Shades of Watercolor

Shades of Watercolor

Devoted to the people who matter most

Article by Emma Devlin Art by Isabella Hageman

The promise sucks the air out of the room.

"Promise me you won't tell your children about your dad."

My butter-sweet Gram is pleading yet firm.

A mere moment ago, something of the same sentiment had been uttered as part of a story. My Gram is old and doesn't like to talk about her family. She likes French cooking, and she likes her cat, Julia (named after Julia Child, of course). And she likes me, her granddaughter. If my Gram and I had grown up down the street from one another, we would have been best friends. We both love gossip, food, and reading, and we were both raised by people who hated us.

But this story does not start with my sweet-butter Gram and me. It starts with the story my Gram told me of how my great-grandmother made a promise to her parents that she would never share the identity of her true father.

Maybe it was the tension that always built when they were left alone for too long. The kind of tension that so often takes root in the space between unsaid words. Or perhaps it was the Ohio air.

It was particularly hot tonight, saturated with silence and smells of childhood. Either way, Lisa was beginning to regret coming home.

Three weeks ago, it had seemed like a good idea, but then, of course, that was before her brother and father had gone away for the weekend, casting Lisa and her mother into a three-day-long wordless standoff.

Lisa’s mother, Gertrude, was in the kitchen, methodically pouring herself gin with a tad of tonic and listening to the radio. Lisa let out a slow exasperated breath, letting the vapor settle in the corners of her lips as she glared at the kitchen door. As if willed by the sound of her daughter's frustration, Gertrude stopped pouring.

Lisa heard the bottle hit the counter, and she closed her eyes in dread.

It was like a bang. “Promise me.”

The words had stuck with me harder than any of my father's threats ever had. I sat miles away from my Gram, and yet, I felt as though her hand had suddenly wrapped around my neck.

The silence crackled on the quiet phone line, and I held my breath.

People are shocked when I tell them I am still close with my Gram. They think of my Gram as the woman who raised the man that tortured my childhood. After all, she was the one who urged me not to banish my father from my life and into the shadows of my mind. She was the one that tried to shackle me to the monster under the heading of "we are family."

I call my Gram, and as soon as I hear the phone ring, there is some part of me that hopes she won't pick up. I imagine her running around the house looking for the handset, and I pray she doesn't find it in time. I cower on the other end of the line waiting for the evil grandmother everyone else expects to appear, and I hope and pray she won't find the phone. But she always manages to locate it just in the nick of time, and her thick, butter-soft voice floods through the phone, and I forget.

I forget that she created the monster, and I forget all the cages she had tried to throw me in, and for the rest of the phone call, she is just my sweet, sweet Gram who took me to Central Park and played dress up with me when I was a girl.

I call my Gram because every time I hear her sweet, buttery voice, I get to be proven wrong.

Gertrude gazed blankly at her daughter from the safety of the doorway. The bottle of gin cradled on her hip like a newborn baby.

There was a faint spark of resentment in her stare, so subtle a passerby would have thought she was just drunk. Indeed, the flame in Gertrude’s eyes was always so faint these days, yet still at the center of their slow throbbing fire sat Lisa.

So perfect, so whole, so…okay.

Gertrude would never let herself admit it, but she hated Lisa a little for that okayness— for being so quick to laugh, for standing so straight, for existing without the weight of the past. Lisa withered under the spotlight of her mother's empty eyes, as she always did until she could take it no longer.

"And what's the drink of choice tonight."

Long ago, Lisa had learned that if she squinted, she could pretend her mother's shoulders weren't shaking; if she squinted, she could blur out the bottle of gin that sat next to her mother; if she squinted, she could sometimes pretend her mother wasn't there at all.

"Mom, you know grandpa doesn't like it when you do that."

Gertrude's shoulders stopped shaking for a minute, the tears that caught in her throat froze, and without thinking, it spilled out into the tense Ohio air: "He's not your grandfather, so please stop acting like the dumb blonde you are and hold your tongue."

"Gram…" I start, not knowing how to fill the space. The promise feels like the long-anticipated second shoe dropping somewhere deep inside me. A flashback of my dad tying my soccer cleat and telling me I am worthless, hugging me and telling me he's proud through choked back tears as I hold up my first report card, jabbing his finger into my shoulder and saying “watch out” through bared teeth. The memories flood together, bleeding into my clear mind and building like a swamp over my thoughts. I search desperately for something…anything to say.

Lisa and Gertrude stared at each other. The words that had been tightening like a noose in Gertrude hung in the air between the two women.

"What?" Lisa demanded. Her focus was honed on the shell of her mother's body, and she watched in horror as Gertrude slammed down the bottle of gin and slumped into a patio chair. A tear welled and flooded down her puffy cheek, and Lisa thought for a moment she could be beautiful in a sad sort of way.

"Your grandfather is just your Gramma Jenny's husband…that is it."

Lisa finally uncrossed her eyes and let her mom come back into focus. She really was beautiful; if she didn't always look so tired and bored, maybe she would have been a rare beauty.

"Mom, stop. For the love of God. What do you mean?"

Lisa would wonder for the next ten years why she had pushed, why she hadn't just said ok and let the promise stay intact, why she hadn't just taken the bottle of gin and ran to her own corner of the house.

"Your grandfather is just my mom's husband, okay? Okay!"

She hadn't meant to scream, but the words had burst out so quickly that they had escaped in a yell. They had been choking Gertrude for years… always choking her… always clutching at something deep in her throat. Sometimes the gin washed the words down farther; they would float away with the bite of the alcohol and settle somewhere deeper in her chest.

But now the floodgates had burst.

Gertrude breathed, sucking the air in big gulps as she stared at her stunned daughter.

Lisa knew her mother hated her a little, but neither of them cared to admit it. As they stood looking at each other, both Clark family women were equally shocked that, for the first time in years, something real had passed between the two of them.

Gertrude took a deep breath.

"Your grandfather raised me, but he is not my father…." She struggled, scrambling to think of how to say the words that had lived in her for so long. "Your grandmother, god rest her; she made me promise never to tell anyone."

Gertrude and Lisa never spoke about this ever again. After the weekend was up, Lisa returned to her fiancé and her okay life and Gertrude to her gin. One month later, Gertrude died while Lisa was on a train.

The broken promise that had failed to die with my great-grandmother Gertrude lives on in my sweet Gram Lisa. Gram grew bitter towards the ghost of her mother and vowed to give her children a better mother than she had received. She defended them through everything, determined to always look at them with the blinding love and forgiveness she was never awarded.

She raised my father. The man that used to tell me I was stupid, who would threaten to hit me or choke me or push me down the stairs or even kill me. There is a part of me that admires my Gram’s ability to still love my dad, but there is a larger part that is terrified by it.

"Promise me you won't tell your children bad things about your father."

I feel the weight of what she is asking of me. Of the silence I will choke every time I look into my future children's faces. The hate that will grow in me if it hasn't taken root already. But more than that, I feel the pain of being proven right. My Gram is, first and foremost, a mother. In her words, I hear the pleas of a parent trying to protect their monster of a son. If only someone had done that for me. If only Gertrude had done a better job of doing that for Lisa. If only we stopped making promises that killed us to keep.

"Yes, of course, Gram. I promise."

To Alicia Granados

To Alicia Granados

The sounds that hold us together

Article by Auna McConnaughey Art by Isabvella Hageman

Mason Ramsey played on the stereo. The floorboards bounced and the pictures swayed with each thrust of your hips. The words belted from the back of your throat, your fist shooting up, singing into the creases of your hand, as the music hit the walls. My words followed yours. It wasn’t long before my hips were possessed by the power of your movement, and I too was shaking the very house we danced in. The door was shut, I was beside your bed. We were enclosed in the safety of our wholeness, lying in the comfort of each other. Your warmth bled out of every bend of your body. It covered all the cold spots that ached on my own. Unaware of what the room would later hold for you, I promised you that I would move in the ways you did, freely.

The sun was setting over the copper rocks, falling down and kissing our rosy cheeks. Snow tumbled from the now dark clouds. The wind whipped snowflakes against our cotton sweatshirts and rested on our shoulders, carrying the weight of secrets secured tightly within us. It was the unspoken that lifted us higher, above the spitting clouds. We soared up in the stars that twinkled brighter than we could understand, marking the outlines of our bodies in the constellations. We jumped, reaching for the tops of the outstretched rocks, our shirts floating up to cover our frozen faces. You grabbed my hand and planted a single kiss on the left side of my face. It burned into my numb cheek, like lightning hitting the corners of the earth and coming back to sear your love on me. I promised you, then, that I would be electric, beams coming out of all the cracks within me.

Sounds radioed out from the stereo and held us together. The music lulled on, and heartbreak bounced within our chests. Each beat stung, clinging tightly to the fractures that tore us apart. Our music began to surround us; it held us tightly and wouldn’t release its grasps until we belted out a word. The speakers boomed next to us as we drifted from place to place. The wheels kept turning and the music got louder. We sat side by side, our asses glued to the seats. Your hand shot out the window, air running across the top of it, dancing between your fingertips. The rocks towered above us. The car shook and bounced as our heads hit the roof. As our bodies found the rhythm of each song, you told me that my music is what you loved most about me. One playlist, stripping us down to our bare bones, revealing all that was stuck within. We found the ache in the lyrics, and it screwed us tightly together. There was no budging, that would mean releasing and forgetting. Instead, we stayed stuck to one another with heads swaying in and out of the car window. The tires screeching, carving our existence into the pavement. I discovered a playlist you made for me, my preferred. In it, you and me. In that moment, tears seeped deep within my skin, promising music would carry you with it, with me.

Our legs laid intertwined on top of your bed. Stillness echoed within the bedroom walls and only the small drone of our voices could be heard. We tried to stay quiet, to ensure the secrets released from our lips wouldn’t ring through the hallways. Our minds were racing, running through each thought we swore we would never share, yet here, they came spilling out. You picked up each word and held it next to your heart. The creases beside your lips deepened as you smiled each time you recognized yourself in the remarks filling the room. Medications were tucked in your drawers, and I didn’t know what they were attempting to heal. To you, the world was gray, and would only begin to radiate reflections of light when they took effect. Around the room explosions of gray took shape, tinting all corners of the space between us. The color returned when you assured me it was working, that you weren’t falling down, but beginning to stand. I promised you that when I saw dullness creeping in from the edges of my existence, I would find pockets of color to tuck them into.

