– Scene 1: The days are short but the years are long- at least that’s what they tell me.
Scene 2: She looks onwards, gazing at the world around her and thinking about the type of environment that she will raise her baby in.
The Remix: She looks onwards, gazing at the world around her and thinking about the type of world she will raise her baby in. The mere thought stresses her out, but she is grateful for every downfall she faces. It means that her baby is still here; there is still life within her. She will gladly accept every ache and pain, every cry and look of disgust. She cannot even imagine a life without her child now. It sounds cliche, but it’s every bit true. She knows what it feels like to lose the very same thing you created.
1 sentence reflection on subject from 2/6 writing exercise + story of object from 1/30 writing exercise:
My mom and I love cheap faux flowers. When I came to Smith, I started collecting fake flowers for my room. Over the years, the bouquets I stick in empty wine bottles have become too large for the windowsills. My dusty floor amasses its own lost and found: the peg to my nose stud, the bracket to my watch, half a pound of road salt, four melatonin pills— I’ll get to cleaning it all one day.
Letter to a younger self and experimental prose
This is it. It happened and it’s over. You have experienced every possible stage with him and it’s time to do it on your own. Two years later you feel more so than ever ready? I know it isn’t fully out of your daily thoughts but this is long overdue. It’s past the stage of embarrassment even. Every other time you have felt a glimpse of hope and independence he returns. This time there is no coming back from the hole as deep as the earth’s core this now stranger has dug for himself. It is time to apply the boundaries that you have with everyone else to him and not be stuck in the trance of fake comfort and love displayed. There is no love and there never again will be in this lifetime. I know you want to be loved.
Sometimes I envision you leaving because your patience runs out. I get it I do, my patience wears thin too. For you though, I’d run on empty, I am not sure you’d do the same for me. I feel forgotten, left out, an afterthought. You’ve always been my first thought. You made the new place feel like home. Walking hand in hand with you to the student bookstore made everything lock into place. I only wanted to buy a T-shirt. You know me, I’m a bit of a shopaholic though I would never admit it. Maybe that’s what makes you hate me, my carelessness, the swipe of a card like it has no consequences. I thought a ‘My girlfriend is a Smithie’ shirt would make you stay. Spoiler alert, it didn’t. Thinking memories would find their way into the mass-produced threading, thinking this would mean I wouldn’t have to watch you leave. It was stupid. Maybe when you wear the shirt people ask about me. I hope they do. Maybe you talk about me, but probably not.
Combination of “Dissolve Yourself” in-class writing exercise and “Short Talks on Lilies of the Valley”
She’s glaring at me from her seat in the Publix shopping cart, expression like the tiny bell-shaped flowers in our garden, poison hidden within innocent white. I didn’t know such a small person could have such passionate emotions, but the frustration and concern are in her eyes, the ones that look just like mine. They’re brown at first glance but hazel in the right light, and right now they look like sparkly dew drops and passing time. I tell her it’s okay to not put on the seatbelt in the shopping cart seat because it’s broken on this one and we’re in a hurry, but she shakes her head. Tiny hands grip the metal cart as she tells me in a language that isn’t quite English yet that it’s not okay because I’ve always told her that seatbelts are important. I wish I could capture this moment, her glimmering youth, in a clear jar and put it on the windowsill. Now I’m looking at her through a phone screen, trying to picture her face clearer than the pixel-y one on my phone. She’s in college now, far away. I think back to that little cluster of love and happiness nestled in the damp leaves of the past that I couldn’t save from thieving time. She knows the importance of seatbelts but I wish there was more I could teach her.
A Combination of Short Talk on The Solar System & Short Talk on Warm Summer Rain
The way your drenched shirt clings to your body makes you look hotter than I remember. We only get to see each other this time of year. When the planets and stars align. I’m trying to make the best of it. I’m not sure what you are up to…then–splash! Your puddle jumping dowses me and mud sticks to my leg. I want to be angry, but I can’t be, not at you. Around and around we go. We are forever looped together in a gravitational pull that cannot be bested. I find that when we are at our furthest distance from each other, the force between us is strongest. Reminding me you are out there, across the reaches of space. So I can’t be mad now. That would spoil the day. This beautiful day. When the sun is still shining and the raindrops look golden. With you in my orbit, soaked to the bone.
This is a combination of my Short Talk on Bones and my flash essay on a topic of interest.
