P.S.

Read This Like a Memory

Article by Leyla Kramarsky Art by Max Montague

Dear you (Me, before I learned to keep a plant alive, eighteen years old),

I graduate in two months.

P.S. This is not an elegy.

I am not a collector of things. I used to be, but I couldn’t take the loss. 

The casualties:

1. A small plastic dolphin, down the bathroom drain. Given to me by a boy who I kissed in the back of the school bus in kindergarten. 

2. A marble horse.

3. A ring.

4. A plastic bunny.

Because you were bad with hard objects (specifically, it seems, those of an animal nature), I keep words. Letters, mostly, but newspaper clippings and old photographs will suffice. I keep telling myself I’ll collage with them. I always carry glue, ready to save something. They live under my bed in a green Staples folder from high school. Sometimes, when my feet stick out from the bottom of my sheets, I’m worried they’ll grab me and pull me under with them.

“I’ve been thinking a lot about postscripts. Like P.S.’s,” I tell Mira. Really, they’re haunting me. 

“Oh interesting.” 

“I’m not sure how I feel about them.”

“Ok.” She nods.

“Like, are they more important than the letter? Less important? Sometimes I think they’re the entire letter.”

“Right. They’re sort of like parentheses.”

“Okay, yes.”

“Like, clearly the writer wanted it to appear less important, but is that because it is or because it’s secretly more important and they’re overcompensating for its secret importance.” 

“Totally.” I agree. What a fantastic take.

I’m talking to Mira over facetime in a bathing suit on a couch somewhere hot. She’s in her room miles away. I wish I could sit down on her floor. I would like her to offer me a cheese stick.

P.P.S.  

My first (your first) home was near the Firestone tires and across the creek from the train tracks, and every time a train passed in the night it shook my room. I still smell it sometimes in wool and gas stations late at night. And each time, I see a blue clock and a sofa and a ghost and I thank God.

I was too young to live there– unable to roast sweet potatoes or drive. But, still, I laughed, I learned what a sun, moon, and rising sign were, I bought my own groceries, I acquired a bike from Craig’s List and had it stolen a month later. The flowers in my vases were always dead, but everything else was so alive. Tingling.

I am sure I fell in love in that house. Maybe with another person, maybe with a new life, maybe with the evening light that snuck through my window at 6:00 pm every day. I had no bed frame and no blinds. Total exposure. 

Everything you’re feeling right now– everything you feel in that house– won’t go away. It will fester. It will boil and steam until it bubbles over and spills onto the tiled floor and burns your bare feet. It will turn purple on your skin in the shape of a thumbprint.

A bruise is a sort of postscript, I think. A postscript is something that can’t let go, I think.

P.P.P.S. 

Another postscript: a sunburn, a half-empty handle of Fireball in the trunk of my car, a squashed straw hat.

Your first summer will be perfect. The trees will be impossibly lush. You don’t know yet how beautiful a color evening can be. On the lakes, in the fields. The whirring buzz of cicadas. The breeze. The burn of whiskey on your throat. It will all sound like a guitar, strummed gently at a campfire by the person you love the most. It will taste like black raspberry ice cream and PBR. When it’s all over, you will stand in your driveway, surrounded by its remnants, and cry so hard that you exhaust yourself to the point of illness and mom has to drive up from the city and tuck you in. 

This is a new kind of yearning. This is how you learn to miss people. This is when it begins to hurt. Words fail because they aren’t feelings. And when I say feelings, I mean it purely in a bodily sense. I mean that songs paralyze me. I mean that freshly cut grass smells like Saturday. I mean that I have dreams. I mean that I think about you all the time. 

When you go back to school you’ll look for it all. For yourself. And you’ll keep finding her as a sort of afterthought. And you’ll miss her. 

P.P.P.P.S.

Sometimes I think that loving someone so much feels a lot like missing them.

“Weak is not a synonym for bad.”

Ruby says to me in the ocean. We’re standing just before the waves break (where I always get scared…because I almost drowned once) and she’s holding back with me. And I’m so taken with how much we know about each other. How much we’ve seen and will see and how much we’ve loved each other through it. And I can’t help but think about being twelve with her. Then being twenty-one with her. Then thirty. Then seventy. Of all the endings, this one is perhaps the hardest.

We spend five hours on the couch in the Airbnb. It’s raining and the power goes out. We finish a bottle of wine in the dark. I wake up holding her hand at 4:30 a.m.

She stands so close to me when I’m making breakfast that I can’t move my left elbow. When I turn to make fun of her, she says “I want to be closer,” and puts her head against my neck. We keep trying to write postscripts in the form of post-grad road trips and next summer adventures, but the words are fuzzy.

I think of Reese and her theories on “perfect hugging height” and the idea that sometimes we are simply made for each other. 

P.P.P.P.S. 

I’m not really sure what I’m writing about. I think I’m just scared of ending this piece/my last issue of Cipher/college.

P.P.P.P.P.S. 

I sort of thought that by the time I graduated, everything would be laid out ahead of me and it would all feel exciting and real and tangible. Instead, you get older and you stop going home and you start going to your parents’ house and the grocery store starts to get boring and you have to learn to cry in front of your friends. 

I am trying to figure out how to take it with me. I worry that everyone else learned to love in a way that I haven't. A way that is free and sustainable and related and doesn’t make them anxious and doesn’t feel like it could crack. I worry that closeness expires across time and state lines. I worry about my mother, my brother’s impending college matriculation, our absence. The holes that form. 

But, then I dance in the kitchen with Evie and Max and I giggle with Emma in the upstairs bathroom with Avril Lavigne playing and Sam is leaning on me on the couch and my arms are wrapped around her and I walk into pillar and Dani and Sabine are upstairs and Dani’s hair is in a clip with a glass of wine waiting and Reese is explaining her book organization method and Lex’s eyes are sparkling and Mira is sending me poetry and words and I run into Arlo on the street and Naomi has come into my room holding something beautiful that she has made and I feel like a child again. And, in kitchens and bathrooms miles away, Maya and Natasha and Jan and Anais and Elsie and Lucinda are in homes with the lights on playing their own music and calling when it’s a particularly nice day out or they’re on a particularly long drive or a star reminds them of me, and the love doesn’t go away! How nice to know. How lucky. 

P.P.P.P.P.S. 

We all look different now. But you would know us immediately. 

P.P.P.P.P.P.S. 

A poem Mira sent me:

Trains 

Rebecca O’Brien

At night the train passes so closely/

Outside my window that my apartment/

Shakes. It used to frighten me the way/

That I would wake in the morning to/

Find that the keys had shaken from/

Where I had set them on the kitchen/

Counter down into the sink, or the way/

That my potted cactus had shaken from/

Its table to spill across the floor. But the/

Morning I awoke to find that you had/

Shaken away with the passing of the/

Train I was not surprised, and that was/

When I knew I had been in one place/

Too long.

P.P.P.P.P.P.P.S. 

There’s never enough, and that is why we save things. Why we write letters and add postscripts. Why we make it so that the longing is something you can hold. To say I don’t want to stop talking to you ever. I don’t want to go. But, we do. And the remnants live under our bed. And they read like a memory, and they remind me of you.

We’re in the yard surrounded by the ghosts of kiddie pools and potluck brunches. Miles and Olivia are piled on top of each other reading. I cut up mangos to share. I imagine our bodies from above. I imagine I could float up into the clouds that are rainbow around their edges from the sun. There’s so much to do, but maybe instead we’ll go for a walk. 

Let the rest of your life be delicious. It is. So far, it was. I miss you.

Love,

Leyla

Dear Leyla,

A Letter to a Friend about Rejection, Enthymemes, and Good Omens

Article and Art by Mira Springer

Dear Leyla,

I am getting stuck writing letters to the wrong people. I started with a response to a letter written to me in high school by this boy who sucked who I loved. He wrote:

"The more I think about your romantic life, the more I think about ‘the guy’ I see you with, who is just so not me, someone who will drop anything to watch whatever show you think is interesting and want to talk about; someone who has as much, or more, energy than you, someone who can keep up."

The letter ends: "I want you to know that I see everything you do, no good deed goes unpunished." 

There are 44 commas in the letter and two periods. I find myself thinking about "the guy" often, far more often than I think about the boy who invented him. 

Dear Reed,

I have no idea where you are now or how you're doing. I don't want to know. It was funny to me that you made a reference to Wicked in that letter when we were both so vehemently not musical theater kids. Recently I realized that “no good deed goes unpunished” was something an old Italian priest said and was not invented by the people who wrote Wicked. This makes it less funny. There was a time when I thought you were the most interesting person on earth; I would have stayed up all night listening to you talk about comedy. You did things to me I can forgive and things to other people I can't. Either way, I think you would bore me now. 

That line, “keep up,” came up again last fall. Another boy told me that he wasn’t good enough for me, that I needed someone who could “keep up.” I wanted to tell him that I didn’t think I was moving that fast. I wanted to tell him that he was doing a better job keeping up than anyone ever had before. I wanted to tell him that sometimes, I struggled to keep up with him, but that the footrace was part of what was so fun about it.

Dear "the guy,"

I wanted to tell him I thought he might be you. He’d been telling me in different ways, over and over again that he wasn’t, but I swear I saw it embroidered on the tag of one of his sweatshirts. I swear I caught a glimpse of that boundless energy just behind the green in his eyes.

Leyla, what if this person doesn't exist? What if I spend the rest of my life writing letters in my head, in my journal, scratched into the soft parts of my skin to the people that I mistake for them?

I spent an entire evening writing descriptions of all ten of the boys who rejected me in high school and how they did it. The one who stopped giving me drum lessons, the one who later recounted to me in great detail a theater-related sex dream he had about me, the one where I confessed my feelings with Love Actually style posters and my friends bought me a strawberry milkshake afterward. I couldn't remember who the tenth one was. 

I deleted the list. I'm not sure why I wrote it, or why I feel the urge to keep track of these things so obsessively. I want to make a graph and plot every point: which rejections were physical, which were emotional, which ones were casual brushes off the shoulder, and which ones were heart-wrenching gut punches. I envy people who lived during times when letter-writing was more rampant. They got to keep records of all of those correspondences, pieces of carbon-copied, flimsy paper that got passed down to their children who don't know what to do with them. So much of what I've written to people exists only in the digital realm. My children will never read it unless I leave them my passwords in my will. 

Getting rejected is a point of pride for me. When I try to explain this to people, they seem to think I am being dishonest and pathetic, but it's completely true. Putting my heart out on the line like that gives me this floating and unsettled feeling in my stomach, like biting into a sour apple or riding that frog hopper thing at amusement parks. But also, it makes me feel powerful somehow, in control of my own destiny. 

It turns out that rejecting someone else feels much worse. There is a power there too, but it does not feel like freedom. It's strange that when I am harboring feelings for someone, it's at the top of my mind for months on end, waiting to be mentioned, but when someone harbors feelings for me, it's possible for me to be completely oblivious. For people to be out there having these big, dumb, Mira-style crushes on me and for me to not know that they're noticing what I'm wearing, the way I speak, the places I go where they might run into me. With the big ones, I used to wait to confess my feelings until being with them hurt more than it felt good. I hate to think I might have been hurting someone in that way.

You're allowed to write about rejection when you're the underdog. Now, there are these things I can't write about. I have an irresistible compulsion to be so honest all the time. I’m working on becoming a better liar, or on fictionalizing the truth.

When I say I want someone to like me, I used to think I meant I wanted someone to love me. I thought I wanted someone to yearn for me so much that it ached. But now I don't think I do. It turns out I want to kiss someone at a party and then keep kissing them and figure it out together and go for walks. Something mutual like this has happened to me three times in my life I think. All three ended in me yearning anyway, so maybe that's a law of the universe.

Dear "the guy,"

What if I settle for someone like the boy who wrote you, or the boy who conjured you up for me recently; someone who gets high more days than he doesn’t, won't shut up about his credit score, writes run-on sentences with 44 commas and no period? Both times I was ready to do it. Both times, I would have gotten high with him most days and asked him to explain how credit cards work. Both times, he pushed me away gently, saying “it isn’t me. The guy is out there but it isn’t me.”

Really, it’s a gentler way of saying “I don’t want to be with you.” I hate when people tell me I deserve better, because shouldn’t what I want matter more than what I deserve? Men have been telling me this for eight years now. “You deserve better.” So what! So what if I deserve better and I know it and I want them anyway! But no, they tell me, I have to keep holding out for you. You’re out there somewhere and when I find you, it will be so magical.