From a distance, your eyes burned a hole in my own. I was guarded by the corner, waiting for you to come around. As you passed, your eyes remained ahead. My voice was low as I called your name. It burned the back of my throat and naturally my arms reached forward to pull you into my embrace. Yet, instead you forgot the familiarity in my face, as I forgot yours. My arms released their position and slapped the sides of my thighs. As I shifted my feet backwards, yours continued forward. I wanted to know all the things that had changed, as the breeze had picked up into wind and blown away all the time, distancing us. I was reminded of the comfort your arms once gave me. You understood the aching that burned me, igniting into flames. Your flames danced with my own, and our tears became one, putting one another out. Yet, here, there was no expulsion of the fire; yours danced right by my own. My head jerked down, and my eyes found the tips of my toes. As you brushed by, your scent rushed next to me. I got entangled in its closeness. I found myself back in your bed, the car, the couch. Your snoring echoing through the basement, your laugh leaking out of the bedroom window, you came out of every dark place, spilling all over. I promised you, no matter where we were, you were warmth, you were home.

I was pissing in the grocery store bathroom. With the sunset creeping over the building and reaching out over the parking lot. I found my friends huddled around a single phone. The light shone so brightly on their faces and highlighted the creases of sorrow. The sunset collapsed on my body and hugged me. It covered me completely and drenched me in the colors that I couldn’t pay much attention to. Shopping carts hit against each other as they were dragged to the other end of the parking lot. Sliding doors squeaked as they opened and shut for passersby. I found nothing in that grocery store. Instead, I stood motionless on the white line drawn to separate the parking spots. Instead of kisses, tears burned into my face and the sunset released its grasp on me, escaping above all that was below. On the pavement littered with pieces of my being, promises were infinite and nonexistent.

Ohio Air

Ohio Air

Promises that Kill us to Keep

Article by Anonymous Art by Max Montague

The promise sucks the air out of the room.

"Promise me you won't tell your children about your dad."

My butter-sweet Gram is pleading yet firm.

A mere moment ago, something of the same sentiment had been uttered as part of a story. My Gram is old and doesn't like to talk about her family. She likes French cooking, and she likes her cat, Julia (named after Julia Child, of course). And she likes me, her granddaughter. If my Gram and I had grown up down the street from one another, we would have been best friends. We both love gossip, food, and reading, and we were both raised by people who hated us.

But this story does not start with my sweet-butter Gram and me. It starts with the story my Gram told me of how my great-grandmother made a promise to her parents that she would never share the identity of her true father.

Maybe it was the tension that always built when they were left alone for too long. The kind of tension that so often takes root in the space between unsaid words. Or perhaps it was the Ohio air.

It was particularly hot tonight, saturated with silence and smells of childhood. Either way, Lisa was beginning to regret coming home.

Three weeks ago, it had seemed like a good idea, but then, of course, that was before her brother and father had gone away for the weekend, casting Lisa and her mother into a three-day-long wordless standoff.

Lisa’s mother, Gertrude, was in the kitchen, methodically pouring herself gin with a tad of tonic and listening to the radio. Lisa let out a slow exasperated breath, letting the vapor settle in the corners of her lips as she glared at the kitchen door. As if willed by the sound of her daughter's frustration, Gertrude stopped pouring.

Lisa heard the bottle hit the counter, and she closed her eyes in dread.

It was like a bang. “Promise me.”

The words had stuck with me harder than any of my father's threats ever had. I sat miles away from my Gram, and yet, I felt as though her hand had suddenly wrapped around my neck.

The silence crackled on the quiet phone line, and I held my breath.

People are shocked when I tell them I am still close with my Gram. They think of my Gram as the woman who raised the man that tortured my childhood. After all, she was the one who urged me not to banish my father from my life and into the shadows of my mind. She was the one that tried to shackle me to the monster under the heading of "we are family."

I call my Gram, and as soon as I hear the phone ring, there is some part of me that hopes she won't pick up. I imagine her running around the house looking for the handset, and I pray she doesn't find it in time. I cower on the other end of the line waiting for the evil grandmother everyone else expects to appear, and I hope and pray she won't find the phone. But she always manages to locate it just in the nick of time, and her thick, butter-soft voice floods through the phone, and I forget.

I forget that she created the monster, and I forget all the cages she had tried to throw me in, and for the rest of the phone call, she is just my sweet, sweet Gram who took me to Central Park and played dress up with me when I was a girl.

I call my Gram because every time I hear her sweet, buttery voice, I get to be proven wrong.

Gertrude gazed blankly at her daughter from the safety of the doorway. The bottle of gin cradled on her hip like a newborn baby.

There was a faint spark of resentment in her stare, so subtle a passerby would have thought she was just drunk. Indeed, the flame in Gertrude’s eyes was always so faint these days, yet still at the center of their slow throbbing fire sat Lisa.

So perfect, so whole, so…okay.

Gertrude would never let herself admit it, but she hated Lisa a little for that okayness— for being so quick to laugh, for standing so straight, for existing without the weight of the past. Lisa withered under the spotlight of her mother's empty eyes, as she always did until she could take it no longer.

"And what's the drink of choice tonight."

Long ago, Lisa had learned that if she squinted, she could pretend her mother's shoulders weren't shaking; if she squinted, she could blur out the bottle of gin that sat next to her mother; if she squinted, she could sometimes pretend her mother wasn't there at all.

"Mom, you know grandpa doesn't like it when you do that."

Gertrude's shoulders stopped shaking for a minute, the tears that caught in her throat froze, and without thinking, it spilled out into the tense Ohio air: "He's not your grandfather, so please stop acting like the dumb blonde you are and hold your tongue."

"Gram…" I start, not knowing how to fill the space. The promise feels like the long-anticipated second shoe dropping somewhere deep inside me. A flashback of my dad tying my soccer cleat and telling me I am worthless, hugging me and telling me he's proud through choked back tears as I hold up my first report card, jabbing his finger into my shoulder and saying “watch out” through bared teeth. The memories flood together, bleeding into my clear mind and building like a swamp over my thoughts. I search desperately for something…anything to say.

Lisa and Gertrude stared at each other. The words that had been tightening like a noose in Gertrude hung in the air between the two women.

"What?" Lisa demanded. Her focus was honed on the shell of her mother's body, and she watched in horror as Gertrude slammed down the bottle of gin and slumped into a patio chair. A tear welled and flooded down her puffy cheek, and Lisa thought for a moment she could be beautiful in a sad sort of way.

"Your grandfather is just your Gramma Jenny's husband…that is it."

Lisa finally uncrossed her eyes and let her mom come back into focus. She really was beautiful; if she didn't always look so tired and bored, maybe she would have been a rare beauty.

"Mom, stop. For the love of God. What do you mean?"

Lisa would wonder for the next ten years why she had pushed, why she hadn't just said ok and let the promise stay intact, why she hadn't just taken the bottle of gin and ran to her own corner of the house.

"Your grandfather is just my mom's husband, okay? Okay!"

She hadn't meant to scream, but the words had burst out so quickly that they had escaped in a yell. They had been choking Gertrude for years… always choking her… always clutching at something deep in her throat. Sometimes the gin washed the words down farther; they would float away with the bite of the alcohol and settle somewhere deeper in her chest.

But now the floodgates had burst.

Gertrude breathed, sucking the air in big gulps as she stared at her stunned daughter.

Lisa knew her mother hated her a little, but neither of them cared to admit it. As they stood looking at each other, both Clark family women were equally shocked that, for the first time in years, something real had passed between the two of them.

Gertrude took a deep breath.

"Your grandfather raised me, but he is not my father…." She struggled, scrambling to think of how to say the words that had lived in her for so long. "Your grandmother, god rest her; she made me promise never to tell anyone."

Gertrude and Lisa never spoke about this ever again. After the weekend was up, Lisa returned to her fiancé and her okay life and Gertrude to her gin. One month later, Gertrude died while Lisa was on a train.

The broken promise that had failed to die with my great-grandmother Gertrude lives on in my sweet Gram Lisa. Gram grew bitter towards the ghost of her mother and vowed to give her children a better mother than she had received. She defended them through everything, determined to always look at them with the blinding love and forgiveness she was never awarded.

She raised my father. The man that used to tell me I was stupid, who would threaten to hit me or choke me or push me down the stairs or even kill me. There is a part of me that admires my Gram’s ability to still love my dad, but there is a larger part that is terrified by it.

"Promise me you won't tell your children bad things about your father."

I feel the weight of what she is asking of me. Of the silence I will choke every time I look into my future children's faces. The hate that will grow in me if it hasn't taken root already. But more than that, I feel the pain of being proven right. My Gram is, first and foremost, a mother. In her words, I hear the pleas of a parent trying to protect their monster of a son. If only someone had done that for me. If only Gertrude had done a better job of doing that for Lisa. If only we stopped making promises that killed us to keep.

"Yes, of course, Gram. I promise."

The Revolving Doors of My Heart

The Revolving Doors of My Heart

A Promise to My Apocalyptic Crush

Article by Hope Shea Art by Koli Razinfindandy

I fall in love too fast. I don’t know why I’m like this, I just am. There is never any rhyme or reason to the fall, and it happens so fast I don’t even know I’ve fallen until he leaves, and I notice how empty I am without him. My heart is a realm with its own gravity. Earth’s gravity is slow and lazy, my gravity hungry and impatient, dragging down my emotions and consuming them immediately; her appetite is insatiable. I go through crushes fast; she goes through them even faster. She is a black hole of sorts, my heart. I think it’s her defense mechanism; she loves so much that she leaves no time for me to decide if I too am in love before she moves on to the next shiny boy.

When you’re high, it feels like the world is spinning and there is nothing you can do to stop it. My heart is on a constant high. She never stops spinning, her revolving door of crushes. I beg her to stop for the sake of my clarity. Truthfully, I do it for my sanity. Of course, she never listens. Until she met you.

Meeting you was like a torrential rain stopping mid-flight. It was like the universe hitting absolute zero. It was like daydreaming in class before the content hits you and you have that lightbulb moment. When I first saw you, I felt like we were destined to meet. You froze my heart in a good way. You made my heart shut up. You made me use my brain. For once, my heart and I were in agreement: we wanted more. All we could focus on was you. Everything was you. You, stopping the noise. You, bringing sobriety to a high. You, being perfect in such a way I feared ruining.

