While Serbs nowadays throw up a holy trinity salute to express their national pride and religion—like Albanians who sign an eagle across their chests with both hands—when I occasionally throw up my thumb, index and middle fingers in a photo, …
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 …
It had been three months since the lockdown was announced in Metro Manila, and suffice it to say we were all going stir-crazy. Our hands were exhausted from the trend of whipping coffee, our eyes were red from Zoom school …
January 11, 2024—I am an absolute mess. Tears slide down my face as I slowly chip away at my now-salty chicken parm sandwich. I quickly dry my eyes in my sleeve just as my mom walks into the kitchen to …
It took living in the Northeast to come to know that I’m a southerner—that is, from the American South. I grew up emphasizing my Chicagoan origins rather than my hometown in Tennessee in forgettable introductions to familiar strangers, having learned …
Over spring break, my mom handed me a letter. Sent by Ms. Clapp, my beloved high school anatomy & physiology teacher, it had languished under a mounting mountain of mail for untold weeks, maybe months. The sender’s handwriting surprised me: …
For much of the month of February, on every Monday and Wednesday from 2:50 to 4:15 p.m., I left behind the crisp air of the Maine winter for the thick, implacable fog of Charles Dickens’s “Bleak House.” The novel, which …
Not every 18-year-old can say they’ve been a guardian for a child, much less for three different children. But this past summer, on August 10th, I had one single day where I was.
There’s a small coffee shop right down the street from my high school in Pittsburgh, Pa. It’s one of those newer, trendier local spots—the walls and tables are covered in plants, and Bon Iver and Hozier play quietly from the …