I wrote a bad song once about Reed before he invented "the guy," about how he used to make my heart explode, but now he makes my chest feel like a muffled firework. As soon as I wrote it, I wanted to send it to him. I'm not sure why. Did I think my pain would be numbed if he understood it? Did I think that if I loved him enough, it would make him love me? I asked him if he wanted to hear it and he said no. 

I have written so much about people who will never read it. A huge part of me wants them to. I think I want to read everything anyone has ever written about me. But I understand now why he said no. It had never occurred to me that someone might see me, might write me the way I’ve been writing people. There is a cognitive dissonance between the version of me she describes and the version of me that lives in my head every day. It's a gift to be seen with such gorgeous specificity, but it's just that—a gift. I never did anything to deserve it, and I've always been uncomfortable receiving. 

It had been snowing for a couple of days, but I had been holed up in my room. As soon as I stepped outside that morning, the first thing that struck me was how quiet it was. I couldn’t hear the hum of I-25 or anyone speaking. There was no one in sight, just piles and piles of snow in every direction. I felt that I had to think of something to say to make up for how quiet it was.

“It’s so quiet,” I said.

He agreed.

Suddenly there was a crack and, across the field, a huge, snow-laden branch broke from a tree and plunged into the snow below. He and I looked at each other in shared disbelief, like, there's no way we just saw that happen. We got into a discussion with Tim later about whether the snow was bad for the trees because it was wet and so heavy. Margot says this is normal for Colorado in early spring.

In class, we learned about enthymemes. When someone makes an argument, they state premises that lead naturally to their claim, but often they leave out one of their premises because it's obvious or implicit. For example, if I say I'm going for a walk at 8 PM and therefore I will wear a jacket, the enthymeme is that it will be cold at 8 PM. But sometimes enthymemes are left out for other reasons; the speaker is trying to conceal something or there's a part of their argument that they're unwilling to say out loud.

Rejections are rife with enthymemes. People say "I'm not looking for a relationship right now" when their unspoken premises are "you're interested in a relationship with me" and "I'm not interested in a relationship with you."

What are the enthymemes of "we can't be friends?" The possibilities run through the dishwasher and come out dirty. I run through them again. I scrub them with the rough side of the sponge until they sparkle.

Dear vowel girls,

Some women have taken up residence in my head of their own accord, but mostly I have loved women through the eyes of men. Smiled and nodded as he described the dark tendrils of hair floating around her face or the ache in his chest when he’s away from her. I convince myself that if I study these women hard enough, someday I could transform into one of them and be loved too. All of their names start with vowels.

I don't resent you and I wish I could hear that you hated me. I wish he would tell me that you're the enthymeme supporting his arguments. This would make more sense.

I look at you with writer’s eyes because I swallowed everything he wrote about you. It went down like whiskey, neat– burned my throat and made me callous. If I could make him swallow everything I’ve written, it would be like gum– sticky, then gone like it was never there (it wouldn’t stay in his stomach for seven years). (I hope he doesn’t stay in mine that long.)

I showed up once when he wasn't expecting me. I always put the door code in wrong the first time, so by the time I got inside, he was already on his feet. He looked scared. I made up an excuse about something I needed in the filing cabinet and he agreed wearily, knowing that it wasn't true, coming down from his panic. I hadn't meant to show up. I didn't want anything in particular from him. I was walking home and I knew he was there and my legs took me, out of habit. I used to walk through the library basement on my way out, even though it was a floor out of the way, just in case I ran into him there. You aren't allowed to talk in the basement, so I knew we wouldn't speak, but back then at least he would have been happy to see me. He would have yelped or whimpered in that somehow flattering way he did when he saw someone he wasn't expecting to see. Feigned fear, implied submission, playful, nothing real.

That night as I was trying to fall asleep, I couldn't get the image of him out of my mind; standing in the archway, backlit by a single lamp, body tense, face full of fear. Did he think someone was breaking in and then was relieved when it was just me? Was he hoping it was someone else and was disappointed? Or was I exactly who he was afraid to see: this person who he couldn't shake, no matter how hard he tried. Who was following him like a shadow. I would be scared too.

I kept pushing it with him, against my own will. All I wanted was for things to be normal between us. I had stopped yearning, stopped writing about him in the second person; all I wanted was to be his friend, and still, I wanted it with such recklessness it became destructive. I was carrying around this quiver of arrows all the time of things I wanted to say to him, things I knew I wasn't supposed to say. Anyone else would have just carried it and kept quiet, but my arm kept reaching into it mechanically and pulling one out, over and over. Nock, aim, shoot. Nock, aim, shoot. I never hit the bullseye (I'm not even sure what I was aiming for) but I kept getting close enough that I couldn't give up.

That moment felt like the end of something. I'm not sure what. Leyla, you tell me it's just the end of me pushing it with him, that maybe I managed to shoot my last arrow. I hit an animal that ran in front of the target; it made my guts twist with shame and I won't shoot anymore. My quiver is empty. 

I think it might have been the end of our friendship. Every time he looks at me, I'll imagine his face as it was that night, contorted with terror, and I'll have to look away. 

I sat on a bench behind my house to finish my book. I could hear the constant drip of snow melting somewhere. The paper was so bright in the sun, it hurt my eyes. I was three pages away from the end when suddenly, without any ceremony at all, a small twig fell into my lap, in the crevice between my stomach and my book. It was alive. Maybe six or seven inches long, broken off at one end, still green. Buds crept up along either side; four at the bottom had already bloomed into these tiny pink and purple flowers. I wasn’t sure whether this was a good luck charm, a celebration of the coming spring, a dance the tree was doing to the sound of the snow melting— or if I was supposed to be mourning the fact that these buds would never bloom. I had no idea how this twig might have become detached from the tree. It wasn’t windy. The sun was out and the sky was still. 

A man with a long gray beard, a green sweater, and sweatpants rode up the hill swiftly on an electric scooter. A lanyard in his pocket flew out behind him and I decided it was a good omen.

Dear letters, 

I keep writing you all the time, even when I am not writing you.

Stop composing yourselves in my head in the shower. Get out of my journal. 

Un-address and rip off your stamps and come back to bed.

I stopped writing to read for a while. Maybe today is meant for consumption and not creation. I just want to pretend to have arguments about stuff that doesn't matter with someone who likes me and I like them too and when they kiss me I don't have to think twice about whether or not I want them to kiss me. I recognize that it is boring of me to want this.

Leyla, do you want things that are boring? What are they? Tell me about it.

With love,

Mira

P.S. This letter ended up becoming a collage of scraps from everything I've written since October. A lot of it is old and faded now. Thank you for being patient with me while I wielded scissors and a glue stick clumsily. We became friends in October because we skipped the Bruce Springsteen event to drink lime-a-ritas and read our writing out loud to each other. You make me fall in love with writing again when I feel disillusioned. Everything you write sparkles and it makes the world around me sparkle too. I hope this ending isn't The End. (I don't think it will be.)

White Child, Asian Daughter

My favorite color is red

Article and Art by Julia Nichols

My mother made me take piano lessons when I was single-digit little.

She says that’s why I have long, slender fingers and strong pinkies.

I wonder what kind of fingers my birth mother had.

My mother’s boyfriend plays the piano professionally.

He says I’m too old to be great, but I could still be really good.

I know my scales, I know how to read music (treble clef).

I quit piano before I could become great because I didn’t want to be another Asian girl who played piano.

I grew up white. My mom is white, my family is white, I was a member of my family and my mom was my mom so obviously, I was white. My mother didn’t hide the fact that I was from China or that I was this thing called “adopted.” I thought it was a simple trait like having a favorite color.

11 months old

Adore her. Squish her face and tell her in your baby voice that her cheeks are just like marshmallows but she’s one hundred times sweeter. Put your pointer finger in her hand and watch it instinctively grip you like you were always her mother.

“Were you sent to your mom in a box?” I was in second grade and I didn’t understand the question. Was it bad to be sent in a box? How did other parents get their children? I didn’t have to understand the question to understand that people knew something I didn’t when I said, “I was adopted from China.” I carried on with caution, still thinking that being adopted was normal, but maybe I shouldn’t tell everyone.

3 years old

Don’t keep secrets from her. You flew across the world for her, you prayed for her, you knew the second that you held her that she was yours.

Comments made towards me between middle school and high school: “Why don’t you have an accent?” “You look like someone who would play the violin.” “Your dad must have strong Chinese genetics.” “Your eyes look like hot dogs.” “Oh, you’re Chinese? Can you read some Chinese for the class?” “You don’t look Chinese Chinese. You look Western Chinese.”

8 years old

Tell her that her mother loved her. She wanted what was best for her. Selflessness is the only reason people give up their children.

Learning that I was not white was a hard pill to swallow. Learning that other people saw me as Asian was even harder. I became repulsed at the thought of playing the violin so I quit. I pretended I was bad at math, I insisted that I didn’t like K-pop, I curled my hair so it didn’t look so straight and coarse and Asian.

Early Teens

You can no longer convince her that love is stronger than blood. She knows why people ask the same question whenever they meet you and her together. She knows why they blink three times when you introduce her as your daughter. Remind her of the good old days. She will hate you because you are implying that the good days are behind her.

My mother used to force me into Chinese language lessons and summer camps. One summer she placed me in an immersion camp. Perhaps she thought that’s what I deserved after refusing to absorb any Chinese from my lessons. At the camp, the staff would not let me go to the bathroom unless I asked in Chinese. They knelt to my level and tried to talk to me in a language that didn’t feel like mine. My mom told me it was so I could “connect to my heritage.” I didn’t know what heritage meant. The people around me felt like they didn’t belong in my world.

16 years old

Watch over her shoulder as she molds her chin to a point and practices smiling in the mirror.

Pray that she doesn’t turn into one of those girls.

Sometime in my teenage years, I was snooping through my mother’s China memorabilia. I had seen most of it a million times: pictures of me at my first doctor’s appointment, pictures of us the first time she held me, my mother’s plane tickets to China, and the keycard from the hotel. My mother wasn’t home when I found a folder with a different kind of memorabilia. A piece of paper that told a story about a baby found on the street with no home and no family.

18 years old

Dream about the days when she used to say I love you instead of goodbye.

18 years old

Touch her shoulder hoping she’ll hold your hand.

18 years old

Take note of her cupid’s bow. It is the only thing that has not changed.

I like to think I get my slender fingers and pointed chin from my mother. I like to think that I get my stubbornness from her too. And I realize that I have. But not from the mother I was thinking of. I hate that I don’t know if I’m genetically predisposed to develop heart failure or cancer. I hate that I care about knowing those things. I hate that if I asked my mother about it she wouldn’t know either. I’ve come to realize that there are parts of me that my mother will never understand. There are experiences that my mother will never be able to share with me the way an Asian mother could. I find myself wondering how much I would wonder if I grew up with my mother. My other mother. I instantly feel ashamed.

Half-Return

Article by Anonymous Art by Alex Wollinka

My joints are stiff and my limbs are cold when I step over the threshold and catch sight of him sitting at his desk, eyes glued to the monitor. My father is like a rabbit bone– pale, weak, and usually only obtained through a frenzied, violent hunt. The war had ripped the meat of humanness from his bones so that in the five years since his return, I could sense an unnaturally cold rage radiating from his breaths. I think you felt it too, though you never said so. Lately, we spend much of our time practicing the art of silence. When his words surface, we reject ourselves and pat down any bumps or ridges that might aggravate. My skin is pretty smooth, most things just slip away.

I choose not to announce my return from school and instead walk lightly, silently past him to my bedroom door. I close it slowly behind me and when I hear the knob click, I drop my backpack on the carpet, roll my shoulders back, and sit at my desk, resting my head in my hands. I breathe through my nose, counting each one. I understand that the conditions under which I live are unavoidable but I can still despise them.

A few years prior, I noticed a loud bitterness settling under my skin, one that seemed to grow like crawling vines. Regrettably, I have had moments of spirited abandon. In these moments, that bitterness bursts through my skin— the skin I have spent so much time flattening and polishing, like paper, and drips my (his) blood on the floor (so here then there, I practice the art of war). While he hisses at me to clean–clean–clean, I scrub the dirty carpet that has scraps of moldy food in its fibers as my body, now a bit too rough to be silent, becomes heavier with acrimony. Sometimes, I wonder what it might be like to look at myself. I imagine it to be expressionless and recondite, what a corpse looks like when it has a thin white sheet stretched over itself.