I am nothing that you want. I’m aware. I’m not your type, and based off your Instagram, you're way out of my league. But still, I like you, because time with you is like spending time in heaven before getting spit back out into reality.

The first thing I liked about you was your vulnerability. I liked how you gave me a small part of you. The part that no one else saw. I got to see you run your hands through your hair in frustration. I'm the one who got to soothe you. I would have given you permission to break me too, you only needed to ask. I’m happy I got to push you beyond what you thought you were capable of, and I’m glad you listened to my instructions. I liked how you scrunched your eyebrows when you were confused. I liked when you interrupted me for clarification.

You have a curious mind and a courageous heart. You insist on learning things you’re bad at, despite being proficient in almost everything you do. You want to grow and improve, and you show others that every day. You are subtle and nuanced, yet open and honest. You are like folklore, the way your name travels on people’s lips as they admire and lust for you. You became more than just whispers in the wind when I met you. You earned a name, a face, a persona. And your vulnerability with me showed that you cared not for pretense or reputation, but rather just for me and you and us. I liked that a lot.

The second thing I liked about you was your punctuality. My heart is a judge who bears witness to the character of everyone she pursues. Never in her eighteen years of life had she met someone like you. I’ve been complimented on being punctual before, I never realized until I came to college how uncommon a trait it was. I like how I expected you to be late to our first meeting because I’d never met a punctual man, but you proved me wrong as you sat there waiting for me. You were so cute when your head snapped up at everyone walking by, wondering if they were me. By respecting my time, you respected me, and in turn I admired you. You don’t waste time, and you are civil. You are both the bare minimum and the gold standard.

I like when it’s just you and me and I feel like I have your full attention, like I mean something. My phone sits quiet off to the side, the lock screen usually dark. I’m not that busy. Not like you. You check your phone when you start to get bored of me and our time together. Your leg bounces when you want to leave, and your fidgeting intensifies. Every rap of your finger on the table is a gavel condemning me to a life without you, and when you gaze at the clock it’s like you turn your back on me and my offering to you. I wish I could entertain you forever.

The third thing I liked about you was your eyes. You weren’t the first blue-eyed boy to steal my heart.

We were eighth grade nerds conducting a mock trial. I was a prosecutor, he the witness. I stared at his eyes while questioning him. I don’t remember what I was saying. I just remember how transparent his eyes were, how quick they were to betray emotion. His shock at my questioning, his defiance at being caught in a lie, his mirthful resignation when he realized he was beyond saving; I witnessed it all in his irises. I shook his hand when he admitted defeat and watched the twinkle of the waves in his ocean blue eyes. As Taylor Swift says, it's easy to sink and drown and die in them.

Your eyes are not ocean blue. They are like snowflakes that are cold and heartless because they refuse to express color or emotion. Too light, too perfect, and so unlike everyone else.

Too late, I realized that I like everything about you. I like how you wake up early in the morning and text me when I’m still in bed; you don’t lack initiative like all the other guys I fall for. I like how you talk over everyone and are unapologetic about your opinions because you are bold in ways I could never be. I like how you give me confidence because you have so much to share. I like that you tower more than a foot over me, reminding me of how unattainable you are. I like how you hold the door open for others because your mother raised you with manners. I like how you don’t follow me back on Instagram. It makes me think about you more.

You’re elusive, like the stars. I haven’t heard you laugh. I have only seen you half smile and do that little grunt of a laugh that doesn’t come from the heart, but from politeness. You haven’t heard me laugh either. If I heard your real laugh, I don’t think I would ever stop wanting it.

You’re enigmatic, like the moon. I want to know everything about you, both the side that the world can see and the side that only outer space can. I want to hear about your craters and depravities, the way you pull me like a tide and how you soar above the world. I want to know about your parents, your siblings, your friends. I want to know about your childhood, your memories, your hobbies. I want to pick your mind, and I want you to tear into mine. What’s your favorite food? Mine is chocolate. What is your favorite color? Mine is purple. What’s your zodiac? I’m a Capricorn. Where are your scars from? Would you care to hear about mine? I taught you how to write an essay, but who taught you how to kiss someone? Who taught you how to stroke their hair, to make their heart flutter? Who taught you your charm, your magnetic energy that pulls me in? Do you know you have this power? Have you perfected it over the years, or were you born this way? Is this another one of your talents, winning the game of love one hopeless heart at a time? I want you to like me enough to want to tell me. I don’t want to beg for answers.

I don’t like girls being jealous of me. I don’t like the animosity I feel when they know you value your time with me more than them. I dislike how you don’t seem to trust me enough to turn on your read receipts, how you fist bump me and refuse to hug me. I don’t like how you can be with me in private and act like a total stranger in public. Girls wouldn’t be jealous if they knew what we were really like.

The sad thing about the frost you cast on my heart was that it didn’t last. Like on Earth, frost is a fleeting beauty of night. Eventually, daylight breaks through and turns the ice into dew. I have never been a fan of this reality. That’s why I sleep with blackout curtains and why I prefer late nights to early mornings; the day is the promise of everything unpleasant. During the day, I am forced to be away from you. I have to go to school and complete menial tasks that teach me nothing about love or life. The day is where I need to pretend to be someone organized, someone intelligent, someone who is strong, motivated, ambitious. The night is everything good about this world. It is a promise of romance and love, of dalliances and dances with the serenade of comets and saucers. In the day you are gone, and so is my heart, because you take it with you. In the night I can become a blubbering idiot who loses all sense of self with you.

You fascinate me, you excite me, you calm me. My hours with you felt like no time at all. You left too soon. You left before I was ready. You took what you needed from me and disappeared, like smoke. You stole my words, my thoughts, my time, my conscience. I am forever stuck in your elusive shadow; you’re just that tall. The world is too small for you. You’re just too goddamn perfect.

The day before our last, I dreamed I died in a snowstorm. I was alone, drowning and suffocating in a lonely abyss. I was a bystander to nature’s quarrel with love. Nature raged and took that anger out on a young couple standing near me. They had held hands in the face of the storm, but were eventually ripped apart by the wind. They might have survived if they hadn’t opened their mouths to call out for each other, but they were in love, and so they did. They were crushed mercilessly. Any words of love or yearning they might have had for one another died when they did, separated and alone. I don’t want to die, not like that. Not pining after a love I would never find again because of forces I couldn’t control.

Liking you is a bit like dying in a snowstorm. You swooped down from the sky long enough to torment me, but not long enough to appreciate me. After your ascension, I find myself getting lost in the apocalyptic turmoil of your aftermath. As if we had been operating on borrowed time, my heart returned to her endless search for the one.

She’s looking for someone to ground her again. She’s looking for you.

That period of time with you - that time where I was enveloped by the quiet and comforting sound of you - was my everything. It was my safe haven. It was blue eyes in the middle of a hurricane. It was you holding my hand in a snowstorm and not letting go.

Now you’re gone and my heart is weeding through everyone she can and deeming them unworthy of replacing you.

That guy I smoked with and confided in on the balcony. That guy who would walk with me every morning to class. That guy who taught me work-life balance and how to quote John Locke.

None of them really compare to you. My heart grows angrier and more dejected at every failed attempt. Like hands on a clock, I keep chasing you through the revolving doors of my heart to return to a time when we were together. As my left hand grips the door and pushes, my right hand wipes tears that too often stream down my cheeks. Sometimes, when I stop pushing against the doors of fate so that I can catch my breath, I attempt to draw you and your memory back into my heart before all traces of you are gone forever.

If you ever return to me, will you stop my heart again? Will you be able to ground me again? Can you stop my endless circling? You never promised me anything, and I almost wish you would have. But promises are as fickle as the weather, and I probably would have died waiting for you to fulfill one. So, promise me no promises, and I will promise you the entirety of my cherished nothing in return.

Common Language

Common Language

29.4.2022

Article by Barbara Billic Art by Emmaline Hawley

 The cold lights cheeks red

Grunge hair, half painted nails

Performing less

For the first time since Zambia

Real rest, drooling level rest

No clean sheets

No space on the bed

Sleeping on a piece of wood

My senses all mixed up

Listening with eyes

Seeing with my ears

So many foreign words in the hot air on 5th floor

No translation

Simple connection, simple invention, imagination.

Like we learned in class

They never let us speak English

At the street lamp post

The gazes as our only common language

I promise you, you promise me

Mainly you

“This is not it”

Out of everything I’ve lost on you since then

I don’t pity my sanity the most

I pity nothing that is mine

I only pity you

Your fear, your prison, your crystalized blood

None of it is me

I sang a song months ago

Where Amy says I cried for you on the kitchen floor

Like a baby crunched up in a ball

Out on the north side of the house with a fur hat on

My cigarette lights, freezing fingers red

Freshly cut hair on my bedroom floor

I’m singing a song tomorrow

Where Joni says We love our lovin’

But not like we love our freedom

Playing God

 Playing God

The girl and the writer

Article by Katie Rowley, art by Kanitta Cheah

          He says it in the back of my car. It’s the first time a boy has ever said it to me. It's the only time. In between kisses, the syllables escape from his swollen lips. His hands wandering around my sixteen-year-old body. He is reaching for my boobs. The black V-neck I am wearing that used to be my mom’s reveals my skin. Maybe too much.

He says it like a question. And he wants my answer to be sex. Or at least permission to touch more of my body.

But maybe that is not true. Maybe I have twisted his intentions for a better story. I have written this story so many times. In it, he always says it and it is never genuine and it always has impure intentions. But maybe he truly did love me at first sight/first kiss. Maybe he didn’t just want to have sex with me.

I took his words to heart at sixteen. Butterflies in my stomach. I was loved. I was loved and I wanted to shout it in the school hallways. I was loved and those three words that he told me every day were a promise. A promise and a protection. A promise that I was safe from everything that could hurt me. A promise that I was saved from loneliness. A promise that I would never ever be hurt again. I was loved by a boy, and it didn’t matter that he begged for pictures of my body every night. It didn’t matter that he didn’t know what I meant when I said no again and again. I was loved and it didn’t matter that he was fucking some other girl after telling me how much he loved me.

