There are the ones I left in a drafty room over a frigid New England December, only to come back from sun-baked California to their slouching, frozen corpses. The countless overwatered succulents, the root-bound vines, the pothos I just couldn’t make happy. The ones left forgotten, unwatered on my ...
The rain waltzed through the antiquated, beige porticos lining the cobblestone streets. Soaked as I was, there was respite in the distance, peeking through the sun-dappled smog: Humana Vintage in all its vanity-inducing glory.
My childhood best friend Lilah once discovered a copy of Super Mario Bros. on the hallway floor of our middle school and stole it. Neither her conscience nor mine stopped us from taking it to her house after school and immediately plugging it into her pink Nintendo DS. For the next few months, every ...
There was no second of purifying blackness, no raising of curtains or lowering of wires, no mechanized magic at all. Samia strode out to the microphone stand at centerstage, wearing her characteristic wide-eyed fishnets, mid-calf black leather boots, and a tiered white miniskirt that clung to her waist ...
Here we are again in the dead of a seemingly neverending winter. But, hell, that’s what Februaries are for. I hope that you all are staying toasty and layered up, because I seem to have found myself overseas, some four thousand miles from home, and it’s just as fucking frigid. But, here I am, doing ...
Mysterious and alluring, it is one of the rarest creatures in the world. Only spotted on the most unlikely of nights, it constantly evades capture at the last minute, coming tantalizingly close before dancing away once again. Despite its slippery nature, it entraps the world's attention as its ...
Maybe I’m sitting at the dinner table, feeling the warmth of the tea mug and the crumbs on the tablecloth. My brother might be beside me, still eating—methodical as a surgeon. My mother is probably ribbing him for sleeping until the afternoon, and between bites, he defends himself: “It took ...
After sunset is the blue hour. The sun is just below the horizon, and on a clear day, the remaining light scatters through the air, turning everything blue. At some point, you must have pushed out of a door, rolled down a window, or dragged a trash bag to the driveway and suddenly felt that blue air ...
My grandfather, a motion picture exhibitor, used to declare every film he saw the “best picture of the year.” I can still hear the natural inflection of that phrase in his voice revealing his pure, unadulterated delight. My grandmother would walk out of the theatre and tell him she couldn’t believe ...
In the very first episode of Fleabag, a beloved comedy-drama, the titular character and her sister Claire attend a feminist lecture together, in which the speaker asks the audience: “Please raise your hands if you would trade five years of your life for the so-called ‘perfect body.’” The rest ...
Honey, There’s A Lineman In The Kitchen
On the sixth night of Chanukah, which is also Christmas Eve, I am awake and burning in my childhood bed. It isn't a flame, but a computer running on my bare stomach that sears a red spot into my skin. But I can’t find it in myself to move. Not quite a week has passed since coming home, and I’m ...
My sister is a forest dweller. She leads a pastoral existence—the trees are her companions and the stars her teachers. At Colby College in Waterville, Maine, the rustic wind nudges time forward. The woods’ many creatures waylay adventure-hungry students skipping astray in the hills, nibbling at ...
The Sunday Scaries are only scary when you think ahead to Monday. I’ve always had the Sunday Scaries, but at the start of freshman year, one of my best friends and I started a tradition called Smoothie Sundays to combat this feeling. Amidst a quiet campus, Tabitha and I got drinks from Tropical Smoothie ...
I’ve seen the clip a few times now. Anya Taylor-Joy is on a press tour, promoting her movie The Menu in a BBC interview. “I have a thing about feminine rage,” she says. She kicks the air playfully as she speaks. “This is no disrespect for any writer. I get a lot of men doing really terrible ...
Gum-covered bus rides. Fingers stained Bomb Pop red. Billabong swim trunks clinging to two still-growing legs. This is what “Clarity”—Zedd’s iconic 2012 pop banger—means to me. When Ice Spice samples it on her song “No Clarity,” one of her first songs to gain traction, pop becomes a signifier: ...
“Draaaaake?...Aubrey Graham in a wheelchair?”
Tears well up in my eyes the instant the plate hits the ground. It shatters on the kitchen floor beneath me, its pearly ceramic fragments blending in almost seamlessly with the tile. I’m six years old, and my dinner plate has slipped out of my small hands en route to the dishwasher. My dad picks me ...
I think everyone has their own form of synesthesia. I have a friend who sees a number whenever they think of or interact with a person—odd numbers mean different things from even, and a person who is a four is entirely different from a person who is a forty.
The annoying, prodding question galavanting across every purchase: What does it mean to be fashionable? It is a question unanswerable, too subjective to even approach. Yet a thousand different corners have thrown a thousand different hats in the ring.
Solutions by The State News
