d make their way through the tourist jam to get to their office after polish ing off the last dregs of their tea. He’d often wished that they could be walking hand and hand, but the prospect of reaching out to grasp her thin, porcelain-like fingers terrified him. He was sure to shatter the delicate beauty of the mo ment if he so much as brushed skin against skin. Touch made the fairy tale tangible, and so he always made sure to keep a

proper distance. Sometimes they’d pop by a bakery on their way to work to compliment their tea. He liked the way her eyes had lit up the day he’d shown her his “secret” scone shop. It wasn’t really a secret of course. Just tucked away in between a row of storefronts that were other wise unappealing to the classy London local or thrill-seeking tourist. Really, the only reason he knew about it was thanks to the blessing that is the inter connectedness of one’s com munity. His mum’s neighbor’s aunt’s sister-in-law owned the shoppe, so—obviously— they’d had to visit sometime. Those days when they’d go in to obtain a freshly-baked clot ted-cream scone were almost better than the rainy days. The exquisite pairing of cream and jam never failed to bring his fa vorite smile to her face. She’d sometimes get a little smudge of cream on the bottom left corner of her lip (always in the same spot, he noticed) and he’d have to squash the urge to reach out and gently wipe it away. Instead, he’d smile po litely and signal to his own lip to indicate the runaway clump of sugar. He liked how she nev er seemed embarrassed by this, even though it happened often. She’d laugh it off in that dev astatingly perfect way of hers,

and he’d laugh with her, wor ries far away.

Until, one day, she wasn’t there to meet him in their usual spot at their sa cred time. He stood there for an hour, waiting for her. He held both their teas, not once taking a sip from his own even when it started to rain. For the very first time, he felt that the rain wasn’t so nice. It soaked through his clothes and dilut ed his tea. Surely, there must have been an entirely rational and reasonable explanation for why she wasn’t there. After he was positive that she wouldn’t be meeting him that morning, he made his way slowly to the office praying that this was all a nightmare and that he’d wake up and realize he hadn’t even obtained the tea yet.

But when she got to the office—late, as it was—she was there sitting at her desk, typing away furiously for what ever reason. He wasn’t sure then if he wanted her to see him. He wasn’t angry. Rather, he felt hopelessly and foolishly heartbroken.

She glanced up from her work then and saw him, and her face broke into what must have been the grandest grin he’d ever seen. She got up and ran over to him, and threw her arms around his shoulders in a hug. She’d never done this

before, and he was still holding the two now-cold-and-diluted teas, which made the whole situation rather awkward for him. But this was her, and how could he ever be angry.

“Oh, I’m so sorry I wasn’t there this morning!” she exclaimed, pulling away from their embrace. “You won’t believe what happened to me though! Harry proposed! I’m going to be married soon!”

It was a miracle that he didn’t drop the tea then because he’d surely have been fired for doing so by their less-than-sympathetic boss. Married? Her? He couldn’t un derstand how this could pos sibly be feasible. They’d been having tea each morning for years now, and she’d never once mentioned that she’d been seeing someone.

Had she?

He’d thought—he’d hoped—that maybe she felt the same way about him. That she felt the fairy tale too but want ed to keep it that way. A perfect feeling that didn’t need to be tied down by the obligations of reality.

She was still rambling.

“...he’s absolutely brilliant, you’re going to love him! He’s working in a bank, and he’s an avid football fan. He visits his mum every other weekend in the country, and she’s the most darling woman that I’ve

ever met…oh, and of course, you must come to the wedding. There won’t be a lot of people, don’t worry. I know you don’t love large crowds and, lucky for you, neither does he. And….”

He was no longer registering what she was saying though. It was all a meaningless mash of words as he tried to compre hend how he’d been so thick as to miss this most critical of details. Harry? Why had he nev er met him?

Had he?

He realized then the great error he’d made when he chose to preserve the fairy tale. To leave his love intangible.

He could see it all now. The moments when she’d be de scribing something but he’d been too busy losing himself in her eyes. The times when they’d gone out in the evenings together as part of a larger group of people, but, now, he couldn’t remember any of their faces but hers.

That, he registered, was all he’d ever really have of her.

Only memories that remain. Sofia Shapovalova was irratio nally afraid that if she dared to share how much she truly cher ished the Nassau Weekly, it would evaporate right before her eyes.