I always write this boy as the villain. He appears in almost all of my writing. Even when he is not mentioned, he is there. And almost all of me wants him gone. I want to erase him. Both from my past, and from my words.

(Almost: If I were to truly expunge him from my writing, would I have anything to say? Do I have a voice that does not silently scream his name?)

I’ve made so many promises that I will stop writing about him. They’re all promises to myself. They’re all promises I continue to break. Promises I am breaking right now. (So meta, Katie.)

I wonder what he would think of his portrayal. Of his presence in every aspect of my life. I think he would be glad he still haunts me. It would boost his ego. He’d call me a liar, though. He’d tell everyone who’d listen that I said it back, eventually. That I made the same promises and so this hurt that I keep returning to cancels out. He would probably still hate me, though.

I think I hurt people when I write about them.

I promise I will try to stop.

I wrote a story about a boy on this campus, and I never thought he’d read it. I have this crazy idea that boys can’t read. Or, at least, that they don’t care enough to read school magazines. So, I published it, and didn’t even consider it’d fall into his hands.

Five minutes before class I got a text from him. We hadn’t spoken in over a year. I hadn’t thought about him in months. He read it and wanted to talk. I think something irrevocably changed in those few seconds it took for me to read his words. Like I had been in some awful car accident and was now paralyzed from the neck down. Like my arms were never going to work again. They would never write again. (Obviously, not true. Here I am, writing.) Or maybe, the paralysis happened somewhere deep inside my brain.

A fear: all I do is fuck up and hurt people through my writing. I make mistakes.

A promise: I will never write about someone else again.

A paralyzation: how to escape the people (boys, family, friends) my writing always returns to.

The words: gone.

I am currently writing my way through a senior thesis. A collection of essays ruminating on girlhood. I take walks and I try to write in my head. I try to escape the urge to write about the new boy I am seeing. I try to escape the urge to write about the boys from my past.

I write in my journal that “I do not know what I want. I feel paralyzed.” I write in my journal that “Sometimes I feel like a god.”

Isn’t that what writing is: playing God? I create the characters. I create their stories, leave out their redemptions. I tell you how to feel about them. And, for some reason, I cannot stop.

Brandon, my advisor and one of my favorite people on this earth, tells me that I do not need to apologize to the boy who I wrote the story about. That I am generous in my rendering of him. The boy tells me that I made him uncomfortable and hurt him. They battle inside of me. The girl who would never want to hurt anyone and the writer. I do not know who to let win. I think this battle is part of the paralysis.

I think Brandon would tell me that I have to learn to let both exist, and I have to carry the writer with me everywhere. And that sometimes, the writer does win. That is the cold, bitter truth. The writer wins. The writer controls. The writer lets the power of portraying those who have hurt her consume her. She lets it fill her up. She lets the power satisfy her.

And it does satisfy her. It satisfies the non-written part of me too.

I tried to think of a time I have felt powerless and came up with an image of a bed and a backseat and a roof and a couch in an apartment neither of us lived in.

The girl from the library tells me how good my story about the roof is. How it made her think differently about the boy we both know. I think about it for weeks. I feel able to leave the roof and the bed and the car. I can leave it all behind.

But, I am afraid the writer within me has lost her appetite. I keep returning to the first boy. I keep writing about him. About how much I hate him and how much anger still lives inside of me. But it’s starting to feel pointless. It’s losing its addictive bitterness. Maybe because he doesn’t care. Maybe because he will never read anything I write.

I don’t text the boy back after he tells me how uncomfortable my words made him.

A draft of a text never sent: I am sorry and I promise I am learning. I promise I am trying to be a better person. I promise I will never write about you again.

(Once again, a promise I have failed to keep.)

I am writing my thesis and I am trying to put the incident behind me, because I keep writing about people who have hurt me and if I think about how my words could hurt them, I will turn nothing in. So, I keep writing about these boys. I write about how they destroy me, over and over again. I spin the same situation seven times. I end up with the same answer: I am always the victim.

It’s not a lie. I don’t think I have ever lied in my writing. (Not true. I have already lied three times.) I have been disrespected and led on and hurt when I didn’t deserve it. But I have also hurt people. I have led on just as many men. I just don’t ever find myself writing about them, let alone thinking about them. (Perhaps that is something I need to work on.)

I have been thinking a lot about the boy from the beginning. The first boy. I cannot erase him from my writing. I cannot erase him from my past. He comes back to me in everything. I write about other boys. Nicer boys. Boys who wouldn’t place their bodies on me the way he did. But he always returns in words. Usually near the end. Usually full of hate.

I think it is okay to hate him. I think it is okay to learn how to free myself through my writing. I loved him so much I forgot how to love myself. I entangled myself with the idea of being loved and it became part of my very being. But I think my words have begun to unravel this self-constructed notion: I am only valuable if a man is telling me how much he loves me. I am learning how deeply I am loved by those who care what I have to say. I am learning how to listen to that love. I am learning how to let my anger speak. I am becoming a writer. (And I am loving myself, writer and all.)

Santalore

Santalore

Don’t let me forget

Article by Alexis Cornachio, art by Alex Wollinka

          I’ve held a couple of meek promises in my life. Not one stands out. I’ve held them loose in my fingers but tight to my chest. My arms have rarely let up. They’re strong, but sometimes promises will fall through the gaps between my fingers. They must’ve been too meek to grip onto.

I’ve never asked someone to promise me anything before.

That’s not true.

Maybe my mom. I asked her to promise me Santa was real – that the half-eaten cookies by the fireside on Christmas morning were the doing of an old bearded man hailing from the North Pole, not my dad’s. I probably asked my dad to promise me that the crushed candy cane scattered across our front steps was really from Santa’s reindeer, not from his own grayed and beaten down running sneakers. Big green pleading eyes told my mom to lie straight to her five-year-old daughter’s face. Promise me Santa is real, you wouldn’t lie to me, right mom?

Santalore. The first betrayal.

Sometimes you have to lie a little to protect your first daughter’s innocence. The guilt still eats at her. She brings it up during winter break, on a car ride out east. The orange sun fades into an artificial earth through my rearview mirror. Objects are closer than they appear. I think the sun is far, far away.

I was taught that promises were sacred. That if you promised something, you couldn’t break it. So, I rarely promise. Unless I mean it.

We’re sitting around our wooden family table from the old house, except now in the gray, hardly furnished rental apartment my mom hates. The table holds our family dinner conversations like one big promise. Close to its wooden heart, it holds belly laughter and my little brother’s recitings of the ABC's. It stores small-town folklore and gossip, and it secretly swells with cruel words we should have never said, screaming matches, and apology tears. Grease stains are remnants of Sunday night take out. Splintered edges round the old rectangular table. It is weathered but could never break. This big promise is sacred.

I get really uncomfortable when asked to hold a promise.

Why?

I’ll mess up. I’ll forget. I get easily distracted by fossil fuel-eating planes that can take me to a place that is far, far away, filled with people I don’t know and versions of selves I could be. These ideas consume my mind. I don’t have time to hold meek promises. Just let me live outside of the constraints of your promises. If it’s sacred, it can’t be touched. I’m not even religious. I’ve only ever believed in Santa. I can’t hold onto it. I shouldn’t.

At some point I decided it was okay to live under the constraints of my own promises -- the ones made by me, to me. Self-interested.

Are promises to myself most sacred?

I’ll lose my grip and let you fall somewhere in between my fingers if you ask me to live under the constraints of yours. I’ll try my hardest, but I can’t promise. Nothing’s guaranteed, right? I’ll mess up. I just want to get closer to the sun. What if your promises take me to the burning edge of a rocky bluff and when I fall off, all I want to do is swim all the way to the sun? But my arms are tired and somehow, they let up.

I promise myself I won’t forget freckles along the ridge of her nose and wet supple cheeks. Those mornings where all I see is deep fog hanging over the ocean. This makes it harder to see, easier to breathe (you). But then I even forget the shitty lyrics written in my Notes app, which is all I left you with.

Other things I promise myself to never forget:

Quiet sobs coming from a hotel bathroom. Super meek. Definitely meek. Lost words that got stuck in the back of my throat.

I forget the code to the new apartment every time I go back. I forgot to put the lockout key under the mat. The one time I forgot to turn the stove off, my roommates came home to a wretched smell and toxified air. Is it because I’m consumed in the memories – in a dream of what could be? What would someone else’s memories look like?

Promise me you won’t forget what it felt like to run for the first time. Promise you won't ever stop running. Until your legs give. Because it makes it harder to breathe, easier to see you. Unlike foggy mornings by the sea.

Portrait of a Life I Kind of Know

Portrait of a Life I Kind of Know

Losing my body

Article by Anabel Shenk Art by Sadie Fleig

 I walked out the backdoor and the air was disgustingly temperate. It was exactly the same temperature as my body. I looked back to check the door and winced at the offensive comfort. There was no end to my body. My skin and the air were as warm as each other. I could not tell the difference. I was everywhere.

Ten years earlier, I had walked out my front door and the air was at least 20 degrees colder than my skin. It struck my small, iridescent body so harshly and perfectly. “Annnnnnnnnaaabelllllllllll.'' Mike Meehan was whisper-shouting from the middle of the street. “Annnnnnnnnnnnaabellllll.”

Was I supposed to respond? I was so small and iridescent. I curled myself around a rectangular pillar on my stoop. Always delaying response time. Always considering ways to release myself from the moment. I stared at him. My eyes little, barely open, widening with every second. I stared at him as he blasted my name into the fog. “Annnnnabbbbbbellll.”

Valerie Meehan, the mother of all five Meehan boys, lived right across the street. Mike came around quite often to move things around in her garage, spray paint metal poles, walk Valerie to the pink church, not quite sure what else. The fog was so gooey as it settled down for its midday rest on the concrete. Mike’s whisper-scream suddenly turned into an opera. The fog wrapped itself around his breath and the note, inducting it. One sticky mess rising and falling above the sidewalk. Like an old, juicy heart undulating slowly and flawlessly on every beat. A heart that’s been beating for years and years, expanding and retracting, unimpaired by time, showing off.

The fog goes up, “Annnnnaabbbbeell,” the fog goes down, “Annnnnnn,” it ripples against the street, practically shutters, “abellllll.”