The Day has almost turned to Night when hunger grumbles in my stomach. I have not left my seat for a few hours and feel a little sore from my inactivity. So I rise from my desk, stretching for a few seconds, and then walk to the door, slowly twisting the metal knob. My feet land on the carpet and I very nearly make it to the kitchen without notice. But, he walks to me and speaks. I speak back. Somewhere, I make a mistake. You are here now too. All of it I clean up. When all is said and done, I am tired and unhungry. I sway back to my room, hands dangling like spiders at my sides, and collapse back into my chair.

You know that rejection makes your face burn white hot and without you noticing, splits your soul right down the middle. It makes you sense yourself incredulously and shamefully. It makes you feel pathetic and pitiful, like a baby fox with its legs broken, abandoned by nature to lay on a bloody, mossy ground. You might try to stare at it head-on but it will glare right back at you. It’ll strike you, shake you, turn you on your head, and laugh.

So on this Day, I choose to reject him instead of myself. I sit silently, swinging my legs back and forth, and despite the weight of my decision, feel excited. Because the way is simple. All there is to do is take the part of me that is him and cut it out. I rise from my desk and place my hands on my hips. I pace back and forth for a few minutes, enthusiasm growing hotter with each step. I’m thinking, thinking. There’s an urgent pressure right behind my eyes, revealing some hidden power pulsing in my head. This is when something strange happens, something you wouldn’t believe. When I think that my chest might burst and my brain will break my skull in two–I feel weightless, like the carpet cannot touch my feet and I am hovering just above it (I think that I have stepped out of myself). The experience is surreal and dizzying. I watch her straight black hair that swings lightly as she moves. I hear the fluids in her stomach and the quick, sharp inhales through her nostrils. The more I look the more uneasy I become, feeling the weight of my "body" shift ever so slightly. The more that I look the less I understand and the less I recognize. Who is she? I ask myself, with the sadness of one already dead and conscious of their own deadness. Who is she?

But this sadness soon turns to exhilaration. Because this one isn't me, I am me!

I, unbound by any law, laugh to (at) myself. I look down at my arms and hands to find that I have none. Glee twists my face into an ugly, triumphant grin. I am no one except myself. Gone is him that travels up and down my body, the one crying through my skin. I've done it! I try to whisper but my voice is soundless, holding none of his enunciations or tones. The world is slowly falling away into white nothingness. White, pure, and chaste. I feel myself moving, running, chasing after something beyond. Where my heart might have been is a strange, ashy glow. As I run, it beats, breathes, and sighs. There is an eternity before I am caught because the world dies and begins again while I run. I’m hanging in limbo, continually moving but never changing. And yet, the world is still a little faster than me. With its birth and death, I also die and then am born again. Nature latches onto me and rips my skin open just slightly.

Here, I fall, paralyzed by the movement of time. I blacken the space, like ink spilling into clear water. For a moment, I grasp everything. Then I hold nothing. I am going away, but I no longer wish to. Any excitement has vanished in a spur of terror and sweat. I'm on the verge of unbecoming and unraveling, feeling myself tipping over the edge into an unseen hell. I understand now that humans aren’t meant to possess multiple deaths and multiple lives. The thought that I could die while still living twisted my body and brain, and nearly eradicated my soul. I hear the sharp slice of a knife as it slips past the skin of the apple, spilling invisible blood. I pull out a few strands of hair and wrap them around my wrist. I get on my knees and begin to clean.

My father is asking me what I am going to study when I leave. Law? Medicine? Or maybe Biology? Dentistry? But then, you’re asking me to come back home.

The Garden Dwellers

Chasing carpentry and mortality in infinite courtyards.

Article by Will Garrett Art by Max Montague

Today I met a carpenter from my neighborhood who only builds with wood from his homegrown trees, their roots entangled over one another like a lattice crust on an apple pie. They continue building under the earth in his circular courtyard.

In the springtime, you can see the tips of cherry blossoms peaking out above the walls of his house. From down the street, their flowers look like clumps of pink-spotted cotton balls. I asked if I could see them up close. 

He led me to the courtyard and onto a dirt path with four spiraling quadrants, a labyrinth of plant life. Traveling along one of the lower quadrants, we passed through rows of giant cacti and desert junipers. A gecko was climbing downwards on the trunk of a juniper. The gecko must have been shy because he scurried around to the other side as we approached. Shuffling sideways, I tried to spot him, when I realized that the carpenter was nowhere to be seen.  

“Hello?” I realized I didn’t know his name. “Carpenter, sir?” 

He emerged from behind a boulder far down the path. 

“Hurry,” he said, waving me over. “I don’t have much time. My red cedar tree is dying.” 

We breezed through his desert, zigzagging along sagebrush and shrubs with branches that sagged to the sand. 

The sun barely reached us, but sweat still gathered on my shoulders.

We reached a light jog as the shrubs of sage grew sparse, leading into spring colors of witch alders and tart blackberries. I was tempted to stop, but I didn’t want to lose the carpenter again. I hesitated and then jogged past a patch of dandelions, their thin stalks swaying. 

The carpenter was pointing in many different directions. First at a field of poppies, then at a valley oak with bulging green acorns. It seemed as if the more things he spotted, the faster he ran. I began to worry that I was going to forget all the different species of plants that I was seeing.

Poplars, daphnes, sugar cane, bamboo, rose bushes. I could barely keep the carpenter in sight. Suddenly, we emerged into a clearing amidst a circle of Douglas-firs. In the center were two cherry blossom trees. Their graying wood was tangled with moss that flaked off the undersides of their arms. The cherry blossoms were a duet, a pair of dancers, keeping each other stable as one tilted backward and let its arm lie loosely outward at a high angle. The second tree stood straight, holding up the sloped waist of the other trunk with its inside branch, the outside branch in a triumphant pose. White petals with pink filaments covered their arms. 

I wondered how the blossoms were blooming, as it was January. The carpenter told me that the blossoms were transplanted from Japan last week. I watched a petal fall from the face of the tilted dancer.

I asked if all of the plant species were transplanted. Begrudgingly, he answered yes, that they would all probably die in a year due to the foreign conditions. However, the carpenter was sure that the deaths of all of his trees would not be put to waste. 

I knew that the carpenter was anxious to attend to his dying cedar, so I let him know that I was ready to move along, on the condition that he showed me how he salvaged the trees in their afterlife. He nodded and took me down a fire road. We quickly arrived at the edge of his courtyard, at the deck below his kitchen. As we walked up the stairs, I gripped the railing. It was smooth to the touch. I was surprised to find that no matter how tightly I held it, there was no resistance. I could keep walking up the stairs at the same pace. My grip didn’t hold me back. It was as if the railing was covered in oil, but without the residue.

The carpenter was across the deck when I ascended the stairs. I saw him pointing first at the wooden planks under his feet, then the railing, the underside of his bedroom balcony, and the walls. I gasped. All of the wood was opaque, a light brown that showed no sign of knots or grains, containing no texture or depth in its appearance. I touched it and it felt warm, freshly cut. 

From the other side of the deck, the carpenter said that it was inflammable. He lit a match and let the flame touch the wood’s surface. The flame crawled up three stories and into the sky.  

When I looked back, the carpenter was next to me, saying that the wood could withstand a hundred thousand rains and never rot. That it was made from the trees in the courtyard, transplanted from every corner of the globe. That its use is eternal.

He said that if I looked closely, I could see a pattern. With my nose just inches away from the wall next to the kitchen door, I stared into a line of a hundred planets forming an eclipse. 

He observed my wonder and asked what I saw. I told him that the universe was blocking its suns. Shaking his head, he disagreed, saying that I envisioned the wall incorrectly and that its pattern was actually a pinwheel of colors splattered on the cars of a moving ferris wheel, each receiving the sun at the apex of their orbit. 

He said that to recognize the pattern requires absolute awareness, something which concurrently applies to the construction of his walls. The carpenter was an acute listener. He knew when his trees had only minutes to live, which is when he would deliver the final stroke. His trees would then be reduced to a fine sawdust and mixed together for weeks in a blend of a hundred species. Once a homogenous blend, the sawdust would be plastered onto the vinyl walls of his house. Every year, a new layer. 

The carpenter told me to stand still as he went to check on his dying red cedar. Motionless on the deck, I watched him disappear into a grove of redwoods with orange spots on their bark, their ridges dried out and dying.  

I remembered the two cherry blossoms, holding out against the foreign sky with their final motion of dance. They too would come to an end, unfolding into the alchemists' stronghold of accruing dust. 

Afraid of staying any longer, I left his house from the side gate.

…

For a couple of months, I had no memories other than highway intersections, lampposts, and elevators, until one day, I found myself away from the city, staggering toward a house at the foot of a mountain. Passing along its front lawn, I fell to the ground in exhaustion, just short of the welcome mat, which was woven with sweetgrass and hickory. 

I was awoken by a tall man, the sun behind his head as he looked down at me. He had curly long hair that grazed the top of his glasses. Offering a hand, he helped me up and introduced himself as Joseph. Without passing any judgment on my trespassing, he welcomed me inside. 

Joseph’s house was thinner on the inside than the other carpenter’s. He led me from the foyer to the kitchen in three steps, an entrance as narrow as a bedroom, yet its halls seemed to stretch endlessly sideways. Opening the fridge, he offered to bring out some focaccia bread. Despite my hunger, I declined the offer, as I was distracted by what looked like a grove of giant trees that towered over the horizon of his backyard. Joseph caught my gaze and proclaimed that I was looking at a forest of red cedars, the first of them planted by his great-great-grandfather. 

Approaching the window, my peripheral view expanded, and I noticed a wall that lined the sides of the backyard, running about a hundred feet along each side of the forest until it was hidden by the outline of cedars. The expansive wall was equipped with a slanted roof and windows. It was his house, thinly barricading the entirety of the forest. The forest was his courtyard. 

Joseph laughed when he saw me marveling at his empire. He said that he always enjoyed showing it to people for the first time, but he made it clear that his house was not built with the purpose of enchanting its visitors. The surrounding walls were a place for the homeless and sick, and its courtyard for the natural dwellings of wild possums, deer, squirrels, hares and cottontails. Joseph told me that he was a carpenter and that the expansion of his walls was owed to the growth of his cedars. With that, Joseph opened the sliding door to the deck and led me into his forest. 

There were hundreds of animal paths and no established trail in sight. We walked on a path wide enough to have been made by a deer. We followed it blindly amongst the red cedars, whose lowest branches were twenty feet high with trunks like stretched tendons. Joseph hooked his hand around a tree and swung sharply to the right. Above his head, a bird's nest rested between the trunk and branch like a shoulder joint. 

Turning the corner after Joseph, an elderberry bush cast its shadow over me. I stopped and watched a robin jump onto a branch close to my face, cocking its head at me. It became comfortable with my lack of movement and bent down to peck at some berries, leaning its head back and exposing its orange chest as it swallowed them. 

Joseph calmly waited for me. He smiled and took a deep breath, appreciating the sweet odor of pineapple and vanilla emitted by his cedars. I closed my eyes and let myself breathe their natural chemicals.

We continued on the deer path for a while until it became blocked by a giant fallen tree. The dead cedar's smell was strong, its body in the centuries-long process of decomposing and releasing nutrients into the soil. Joseph said that it was five hundred years old. It could have served as excellent building material based on its size and fibrous strength, likely suitable for 300 roofing shingles, 40 rocking chairs, and 2 fireplace awnings, except that by the time Joseph found it, it was too late for any productive conversion. Instead of having it cleared for the immediacy of space, Joseph figured it was healthy to leave it alone, as its dead body provided vital compounds to the rest of his forest. We sat on top of it and rested, sharing some apples that Joseph brought. I took a bite and as I chewed, each crunch of the apple was flavored by the sweet aroma of the tree’s disseminating nutrients. Joseph finished his apple and hopped off the log, placing its brown core on a bed of needles to decompose with the giant and its army.

Joseph calmly paced back and forth below me as I sat up high. His eyes searched for patches of sky in the canopy as his footsteps crunched in its fallen needles. Thinking about the material possibilities of the trillions of plant fibers I sat on, I asked the carpenter if he used the wood from his ancestral garden for his job. He responded that the trees I was seeing were not for any external projects and that they would never leave his house. Joseph only used them to sustain the life-years of his walls. 

