Introspection
On the Trail
I was miserable, the thought wheezed, I should go home. And it never quite left. Two months later, when my dog’s cancer was close to consuming him, I called it quits and got on the next flight to Boston.
Short Stories
Like every morning since sometime in seventh grade, I woke up that morning five feet, one-and-three-quarters inches tall, and I will likely continue to do so for the rest of my life.
Endpaper: Fireflies
Over the phone, my mother’s voice sounds the same as mine. Same cadence, same pitch, same laugh that bubbles from nowhere. We walk through the mall, and she criss-cross links our arms. A hat vendor asks us if we are sisters.
Coordinates: Lunar Eclipse
Lunar eclipses are traditionally harbingers of some kind, great signals in the sky warning of the wrath of the gods or the terrifying impermanence of the things we hold constant.
Modern Love: Breathing that Whole Time
“Do you ever”—I broke eye contact for a second—“Do you ever run out of breath?”
Party Like It's c. 2003
After weeks of begging my editor to let me write this story, she acquiesced. I gave up my phone and Facebook account to my roommate. The terms of this experiment were laughably soft. I figured that this week probably best mirrored the conditions for a student in the early 2000s: access to email but not to phones or social media platforms.
Gender Gap
Virginia Woolf sat in the library at Oxford imagining the books that Shakespeare’s sister didn’t publish. Sometimes when I walk deep in Widener’s belly, I feel the incredible pressure of the books that are not there.
Paris, I Love You, But You're Bringing Me Down
I went to Paris wearing a red peacoat, convinced that the city’s monochromatic madames et monsieurs were an overblown American myth. I rubied my lips for good measure. My delineated Cupid’s bow awed a grand total of two people: myself (easily impressed) and the one creepy guy who dubbed me a bitchy bouche rouge when I didn’t flash a smile at him as I passed him on the street (easily dismissed).
A Survivor is Born
In the face of terror, it is essential to remind yourself of your ability, whether what scares you is writing a conclusion to your thesis or cauterizing an abdominal wound on the fly. Sitting under the fluorescent lights of my dorm room as I fumbled through Tomb Raider, I heard Lara’s words and I felt their importance.
Spring Break Postcard: Met-Cute
Perhaps If I had grown up in Michigan I would have fallen in love with the New York City skyline, the tops of buildings glimpsed in small square segments from a plane. But I lived commuting-distance from Manhattan, in a suburb where the stone walls of colonial pastures lined the road to the train station. And so I met the city from the ground up: the smooth blue of the Hudson to the raised tracks over Harlem, only then to the skyscrapers in the distance.
Spring Break Postcard: Food in Ma Belly
My roommate decided to visit me at home in Philadelphia. It was frigid, and every day we ate sandwiches. My goal: that he would leave with a fuller stomach, significantly closer to heart disease, his face slick with oil.
Spring Break Postcard: Orbs in Cancun
I landed in Cancun ready to embrace a cliché. There were no plans except to set aside the haughty, critical coldness of Cambridge and indulge in that undergraduate tropical escape narrative that is Mexico for Spring Break.
Spring Break Postcard: New York, N.Y.
Born to New Yorker parents and raised in Connecticut, I am not inspired by New York City to breathless wonder unlike the millions of tourists who visit every year.
Weather
In January, my skin turns to snow. I leave my dorm in the morning, hair shower-wet, mousse-sprayed to my neck, snowflakes crystallized in my curls. I wear black tights and salt stains bloom on my thighs; I wear black boots and white lines cross my ankles in waves. The spaces between my fingers grow cold.
Madame Mademoiselle
In those lazy summers of five or six years ago, when every morning we awoke together ready to take on the backyard, we favored one in particular. I wrote a description of that game, Madame Mademoiselle, in my college application essay. My sister watched me compose the first draft.