I never actually saw the face of the 100-year-old-woman who lived in the house right next door to mine. She was 100 when I was born. She was 200 when I was five. Then 300…she died when I was 16. I swung from a very round, very smooth red buoy my dad had turned into a rope swing in the yard. My butt slid further and further down the red ball every time I went up. When I leaned my head backwards on the swing, everything softened. The ground and the air no longer existed apart. They were kissing each other at the meeting point. My eyes rolled around until I couldn’t see anything. Whipping my head back up onto my neck, I swung again. At peak height I could barely see four ceramic bowls on the other side of the fence. They were lined up in 100-year-old woman’s cement yard. 100-year-old-woman put rice out to feed rats that came by. One day, I was swinging and could see her. She was kneeling down over the bowls, re-filling them with what I imagined to be leftover rice. I wondered if she had made it fresh. I couldn’t see her face. She knelt deliberately over the bowls. It took a whole day to fill them all up. She started in the morning, got one full by noon, got the other three full by five, and by the time the sun began to set, the rats enjoyed their meal. When she was 200, she couldn’t leave the house anymore and the rats stopped coming. “RAATSSS!!!” My mom hates rats. When she talks about them her face melts and she almost cries. I stood up on the red buoy, used my toes to balance my weight, disengaged my neck muscles, and plunged into the lovely, emulsified air.

“Well, well, well…” Bobbi the Butcher’s eyes burst out of his bald head. “Where’s your mama? Are you old enough to be here on your own?”

There’s a gigantic case of slimy chicken breast, tiny shrimp, and lamb chops between us. The room smells cold and sour. It’s hard to say how old Bobbi the Butcher really is. He’s worked at this butcher counter as long as there’s been one. He is twelve feet tall and he is screaming. My body absorbs the sound of his voice as fast as it can, trying to keep up. His voice bounces around like a song. It is loud and then it quickly dissipates, soaked up by the big sourness. Then it’s loud again. His laugh is even louder. It shakes the counter and the meat jiggles on the ice. I smile as wide as I can before I look stupid. Bobbi the Butcher owns the 2006 white Scion xB that sits on our street. I see it out the window or at the end of a walk and I imagine Bobbi the Butcher driving it to our neighborhood every morning, belting Prince out the window, pausing to shout the name of someone he recognizes on the street (he knows everyone), wiggling his body, his shoulders, his fingers. I gaze at all the pink flesh in the case and think about how odd it would be if Bobbi the Butcher came to our house for dinner. I grasp onto my shopping basket and try to figure out once more how old he could be, or rather how long he’s been standing behind this butcher counter. He spins around, threatening to break into dance under the fluorescent lights of the store. My dad needs an onion, or maybe two. I can’t remember so I begin my backwards walk away from the butcher counter. Bobbi the Butcher’s eyes soften, and we melt away. I’ll see him next week or next year.

The steps that go up to Turtle Hill are just one block up from my house. My dad and I counted 5,000 steps once. Or was it 500…or maybe 500,000. Halfway up the steps I laid, sprawled out in the arms of my first boyfriend. “You know there are 500,000 steps?” We both shivered in the dark, cool air. “I love when it gets dark earlier and earlier.” “I feel like a worm in the night. Slithering around, no real sense of anything.” “I can’t really see and I can just…” “Slither?” The more of my body that touches the concrete, the more heat I lose through my jeans. My muscles get weaker, and my mouth moves slower and slower. All of a sudden, I am a spirit, more of an affect, less of a body. We stayed out as long as we could stand the cold. The earlier it got dark, the longer we could be worms together. I broke up with him on the top step. It was day and I could see everything. I said I could feel myself changing and my skin felt tight. I was fifteen. But really, I was only ten and it was just that Mike was still whisper-opera-singing and I couldn’t for the life of me see my name in the wet, dripping fog. And so, he got up, bounced down the steps one by one and I watched. Slithering. Maybe I thought it was time to stop slithering and start walking a little faster and appreciating the daylight, but I was going to miss him. “This is my spot,” it read in spray paint on the side of the steps three years later. My mom and I stopped on our way up to look at the words and smile. I recognized the handwriting.

The pink church that Valerie Meehan went to every week is also a school, and the courtyard is enclosed with a chain link fence. Along the sidewalk, there used to be an old, dead tree that had grown into the barbed wire. Its middle section was missing. It was just the top branches and the stump sitting snug in the fence. When it was still there, and my body was small enough, I would stand on the stump and press my head up against the top and pretend to be the middle. Pieces of the dead bark hung from my hair.

I used to tell my mom to close her eyes when I laid next to her in her bed. Once they were closed, I’d get as close as I could to her face without touching it. I tried not to breathe so as not to give myself away. I told her beforehand to open her eyes once she heard me snap my fingers. I get close, then feel a laughter rising so I back away and take a deep breath. Once again, I move my face right next to hers. I hold my hand back, away from my face. I snap, her eyes burst open, and I scream joy across her head and up her nose. Some of all of this gets too far up her nose and she sneezes.

I stumble into my bed fifteen years later, 1,000 miles away, and close my eyes thinking about my backdoor and wake up to that same body-temperature air soaking into my skin and nails and eyes. I call down to my mom. My voice bounces off my door, smacking me in the face. I sit straight up in bed and watch the fog roll in through a crack in the window. It fills up my room and I call down again. I’m everywhere.

Searching For a Love Story on the Block Plan

Searching For a Love Story on the Block Plan

How to Move on from Romantic Rock-Bottom

Article by Zeke Lloyd Art by Isabella Hageman

 Last year, I tried to explain love in an email. I had a running chain of correspondence with a friend of mine. Most of them were long, rambling messages. There was no theme, so there was nothing we couldn’t talk about. On July 15th, 2022, I tried to break down love.

I remember your theory on first love, this idea that we always have something special for the first person we loved. I disagree. I had lunch with my first girlfriend today, and honestly didn't feel anything.

It comes down to one simple thing: people change. Sitting across from her, I saw a kind, confident, and wonderful person. She wasn't the person I loved, though. That's ok. That's what I was asking about with your lifelong best-friend. I was just curious to hear if anything had changed, but it sounds like you two changed together. I think that's one reason your friendship still works so well. Sitting across from my ex-girlfriend today, I realized we did not change together. If she and I met today, there would be no spark.

Around February, when I started working on this piece, I set out again to figure out what love is.

Maybe the answer has been in front of me the whole time. At every wedding I’ve ever been to, happy fiancés have shared a biblical definition. “Love is patient, love is kind, it is not jealous; love does not brag, it is not arrogant.”

But that’s always been a little too abstract – over said and under explained.

Candidly, my quest to understand love began the first time I ever saw a romantic comedy. At this point, I don’t remember which movie it was. I’d like to think it was When Harry Met Sally, but maybe it was an older classic my parents showed me like Philadelphia Story or Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. I was always taken with Jimmy Stewart’s anxious yet passionate demeanor. But as much as I want my fascination to have begun with a feature-length film shared across the generational gap, I suspect it was something I found on my own. So, while I’m not proud to admit it, my best guess is that I fell in love with romantic comedies the first time I saw Taylor Swift’s You Belong with Me music video.

But whatever it was, it didn’t take long for me to become infatuated with films about romance. I’ve always found something magical about the genre. I lost interest in fantasy at a young age; it was too removed. But rom coms, that’s something to believe in – the perfect insertion of mysticism.

But it is a tough genre to love.

There were seven of us in the Washington, D.C. hotel room. It was a school trip, put on for the Model UN team. The three upperclassmen present, myself among them, selected the Netflix original romantic comedy Set It Up as that night’s film of choice.

It was not a popular pick.

“How could anyone believe this is real,” pondered one freshman. “It’s bullshit. It’s a bullshit movie,” added a sophomore. I didn’t mind much. I laughed. I saw the magic. I devoured the secret connection between the main characters. It gave me hope.

The hecklers had a point, though. A friend of mine, the same one I emailed my thoughts on love, even called the genre “pornography for the romantic.”

The plots aren’t plausible. They’re manufactured. But I wanted them to be real.

So, when I heard that the theme for this issue was “Promise Me,” I jumped on it. Finally, the opportunity to write a true love story. I could prepare a real-world defense of fantastical love.

And I knew the perfect couple. Michael and Sienna had been together for almost two years. They checked every box – loyal, energetic, effective communicators. And because I was talking about love, not just what makes two people click, I interviewed friends, acquaintances, and even exes on the subject.

Now, after working on this project for a few months, the interviews blend together. The process is the same for each one. I reach out, we agree on a time to meet, they answer my questions, then I look through my scribbled notes to find their most impactful sentiments.

Then I do it all again.

I interviewed Michael and Sienna on five or six different occasions for this project. Outside of that, I talked to five people. In total, I have a combined ten hours of formal interviews. After I listened through all of the interviews, after I wrote their stories, I gave up trying to write a nonfiction account of their love.

It’s impossible to write a true love story.

I only ever write the love story I want. I can’t take myself out of the equation. Everything I want from love, everything I already think it is, there’s a million little biases which have built a wall between me and objective understanding.

Ironically, it’s the same reason my search for love has been so emotionally taxing.

Reality has escaped me. I’ve lost track somewhere along the way. Like those on screen, the people I’ve dated have become characters. I manifested them, I used the almighty idea of “love” to justify a subconscious deification.

It’s the opposite of a relationship at its end. In a dying relationship, you start to see someone as worse than they ever were. They’re annoying, frustrating, intolerable. Every little thing they do fits into the maniacal mold you made for them.

But afterward, once it ends in a fiery disaster, your whole mentality is reversed. You create a fantastical character. You make them into the Sally to your Harry. Because as much as you want to move on, missing them still gives you more than letting go. In missing them, you hold on to a version of them that loved you.

I hate missing someone on the Block Plan. The other day, sitting at one of the high tables in Rastall’s, I tried to figure out love. You can know you were in love, I thought, when you feel a twinge every time you see them. It’s a funny feeling that starts in your stomach. Then your head freezes. Your eyes lock, and for a moment you know you could look away if you wanted to, but you don’t want to.

It’s not because you crave reunion. You don’t want to get back together. And while one of the worst parts of missing someone is the dreaded mental montage, that series of consecutive flashbacks featuring them, always smiling, in the places where you had your happiest moments, that’s not what the twinge is.