Red cedars sprouted. Walls were constructed around their presence, by their presence. The cedar was used in siding, shingles, door frames, decks, railings, and landings. The walls expanded outwards, but as the trees grew and spread at the core, the inside of the house was knocked down to make more room, a process repeated by generations of Joseph’s family. New walls emerged on the outside, the inexorable family ring covering more ground. The trees spread their seeds to the edges of the courtyard and kept growing, inflating the stomach of the house, stretching out its walls.

As he told me this, I was so concentrated that I bit my lip while eating my apple. Tart juices splayed and stung my mouth. I swallowed.

Joseph told me that at the heart of the forest was a clear cut void of humus where the first trees once stood. 

I gazed over him and his cedar empire. A fog was forming at the end of my vision, which made me excited. Soon the trees would be replenished and my skin would feel clean. I felt the softening bark and upended a small strip of it, rolling it on my fingertips. 

I wanted to find a tree with a low enough branch to hang from, to let my back crack as I rolled my neck and to let the fog take me. I scanned our area but could find no such tree. So we walked back along the same path, seeing the same trees backwards, wading into the growing fog. Its density began to deafen the trilling calls of swallows and their nests, concealing the higher foliage and the tiny cones drooping under green needles. I could hear a trace of Joseph's softened movements before I felt myself slowly leaning forward into a pillow of soil, a blanket of humus tucked above my arms. 

To the Boy Whose Name I Could Not Pronounce,

Hi.

Article by Anonymous Art by Liz White

Or hola, because we only spoke in Spanish. But I will write this letter in English, because it is the boring, monotone language you dislike and don’t know, and I can guarantee you will never read this. 

I just wanted to say that I regret that we will never see each other again.

And that I woke up with your lighter in my pocket, but I lost mine along the way.

And that I hope you and your friends find happiness and time to think of me and my friends now and again. 

I’m a shit English major because words fail me at times like this. You discovered I was a poor student when you questioned why I even needed to study English if I already spoke it. Good point. I much preferred our night of no English. The world would be simpler if I studied what would bring me closer to you.

I often find myself fondly reflecting on the time we shared: our playful dancing in the bar or the intimate shot-taking lessons you took upon yourself to give me. I miss your smiles and strong arms, your leather jacket, and your warm body. When I find myself walking down a street alone, my mind flashes back to the way you always waited to link my arm through yours before you would take a step. You are so sure of your steps and your direction– something I admire about you– and yet you did not allow me to fall behind or recede into your shadow. You brought me along with you, and so I suppose I owe you a lot of my confidence too. 

I’m going to tell you a secret that I’m sure you would be mortified to know that I know. You presented yourself so strong and self-assured to me that I would never have thought to question if you were anything else. However, there are no secrets between girls, and my girlfriend from that night– Estupida as I remember nicknaming her– told me everything. She told me how you were nervous to kiss me so you asked her for advice on how to approach and woo me. She told me how you were timid and scared of doing something wrong, and how she had to reassure you of my interest. 

I don’t think I’m intimidating, but perhaps I should be flattered that my presence flustered you. Your hands, to their credit, did not waver or sweat when you held my hand, my hips, my neck, my cheek. You were the epitome of perfection and that is why I was scared. After that initial fright, I went back out for you, but you had disappeared by then. 

Your dependable body I had become accustomed to had vanished, but you still had a weird way of showing me care. By answering your friend’s call and listening to my failing Spanish. By calling me the next day to ask how I was doing. You faded more and more, and yet I still think about you every day. 

I want to thank you for having kind friends who loved my friends too. Thank you for showing me happiness and life. Thank you for making me laugh and teaching me strength. 

I realized recently that I am not the main character of my dreams. When I remember them, I can only recall how I am a passive bystander who lets the action slip past, intangible and foreign. You’re like my dream where I can’t seem to take action or hold on. I imagine if I were to ever return to your world, I could make my dream come true. Maybe I would fix everything I have spent the past month agonizing over. I would absolve my regret; you would muster up more courage. I wouldn’t leave you out there standing on my doorstep, with nowhere to go but home. And you wouldn’t leave me with only a cursed lighter as a reminder of you. 

I don’t know how to end this letter. “Sincerely” is not good enough for a closing– this entire letter is clearly raw and sincere. “Love” is too strong a word to explain what we had. And nobody closes a romantic letter with “regretfully,” “passionately,” or “sadly.” I think I’ll close out this letter with my name; the first reason is because you may have forgotten it, and the second is because Hope is all I have for my future and the potential it has to make our paths cross again.

Hopefully [to writing our wrongs],

      The Girl Still Chasing Her Dreams 

Me and the Ghost

Article by Zeke Lloyd Art by Alex Wollinka

The cold woke me up. Two or three times I managed to wrap the blanket around me tightly enough and I fell back asleep. But, eventually I couldn’t take it anymore and allowed my brain to switch on. The red digits on my alarm clock told me it was still the dead of night. Sitting up, I saw that the window on the other side of my room was open. When I went to shut it, my foot landed on cold, wet snow. It had collected on the floor beneath the windowsill. After closing the window and drying my foot, I again held the covers tightly around me and pushed my head into the pillow. 

My heart sank. In vivid detail, I remembered closing the window the night before. 

Suddenly, I felt watched. The window was only a few feet off the ground, and it felt like whatever may have come inside might not have left. I could hear the blood pump through my neck. I fumbled around the bedside table for my swiss-army knife. Wrapping my hand around the cold metal, I looked up to see the closet was now ajar. 

The specter stepped out with a coy smile. His skin and clothes held a pearly, translucent sheen. In the darkness, he seemed to glow. I could see he was a little under six feet. He wore plain clothes – loose jeans and a green sweater. He looked to be in his early twenties, his face a little ragged and his hair unkempt. His expression was apologetic. He seemed embarrassed. 

“I really meant to say hi in the morning. Just came in to scope the place out.”

That’s how I first met Roger.

It was my first day sleeping alone in a city over 1,000 miles from home. A few weeks before, Colorado College had asked freshmen to leave campus. Many of the residents of Loomis’ third floor chose to live at West Edge, an apartment building at exit 146 off I-25.

I remembered the August heat beating down on my neck as I stood outside my new dorm for the first time, ready and eager for college life. I remember sitting in the passenger seat of my roommate’s car as we left that dorm behind after just a single month.

It wasn’t the kind of change I wanted. But I was liberated. I biked to campus, a place online class made almost entirely void of people. I roamed the empty paths and sunkissed grass. I stopped to read or sit or watch the geese fly overhead. It was my own little world far away from everything I’d ever known. It was the kind of discomfort that kept me moving, always ready to engage and understand.

It’s a different kind of discomfort to be in the presence of a conscious, non-human entity. It’s less motivating and more mortifying. Right after his jumpscare introduction, he explained a little bit about his situation. He can’t eat or sleep. He can’t pass through walls.  The confusing thing, he said, was whether he really was a ghost or not. 

Roger couldn’t remember dying. He called the start of his spectral episode “Kafkaesque.”

“I just woke up like this,” he said. “The blankets lay flat on the bed. I was hovering, just barely, over the mattress. Thank God, though, there was no body in the space I occupied. That’s a good sign, I think.”

To Roger, this meant some chance at a return to his normal form. He was on the hunt for unfinished business so that he might reinhabit his body.

Sitting beside my new acquaintance, I refrained from sharing my doubts about his plan. Completing unfinished business generally moved ghosts from their spectral forms onto the afterlife, not back into their human bodies. It didn’t explain why he was talking to me, either, so I decided to ask.

“Just had a feeling about this place I guess,” said Roger. “Thought you might be the type to help me out, walk through the problem with me.”

It’s awkward to talk with a ghost, especially when they’re convinced they might still have a chance at life. What you have, and what they lack, is so plainly apparent to the both of you.

I agreed to help. I wanted to understand. And I did want to be of service. But candidly, I wanted to escape the mindnumbing online classes which had consumed my every waking moment. 

“Ok. Where to first?” I asked.

Roger said he knew exactly what to do.

First, we went to campus.

“I stole a refrigerator from here a while back,” he said sheepishly. “But back to its original place now, I think. A good time to remedy the situation.”

Using a borrowed car from my roommate, we drove to Loomis, the dormitory on campus where he had left the stolen appliance.

“I put it in what we called the ‘party room.’ Four cool guys in my hall got together and swapped the beds around. One room had two bunks, and one had none. That was the party room,” he said. “I wasn’t in on the swap, but I figured the addition of a fridge would be a sign of good faith.”

He did not elaborate on whether the gift had won the favor of the “cool guys.” My mind wandered elsewhere, namely to the level of risk involved in our mission. Amidst the COVID-19 protocols, sneaking into dorms had become a much more difficult task. And with the administration on edge, it seemed like idiocy to aid and abet in burglary. 

After parking the car outside Montgomery, the operation went smoothly enough. My card access somehow still worked. It was almost 4:00 a.m., so the halls were empty. The way there was simple. The “party room” seemed to be pretty close to where I had stayed before I moved off campus. The room was unlocked. Sure enough, there were two mini-fridges inside. Both beds were occupied, so Roger and I moved carefully to the far side of the room. In an attempt to be polite, we cautiously and quietly moved the contents of one mini-fridge to the other. Then, in a slow, coordinated lift, we crept out. Roger nodded his spectral head down the hill towards Bemis Hall. I’d never been inside, but Roger said he knew a secret way in. 

He left me for a moment, and for a few minutes I looked around at the winter scene. An eight inch layer of snow lay overtop everything. Between McGregor, Bemis, Antero, and Ticknor, total silence captured the night. The cloudy sky reflected light off the white blanket below. Underneath the glow of street lamps, I felt as though I’d just entered Narnia. Making friends, breaking into dorms, discovering new places– this was the beginning of college. 

Just as I began to catch snowflakes on my tongue, Roger let me in. We carried the mini-fridge up the stairs to the booth. To my surprise, there was already a mini-fridge there.

“Right, yes. They had two when I stole one,” he said in response to my puzzled expression. I shrugged. We put down the mini-fridge. When nothing happened, Roger appeared frustrated. He moved it over slightly. He plugged it in. He moved a milkshake from the first fridge to the one we’d just put down. 

“Fuck,” he said.

This marked the beginning of Roger’s slump. I was surprised to learn he didn’t really have a back-up plan. I guess he thought moving the fridge would do it. When it didn’t, he holed himself up in my closet for weeks. Roger listened to loud music, slammed his body into the wall, and often moaned with little concern for my online academics. He rarely left, and when he did, it was to brainstorm what he might be missing. 

The day he brought me a letter was his last day. It was a frigid, stormy evening. Rain pattered against the glass of the very window he had slipped in through a month prior. Lightning flashed against the mountains’ silhouettes. Clouds hung low over the city, a light mist whirled close to the wet earth. 

“Can you mail this?” He handed me an unsealed envelope with a note inside. “I want you to read it, too.” 

I glanced up at him. His eyes looked tired, his shoulders slumped. He looked older, then. It didn’t seem like he had much faith in this new attempt to complete his business. He just seemed ready to leave. Existence had become his curse. I looked down at the words on the page.

Dear Mary,

I’m sorry about everything.
The main problem, I think, was the way I talked about it all. I got a lot of words wrong. I might do just that in this letter. Sorry for that, too. I tend to get the words wrong in complicated moments. That’s when I think about you most. That’s why I’m thinking about you now.

I can’t imagine how much I hurt you. Can I ever know? I felt a horrible, gut-wrenching shame. And afterwards, I never really could ask how you felt. Can I step away from myself and understand how it was for you? Maybe someday. But not now. How terrible a thing like pain to wash away guilt. 

I picture you happy now. Happier, at least. But I think you think about me. Maybe it’s arrogant. Maybe it’s just because I think about you a lot. Sometimes when I think about you, you’re alone. Sometimes you’re next to someone handsome. I can’t bring myself to smile when I picture that. I just imagine your face in my mind’s eye and I feel all right to know that you’re not so sad anymore. 

But I can’t undo anything. And if undoing anything would take away the time we spent together, I wouldn’t want to at all. 

I miss you.

That didn’t hurt to write. It hurt to read and know I wrote it.

But I do miss you.

I hope we can talk again sometime. I’m sorry about everything. Really sorry.

Yours,

Roger

I looked back at him. He looked away. 