All My Dreams Wrapped Up In A Little Ball

By FRANKIE DURYEA

October 24, 2021: At cool amusement park with mirabelle. Your mind had to be strong to go there. I could look summon my friends. Then at beach

This is the first entry on my Notes app document, entitled “Dream Journal.” It wasn’t meant to be a long list. My psychology teacher had suggested we try keeping one for a week. I logged one more during that time. Prior, I had maybe only two recurring childhood dreams I could remember. They were:

1. I am a bouncy ball, barely managing to land perfectly for every bounce on a moving platform making its way down the acid/ink river. - There’s a knot in my stomach when I wake up from this one.

2. I pet a dog, and it turns into a bear

I was weird. Anyways, after starting the dream journal for class, I found myself not wanting to stop. So I kept going. And now I’m writing this on October 29, 2022, and it’s been a whole year of dream journaling.

Over that time, I’ve logged:

86 total dreams

15 dreams since having come to Princeton

2 dreams where I am not wearing pants and this is a point of anxiety

1 dream where I’ve died and seen myself die

1 semi-lucid dream

1 dream about the Nass

And countless dreams where the characters are people I’m not friends with in real life— including probably some of the people reading this.

Of course, we don’t have the time for me to share every dream. You, you rascal you, probably wouldn’t even like most of them. So I’m going to give a highlight reel here.

Simpson a are my parents they’re abusive. Mr Simpson can’t remember name of kils us with knife homer it’s homer. Homer kills us with knife marge more reserved until she uses lava in wall. They crazy

This is a personal favorite. Feels like psychoanalysts would have something to say about it.

It’s like cross country but trial by fire, I might die if I fail but I’m bad at it. But then I’m in a car, and I need to be towed. I crash. I do the bird

One of the nice things about writing down your dreams immediately when you wake up, is that there’s some mixing of pathways, of language, of images, of sounds. Like in this dream, where I flip someone off. I remember waking up, and the image of my middle finger was inextricably linked to the phrase “do the bird.” Sometimes we rely too much on what words can describe. But in dreams we step outside of that constraint. Letting my mind wander in dreams allows me to get lost within myself.

Chaos reigns alongside Homer Simpson in this writer’s Notes app dream journal.

Old woman Allison is my girlfriend she wears like steampunk trad wife stuff but more steampunk she also maybe can fly? I on accident introduce to my family, who think she’s weird. Then she jet packs over to see if I’m thinking of her, and in doing so, falls from the second story.

I literally don’t know anyone named Allison.

`

There’s a killer? Maybe not killer, just man trying to accomplish something. He’s tried before but it hasn’t been working. I’m in this room with him and others

Sometimes the dreams are like this, where it feels impossible to write down my memory. Sometimes the

memory isn’t an image, it’s a feeling. Sometimes it’s plain nonsense. Part of the beauty of dreams is how momentary they are. You can’t be looking forward to the next thing during a dream. And you lose it as soon as it’s over.

On a plane sitting next to old geezer

This feels mean.

Duck chicken like beasts I had to fight them there’s a slide but the slide is a natural slide and too tight for me, afraid I’m gonna get stuck and then die. I rob people, and then blame it on the ducks, big court case, but everyone just shoots each other instead of law stuff… at home more ducks

Tell me this wouldn’t make for a good Nicholas Cage movie. One of things you find from writing down your dreams is that there are these crazy seedlings of ideas. It’s cool to see what your imagination produces when there’s no inhibition. In my own artistic pursuits, dreams have been important to understanding what images come to me over and over again - since these are the images I want to see more of in real life or in writing.

Car gets hit, very slowly, by old woman in sedan. I tell her I need her insurance or number but I feel bad because she doesn’t believe she hit my car and just keeps laughing

Climb to top of beautiful peak with friends, find world isn’t that big, come down and tell people on ground, have warm embrace with random person

I remember thinking this was like the solution to all wars. New Buddha vibes.

This is one of the few dreams I’ve had while at Princeton that have been funny. Something about the Bubble. Maybe it’s that sleep feels like a commodity here. Maybe it’s just that the dreams I do end up remembering tend to be ones where I sleep through my alarm.

Peter and me. There’s a house. Peter’s brother cannot be in the sunlight but he loves a beautiful tree outside the house when the sun hits it right it looks golden.

Every once in a while, a dream will emotionally move me. This was one of them. I don’t know why Peter, a high school friend of mine, was in the dream. Rationally, there’s a lot about the dream that doesn’t make sense. But I can still imagine the tree through the window, being hit just right by the sunset sun. It was melancholic given the context of the brother, and I woke up a little sad.