Because it’s not that complicated. The twinge is just the way you feel when you’re reminded that they exist. They’re a real, breathing person with skin and stature and all the physical features you loved about them. And for the time they stay in your vision, you can’t deny their existence. You’re forced to accept that they kept living without you - moving and growing and changing. They’ve done everything. They’ve lived a hundred lives and there’s the proof, the skin and stature and everything you loved about them standing right there.

And you remember what’s not real - the relationship. That’s not breathing and growing and changing. That doesn’t exist anymore.

I don’t think I loved anyone in high school, but I have been in love on the Block Plan. And now I feel a twinge almost every time I walk through Worner.

At first, I saw my piece as an opportunity to write a real love story, a chance to pen my defense of the rom com. But for those of you reading because you’re interested in finding the secret sauce that makes a relationship as magical as the one featured in Set It Up, I doubt it will surprise you to learn that I wasn’t able to find it.

Because from the beginning, I didn’t want to defend rom coms. Not really. I wanted to answer a much simpler question, the same question that everyone asks themselves when a relationship ends: what would have made it work?

That’s much easier than moving on. So, I did interviews, philosophizing about the grand idea of love. In an early draft, back when I was writing a nonfiction account of Michael and Sienna’s history, one of my editors called the piece “very journalistic.”

That’s how I wanted it. Removed. I didn’t want to be in the story because putting myself in the story meant moving on and understanding that missing someone isn’t fixed by reminiscing and romanticizing.

And rom coms don’t help. After watching enough movies, it seems easy to stop missing someone. When you’re hopeless, lying at a romantic rock-bottom, the right person manifests themself from somewhere you never anticipated.

But moving on isn’t glamorous enough to put in a 90-minute Netflix original.

Moving on is forgetting - forgetting so much that you can love someone else. Forgetting the way you felt, forgetting what made you feel that way, forgetting who you were with them. It’s becoming someone different. Because if you stayed the same, you could never be happy with anyone else.

And let’s face it, moving on is the only way to have a true love story on the Block Plan.

Bunk Beds

Bunk Beds

Things are Always Simpler from Up Close

Article by Elliot Singer Art by Liz White

I only have two memories of when it was just the two of us. Kapp and Elliot. The first is fleeting, a whisper in the wind; I’m following him as he walks along the hallway, running his hand along the banister as we go from our room to our parents’. I know it was just us then, Kapp and I. I followed him with nobody following me. I suppose in some ways I still do.

The second memory I am more sure of. We stand on the blacktop together, holding hands, watching the other kids laugh and play. This was how every recess went during those six long months of living in New York. Forced to the outskirts by a lack of confidence and big city charisma. It was one of the only times I knew that he needed me as much as I needed him.

After that, I just remember being in the middle, sandwiched between Kapp and Emma. Big and little, leader and follower. I cried when I found out that he wouldn’t be on the top bunk anymore. Now we had to take apart the bunk beds, lay them side by side because neither my sister nor I could climb up so high. It was hard to talk across the gap to my sister’s adjacent bed, harder than it was when my brother was above me on the top bunk. I wasn’t used to sleeping through the night, no longer stirred by his bare feet padding down the wooden ladder to pee.

Kapp moved to the room next door, where I would so often hide while he was brushing his teeth, burrowing beneath the white and green polka dotted covers, the queen bed so much bigger than my own. Inevitably, I would get dragged back to a different set of pastel-colored walls, footie pajamaed feet squirming in my dad’s arms, Kapp giggling surreptitiously in the background.

Years went by when I felt too alone to fall asleep.

Kapp’s spy-themed birthday party, turning eight. I was five, and in my eyes, Kapp was a bastion of knowledge. The epitome of a “big kid,” a title to which I desperately aspired. I was fiercely jealous of his party, looking on that morning as he meticulously filled cellophane party-favor bags with cheap blue-light pens and dollar-store dark sunglasses. My parents had pulled out all the stops for that day, hiding scraps of paper with clues around the house and neighborhood for the gaggle of boys to find. Eventually it led to the cake, a two-foot-high mountain of Rice-Krispie treats — his favorite — with a wax “8” candle stuck in the melting marshmallows on top. I was a paranoid kid, fiercely afraid of kidnappers, heights, and death. I could barely stomach the first six clues as I anxiously tagged along to each hiding place. After the clue in our damp, dark basement alluded to a hostage situation, I lost it, running upstairs with my bare feet and collapsing into tears in my dad’s lap. I had barely recovered when they returned. Beaming with pride and a crumpled fistful of paper clues, Kapp showed off his tricked out plastic watch that had been the spoil of their hunt. I clung to my mom’s coat as he opened presents wrapped in the Sunday Times, visions of the forgotten hostage swirling in my mind.

The next five years are a barely permeable red, an incoherent montage of seething. Perpetual kettle whistling punctuated by moments of a rolling boil. During those years as my body changed and became foreign while Kapp only grew stronger and more secure, he could get under my skin like nothing else. Everything he did would bring me to tears, smashing books on the floor in frustration, slamming doors, kicking soccer balls into thickets of brambles. I always ended the game, the conversation, the math worksheet, before he could beat me. Better to get sent to my room — therapy even, as long as he didn’t know — than risk losing his respect. I lost myself to a deluge of jealousy, craving the way his canary ski jacket zipped up perfectly to meet a meticulously stickered helmet and matching goggles. His soccer pullover with his name embroidered on the left chest. The way my grandmother fawned over her only grandson, taking him upstairs on his thirteenth birthday to put his very own mezuzah on the door frame. I never got one when I turned thirteen.

When I turned sixteen, we had been going to the same school for two years. Our friend groups had overlapped at points, and I was elated that the people who liked him liked me, too. Evidence that I might have a sliver of the casual confidence that had always seemed so effortless for him. Now I know that wasn’t true, but things are always simpler from up close.

He drifted away the last six months before leaving. My pursuit of his approval had anything but diminished over the years, a steady yearning for attention and validation from before I could remember. I had long gotten used to his temporary absences since he had moved out of the bedroom, back when we were barely old enough to know the difference between boys and girls. But the abstraction of his departure, gently erupting from a pale twinge to conscious pain, became clearer as January — his eighteenth birthday — wore into spring, and all too soon graduation. Sometime in April, the fighting of our childhood had returned. We fought over whose turn it was to do the dishes, whether or not I had bad taste in music, who sat shotgun on the ride to dinner. I wanted desperately to just talk to him, but a mask of boyish masculinity and impatience for college rendered him taciturn and me endlessly exasperated.

Arguments always seemed to surface when we left the house for school. With each passing morning, he seemed to take a little longer eating his eggs and packing his backpack while I waited impatiently at the doorstep. Or he’d turn on a dime and rush me out the door in ten minutes, my breakfast half eaten and binders askew. One morning, finally fed up, I yelled at him as I ran barefoot to the car, with socks, shoes, and cereal bowl in hand. I told him I was sick of him dictating the time we left based on his particular whims, that my life didn’t revolve around his. He shot back that I was being ridiculous and overreacting. I slammed the door as hard as I could when I got into the passenger’s seat, and we sat in silence all the way down Masonic and over Twin Peaks.

We both cried that day, one of the few times he cried in front of me since we were little and he fell off our homemade tightrope and broke his arm. That and when Nana died. But in the car that day, listening to “A Day in The Life” by the Beatles, he confessed to me that he wanted these last few months with me to be good, for things to work. He told me he was going to miss me all the way out in Connecticut, and I told him I was scared for him to leave.

I slept in his bed for a week after he left. I felt like I was falling, the ground pulling out from under me, albeit down an all-too-familiar chute. He was growing up as I looked on, sluggish and lonely. His bed somehow felt bigger than my own, like I was drowning in the sheets and comforter, even though we had bought identical models years before. I wondered if his dorm bed felt too big, and if somebody else occupied the bottom bunk.

I’m gone now too. I left home much like he did, impatient for the promise of newness. There weren’t as many fights with Emma though, and the tears were different. Sisterhood has a script. I don’t know if we followed it exactly, but during the goodbyes my role was clear. The exasperating complexity of our dynamic was on a path well-trodden, the specifics of our particular situation dwarfed by a shared pressure towards womanhood. How do you create genuine closeness when the constraints are so plainly external? The one-too-many books about the beauty of sisterhood we had each read came with a reminder at every turn of how acutely we were failing. I was clear on the gravity of my actions as a role model, familiar with my potential to harm purely through her observation of how I chose to live. Saying goodbye was sad, but now I knew how to do it.

With Kapp, there was no structure. Our potential for closeness was unsurveilled and imprecise. Brothers and sisters are allowed to be cordial, dissonant, or inseparable, no questions asked. I think we both realized this early on, tested its boundaries as we grew apart. There was an elasticity to our intimacy, spanning far when proximity felt dangerous, and then pulling us together in a moment.

When we’re home, we cook dinners together and talk about bikes or laugh at obscure tweets. Cannellini or garbanzo, disc or rim brakes; we argue but none of it feels particularly urgent. The easy, immediate familiarity feels safe and also tragic. Why is it only now that we get this? People tell me that it’s normal that we are closer now, the space across time zones and coast cultures shrinking a gap of envy. We grew into ourselves during the years apart, and puzzle pieces tend to fit better when the edges aren’t so jagged. Still, distance feels like an odd price to pay for unity. I hope the two aren’t mutually exclusive, but I don’t know if I’ll never find out. There don’t seem to be bunk beds in our future.

Dancer

Dancer

Lightning in a Bottle

Article by Niko Cvitanic Art by Avery Carrington

 Last year, I tried to explain love in an email. I had a running chain of correspondence with a friend of mine. Most of them were long, rambling messages. There was no theme, so there was nothing we couldn’t talk about. On July 15th, 2022, I tried to break down love.

I remember your theory on first love, this idea that we always have something special for the first person we loved. I disagree. I had lunch with my first girlfriend today, and honestly didn't feel anything.

It comes down to one simple thing: people change. Sitting across from her, I saw a kind, confident, and wonderful person. She wasn't the person I loved, though. That's ok. That's what I was asking about with your lifelong best-friend. I was just curious to hear if anything had changed, but it sounds like you two changed together. I think that's one reason your friendship still works so well. Sitting across from my ex-girlfriend today, I realized we did not change together. If she and I met today, there would be no spark.