I pulled out a small packet. It was a draft for my class. We had to write a letter to someone who helped us in our transition to college. I handed Roger the papers. 

My Friend Roger,

I didn’t feel so alone at first. I came here to find a new life for myself. I figured a new life would be lonely.

I can’t say for sure that I’ve found a new life yet. I feel lonely a lot. Then I met you, a horrifying translucent whisper of a person. I realized pretty quickly – your time here is over. Your next steps, they’re somewhere else. You can go back and try to fix all of your mistakes. You can return fridges and tell her you’re sorry, but it doesn’t change who you are. You did those things. You have to exist with that.

But to think that’s who you are?

Roger, I admit I don’t know you. We do seem eerily well-connected, and I’ve learned a lot from you, but I only met you a few weeks ago and I’m still not totally sure you’re real. But in that short time, I’ve learned about your mistakes. If I could try to fix my mistakes from the last four years, I would. 

But I am done trying to change who I am. I just want to change. I hope you can do the same.

His eyes met mine. It felt like I was looking at a person, a human person. I almost smiled. Then he turned away. The wisps of his outline curled in quiet shapes. He opened the window, stepped outside, and walked towards the mist. A flash of lightning showed him crossing away from the parking lot. Then, in the darkness, he was gone.

I turned his envelope over in my hand. There was no address on the back. Just a name. Mary. I wondered if I would ever meet her.

I put the letter on my bedside table, turned over, and went back to sleep.

Pills and Potions, Dreams and Nightmares

Article by Avery Carrington Art by Kristopher Ligtenberg

It’s 4:00 a.m. I’m dazed, coming off of the adrenaline from the nightmare I just had. A child’s giggle strikes my head, with flashes of me rapidly running through a house similar to mine. I flush the toilet and go to the sink.

Splash. The sound of soap and bubbles wash me out of my grogginess, and I look up…

Stark gray eyes, plastic skin, and a brimming smile revealing uncanny teeth, all meet me face-to-face in the mirror— at least from what I could make out without my glasses. I look closer, drawing you into focus. Seeing you clearer, I see a queer creature… a trembling mess, trying to find an equilibrium in gender in a moldless body.

Rubbing my eyes, my hair sticks up, and I begin to question my sanity. In a moment, you fortify yourself, smile, and the molding of your face perks up, signaling your innocent heart.

“Who are you?” I call with my nose pointing to the mirror, eyebrows pricked in confusion. You shake your head, seemingly ignorant of your name. You make a gesture to disarm me and step back. Your head begins to flash many faces— some familiar, the rest unknown. I gawk in fear and disbelief. You settle on something… someone I’ll call enigmatic.

Is this a dream?

I dart to my bed, toppling my poor cat in my haste to grab my glasses. You’re still there with that insane smile. We stare each other down until 6:00.

6:30. The sun creeps in through my quaint window overlooking my succulent garden. I go about my business, trying to blot you out of my mind. Fixing breakfast, pooping, and brushing my teeth all encompass the first half of my routine. I sling my towel around my waist and step into the shower.

My morning karaoke starts in stride. Every once in a while, I peer through the curtains and see you there. I am trying to cloak my anxieties with the tempo of a typical day.

I’m finally dressed and about to head out the door. I’m hypnotized by my regular morning buzz and I get one last look at myself, temporarily forgetting you’re there. I come in, lights on, and flash. The nightmare stews in my stomach.

I walk up to you. Face to face… I lash out with a scream, startling your welcoming smile. You fall back, disarmed for a moment. I peer into the mirror, looking down, and see a feeble creature seizing in fear on the floor. I stumble back, apologies slipping out of my mouth, making an effort to rectify my tossing stomach. I fall to the rim of the tub crying, recognizing my brutality. While my head is down, you climb up. You let me stew for a minute before you start to tap on the glass. I hear you. I lift my head, searching for a truce. I stand and go forward.

I make it back to the looking glass. We are at a draw, once again face to face, finally distilling a semblance of peace. Minutes pass and you whisper something too soft to hear. I ask you to repeat meekly and your mouth sculpts the word, “enigma.” I pause, trying to decipher the word.

“What?” I ask again. 

You also take a pause, trying to figure out the best way to communicate the message to me.

“Enigma,” comes again in a soft speaking voice… I still don’t hear.

You contort your hands around your neck, choking out the right shape to deliver your message and all I hear in a sonic flash is “ENIGMA!” Your answer is coming down like a thousand horns of Jericho.

I drop incapacitated in the sharp fibers of glass. Our realms collide, bringing a point of singularity allowing you to enter. You tiptoe over me, bringing your stance down to meet me at my face. You lift me, still with that same unarmed smile, and prop me against the tub. I come to, covered in debris and lacerations. I stutter up, glancing around trying to find you. The shards reveal a path out of my bathroom into my house. I hear my cat hissing and swatting at your intrusions. I stumble to the doorway. I hobble and stand up. You swivel your head towards me and let out that all too familiar child’s giggle.

Send it Back!

Article by Addi Schwieterman Art by Alex Wollinka

Dear Me,

As much as I don’t want a letter from you, you don’t want a letter from me. And if you ever tried to mail something through the fabric of time, I would definitely send it back. You’re probably more likely than me to figure out how to send things through time, but you don’t know my address.

When I think about it, you’ve already figured it out. Write something that you’ll forget about for a few years and then I’ll read it on the specific day you’ve planned in advance, reeling me in with the opportunity to know exactly what I was thinking years ago. But I have no chance to do this time capsule letter for you.

From time to time you cross my mind. Endless nights in your bed surrounded by the piles of clothes, dishes, papers, spilled shampoo, blankets, and wrappers. The weight of shame stuck me to the mattress, as I promised that tomorrow I’d finish my homework right when I got home from school, go on a run, clean my room, wash my face, brush my teeth, finish my laundry, shower, and fall asleep without YouTube echoing in the background. I wince when all these scenes flood back, pleading that I’ll never let that part of me reawaken.

I feel big when you sneak into my mind. I can imagine us sitting in a car together, driving. Sisters almost. You admire my horizontal license and I insist you eventually kiss boys and don’t spend so much time thinking about food. I explain you accept the old parts you used to hate about yourself but find more complicated things to become dissatisfied with. Things like how you treat your friends and if your mom knows you love her. If you are just jealous or if he’s a douche. If you are working too hard or if everyone else around you is working harder in secret.

I read that letter you wrote me in the eighth grade. Sitting in our bedroom on the floor, I found it tucked away in one of our bins of treasures. It was long and elaborate. A water-colored front with lists of prying questions. Have you had your first kiss? Who are your friends? Where are you going to college? Did you stay in shape? You allude to the last one a lot, in many ways. Did you stay in shape, make sure to stay in shape, don’t forget to workout, are you in a sport during all three seasons? It’s strange what you focused on.

The walls of our room are bright blue, with a gold chevron accent. Summer is here and you sleep with your window open and wake up whenever the sun becomes unbearable. Up on the wall across from the window is a poster you made on trace paper with the word “FIGHTER” written across it in big pink letters. Fighter? Fighting for what? All the wrong things. Turned pages of Seventeen magazine reveal the headline “Summer Abs: 20 minute workout.” Thank your dad for getting you the subscription to the magazine. How could he know what’s inside?

In our high school parking lot next to a boy you don’t like very much. He has thick black hair and a shitty disposition. He always thinks he’s right and what makes it worse is he usually is. There’s nothing to do right now but sit in cars and later you’ll make out in the back seat despite your lack of enthusiasm. Say it. “I don’t know if college is the right decision for me.” He thinks you’re stupid now. Let’s face it, he always thought you were a little dumb.

Sit at the desk our dad built into your closet that you feel guilty for not using as much as you had idealized. Mr. Wylde announced to the class all work needs to be turned in by the end of the weekend for it to be graded. He’s still missing some essays from January. He stands behind your desk and tries to discreetly mumble that you need to turn in your essay that’s now three months late. It’s Sunday night. You’re confused why it’s been three months of promising yourself today would be the day you finish it, since you are confident in your abilities to methodically connect the lines of Macbeth to the motifs you wrote on the inside of your front cover. Something held you back those three months. In your mind there’s a word for it that likes to shuffle around until you're asleep. Lazy. But it's different than that. Unfortunately, you don’t have a professional to declare it.

You sweat through your shirts in the winter and wear men’s jeans to parties. The laundry in the washer is yours and it’s been there for five days. Hours in the bathroom haven’t fixed your hair or skin or the asymmetry of your face and everyone thought your best friend was hotter than you. Shorts ride up in between your thighs and you can’t explain why you are wearing a one-piece suit again. But you put in a half-assed attempt at convincing yourself it might get better.

We lost control by the end of high school. Couldn’t keep up. You hated every second of the day. I wouldn’t take any of it back. I love you in an endless way. As much as I don’t want to return to her I wouldn’t erase her. She reminds me to be nice. Stuck to your bed, staring at the sunset from your high school parking lot, I still love you. If I could, I'd come back to you. Through the sky. Past the clouds and stars, sucked through a purple blue void of silence back down to you. I could come as the wind and whisper it in your ear. Wrap around your head and melt into your mind. Write a letter and leave it for you. If I could, I would convince you then that it was all ok. You were a good person even when you gave up.

But you’d think I was lying. And when you got that letter, you ignored it. I know this because you did. People explained the contents of the letter over and over. Remember driving back from school while Mom pleaded with you at the red light that you could achieve something and fail at the same time? In your best friend’s room where she illustrated how each part of you was meant to be. Now I just feel tinges of pain and a slow reconciliation that maybe they were right. Maybe you should just try. Let beady eyes watch you fall and feel the disappointment of your failure.

Look at yourself.

Some days it’s all too familiar. All the problems, all the same. But there are feelings I still haven’t outrun and new roadblocks that reveal themselves as I am further and further from your bright blue walls and essays on Shakespeare. I know in 10 years I will love who I am today. And if I focus, I can see her thinking of me. I can’t get rid of the misery you experienced but I can promise I love you despite it. And even if it’s not immediate, we will love ourselves endlessly.

Sincerely,

Me

A Letter in Four Parts

Content Warning: Strong mentions of suicide

Article by Katie Rowley Art by Isabella Hageman

To Audrey,

A letter in four parts.

Ⅰ.

I am high, relishing in the soundproofness of my headphones, and I am scared this will turn into the first draft of a suicide letter. It is March 5th.

A girl I once knew told me that one day, after school, she got ice cream and drove into the mountains, determined to die. She didn’t, but I can’t pass by that ice cream place without thinking of her. Two hours ago, I drove to Target and convinced myself I wouldn’t be around the next time it snowed. I got low-calorie ice cream and considered driving away from my life. I could easily disappear into the mountains, launching my car off a cliff. Or leave myself on I-25, praying that someone was drunk or tired enough to slam into me. I drove back to my house, got high, and hoped to work up the courage soon. According to my phone, it is snowing as I type this.

I am not sure why I feel compelled to tell you this. I’d never sit in the passenger seat of your car and confess my suicidal ideation. I’m not sure we’re close enough for that. I don’t feel close to anyone anymore. I fucked it with Aubrey and I don’t even know how. I’m fucking it all. I am trying to burn all my bridges. Disappear into the smoke.

I tried to overdose freshman year. In the dorm room right next to yours. During those first three weeks I was jealous of the laughter shared between you and Mayta. I posted noise complaints via Snapchat for all my friends back home. Anna never moved in, so I spent nights sending nudes to Luke. He was snapping me back from another girl’s bed. Polaroids of her and her high school friends filled the background behind his cropped face. I was so sad. So, the night before leaving for the semester, I repacked my entire room, laid on blue linoleum, and swallowed a handful of Advil. Laughter from your room drifted through the too-thin walls and I started to regret it. You were planning a road trip that would never happen and I was wondering what my dad would do with my body. The internet said I would be okay but I stayed awake the whole night just to be sure.

I think about throwing myself from the bridge over Monument Creek every time I walk over it. If I had the money, I’d throw my phone into the water. Watch the boys and their compliments I still cling to drown. I want a new life. I want to lose everyone’s numbers. I want to stand, soaking wet in the cereal aisle of a yellow-lit supermarket. I want the concerned fright of the only cashier working, asking for my phone number. Asking me who to call. I want to only know my mom’s number.

