Mia Lasic-Ellis

Early in the fall it is not rainy, but I decide to wear rain pants to lab anyway. We study mosses flagged by yellow tape for a few hours. The medium is found ballpoint pen on waterproof paper: my favorite as of late. After, briefly, I search for mushrooms. They are few and far between; better yet, I am impatient. Instead, I convince Kendall to lie in a patch of peat moss with me until we have to leave. Perhaps if we had stayed there longer, we would have turned over with the next cycle of growth, invaluable and unseen, buried under a new carpet on the forest floor. In the meantime, October mycelium finds its way through the ground underneath us. All afternoon, rain threatens to fall but never does, and I find that, really, things are okay.

Of the neurons firing in your brain, only so many traverse your consciousness. For the last three years, I have been fascinated by how much I have changed and how little I have seemed to notice. From start to finish, the brain takes approximately 26 years to finish developing. I am trying to watch it happen.

I like filling my fruit bowl with pears. The odds I say yes to a receipt when I buy something lie around one in four. I keep forgetting to lock my car. I am delighted by a Tuesday morning snow squall. I feel caught up in a series of inexplicable frameshifts that I hope mean something about my frontal lobe but in reality could mean nothing. Like everyone else, I am desperate for sun.

On one Saturday a downed power line redirects traffic and turns my front porch into a two-way street. As the scene unfolds from my window I am so happy and stable I find it oddly poetic. I think the brain is like a carpet of moss—an ancient body of infinite change. When one layer of moss dies it sinks towards the earth and propagates a new layer on top. Here too: I learn one thing or two about the world and my brain starts to think in poetry.

There is only so much I remember of what lies underneath, but I try anyway: first it is the cold embrace of the Atlantic and the yellow smudge of the full moon. Before that, a kitten hanging from my sweater and crying so hard I cannot summon up the tears again when I am supposed to.

Like moss the brain is soft too, and easily imprinted. Despite the turnover each time it happens, each indent is kept somewhere—often underground, sometimes buried in the patterns of my brain. I become more pliable; so does everything else. From a second-story print shop I watch not a flock of birds, but their shadows climbing the brick building next to me. I wonder what they are, where they are going, what they are saying. Shuffling my feet against the floor, I think about what a pleasure it is—to be warm next to this heater, experiencing the world reshuffle for the thousandth time.

Caitlin Panicker is a member of the Class of 2026.