Around February, when I started working on this piece, I set out again to figure out what love is.

Maybe the answer has been in front of me the whole time. At every wedding I’ve ever been to, happy fiancés have shared a biblical definition. “Love is patient, love is kind, it is not jealous; love does not brag, it is not arrogant.”

But that’s always been a little too abstract – over said and under explained.

Candidly, my quest to understand love began the first time I ever saw a romantic comedy. At this point, I don’t remember which movie it was. I’d like to think it was When Harry Met Sally, but maybe it was an older classic my parents showed me like Philadelphia Story or Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. I was always taken with Jimmy Stewart’s anxious yet passionate demeanor. But as much as I want my fascination to have begun with a feature-length film shared across the generational gap, I suspect it was something I found on my own. So, while I’m not proud to admit it, my best guess is that I fell in love with romantic comedies the first time I saw Taylor Swift’s You Belong with Me music video.

But whatever it was, it didn’t take long for me to become infatuated with films about romance. I’ve always found something magical about the genre. I lost interest in fantasy at a young age; it was too removed. But rom coms, that’s something to believe in – the perfect insertion of mysticism.

But it is a tough genre to love.

There were seven of us in the Washington, D.C. hotel room. It was a school trip, put on for the Model UN team. The three upperclassmen present, myself among them, selected the Netflix original romantic comedy Set It Up as that night’s film of choice.

It was not a popular pick.

“How could anyone believe this is real,” pondered one freshman. “It’s bullshit. It’s a bullshit movie,” added a sophomore. I didn’t mind much. I laughed. I saw the magic. I devoured the secret connection between the main characters. It gave me hope.

The hecklers had a point, though. A friend of mine, the same one I emailed my thoughts on love, even called the genre “pornography for the romantic.”

The plots aren’t plausible. They’re manufactured. But I wanted them to be real.

So, when I heard that the theme for this issue was “Promise Me,” I jumped on it. Finally, the opportunity to write a true love story. I could prepare a real-world defense of fantastical love.

And I knew the perfect couple. Michael and Sienna had been together for almost two years. They checked every box – loyal, energetic, effective communicators. And because I was talking about love, not just what makes two people click, I interviewed friends, acquaintances, and even exes on the subject.

Now, after working on this project for a few months, the interviews blend together. The process is the same for each one. I reach out, we agree on a time to meet, they answer my questions, then I look through my scribbled notes to find their most impactful sentiments.

Then I do it all again.

I interviewed Michael and Sienna on five or six different occasions for this project. Outside of that, I talked to five people. In total, I have a combined ten hours of formal interviews. After I listened through all of the interviews, after I wrote their stories, I gave up trying to write a nonfiction account of their love.

It’s impossible to write a true love story.

I only ever write the love story I want. I can’t take myself out of the equation. Everything I want from love, everything I already think it is, there’s a million little biases which have built a wall between me and objective understanding.

Ironically, it’s the same reason my search for love has been so emotionally taxing.

Reality has escaped me. I’ve lost track somewhere along the way. Like those on screen, the people I’ve dated have become characters. I manifested them, I used the almighty idea of “love” to justify a subconscious deification.

It’s the opposite of a relationship at its end. In a dying relationship, you start to see someone as worse than they ever were. They’re annoying, frustrating, intolerable. Every little thing they do fits into the maniacal mold you made for them.

But afterward, once it ends in a fiery disaster, your whole mentality is reversed. You create a fantastical character. You make them into the Sally to your Harry. Because as much as you want to move on, missing them still gives you more than letting go. In missing them, you hold on to a version of them that loved you.

I hate missing someone on the Block Plan. The other day, sitting at one of the high tables in Rastall’s, I tried to figure out love. You can know you were in love, I thought, when you feel a twinge every time you see them. It’s a funny feeling that starts in your stomach. Then your head freezes. Your eyes lock, and for a moment you know you could look away if you wanted to, but you don’t want to.

It’s not because you crave reunion. You don’t want to get back together. And while one of the worst parts of missing someone is the dreaded mental montage, that series of consecutive flashbacks featuring them, always smiling, in the places where you had your happiest moments, that’s not what the twinge is.

Because it’s not that complicated. The twinge is just the way you feel when you’re reminded that they exist. They’re a real, breathing person with skin and stature and all the physical features you loved about them. And for the time they stay in your vision, you can’t deny their existence. You’re forced to accept that they kept living without you - moving and growing and changing. They’ve done everything. They’ve lived a hundred lives and there’s the proof, the skin and stature and everything you loved about them standing right there.

And you remember what’s not real - the relationship. That’s not breathing and growing and changing. That doesn’t exist anymore.

I don’t think I loved anyone in high school, but I have been in love on the Block Plan. And now I feel a twinge almost every time I walk through Worner.

At first, I saw my piece as an opportunity to write a real love story, a chance to pen my defense of the rom com. But for those of you reading because you’re interested in finding the secret sauce that makes a relationship as magical as the one featured in Set It Up, I doubt it will surprise you to learn that I wasn’t able to find it.

Because from the beginning, I didn’t want to defend rom coms. Not really. I wanted to answer a much simpler question, the same question that everyone asks themselves when a relationship ends: what would have made it work?

That’s much easier than moving on. So, I did interviews, philosophizing about the grand idea of love. In an early draft, back when I was writing a nonfiction account of Michael and Sienna’s history, one of my editors called the piece “very journalistic.”

That’s how I wanted it. Removed. I didn’t want to be in the story because putting myself in the story meant moving on and understanding that missing someone isn’t fixed by reminiscing and romanticizing.

And rom coms don’t help. After watching enough movies, it seems easy to stop missing someone. When you’re hopeless, lying at a romantic rock-bottom, the right person manifests themself from somewhere you never anticipated.

But moving on isn’t glamorous enough to put in a 90-minute Netflix original.

Moving on is forgetting - forgetting so much that you can love someone else. Forgetting the way you felt, forgetting what made you feel that way, forgetting who you were with them. It’s becoming someone different. Because if you stayed the same, you could never be happy with anyone else.

And let’s face it, moving on is the only way to have a true love story on the Block Plan.

Forever is the sweetest con

Forever is the sweetest con

Reflections on first love and the illusions of forever

Article and art by Kylie Haney

“I’ll probably show up at your door one day,” you said, tissue in hand, tears in your eyes. This was the second time I’d seen you cry in three years, but it was a long time coming. We agreed this wasn’t working. For once, our love wasn’t enough. We had survived many fights, and we wouldn’t make it out of this one unscathed, but we still loved each other. This fight, though trivial, was a devastating weight all coming down at once and crushing everything we had built. As we said goodbye, I asked you for one last kiss, then watched you leave as I struggled to breathe.

I still remember all of our “firsts.” Our first date was at the movies. I thought you’d be late, but there you were, waiting for me. Our first kiss was fueled by desire. As our lips touched, the sparks in us burst into full flames. Our first “I love you” was a promise we thought would last forever. But love is a fragile, often fleeting flame, and even our blaze had to burn out.

I always made fun of other couples for being naive enough to believe they could have a future together. But with you, I wanted to plan it all. In AP Biology, we fabricated a ridiculous life. We whispered in class and laughed until it hurt, dreaming up a fantasy outside of our hometown. We planned to visit Australia together one day, because you had seen a beautiful sunset there before and wanted to see it again with me. For our anniversary, you gave me a promise ring, a tangible symbol of our commitment to each other. I wore it every day because I believed in its promises of devotion. When I doubted that devotion, I would read the letters you wrote me. I would trace the shape of the words on the page, feeling the love that you had poured into it. Each one ended with the same promise: that I would always be your world. That we would have a future together where we could escape and build a new life. We made all of these promises we couldn’t keep for a future we couldn’t have. But still, we tried.

For some reason, I thought we could defy the odds. We had made it this far, and our love was special, right? Long distance never worked, but you said that it could for us. You promised you wouldn’t leave because we worked, because even in our worst moments, something seemed to be working for us that wasn’t for others. Even with the distance, our love was still strong. You said it felt wrong to be so far away from me and that you would pack up and move to Colorado if you could. But we stayed together over a thousand miles apart, texting and calling when we could find the time. When you didn’t have time for me, I returned to the letters, reading your promises to love me forever, to do anything to hold onto me. We made so many promises, but they were all the wrong ones.

The funny thing is that we survived the distance–it was once we were back together that we came to an end. Our goodnight selfies were becoming infrequent, three words becoming two. Yet still, the fight came out of nowhere, out of a black Nissan Altima in the Chipotle parking lot. It was stupid, but at the time it felt like everything. After a silent drive home and a dreadful conversation, it all came to an end. Except it didn’t. It wasn’t a real end because you promised to show up at my door. You promised us the story your parents shared. The story where the boy shows up at the girl’s doorstep after years because he still loves her and can’t imagine his life without her. Even a month later, when we encountered each other again in that hotel room, you said you still stood by your words. But now, where do you stand? You tell me not to count on it, yet you don’t close the door altogether. So where does that leave me? You’ve left me suspended in my delusional hope that some part of your promise was true. I’m left thinking about all that you said, trying not to hold onto every word. Even though I returned everything you’d given to me, I kept all your letters. Your promises stayed with me even though you didn’t.

You promised to always be there for me; I promised to always remember how good we could be together. You promised to love me until the day you die; I promised you would forever be my always. But some promises are made to be broken. You’re no longer here; I’m beginning to forget you. You don’t love me anymore, and I’m finding new forever’s. Of all our promises, that last one of your return, still haunts me. That one would be the worst promise for you to break. That promise should never have been made in the first place. How am I supposed to go through my life holding on to the empty promise that you will come back for me? This isn’t a fairytale, or the rom-com love story your parents shared; this is a cold reality where distance and time matter. Now, I need to promise myself that I will try to let you go, try to forget the deceitful promise of forever.

A Mosaic of Me

A Mosaic of Me

Red Nails Jackie

Article by Mattie Valinsky Art by Isabella Hageman

A mosaic of me lives in my notes section. Dictated fragments of my life interwoven with others, the memories that I return to incessantly, the ones that bring me moments of pure, uninterrupted joy.

Reminders of me in others and reminders of them in me.