I am rereading The Bell Jar. Well, actually, I am listening to it, narrated by Maggie Gyllenhaal.. I’m on the StairMaster when she monologues about the fig tree. I am sitting at the base of my own fig tree. Watching the branches stretch out in front of me. The figs of my future grow. A fig: I could move home, try applying to MFAs next year, and hope I’m good enough by that time. A fig: try and make it in New York, find someone to move in with, and get a shitty job at a publishing house that’ll go out of business in a year. A fig: wait and see if I get into Pitt; love myself in a bigger city. A fig: hope to find a boy to fall in love with, follow him around, and end up a mother in two years. But all of my figs are dying, and I sit in the dirt, just watching.

As I drove to Target, I made a list of all the things that have been ripped away from me. This city brings out the worst in me. It's made me into someone I barely recognize. I was so good. I was so kind. I bought my friends' birthday presents on time. I was a good daughter. I followed through on everything I said I would. I wasn’t a writer before, and I let this city shape me into one. I let people I thought I loved tell me I was great. I let people I trusted and revered compliment my supposed craft. I let it all get into my head. Build up my confidence. I let my words define me. Four years here, and I truly believed I was a good writer.

Now I do not know who I am.

I am sobbing as I am driving and I am so angry. I feel like screaming at everyone who told me I was good. They are all liars. I’ve always been paranoid that everyone has been lying to me and now every email is a confirmation. Mostly though, I am angry at myself. How could I ever think I was destined for anything great?

I am talking about a writer in the library, and Emmie calls her writing crazy. Her tone inflicts disgust and my mind races back to a conversation I had last fall. Emmie, Zeke, and I are on the quad, cold sun on our arms. I’m not sure how we got here, but they’re both saying my writing is crazy and too harsh on the boys. I’m not sure what stories they’re referring to. I kind of doubt they’ve ever read anything I’ve written, but their words still settle in my pores. I don’t write for months. And when I do, I try my best to paint the boys golden. Place the fault on my actions. My inactions. Try to learn that disinterest does not make them villains. My professors praise my past work for its honesty and fearlessness, but it feels fake now. Written through the lens of a narcissist. Nothing I’ve written is brilliant. Or beautiful. Or moving. It’s all just bullshit diary entries nobody wants to read. The schools I applied to knew it. They probably think I am just a mean, vindictive girl. And now I can’t write anything without shame. I can’t feel anything without disgust. They’re all calling me crazy behind my back.

I am watching the figs fall. They’re cutting down the branches.

Ⅱ.

(Written on March 3rd. Expanded on March 4th. Considered Scrapping on March 5th.)

Sophomore year, after I probably spent an entire hangout bitching about how distant Peter was if we weren’t actively fucking, you told me that I should try dating girls. I had kissed two girls that year and wanted more. One was the same girl in two different dorm rooms. We had sex both times and it was nothing like Haley. I think I was too high the second time, and it was probably never going to work anyway. The second girl was at the end of a party. Dizzy from the remnants of a drunk night, I didn’t even ask her name. I had hung out with you earlier. We had told people we were engaged at the gay club they shot up a year later. In a Zoom breakout room, a couple of days after our engagement, a guy who spent the whole night making out with one of my friends told me that he saw us kissing, and thought it was so hot. So I spent the spring tangled up in the bedsheets of a future with Peter in Boulder and I haven’t kissed a girl since. Now I want to more than ever.

Two years ago, I had a silly five-second crush on a girl in one of my classes. But I pushed it down into the deepest corner of my gut and became her friend. A week ago, I would have sworn I was over it. I don’t think I’ve ever told you about her. Get ready, you’re in for a mouthful.

It hits me suddenly, in the dark. I am the drunkest I’ve been in months and every time I shut my eyes I see her. I see her in an apartment, wearing that white tank top and those baggy jeans. Pretty. One of our walls is painted a deep dark green and there are built-in bookcases on the other walls. We have too many books. They live on the shelves and in piles on every flat surface. We read silently before bed. She’s wearing her glasses, and I run my hands through her hair. I get to kiss her.

I see her again the next day but I am too high and nonverbal to even say hi. I feel shitty about it on Lexi’s couch as we watch Seth Meyers on Youtube.

Sunday. I wake up crying and spend the whole day sick with desire. Is it normal to feel so dirty about something that could be love?

I already know what you’re gonna tell me over dinner on Friday. I need to fuck up the friendship. I need to go for it. We’ll talk over the pros and cons until our tongues are tired. We’ll devise a plan: I’ll text her next time I am fucked up and brave. But that didn’t work last time, and it hasn’t really worked out for me ever.

I text my friends that I think I am maybe in love with her. I wouldn’t call it love. If we are being honest it is probably a last-ditch attempt to grasp onto something that isn’t the ending. It is hope. It is the present. It is one last bad idea. It is probably just lust. But maybe it is love in the form of her body on my bed, sunlight on her stomach, mid-day drunk on the taste of her lips and the cadence of her voice. (But really, what is the difference between that and lust?)

I love people I cannot have. It’s an ever-apparent pattern. I knew I couldn’t have the roommate. I knew I couldn’t have the blonde. I knew I couldn’t have the boys on the sports teams. As soon as Peter told me I could never have him, I fell harder than I ever had. I wonder if some part of me knows that I cannot have her. Should not have her. Will not have her. If I put on my therapist hat for a second, I think it is because I am still scared of Luke. I wonder a lot about who I would be without him. What college would have been without the haunting of his hip bones. If I would still be lovable.

It hits me as I’m on a walk that it is March and in a month and 20 days I will have gone a year without sex. I round up and I am revirginated. I cannot wrap my head around the fact that I was ever wanted. I have a theory that she will never like me. I’ve lost all my confidence. Standing in the mirror, I understand the repulsion.

And, if I do tell her, the timing is already probably fucked. I am always too late. They have moved on, found new girls to sleep with, needed to start focusing on themselves, spent weeks coming up with plausible excuses. I was raised punctual, but CC culture has steeped into me like a rotten tea bag and now I am too late for everything.

In the kitchen, Emmaline asks me if I am just looking for something to write about. And maybe that’s all this is: material.

On a different walk, I have another vision. I am sitting on what I imagine to be her bed and my hands are stuffed in my lap in a desperate attempt to hide my anxiety. I projectile vomit a confession of my crush. Words flow uncontrollably from my mouth. Every five seconds I fit in an apology and reassurance that it is okay if she doesn’t feel the same. I do not know her well enough to know what she does next, but god do I want to. (I do not think I have ever known someone.) (In the ideal image I create of her, she interrupts me with her lips on mine. I think that only happens in the movies.)

I will never tell her. (Decided on March 5th.) I am 97% sure she feels nothing toward me and I am 83% sure this crush is just a distraction from the quiet fizzling end of the only future I planned. I am on a different walk, and I have yet to hear from Iowa, and my email inbox only has a rejection from Wyoming. Last week I told Brandon (Shimoda, my advisor) that I could definitely get into Wyoming. I mean, it’s Wyoming. But I didn’t. I spent the rest of the walk sobbing. Spent the afternoon doing the same. I am convinced a Wyoming rejection means I will not get into another MFA, and I do not know what I will do. She floats into my mind briefly as I contemplate the ending of everything. She is just another rotten, dead fig sitting at my feet.

I cannot handle any more rejection.

Ⅲ.

I tried my hardest to make this into a love letter. I wanted to tell you about the girls and how much I love all my days with them. But we’re splitting at the seams and it only feels good when it's sunny now.

I really did try. I spent my days walking, hoping I’d come up with the words to capture the moments of sunlight. Tried to write poems inside my head but all I could think about was her boyfriend and braiding hair and Alaska.

I wanted to write about the moments spent with Margs downtown. Tipsy walks home, buying Girl Scout cookies and overpriced seltzers and bottles of prosecco. Laughing when the last person I fucked walks into Webers. The moments of 1:00 am: eating mac and cheese out of the pot on our dirty kitchen floor while the edible Zeke gave me sets in. The moments where I swear the girls I sit next to on our dirty couch are the most beautiful people I know. The moments sprinting across streets. Sitting in crowded bars. Texting them drunk about how much I love them. But no matter how hard I try, I cannot return to the love of last year.

I wanted to write about how you taught me how to love girls. I can’t really explain it. I was friends with almost exclusively girls in high school, but it never felt as good as that first real college week with you. Being loved by you feels pure. I think you are the most genuine person I know. You taught me how to see others. How to love others. How to bare my soul. How to love women. I met my best friends because of you. I am forever changed because of you.

I wanted to write about the gardens we will have one day. How we are trading flowers back and forth and braiding stems into our hair. But our dreams are too big and wildly different. The flowers will die and we will plant our roots elsewhere. We will water our own soil and find new girls to love.

Ⅳ.

Three years ago, we walked by the house I live in now. It was a rainy April and you were fighting with Rosie, so you called and asked if I wanted to go on a walk. We walked east. I had never been east before, only south. We walked and you told me about the girl who left you for Australia and I’m sure I rambled on about Peter. In my head, he was still mine. I didn’t know about his girlfriend. (I wouldn’t know until May, and after I told you, white carnations showed up at my doorstep.) We shared AirPods and listened to “Liability,” and we must have walked past my house because I remember the Vietnamese church so vividly in the rain.

I had never been scared to live anywhere before this summer. But then a man shoved me in the kitchen and left us locking doors behind us. And the house right next to us got broken into and the girls could no longer live there. And they stole shoes from our backyard. I sleep right next to pepper spray and two baseball bats. I heard footsteps in the middle of the night, locked myself in the closet, counted down the minutes, and tried to decide when I should call the police. I can only sleep if I am high now. I’m not sure if that means I’m addicted or just scared.

It’s all ending and I want nothing more than to live in Room 011 again. I want a redo. A life where Zeke doesn’t get COVID and you and I are not just friends because we lived next door and spent our hour of outside time sitting six feet away from each other. I want to meet your other neighbor who moved out too soon, Lexi, and find out she is a Swiftie and befriend her long before summer nights spent high in a basement. I want to meet Emmaline and Marina in a classroom in Armstrong. I want frat parties and real shot glasses bought downtown during first weekend.

I want to see the deer outside of our windows the second day after moving in and think they are god. I didn’t believe it back then, but I think I am starting to.

Weeks before I graduated, I saw a deer with one antler everywhere and that had to mean something. It felt like a ghost following me. Or maybe a mirror.

After graduation, five elk lived in my parents' new neighborhood. I’d take an edible and walk in the dark. I’d swear the elk were following me, that I’d turn around and beady, glowing eyes would be staring at me. I convinced myself for a week that I’d die via elk antlers piercing my chest. I would have just enough time to watch thick blood flow out of me. The creature would pull its antlers from my flesh and leave my body crumpled on the pavement in the yellow glow of the streetlamp.

Freshman year still turned technicolor in my memory. I smoked a joint for the first time in Mayta’s apartment and we probably talked shit about Rosie. I drank wine from a mug on Amalia’s floor until the world spun. I spent nights in your mega bed in that basement. We laughed over phone calls from the boys. We pulled mattresses from beds and watched movies on the floor. We baked a cake and celebrated birthdays for the first time. We ate pints of Josh and Johns for dinner. I kissed a girl. I cried when I left for the summer. And I grew grateful for all the fucked up shit that led me to the passenger seat of your car three and a half years later.

As we get closer to spreading across the world, every second feels crucial. I want to remember every conversation in perfect detail. I want it all to stay golden in my mind. I want us to stay 22 forever. I want no weddings, no babies, no new friends in new cities. I want us all to get snowed in. I want to get day drunk and walk to pizza every Saturday for the rest of my life. I want the restaurants to stop burning down. I want the cars to stop speeding into storefronts. I want to hold their hands and stumble home drunk every night. I want to spend my nights at a dive bar, watching the door, waiting for the people I love to show up. I want to smoke drunk cigarettes and wake up in the morning with the smell still on my sweatshirt. I want people to text when I get home. I want to sneak around with that girl and spend my nights at hers. I want quiet moments in the mornings. I want debriefs. I want nothing more than to stay.

Tuesday. I counted seven bird nests on my walk. Every time I looked up at the trees, I saw a new one. Sparklark.com says they represent “home, rebirth, and the start of something new.” I tell a girl at the bar that I am going to Alaska. She’s the first person I tell confidently, but she’s swaying back and forth and I doubt she’ll remember this conversation in the morning. It snows two days later. Enough to break branches. Do you think it is hard to rebuild a nest?