Found old film camera in bag at Cuernavaca park when I look through it shows house in Tahoe two years ago, you can see me, gee, papa, coco Chloe, dogs that have died, everyone. It’s looking into the past.

The house in my dream is one I used to go to with my whole family for Christmas. I

wrote this knowing we probably will never all go up again together. Looking back on a year of dreams, I find most of them funny, and I put them out into the world here now for that reason. But the reading of all them together also gives me a retrospective of the last year of my life—what’s been stressing me out, what’s been on my mind. And some of the dreams I hold close to my heart, like this one. I definitely recommend dream journaling to anyone who’s interested. It gives you a break to reflect on your creative weird imagination. Because everyone does have weird dreams. You just have to be conscious about remembering them.

This is the end of one year of dreaming. Looking through forgotten dreams has been fun. A collage of my year spread out in front of me. In each rereading of a dream, I in some small way relive the joy or sadness of having dreamt it—that fleeting moment in the imagination that only really exists in the present of experiencing it. And mirrored in these beautiful fading dreams are the real life celebrations and disappointments that formed them. I’ve heard names of close friends who I’ve had to leave across the country. I’ve seen places that since then I’d forgotten. In dreams I’m reminded of the hurt of betrayal and crippling fear. I’m also reminded of love, deep friendship, and family. In a new place, these experiences take on new meanings and transform. But they retain that initial memory that is so fun to

reminisce over. And no matter how much my perception of the real experiences may change, the dreams of them persist, stone-like and unchanging in my dream journal. Veiled in absurdity, they take on a nature of their own. At the click of a button they could be deleted. But they remain there, these trippy dream representations of my real life. I have a good amount of ones, irreal celebrations or memories filled with uncomplicated joy, that I won’t share. Because that makes them feel more special. I’m personally looking forward to another year of writing down what I remember in the morning. All I can hope for is more funny nonsense mixed with meaningful memories.

But the Nassau Weekly remains there, these trippy dream repre sentations of Frankie Duryea’s real life.

something akin to fear. I saw his right hand slide slowly over his daughter’s coat, protecting her.

The woman turned to me. “The man?” she asked. Her head was tilting slowly, as though I were some kind of in teresting specimen she’d just put on a slide.

“The one who threw himself in front of the train,” I said, with conviction.

“And how did you know that?” she asked, moving closer.

I blinked, but her face did not waver before my eyes. “I—I don’t know.”

“What sort of man?” she asked, now directly in front of me, a steely glint in her eyes. She pressed back her au burn-graying hair with her left hand, sliding it behind one ear. “What did he look like? What is his name? How much do you know?”

“He’s forty,” I said, “dark hair, but a little white and gray on the sides, dark eyes, sad

pacing, and the father and his little girl were standing frozen, wide-eyed, just before the exit.

“It’s you,” she said, freezing, stopping, staring at me. “The minute the train stopped, I knew something was wrong. I knew—I wasn’t at my strongest. And there’s proof,” she continued, gesturing at the little girl and her father, hover ing at the door. “They almost left. They almost… slid out of my grasp.”

It took me a moment to realize that no one else on the train had moved, only that

but she cut me off with, “Not with your words. Your mind.”

I stared at her. I had no idea what she meant. All I could manage was, “Who are you?”

The sounds and sights of the train seemed to be sway ing and echoing all around us, as though there was a forcefield of color and it was all drawn to the center, to the woman with auburn-graying hair and torn knitting lying on the ground, and me—why me? But there was no denying it was all there. Or that I had known about the

and stared at me, hard. “If you want me to answer that ques tion, then you’ll have to close your eyes.”

I stared at her. I couldn’t remember what I’d asked.

“Just for a second. So I can get that poor man and his daughter to sit back down, and tell the driver to close the doors again.”

I had more questions than there are words in the world but I closed my mouth for the moment and acquiesced.

The silence grew

deeper.

I opened my eyes. The doors were shuddering shut and the man and his daughter were seating themselves down again, as obedient as lambs. The woman smiled at me. “You’re not very well-trained, but you have some power in your voice,” she said. “Now, if you want me to tell you who I am, you must first tell me who you are.”

“You said I just had to close my eyes, and you would tell me who you are. And—” my voice caught. “And who that man—”

She waved a hand. “He matters, but not to you. He was going to die anyway.”

“What?”

“I would’ve stopped him, but it’s too late. You interfered.”

“I—inter

forgive you. It’s not the first time. But it seems you don’t understand who you are.”

“As I said, you said you’d tell me who you—”

She sighed. “Well.” She picked up her knitting and let out another little sigh. “Well. I suppose I should start at the beginning.”

