Cipher Mag
Letter From The Editor: Bad
Letter From The Editor: Bad

monica black

God's Name in Flashing Lights

A month after arriving at Colorado College, first-year Calla Langton conducted an experiment. She started recording what people said to her when she told them she was a Christian. It wasn’t that she had hid her faith before, but she had come to school not thinking she would ever need to tell anyone. 

“I decided to just kinda feel it out, like, how would it be if I just brought it up in random conversations, with people I’m not necessarily the best of friends with?” Langton told me. Langton is a sort of Christianity guru at CC – everyone I spoke with directed me back to her, like a compass pointing home.

Mercurial

Mood stabilizers sound like they’d do more than they do. Nothing has really changed, except now I get migraines and alcohol makes me sick. I see the school psychiatrist about once a month. She asks me how the medicine is going, and I give her a list of side effects. I tell her that I haven’t had a manic episode, but the day Kendrick’s untitled/unmastered came out I spent six hours transcribing and posting the lyrics before anyone else got to it. She makes a note of this. “Sounds like hypomania,” she says.