I remember the audience. I remember those who were there with me for these theatrical experiences.
I remember a frustrated mother, a daughter on the verge of throwing up as I struggled to face the pixels in front of me.
By all accounts, bones in a video game should not be feared, the dread and sorrow linking hundreds of strangers in a moment as we witnessed a tragedy on a stage should not be considered a true loss. What is on stage and on screen should not ingrain themselves into my brain, as if they were pre written into the script of my life, in the way they do. They are not real. The audience knows this, the frustrated mother to my side knows this, I know this. Despite this, to me they were real. They were everything and nothing at once.
Reality fades as I remember the golden light and transcendent experience of witnessing “Epic III” in “Hadestown”, of feeling spring return full force each moment I feel the breeze on my skin, as I see the colossal skull, mouth open, remnants frozen in a moment of agony born of a sudden death from the game on my computer around me wherever I go. The stage and screens in my life have captured my attention; no, not just my attention, my very being. The stories they tell, the places they bring me to are around me everywhere, daunting, terrifying, ethereal, delightful, everything at once.
They are false, restricted to the screen, smaller than my hand when I lift it to the computer, gone, the instant the curtain closes and the theater is emptied.
I know this. But I pay it no mind. To me they are real. The experiences crafted before me transport me beyond my mind into an expansive new world, one of my own creation. The games I play, the shows I see, stick with me long after I have put them down. They give me an eternal escape I can return to at any time. In my mind I am surrounded by the stories and places I have watched on screen and stage. I am drawn in and enamored by the volume of life and passion born of my imagination, born of my memory, born of screen and stage.
Combination of Creative Non Fiction Essay and Short Talk on Drive-Thru Shifts
There’s a song playing from the speakers that probably shouldn’t be. Heavy metal. It clashes with the “food for the family” posters on the wall. 10:00pm. Who wants a sub at 10:00pm? Surely someone. But your shift is going to be over in thirty minutes, so you’re hoping against hope that this person will grab McDonalds instead. They don’t. The headset vibrates once then twice. A heartbeat without resonance. Vrmm. Vrmm Vrmm. Click.
“What Can I Get For You?”
“A number twelve, with aaaaaa– Diet Coke, and the BBQ- wait no- salt and vinegar chips.”
“Will That Be All For You Today?”
“Yep.”
“That’ll be 10 dollars and 25 cents. Pull Forward And We’ll Have That Right Out For You.”
Click. Coworker is already making the sandwich. You grab a cup and start pouring the drink. Then you hear the hit. There’s the scream of tires on asphalt, and a very literal human shout. Then the car pulls up to the window. A woman with blond hair.
“Do you call the police or do I?” She snaps as soon as the doors woosh apart.
“Umm, what just happened?” Wrong question.
“God, what does it look like? That woman just rear ended me! Will you call the cops or do I have to?”
Manager steps in, thank Christ. “Ma’am, if you could call the police that would be ideal, for insurance purposes.”
The red and blue lights pop into view soon enough, siren blaring. You take the order of the woman who did the rear ending. It’s clearly been a rough night. When she pulls up to the window, you can’t look her in the eyes. It’s just a tad ridiculous, telling her to have a nice night in that voice you have to do, well looking her dead on.
Your shift ends right at that moment, but you won’t be braving that parking lot until the dancing red and blue is fading down the main road twenty minutes later.
Manager left. Coworker too. Just you, closing the place down. You hate how quiet and dark it is. You book it to your car, no one there to call you silly, and also no one there to witness the consequences of a lack of caution.
You hit something on the way home. You don’t know if it was alive, but it’s dead now. God damn late shifts. God damn stupid radio. God damn lack of focus. God damn… God damn.
A combination of my Short Talk on Dancing and part of my Letter to Childhood Self:
I was pulled out of class.
A competitive dance class.
Piles of dance shoe boxes and racks of leotards surrounded us as we sat side-by-side on a small black bench meant for one. In the studio’s store space, my perception of dance shifted.
“I tried contacting your parents, but they didn’t reply.” she bluntly began. My mom was out of town for medical care, my dad with her. I was with my grandparents. I was confused. The dance studio director began to explain.
Because I was disabled, my participation in the class would hinder the choreographic process. The way I danced would lower the scores given at competitions. My heart pounded. Because it was “unsafe” for me, I was no longer allowed to participate. Our conversation ended there.