“The beginning of what?”

“Me,” she said quiet ly. “We’ve got time, don’t wor ry. Your mother is out shop ping with her boyfriend and won’t be home until ten.” She picked up the ball of yarn on the seat behind her. It was a dark, musty mustard yellow. I watched as she began to unrav el the spool and let it fall down onto the floor of the train. I felt like something inside me was unraveling, too, or I was only just noticing how unraveled I

the yarn, the very end, not the bit that was connected to what ever misshapen thing she was knitting, but the very, very end, a frayed piece that dangled in front of me like a taunting finger.

I hesitated, staring at the woman, and then took a deep breath and picked up the bit of frayed end, causing the long wooden knitting nee dles to clatter to the floor as I jerked on the end of the yarn. Smoothly, slowly, impossibly, we slid sideways into the dis solving air, which whistled and sighed, mockingly, with in comprehensible whispers my ears strained to decode.

“This will only take a second,” I heard the woman say as the air disintegrated. “It’s years… years and years of memories… but they’ll only take a second.”

CONTINUED FROM PAGE 9

Charles destroying a beautiful ly constructed mound of toast, scrambled eggs, and avocado. Her mother pouring coffee, her father narrowing his eyes into a classic novel. She com mented on the toast creation. “Were those the last eggs?” Not because she planned to make eggs but because his enjoyment of his breakfast hung in the air like a spider web Jane had to duck underneath. She thought feigning interest would suffice but instead it backfired—there were, in fact, eggs left in the fridge. Her mother perked up, fully prepared to turn on the stove and feed her daughter .

. . . what would you like dear, fried eggs? Pancakes? French toast? No, she was good.

Lisa surrendered, sitting down across from her teenage daughter and wondering when Jane decided she no longer needed the comfort of a but ter-soaked flapjack, much less her mother.

She started asking this ques tion a while back, when Jane first began to hack at the family traditions with a dull ax, get ting the job done but not with much grace or stealth. Things like “Mommy Mac n’ Cheese” and “Breakfast for Dinner” were no longer in demand. Jane had unsubscribed from the Clean Plate Club, found ed during childhood meals with her older brother. Charles suffered his own losses and blamed an obvious culprit. He could no longer relish the fight for the last slice of cantaloupe

or the most substantial hunk of cookie in the cream. But he was not sentimental, or at least he had better things to worry about than the fleeting (certainly fleeting) behaviors of his sister Jane. Jane did not think he knew of these behav iors. Charles did not think she thought he knew. And what would asking do, if not give her the satisfaction that her strug gle had been worthwhile? More attention was not what she deserved. She was an expert in the field of vanity, which, in the dictio nary of her twisted hab its, translated into self-de struction. Jane knew this, perhaps more than anyone, and there was a dissonance in her compla cency. She thought she had to suffer some to re solve her lack of satisfaction, but in doing so, condemned herself to a constant state of needing more. She relented, anointing herself with saintly status and defeating her better judgment. Charles, stubborn as his sister, let her carry on.

The humidity persisted for the entirety of January, until the first week of February made it compress like a stone and tumble into the pit of Jane’s stomach. The cold snap arrived just in time for track season.

In order to get to her gym bag, she first had to embark across a sea of girls, girls, girls.

Jane to hold her pizza as they searched for a table, ashamed at the quantity of carbs she was about to consume.

Jane fled to her familiar spot next to Anna.

“I have such a good feeling about this season, like last year kinda sucked because of my panic attacks, ya know, but I feel like I’m so much mentally stronger now, like I’m able to deal with that and like, it’s all mental. Ya know. Running is so mental. It’s gonna be such a good season you’re gonna do distance with me yeah? Are you excited? It’s gonna be so fun.”

Jane punctuated her cease less stream of enthusiasm

builder lifting a two-pound dumbbell. Next to her impressively white ten nis shoes, a cockroach looked at Jane with the smirk of someone scrutinizing her appear ance. He scampered towards her. It was on. With her well-worn Adidas shoe, she put an end to his ob noxious perusal. The sound of her sneaker coming in con tact with the scuff-stained tile floor caught the attention of Caroline’s frigid blue eyes and those of the rest of her fleet. Jane had offended them with such strikingly unladylike be havior. Wanting to escape their silent scrutiny, she was itching to run.