Please stay. Write. Call. Let me help pick out engagement rings in three years. Live in the same city as me in five. Shape part of your life around mine. Remember the four years of sunlight on our skins in May. Pinky promise you won’t forget me.

Katie

P.S. I make it to the next snowfall. And I choose a future with snow and writing, far away from here. So I decide to see my girls as golden again and bask in their warmth. I decide to get over myself and tell the girl that I want her. I decide to collect the fallen figs and plant a new tree.

A letter to my pet chicken that died (2/22)

Article and Art by Lila Garfield

I’m sorry that I didn’t give you a name and that as a result, I can’t address this letter. It feels wrong to write “dear chicken” or make a name for you now. I think what I wanted was to avoid having an emotional connection to you. As if to be nameless is to be independent. 

You were one of the strong ones. You made it through the summer, you survived the raccoons and the coop that could never contain you. You witnessed all of the drama on the farm and the attempted coup. I know that it wasn’t easy living there. After a week, the milking goat started to develop an infection and it quickly spread to the other two, which I’m sure you were aware of but hopefully you never had to see it. They had bloody sores around their mouths and noses and they seemed to be in pain most of the time. We lost three ducks throughout the summer, each consumed to varying degrees, one left outside in the grass and two left inside the coop. In my head, I can hear you all screaming, maybe in warning or maybe in fear, and I imagine a sort of animated scribbled cloud of flapping wings and feathers and blood. 

But still, you persevered. We brought you and five others home in the back of my car in pet carriers. We felt bad that you all were so squished for three hours but eventually, we got home and you were free at last! I think you had some trouble adjusting, and I should have tried harder to talk through that with you. But soon enough you all were laying every day, big brown and blue eggs, next to the white golf ball that marked the nest. 

I wasn’t home as much as I would have liked. I feel so guilty that I didn’t care for you in the way that you deserved. I think tasks of care, which are your sole source of sustenance, can become mundane or inconsequential for humans. It would have been easy for me to fill up your food and water, collect your eggs, or give you treats, but it was easier to ignore you. This was something I considered, but never in a way that resulted in a change of behavior. Of course, the thought has more weight when I no longer have the option to improve our relationship. 

In the summer the backyard glows golden green. In the spring it smells like lilacs and the lawn becomes a carpet of cottonwood. You saw the fall and the changing of the leaves, and you saw the months of freezing gray and snow. I wish you had made it. 

I was flying back to Chicago when I found out that you had died. When we got home it was dark and cold, and we had to find the key to get inside. I immediately ran to the coop and shone a flashlight through your window. The others crowed at us, clearly bothered by our waking them up. Your body was stiff and lifeless, almost completely flat. I took you out of the coop and put you on a sheet of chicken wire framed by wood planks. My dad told me to put you in the garbage in the alley. 

I know you know this, but in Judaism, there are specific rituals and traditions around death, rooted in the prioritization of respect. I told him that I couldn’t do that, that I would bury you the next day when it was light out. The ground was mostly frozen and covered in a blanket of snow, and it would remain that way, but at least tomorrow there would be light. 

The next day I didn’t bury you, nor the next, nor the day after that. Centuries passed and you lay on a shelf in the garage. Every day there was a new excuse. And then I left home and went back to school.

I’m writing this because I want to apologize. I know that your death was not my fault, but I think I feel responsible because of my lack of compassion towards you when you were living. I’m sorry for not spending enough time with you, for treating your care like a chore, and for treating you as unimportant. Most of all, I want to apologize because five other chickens remain in the coop and I know that I won’t do any better with them. 

Thank you for giving us fresh eggs and life to the farm and the garden. Thank you for understanding that my capacity and desires did not align with your needs. 

Love, 

Lila

This is Your Brain on Video Games

Article by Ben Crawford Art by Kristopher Ligtenberg

My cousin waited out the night in a hole dug into the side of a mountain, lit by a single torch, with a crafting table in the corner and a wooden door leading to a cliff face. Outside was only darkness and the sound of rustling bones, hisses, and growls.

On the screen of his 2008 Macbook Pro was an early version of Minecraft Java Edition, the sort of place that I had thought existed only in my dreams. A place that was bigger— infinitely bigger—than the world that I lived in. A place where I could live the adventures I read about in my books. I was nine years old, and I asked my parents if I could download the game as soon as I got home. They said yes.

Sometimes I would play with my cousins and friends, but just as often I would put on my headphones, find an empty room, and play Minecraft for hours on my own. At first, I just played single-player, but when that got boring, I moved on to multiplayer: capture the flag, Hunger Games, factions. On Lord of the Craft, a text-based roleplay server inspired by Lord of the Rings, I played as a cutlass-wielding first mate in a guild of pirates, a thieving street-urchin who eventually became a warlock, and a member of the elite class living with his family in the desert city of Calthazar. Words were our medium. With the right sentences, a Minecraft server, and a stable internet connection, we could be anybody we wanted. 

The rest of my life faded away. I dreamed from inside the bodies of my characters, sent messages to online friends on Skype more than to my classmates on iMessage, and my imagination constantly swarmed with elves, orcs, and dwarves. Classroom lectures became a muted drone against the backdrop of my daydreams. Hockey practice was a nuisance. When my big brother and little sisters went outside to play soccer or wiffleball, I stayed inside on my computer. And by the time I got downstairs for dinner most days, the food was cold and the table was empty. That always made me sad, like something important had been taken from me while I wasn’t looking.

But my Minecraft friends always made me feel better. I never saw their faces, never heard their voices, and never knew their real names, but we wrote stories together, built cities together, and developed our own inside jokes and rivalries. There was a couple from Portugal, a high school student from the Caribbean, and a boy from South Africa, and they had usernames like I’mCookiie, Mephistophelian, and Krank2012. I never met them in person, but I could predict the words they would use, the jokes they would tell, and when they would or would not be online.

I haven’t spoken to any of them in seven years. Some of them wrote farewell posts on the server forums, but most just logged off one day and were gone. After I left the server, one of my friends messaged me: where u go? I saw his message but never replied. It wasn’t because I didn’t care about him, I just didn’t know what to say. Back to real life, maybe? But what the hell is real life, anyway?

—

One day it struck me that there were only two people in the world who knew what Lord of the Craft was and had also seen my face: my best friend Daniel and my little sister, Charlotte. Everyone else—my parents, my other siblings, my other friends—had no idea how complex and immersive my online life had become. I couldn’t shake the feeling that this meant that they did not—could not—really know me. And I couldn’t really know them.

The loneliness began to hit me on Sunday nights and summer afternoons when my family wasn’t home, and at school dances where everybody seemed to be playing a different game than I was. There was only one way to make the feeling go away: call Daniel and log onto Lord of the Craft. There, everybody understood, and everybody loved to do what I loved to do.

I didn’t really grow out of Minecraft, but I didn’t exactly quit either. I wanted to stop enjoying it so much, that’s true. I was afraid of how completely the game obsessed me, and I felt that I would never be able to “fit in” if I kept caring more about a roleplaying game than the rest of my life. But Lord of the Craft wasn’t so much abandoned as it was pushed out of the way to make room for another game, one that would eventually dominate my life just as much as Minecraft had.

—

My cousins and I climbed into a green Toyota Sienna after summer camp, just as we had done all month long, and my nanny drove us to our grandmother’s house. When we arrived, laptops, headphones, mouses, and mouse pads emerged from backpacks and we claimed our spots: I was at the desk, Christopher, William, and Breanna were on the couch, and Charlotte, the youngest, sat on the floor. For the rest of the afternoon, the room was full of shouting.

“Should we take drag? Should we take drag?”

“No. They have vision.”

“We could force a teamfight.”

“Let’s just push mid.”

My mom’s voice pierced the study walls: “Dinner!”

“After this game!”

“Pause the game!” she yelled. How many times would we have to explain that you can’t pause League of Legends?

On weekends, if we weren’t already having a sleepover, I would wake up early, log on, and scan my friends list.

Binney: online.

Charlotte2233: online.

dhmg195: online.

Then I would grab a house phone and a bag of grapes, snag the good chair, and call a number I knew by heart. A cousin would pick up and we’d spend the day playing League, taking breaks only when one of our parents needed to use the phone or we had to eat lunch. Sometimes we skipped lunch entirely. If we were lucky, we might even manage to find a “full squad,” filling an entire team with five cousins. I liked to pretend that we were professionals when that happened, competing in front of a packed stadium in the Riot Games Arena, in Los Angeles. For many years, the smell of sunscreen and the hum of AC units reminded me of summers spent playing League.

I quit League half a dozen times in high school, but I always came back. I loved the game too much to stay away: the strategy, the mechanics, the streamers, the updates, the competition. I loved watching the World Championships and feeling like I was a fan of something, just like my brother and my Dad were fans of the Red Sox, and I loved playing with my friends on Friday and Saturday nights. Even if I wished my passion was baseball, playing guitar, or Geo Bees, it wasn’t. Even if I wish my passion involved face-to-face interaction, physical exercise, or just a shred of social capital, it didn’t. I liked video games. And barring an act of God, I was never going to be done with them.

—

By the end of the pandemic, I knew loneliness in all of its flavors. Desperate, quiet, dogged, angry. Its contours, its slipperiness, its jagged edges. But for a while, video games protected me from that. After all, since high school had begun, all I had ever wished for was to return to the days when I could spend entire weekends playing video games without any consequences. At first, quarantine seemed like a dream come true.

For eighteen months, my friends and I played old classics— Minecraft, Call of Duty, League of Legends— and experimented with new titles— Fortnite, Sea of Thieves, Among Us. We didn’t have sports or plays or Model UN anymore, and school had become preposterously easy, so free time appeared out of nowhere. Enough free time to drown us. When one game got boring, we moved on to another. By the end of the first month, I was sick of every game I had ever played. But there was nothing else. So we kept gaming.

I was ten years old the first time a video game made me cry. I had built a dirt hut next to a lake in Minecraft, complete with a bed and chests, and then decided to go adventuring— but no matter how long I spent looking, I couldn’t find my way back home. My parents had no idea how to stop me from sobbing on the floor for the next two hours. The last time a video game made me cry, I was nineteen and I had just returned from my first semester at college. I had made plans to play Fortnite with my two high school best friends, and at 10 pm I put on my headset and joined the Xbox party chat. We played a few games, but I kept dying because I was looking at my phone during the game.

“You aight, Ben?” James asked.

“Yeah, I’m good,” I said. “Just tired.”

Jake and James went on talking about an anime they were watching. They seemed fine. Totally fine. Why wasn’t I?

“I gotta go,” I said.

“Already?” Jake asked. “Bro, we just got on.”

“I can’t play right now. Sorry.”

“Alright, man,” James said. “Whatever.”

I made sure my microphone was off and then began to sob into the couch cushions. I wasn’t sure why I was crying, but I knew that I never wanted to touch a controller again. I didn’t want to put on a headset or hear the chime of an Xbox or Playstation turning on, didn’t want to talk about the latest updates and releases, didn’t want to hear somebody’s voice and not see their face. I hated that basement, the study upstairs, my computer, my consoles, my Nintendo and Gameboy, my Switch, and the Wii buried in a box in the back of the furnace room. Part of me even hated those two friends.

For two years I didn’t play a single video game.

—

Have you ever been to the gaming lounge in the basement of Palmer Hall? It’s hard not to picture yourself playing in front of a sold-out stadium when you sit in one of those leather chairs with CC logos emblazoned on the back. That room helps me get through delicate moments. Moments that are like crossing a chasm on a tightrope, only you can’t see the bottom. If you fall, maybe you’ll hit the ground in two seconds, or maybe you’ll just keep falling, falling, falling.

I broke my two-year video game hiatus in that room. It was a simple thing. A friend from home invited me to play a new game with him, and instead of feeling disgusted, I thought to myself, sure, why not? I think I even felt a little bit excited. Since then, video games have crept back into my life. I taught my girlfriend how to play Fortnite. I reactivated an old Minecraft realm. And after one all-day gaming session, I remembered why I used to wish I had a different hobby.

I don’t play as many video games as I used to, though. These days, I write stories instead. But I guess it’s the same thing I was doing when I was twelve: leaving behind my day-to-day life for a more interesting one. I’m still desperate to share my fantasy worlds with the people around me, only now they’re words on a page instead of pixels on a screen.