I was near tears when my sister, who I saw in the hallway, asked why I wasn’t in class. I had to explain. I don’t remember much more about that day, though the memory of my initial conversation with her will be vividly burned in my brain for years to come.
When I was an infant, my parents were told I would never walk. Dance? Out of the question. Impossible. However, at age six, I made my debut dance performance as a munchkin from The Wizard of Oz. Never in a million years did I imagine that a miracle like this would be discouraged just because my body dances differently than my mind. Dance? Once again out of the question, even though it was proven possible, because my dancing was different.
When I dance, I feel like I am dancing the way an able-bodied person would be dancing. Until I look in the mirror. Then I see the difference. Though some people may care, I don’t. I dance to bring myself joy. If I look different or “weird,” so what? In my mind, I am dancing. My body is just dancing along the only way it knows how.
This is a combination between one of my Short Talks and the Travelogue from the first week.
When my mother was in high school, an ambitious, over-committed teenager with an hour-long drive to face every morning, her car flipped. The cost was sleepless nights, sinking eyelids, slipping hands. The cost was almost her life. She repeats the story now, solemnly, emphatically, to warn away the same sacrifice in her two daughters, caught up in homework and extracurriculars, learning to drive.
She is not on this hike with us; it’s only my dad, my sister, and me, slowly drawing nearer to the peak of this mountain, passing between the affectionate heat of the sun and the cooler caresses of shade in the bristly clusters of birch trees. She stayed behind, is sleeping in.
The automobiles she warns us about are not with us either. I cannot hear cars from up here. Sometimes I can see them through gaps in the treeline, traveling across the base of the mountain in neat ant rows. But I cannot hear them, only the wind and the responding rustle of leaf and fern and the steady footfalls of my family as we walk on and on. And I cannot smell them, no exhaust, no oil, only the refreshing washes of greenery and height and clean stream water. And dirt. Honest dirt.
Soil and mud and rocks and twigs might scrape our legs and bruise our knees and twist our ankles, but they will not play with us like puppets caught in cages of crumpling metal. They will not bowl us over like red-and-white pins at the end of a lane, crashing into us at the whim of another guiding hand.
A tired driver, we’ve been warned, can turn a car into a bowling ball. I will never pull an all-nighter.
– Scene 1: The days are short but the years are long- at least that’s what they tell me.
Scene 2: She looks onwards, gazing at the world around her and thinking about the type of environment that she will raise her baby in.
The Remix: She looks onwards, gazing at the world around her and thinking about the type of world she will raise her baby in. The mere thought stresses her out, but she is grateful for every downfall she faces. It means that her baby is still here; there is still life within her. She will gladly accept every ache and pain, every cry and look of disgust. She cannot even imagine a life without her child now. It sounds cliche, but it’s every bit true. She knows what it feels like to lose the very same thing you created.
1 sentence reflection on subject from 2/6 writing exercise + story of object from 1/30 writing exercise:
My mom and I love cheap faux flowers. When I came to Smith, I started collecting fake flowers for my room. Over the years, the bouquets I stick in empty wine bottles have become too large for the windowsills. My dusty floor amasses its own lost and found: the peg to my nose stud, the bracket to my watch, half a pound of road salt, four melatonin pills— I’ll get to cleaning it all one day.
Letter to a younger self and experimental prose
This is it. It happened and it’s over. You have experienced every possible stage with him and it’s time to do it on your own. Two years later you feel more so than ever ready? I know it isn’t fully out of your daily thoughts but this is long overdue. It’s past the stage of embarrassment even. Every other time you have felt a glimpse of hope and independence he returns. This time there is no coming back from the hole as deep as the earth’s core this now stranger has dug for himself. It is time to apply the boundaries that you have with everyone else to him and not be stuck in the trance of fake comfort and love displayed. There is no love and there never again will be in this lifetime. I know you want to be loved.
Sometimes I envision you leaving because your patience runs out. I get it I do, my patience wears thin too. For you though, I’d run on empty, I am not sure you’d do the same for me. I feel forgotten, left out, an afterthought. You’ve always been my first thought. You made the new place feel like home. Walking hand in hand with you to the student bookstore made everything lock into place. I only wanted to buy a T-shirt. You know me, I’m a bit of a shopaholic though I would never admit it. Maybe that’s what makes you hate me, my carelessness, the swipe of a card like it has no consequences. I thought a ‘My girlfriend is a Smithie’ shirt would make you stay. Spoiler alert, it didn’t. Thinking memories would find their way into the mass-produced threading, thinking this would mean I wouldn’t have to watch you leave. It was stupid. Maybe when you wear the shirt people ask about me. I hope they do. Maybe you talk about me, but probably not.