Jane could not keep up with the teenage boys in front of her, charming dimwits fueled by in tuition and shitty school lunch es. They got farther and farther away from Jane, stranding her

on the endless track. Stride after stride, the monotony of

rified Jane. The routine was unbearable. The rubber clung to her sneakers, while the cold gnawed at her skull. Her body, formerly a loyal servant, incited a rebellion. She wanted a warm

tion, she retreated to the locker room and dizzily and shakily searched for her water bottle in her bag. Among dirty socks and mechanical pencils were for eign objects: two granola bars that only Charles knew were her favorite and a sticky note that read, “Mom is picking you up today, she’s off work early.”

A considerate omen, uncharac teristic of siblings who act like siblings. Six o’clock arrived along with her mother’s car: it was a liferaft, awaiting her with the seat warmer already on.

She was lucid enough to under stand the generosity of it all. She was still human enough to feel intense guilt, and child enough to feel intense longing.

Hasty greetings. Immediately tears made salty trails around Jane’s red and puffy nose like ice cream next to a warm cake. Her visible dis tress vanquished her stubborn nature and her vain inclina tion. Her stoicism failed her.

And simultaneously Jane was exactly where she wished to be: at the point of no return. No de cision was to be made—she un derstood for the first time the precarity of her sanity. And she may have been vain but she was not foolish.

“What, sweetie.” Lisa truly cared. Fuck—Jane would have

to be more specific. Lisa had a knack for reading minds but was also pru dent, careful not to incite defense.

“It is just, so hard… with food.”

“What do you mean,” Lisa responded with genuine concern. Overwhelming for Jane. She herself had dismissed her feelings to the point of delusion. Tongue-tied, she back-stepped.

“Never mind.”

A long silence passed as Lisa exercised her mul titasking superpowers, driving the car with all her focus while rubbing Jane’s shoulder with all her love.

Jane complained about the cold and how much faster everyone was than her.

“But can you tell me.

A little bit more about what you were gonna tell me?”

Crickets. “It’s just, like, I ate a lot today, but, in gen eral… I am always think ing about food.”

Toads. “It is all I think about.”

Cicadas. And then to Jane’s relief and expectation: “I know.”

“You know?” Did she?

“You have lost a good

bit of weight.”

Jane could not help feeling a sense of accomplishment.

Old habits die hard. But she had initiated a com promise of some of her agency, yielding her hab its to the will of doctors, family, and the Terms and Conditions of the Clean Plate Club.

After a confession that confirmed the suspicions of her mother and her brother, answered the con fusion of her cousins and her friends, and shocked her father’s harmless oblivion, the mud on her sneakers began to dry and crack off until they were bare enough for her to thrust her feet above her head and do handstands in the grass. She had to become more flexible, but wondered what was left of herself without her dis cipline. She doubted her ability to be excellent, and also knew, deep down, that kale and almond milk did not make her excel lent. She wondered if in sacrificing some of her ri gidity, she would lose her whole ability to persist in anything hard, anything worth discipline. And she also wondered if there was something beautiful in her newfound mediocrity.

That night, her family

sat around the dining ta ble in the warm indoors and talked about how swimming pools are actu ally kind of gross and the cousins’ lake house is in shambles isn’t it and why do so many people take AP physics even though it has such a notorious reputa tion and remember when you kids used to do hur dles over bamboo sticks and wow Charles you re ally need a haircut and I’m surprised that branch where the swing is hasn’t given up yet.

EPILOGUE

Lisa called her mother the following morning. It was a Sunday. Francine answered the phone in the way she al ways did, sounding slight ly agitated but expectant of news—the mundane kind, the good kind.

“Poor Jane is al ways thinking about food. We’re going to look for some help.”

Without skipping a beat, her response as predictable as an answer ing machine, Francine said, “Oh alright, oh good. How ‘bout that.”

A beat. “Crossword question for you. Clue is ‘Like this puzzle, an old movie, or a piano.’ Thirteen letters.”

A Haibun for our Fallen Leaves

by OLIVIA ROSLANSKY

Migrating cranes trace the dark sky just above dormant and slanted beech trees— their crumpled leaves with broken veins staining the pavement like lost tourist maps. On a decaying bench, two lovers swaying and shivering in the languid wind, gazing down at the frozen patches of brown. Pale moonlight seeps in through holes in the shadows to illuminate tired eyes and fingers fiddling with a ring— rusted. Short breaths are suspended like smoke, naked against the frail air. A year ago, at this spot, the yellow beech leaves blended with rays of sunlight to wed into pools of gold that fell across four blushing cheeks. Leaves that just took their last breaths. a river of stars final words ricocheting between two buildings