A note that doesn’t exist until the next addition comes to me, then I type without consideration for the English language. It’s the only facet of my life in which I am patient and practiced in pretending, for fear of overloading something so precious. Despite the delicate balance I walk, the additions are quick, short, stocky sentences that lack finesse like the ones I often find in my more unedited pieces. My so-called patience centers around my ability to ignore said note until the addition comes to me, then all bets are off. “Red nails-Jackie” titles the note out of sheer embarrassment to come up with anything better. It's awkward to care so much, admitting to yourself that you are capable of missing. So, I ignore the thing that means so much to me. I would rather forget about the note and leave it untitled, but alas, Apple decides that what I christened the note with shall be its label. “Red nails-Jackie.” Acknowledging the existence of said note is worse than leaving the never-ending body of text headless and confused. The note will remain cryptically confused in the sense that one day, I wish to no longer be able to understand the very thing I gave substance to. My hope is that the sorry souls that come across said note, somehow and somewhere, will assume that the senseless scribbles are a collection of passwords or goals or strange dreams that just had to be written down. The normal ramblings of life and nothing more. Not the tributes to people I love, the reminiscence of happiness, the things that are innately the names I write about, the “what makes you, you,” the stolen pieces of others I now hold as my own, the people I love that don’t know it and the mundane things that are forever ingrained in my brain.

“Red nails-Jackie.” The original, unedited version of the title is “Re nails-Jackie salad bowl Pumpernickel,” which says a whole lot of nothing. I’m aware. Before I even knew I was starting this, my fingers were typing for me. Hence, the “re nails.” The red nails refer to my aunt Jackie, who is a sporadic woman with spindly long red nails, her signature, that always found themselves in trouble with my mother, the germaphobe. When at my Nona's dinner table, they’d reach over to pluck and pick at everything. I must add that Jackie is on my father’s side, which is to say she was admired for her gusto, but ultimately tolerated by my mom. Appreciated, but loved only in small doses, ones that were expertly planned and considered with the ease of exiting swiftly with four children. The reason being that eating with her is a tricky and choreographed dance that will leave you hungry due to her signature rouged fingertips that curiously found themselves in things. Specifically, the shared salad bowl (that always stunk of vinegar), the one with tongs readily available, and the pumpernickel bread—mine and my Nona's favorite. Let me tell you, I did not dare to touch that bread with my mother sitting stoic next to me—signaling that I would eat at home. Jackie’s favorite act was using her pinchers to prod at the pumpernickel bread, swishing her fingers in drawn-out circles, to showcase that the bread’s marbling of tan and brown is how you distinguish the loaf from others. A polished product from the Jewish bakery downtown, the type people wake up early for and feel accomplished when a coveted loaf is snatched.

As a child, all I was ever wondering about during her performances was whether she had all ten nails intact. I was not going to be the one who ended up with one of those suckers on their plate—no surprise crunches for this girl. My family would joke that the day a nail comes loose is the day to buy your lotto tickets and scratch-offs because you were the chosen one—my response, laughter, was always dipped in hesitancy. To prevent such a monstrosity, my mind would map where she had touched. Anytime my aunt Jackie needed “just a pinch of onion more” or to rip “just a corner of bread” to soak up all the vinegar from the salad, I understood that I was not to have salad or bread. Her sickly (to me) long red nails always pinched or played or ripped or prodded food to then return to the table, never grabbed in full. Because that was too much for her. To her, “oh, I just washed my hands” acted as a defensive justification for sticking her supposedly “washed hands” in everything. As a family unit, our court of peers always called bullshit on her supposed “clean hands” because as a louder opinionated crowd, we required the type of proof that was never there. A dripping faucet, a whiff of soap or possibly, a damp kitchen rag slung over the oven handle. No Passover table was safe from her fingers and after the long readings, I just wanted to eat. No wonder my mother brought her own Tupperware for her “picky eaters” on longer dinner visits. Admittedly, before the introduction of Jackie to the dining table, I can’t remember a time when I refused my Nona’s cooking. In her presence, I unknowingly accepted my role as the peacekeeper in the game that was family dinner, which meant understanding that Jackie would remain unchanged and knowing better than to inflict senseless uproar by leaving the dinner table. I dodged many accusatory questions upholding this act, “What do you mean, my food is not good enough for you?” Instead, I waited for a casual slip of the hand under the tablecloth that presented gifts of grapes and peanut butter sandwiches, a sleight of hand trick perfected by Pamela, clever mom.

And for that, Jackie is cemented in my mind and notes app as “Red nails-Jackie.” The rest of the note contains a similar vernacular, incomplete phrases or words and then a name or initial.

Notes

“Re nails-Jackie salad bowl Pumpernickel-Jackie”

“Records signature-Harlen.”

“Lyin’ eyes-highway relative”

“Me feeding everyone bread with ease, I’m cool I can be cool, mouth open-D.”

“That was good, class reading, Desperado, like a negative-G.”

“Blue speaker, Captain Jack-W.”

“Ruining the internet, Parakalo, broken wine glass-M.”

“Flick of the glass, taxi, rap, Disney-N.”

“Bottom of the bag, built like a friend, world cup-C.”

“Gold sparkles in the corner of the eye-L.”

“Passed out on the dinghy-E.”

“Cackling like old ladies at brunch-E.”

"Imitation game-Mr.Brauer"

*I wish to go to summer camp with these people, to invite everyone who ever captivated me with their presence and host a workshop where we get to do all our favorite things and just live together. Content in doing the mundane, happily together.

You see now. You must. They come in flashes, these stocky phrases, satisfying some part of my brain that yearns to be clicked into place and maneuvered forcefully until I know forgetting is no longer an option. That some part of me fossilized these people for myself despite the reality of notes deleted, phones lost, memory faded, and the enigma I molded for future me to crack (will I always know what “red nails” is referring to?). It's easy really, everyone can do it. Here, let's start with “enigma.”

The first time I heard the word enigma was in The Imitation Game, a movie I've watched so many times the words have become jumbled together in my memory despite the soundtrack remaining clear. That movie is so sensory-oriented. To this day I can drum my fingers to the beat of the eerily quiet hum of the machine they built to decode Nazi communication. Lots of noise in that movie, originating from moving parts and little pencils in awkwardly giant Cumberbatch hands that scratched math on notepads. I can see this movie in my mind: Mr. Cumberbatch stood bent in a suit for most of it, as if he was uncomfortable with himself. It was the only movie downloaded on my mom’s knock-off iPad for an eight-hour drive to Wildwood, New Jersey, from Rochester, New York, most of which was spent in Philly traffic. I think I, too, became bent after eight hours. What a strange choice of movie to spend your spare gigabytes on. Like my mother didn’t have access to something more lighthearted. Now, I don’t remember my seat position, reclined or not. I don’t remember why I kept replaying the solemn movie. I certainly don’t remember the exact plot. But I feel and can see this moment. Maybe that’s why I chose to write about this movie for pre-calc extra credit because I thought I could write three to five pages about the significance of math in the movie. I certainly could not. With confidence, I turned in a ten-page paper detailing more about myself and what bits and bobs of the movie I could recall than any math that could crack Nazi coding. I’ve noticed this pattern with myself; I'll read a prompt, write without consideration of said prompt, and then tirelessly attempt to edit my writing to fit said prompt, which doesn’t feel very prompting. Prompts to me are words, phrases, images, or feelings that I am ignited to write about, not structured guidelines that produce boring ramblings that didn’t exist prior to writing. I dedicate this notion to Mr. Brauer and the note on my phone titled “imitation game-Mr. Brauer.” For the pre-calc teacher that appreciated that math meant road trips to NJ, knock-off iPads, what happens when you idly sit in a car for hours, and not something more significant. Admittedly, I didn’t deserve an A, but thank you, Mr. Brauer.

Essentially, you find the essence of the people in your life, and you mark them. You let them come to you at first, sometimes prompted by words or phrases, but chosen by your brain as a way to cement others in you. Strangely, I can never write about the people in my immediate family because there is not one thing, one moment, that can sum up who they are to me. Not to say that the people who live in my notes section are exclusively their markers, but these fleeting fumblings of my brain allow me to remember people I haven’t seen in a while, won’t see again, or moments I have no hopes of returning to. You know those moments, the ones you examine for comfort on cold days until they are so looked over and cared for that you get frustrated over the minor details. What did he say? Where was I? To prevent this, I note very little detail. I never want the “why can’t I remember?” I love details, but leaving space and air for your memory to breathe is important. I can’t and won't remember everything, but the memory parcels I do have bring me back to the moment and allow my brain to fill the rest in. Lie to me, sure. Whatever it needs to do to bring me back. Admittedly, I may never know the exact look, words used, or backdrop to these moments. However, I remember how my body felt—my reactions. Muscle memory is a crazy thing. Red nails. Only two words need to be said to have the scene flash before my eyes, which invokes a shudder (my aunt Jackie and those damn red nails). My honest hope is that the people whose names I share will have almost no idea as to what I am saying about them because of how I said it. I almost hate that I wrote this because now I am laying out what I so carefully wanted hidden.

To my phone, my confidant — keep them safe for me,

Mattie

Lettitor

Dear reader,

Why do we make promises? When we chose the theme for this issue, we expected a sweet collection of love stories; odes to vows held close and kept. Instead, we learned that promises are so much more than that. What you are about to read is an honest and vulnerable portrait of the messiness of human relationships. It’s an exploration of the gritty, tangled threads that hold us together and pull us apart. We noticed that the failed promises are the ones that really stuck with our readers, the ones that were broken or strained, or made for the wrong reasons. But, even amongst the pain and disappointment, through these stories, something triumphant emerges: proof of the desperate and enduring need for understanding, trust, and connection.

In the pages of his issue, an anonymous writer dusts off the generational secrets her family has carried in silence for decades, buried but never gone. Mattie Valinski shares the hidden gems in her notes app, where fragments of sentences capture moments and people she may never see again-- a promise to remember what the bits and pieces truly mean. Alexis reminisces on the frightening weight promises hold, big and small, and makes promises to herself to never forget the things that matter most. As you read this issue, we hope you can connect to the promises people have shared, and maybe make a few to yourself.

What is a promise, really? Words that leave a bitter taste in your mouth, a ghost that tugs at your heart, a floor that might give out from under you at every moment. Something that feels so heavy yet so easy to break. All the things you’ve been and the things you will become. As we move into the summer, we urge you to be gentle with your promises.