Combination of “Dissolve Yourself” in-class writing exercise and “Short Talks on Lilies of the Valley”
She’s glaring at me from her seat in the Publix shopping cart, expression like the tiny bell-shaped flowers in our garden, poison hidden within innocent white. I didn’t know such a small person could have such passionate emotions, but the frustration and concern are in her eyes, the ones that look just like mine. They’re brown at first glance but hazel in the right light, and right now they look like sparkly dew drops and passing time. I tell her it’s okay to not put on the seatbelt in the shopping cart seat because it’s broken on this one and we’re in a hurry, but she shakes her head. Tiny hands grip the metal cart as she tells me in a language that isn’t quite English yet that it’s not okay because I’ve always told her that seatbelts are important. I wish I could capture this moment, her glimmering youth, in a clear jar and put it on the windowsill. Now I’m looking at her through a phone screen, trying to picture her face clearer than the pixel-y one on my phone. She’s in college now, far away. I think back to that little cluster of love and happiness nestled in the damp leaves of the past that I couldn’t save from thieving time. She knows the importance of seatbelts but I wish there was more I could teach her.
A Combination of Short Talk on The Solar System & Short Talk on Warm Summer Rain
The way your drenched shirt clings to your body makes you look hotter than I remember. We only get to see each other this time of year. When the planets and stars align. I’m trying to make the best of it. I’m not sure what you are up to…then–splash! Your puddle jumping dowses me and mud sticks to my leg. I want to be angry, but I can’t be, not at you. Around and around we go. We are forever looped together in a gravitational pull that cannot be bested. I find that when we are at our furthest distance from each other, the force between us is strongest. Reminding me you are out there, across the reaches of space. So I can’t be mad now. That would spoil the day. This beautiful day. When the sun is still shining and the raindrops look golden. With you in my orbit, soaked to the bone.
This is a combination of my Short Talk on Bones and my flash essay on a topic of interest.
I remember the audience. I remember those who were there with me for these theatrical experiences.
I remember a frustrated mother, a daughter on the verge of throwing up as I struggled to face the pixels in front of me.
By all accounts, bones in a video game should not be feared, the dread and sorrow linking hundreds of strangers in a moment as we witnessed a tragedy on a stage should not be considered a true loss. What is on stage and on screen should not ingrain themselves into my brain, as if they were pre written into the script of my life, in the way they do. They are not real. The audience knows this, the frustrated mother to my side knows this, I know this. Despite this, to me they were real. They were everything and nothing at once.
Reality fades as I remember the golden light and transcendent experience of witnessing “Epic III” in “Hadestown”, of feeling spring return full force each moment I feel the breeze on my skin, as I see the colossal skull, mouth open, remnants frozen in a moment of agony born of a sudden death from the game on my computer around me wherever I go. The stage and screens in my life have captured my attention; no, not just my attention, my very being. The stories they tell, the places they bring me to are around me everywhere, daunting, terrifying, ethereal, delightful, everything at once.
They are false, restricted to the screen, smaller than my hand when I lift it to the computer, gone, the instant the curtain closes and the theater is emptied.
I know this. But I pay it no mind. To me they are real. The experiences crafted before me transport me beyond my mind into an expansive new world, one of my own creation. The games I play, the shows I see, stick with me long after I have put them down. They give me an eternal escape I can return to at any time. In my mind I am surrounded by the stories and places I have watched on screen and stage. I am drawn in and enamored by the volume of life and passion born of my imagination, born of my memory, born of screen and stage.
Combination of Creative Non Fiction Essay and Short Talk on Drive-Thru Shifts
There’s a song playing from the speakers that probably shouldn’t be. Heavy metal. It clashes with the “food for the family” posters on the wall. 10:00pm. Who wants a sub at 10:00pm? Surely someone. But your shift is going to be over in thirty minutes, so you’re hoping against hope that this person will grab McDonalds instead. They don’t. The headset vibrates once then twice. A heartbeat without resonance. Vrmm. Vrmm Vrmm. Click.
“What Can I Get For You?”
“A number twelve, with aaaaaa– Diet Coke, and the BBQ- wait no- salt and vinegar chips.”