A few nights ago I downloaded a game called Outer Wilds, a single-player space-exploration game. So far, I’ve just found a lot of new ways to die: blackholes, suffocation, being crushed by a massive pillar of sand. Twice the sun has exploded — not exactly sure how I’m supposed to avoid that one. I don’t really have to, though, because each time that I find a new way to die, the game plays a timelapse of my latest play-through and I respawn on my home planet like none of it happened. The other characters don’t even remember that I ever left in the first place. The game gives you the option to interact with them:

“I keep dying up there, man, what’s going on?” I ask the launch technician.

“You’re crazy, man — you’re lucky you already passed flight school!” they respond.

So, with nothing else to do, I climb back into my cobbled-together spaceship, press the right trigger to launch, and pick a star to explore. Maybe one I’ve never visited before; maybe the very same one that killed me last time. But what am I supposed to do, stay at home just because the sun might explode? Where’s the fun in that?

Empty Campsites, Empty Promises

A letter woven out of string

Article and Art by Katie Lockwood

I met my pen pal when I was ten while camping at the Grand Canyon for spring break. It was an obligatory bond that started when my dad noticed a neon-hoodied girl bobbing around the only other occupied site in the whole campground. He decided from our similarly questionable fashion tastes that we should be friends. 

We bonded over little other than our love for obnoxiously colored Under Armour hoodies. She had a parakeet, a little brother, and played soccer. I had a recently dead dog, been called an old soul since I was six at every adult dinner party, and bright pink shin-guards which hadn’t been touched for four years. 

We would hang out after dinner in the empty campsites. I suggested that we should make fairy houses. She was far more into kicking a soccer ball back and forth. Logically, we settled on playing Go Fish, because cards are the only thing consistently kept in a family camping supply to entertain bored kids, and Go Fish is the only card game 10-year-olds know how to play. People say that games like Uno and Spoons bring out the worst in people, which I can safely say is true having watched people get stabbed in the leg with broken plastic spoons.

But if games like these bring out one’s most barbaric qualities, I think Go Fish conversely brings out one’s tolerance for the utterly self-aware and mundane. No one wants to sit around considering the cards they have in their hand. No one wants to respond monotonously to being asked about what cards they do or don’t have, and no one wants to fish for something worthwhile– until it is a card game, and, at that, the only card game one knows how to play. We played until it was dark enough that you had to squint and hold the cards close to your face, or until one of our parents called us back to make smores (whichever came first). 

Every night that week, we milled about like old people who play cribbage in the park on Sundays (I wasn’t called an old soul for no reason). Sometimes she brought her little brother, who I didn’t mind, until he asked why I wore the same hoodie every night. It was at that moment that I noticed how much more expansive her neon hoodie collection was than mine. 

Altogether, I liked her more than her little brother, which was saying a lot considering they were two of the four people I had to interact with that week. 

We gave each other our mailing addresses at the end of the week. I honestly can’t remember whose idea it was to be pen pals, as the concept was utterly outdated by 2015. We were the dawn of screenagers. I had my mom’s old iPhone that I used to take up-close pictures of wildflowers and rocks with, which I then edited and over-saturated to oblivion. We could easily have given one another our phone numbers at the end of the week to stay in touch, and we could have just as easily forgotten each other in the next few weeks back at school. Why, instead, did we play limbo with the idea of knowing one another?

I kept a box of the things she sent me: pictures of her skiing trip to Montana, a postcard from Boise, and a doodle she sketched of her room. I kept the envelope from the most recent letter she sent, replacing it each time she sent me something new so that I could remember her address. I sent her a friendship bracelet I made (made with blue and green string because those were her favorite colors), pictures of the swingset in my backyard, and a copy of the program from the play I was in around that time. 

Dear Pen Pal, 

How are you? What’s your favorite color? How’s your little-shit brother? Do you want to keep pretending that we care about this now that we’re 9 years older? Should we get Snapchat instead? What’s your favorite movie? What makes you scared? Why did I listen to my dad when he said I should go talk to you? When’s your next soccer game? Will you write to me to tell me how it goes? Are we drifting? Do you secretly dread writing like I do? What are you doing tomorrow? What are you doing for the rest of your life? What did you do when you left the Grand Canyon? What did you do when I left the Grand Canyon?

Do you still wear neon hoodies?

    xoxo

I came to learn that she had family in Wheat Ridge, which I don’t think she realized was nearly five hours away from where I lived in Colorado. She mentioned how fun it would be to reunite there someday, and we toyed with the idea in each letter we sent. The thought of seeing her again slightly intrigued me, but mostly made me want to throw up. What are we going to do now that I don’t wear neon-hoodies and all I know about her is what she told me?

I can’t remember if I was the last one to write, or if she was. But there isn’t an envelope in the box now. I gulp at the fact it was probably me. 

Dear/Love

Article and Art by Chloë Fontenelle

Dear,

How have you been? We haven’t talked in years now, although we still have each other’s numbers and follow each other on Instagram. How do you remember us? At this point, I’ll probably never know, but here’s how I remember it:

We became close in eighth grade, seated together randomly in humanities class. We’d known each other for years, just like we’d known everyone in our grade for years. We’d even attended each others’ birthday parties, but we had never really clicked. We were both thirteen, in between friend groups somewhat, and so miserable. The first few months were light, fun— the magic of discovering a new person, discovering yourself through a new person, our dynamic intense but still uncomplicated.

Then, your father died. Before that, I had been the only child in our grade with a single mother, with no father on the scene. He died suddenly when I was six, and we moved right after. It wasn’t something I thought that I was particularly secretive about, but I never volunteered this information either. People who had known me for years would ask casually what my father did, why they had never met him before, and I would be cornered. 

I would try to tell them as casually as I could, try to match their tone, and yet I would already be bracing myself for their stricken expressions, for the inevitable awkwardness, for the guilt. I would feel like crying and laughing and would be terrified that I would do either. How hadn’t they known earlier? (Why hadn’t I told them, made it more public knowledge to maybe avoid this exchange altogether?) In a town that small, you expect to know everything about everyone. How could I explain that all I wanted at that age was to blend in as much as possible, be exactly like everyone else. I would say anything, or say nothing at all, to accomplish this.

You never had that option. Your father died suddenly in the middle of the school year, and everything was going to be different forever, and I didn’t feel like I knew how to help you, or the right thing to say, the right thing to do. Maybe it hardly mattered; we were both fatherless girls in a sea of respectable nuclear families and maybe the only thing I could do then was be there. And we were so deeply enmeshed at that point, us plus another friend, inseparable as a trio in a way that’s maybe only possible when you are fourteen and things are falling apart.

And I don’t think any of us knew what to do for each other at that point, and things were rocky and painful, too, but I was so, so happy to have the both of you. Looking back now, some of the ways we tried to care for each other seem misguided, but I guess we didn’t know what else to do. We loved each other, of course, but didn’t always know how to help each other. This is the only way I knew how to be there for you. To listen. To pay attention.

I felt like I could understand you so well, even when the things you said or did didn’t make much sense on the surface. A boy new to the school asked about your father years after it happened, and you said he was away right now. And I understood exactly why you did that, even if you risked him finding out later on, asking awkward questions. 

You would tell me often that our friendship was too one-sided, that you wished I would come to you with things, not just play therapist. I didn’t know what to do about this. I was so ashamed of everything about myself and didn’t know what to do about that either. And in so many ways we were so similar— our anxieties, our eating disorders, our shame, our grief. You talked all the time about how well I could read you, that I would seem to know about things before you even said them out loud. You took it as evidence that I knew you so well, and maybe I did, but I think it was often just that I knew myself.

In many ways, especially the most painful ones, we were so similar, and yet I didn’t know how to express this to you. I think I always hoped you could intuit these similarities yourself, just “know” somehow, but this is a ridiculous thing to ask of someone. When you would talk about the one-sidedness of our dynamic, I was inclined to agree, but felt that I was actually at the advantage. We could be so close, and you could tell me everything and I could listen, and in turn, I could reveal nothing to you and stay safe. As the years passed, it felt to me that we were so ingrained in this routine that change was impossible. I didn’t have the words to express this to you either.

As a trio, we stayed so close for the first half of high school, and then things got darker. I don’t know how to talk about some of it even now. Through it all we had the roles we would fill for each other, taking turns playing best friend, concerned parent, free therapist, closest confidant, life coach, even critic and competitor. Our other friend would usually take the hard stance, telling us what we should do about all of our problems, while I would play mediator.

As we became increasingly comfortable in these roles, they shaped our group dynamic as three. You and I became closer, maybe a bit at the expense of our third friend, who believed she knew how we should act, and what we should change to fix our lives. It got to the point that our third friend confessed to me once that she knew that if I couldn’t come to a sleepover, it wouldn’t happen at all, that you would bail. She had always wanted to be closer to you, I think, and you favored me, and she resented me for it.

I wasn’t really shocked, then, when you told me that you liked me at the end of our freshman year. You had always told me how much you loved me, expressed it in that intense, over-exaggerated way that close friends do at that age, but something intangible had shifted between us a few weeks earlier. I had sensed it and wasn’t sure what to think about it. But then you confessed to me with such an aura of impending doom, like you already knew what I was going to say before I said it.

Of course I rejected you. What else could I do? I would tell myself I was straight for two more years after that point, and tell everyone else I was straight for at least two more years after that. I couldn’t say any of this to you at the time, so you assumed I was straight and I did nothing to disabuse you of this notion. I loved you, with the nebulous, undefinable intensity of a relationship of that kind. But I felt that there was nothing else I could do.

Besides, from the second I started to think about it I was convinced that dating would be bad for us, and would have wrecked one of the only stable friendships we both had at that time. Even now I stand by this. Getting together would have ended badly for us. After all, even just acknowledging the mere possibility changed the dynamics of our relationship fundamentally.

And I wanted to leave our school, our hometown, so badly— I think all of our friends did, at least a little bit. And I worked hard at getting out of there and told nobody, not even you. And I did all the work, and then I got an opportunity, a really, really great opportunity, to leave for our whole junior year. 

And some of my friends were upset about it when I told them, sprung it on them suddenly towards the end of our sophomore spring, but you acted happy, saying how great it was that I was getting out. And I didn’t really believe you, and would have understood if you were angry at me, but we both knew it would change nothing. I was leaving anyway. 

And we were friends again, of course we were still friends, with the onset of senior year, but we had drifted. Junior year had been hard for everyone in different ways, and I had left, and we were both different people, sort of. And we had so little time left here. We were still friends, part of a larger group, but you felt so far away from me now. I was vaguely aware that we had lost something, and I wanted to find it again, but I wasn’t sure how.

Senior year pre-Covid was a blur, but I remember you wrote me a letter— you used to do things like that a lot. I don’t remember what it said exactly, just that it was beautiful, and very like you. I’m sure I meant to put it somewhere for safekeeping, but I haven’t seen it since. Could’ve been anywhere, tucked in a chemistry notebook or crumpled at the bottom of a backpack. Looking back, I could kick myself. How could I just lose something like that? How could I forget every word of it?

If you ever want to write me another letter, or text me, or call, or even smile whenever we pretend not to see each other in the grocery store during breaks, you know where to find me. Or maybe I’ll reach out first, for once. The phone goes both ways.

Love.

Lettitor

Dear Reader,

The United States' Postal Service consolidated Mail Recovery Center is located in Atlanta, Georgia. The MRC is responsible for sorting, storing, and— if possible— returning lost mail. At this “Dead Letter Department” the USPS investigators open letters in order to salvage them, to determine the identity of the senders and recipients. There is a place where lost letters go to dwell, where they are read – but perhaps not, or not yet, by the intended recipient. Welcome to the Return to Sender issue.

“I envy people who lived during times when letter-writing was more rampant,” Mira writes. While most written communication has moved on to faster, more convenient forms like texts and emails, letter writing carries a certain intimacy, a form of communication that seems to hold ever-increasing weight as time goes on. Letters give us something to hold onto, with words shaped by the subtle movements of a person’s hand, peppered with crossed-out sentences and notes in the margins. For the last issue of the year, we wanted to capture the timelessness of letter writing, and the bittersweet feeling of a one-sided conversation— something that may never be sent, received, or responded to.

In this issue, we received a range of creative interpretations of what a letter can be. Letters to past and future selves, to old friends, lovers, and childhood pen-pals. They address the known and unknown, voicing hopes and fears that must first be sent away in order to reach their recipient.

Sincerely,

USPS (...The Cipher Staff)