“Will That Be All For You Today?”
“Yep.”
“That’ll be 10 dollars and 25 cents. Pull Forward And We’ll Have That Right Out For You.”
Click. Coworker is already making the sandwich. You grab a cup and start pouring the drink. Then you hear the hit. There’s the scream of tires on asphalt, and a very literal human shout. Then the car pulls up to the window. A woman with blond hair.
“Do you call the police or do I?” She snaps as soon as the doors woosh apart.
“Umm, what just happened?” Wrong question.
“God, what does it look like? That woman just rear ended me! Will you call the cops or do I have to?”
Manager steps in, thank Christ. “Ma’am, if you could call the police that would be ideal, for insurance purposes.”
The red and blue lights pop into view soon enough, siren blaring. You take the order of the woman who did the rear ending. It’s clearly been a rough night. When she pulls up to the window, you can’t look her in the eyes. It’s just a tad ridiculous, telling her to have a nice night in that voice you have to do, well looking her dead on.
Your shift ends right at that moment, but you won’t be braving that parking lot until the dancing red and blue is fading down the main road twenty minutes later.
Manager left. Coworker too. Just you, closing the place down. You hate how quiet and dark it is. You book it to your car, no one there to call you silly, and also no one there to witness the consequences of a lack of caution.
You hit something on the way home. You don’t know if it was alive, but it’s dead now. God damn late shifts. God damn stupid radio. God damn lack of focus. God damn… God damn.
A combination of my Short Talk on Dancing and part of my Letter to Childhood Self:
I was pulled out of class.
A competitive dance class.
Piles of dance shoe boxes and racks of leotards surrounded us as we sat side-by-side on a small black bench meant for one. In the studio’s store space, my perception of dance shifted.
“I tried contacting your parents, but they didn’t reply.” she bluntly began. My mom was out of town for medical care, my dad with her. I was with my grandparents. I was confused. The dance studio director began to explain.
Because I was disabled, my participation in the class would hinder the choreographic process. The way I danced would lower the scores given at competitions. My heart pounded. Because it was “unsafe” for me, I was no longer allowed to participate. Our conversation ended there.
I was near tears when my sister, who I saw in the hallway, asked why I wasn’t in class. I had to explain. I don’t remember much more about that day, though the memory of my initial conversation with her will be vividly burned in my brain for years to come.
When I was an infant, my parents were told I would never walk. Dance? Out of the question. Impossible. However, at age six, I made my debut dance performance as a munchkin from The Wizard of Oz. Never in a million years did I imagine that a miracle like this would be discouraged just because my body dances differently than my mind. Dance? Once again out of the question, even though it was proven possible, because my dancing was different.
When I dance, I feel like I am dancing the way an able-bodied person would be dancing. Until I look in the mirror. Then I see the difference. Though some people may care, I don’t. I dance to bring myself joy. If I look different or “weird,” so what? In my mind, I am dancing. My body is just dancing along the only way it knows how.
This is a combination between one of my Short Talks and the Travelogue from the first week.
When my mother was in high school, an ambitious, over-committed teenager with an hour-long drive to face every morning, her car flipped. The cost was sleepless nights, sinking eyelids, slipping hands. The cost was almost her life. She repeats the story now, solemnly, emphatically, to warn away the same sacrifice in her two daughters, caught up in homework and extracurriculars, learning to drive.
She is not on this hike with us; it’s only my dad, my sister, and me, slowly drawing nearer to the peak of this mountain, passing between the affectionate heat of the sun and the cooler caresses of shade in the bristly clusters of birch trees. She stayed behind, is sleeping in.
The automobiles she warns us about are not with us either. I cannot hear cars from up here. Sometimes I can see them through gaps in the treeline, traveling across the base of the mountain in neat ant rows. But I cannot hear them, only the wind and the responding rustle of leaf and fern and the steady footfalls of my family as we walk on and on. And I cannot smell them, no exhaust, no oil, only the refreshing washes of greenery and height and clean stream water. And dirt. Honest dirt.
Soil and mud and rocks and twigs might scrape our legs and bruise our knees and twist our ankles, but they will not play with us like puppets caught in cages of crumpling metal. They will not bowl us over like red-and-white pins at the end of a lane, crashing into us at the whim of another guiding hand.
A tired driver, we’ve been warned, can turn a car into a bowling ball. I will never pull an all-nighter.