I wonder when I started being afraid of alone time. It’s been an unconscious, foreboding feeling for so long; I’ve adopted it to the point that I feel like I exist as a result of the feeling. What happens now, when I’ve grown used to relying on others? Memories of my childhood sporadically come ...
September, 2021
I sit in the passenger seat. My mother holds the wheel with both hands, staring ahead at the gray road under a gray sky. I know, without looking up from the electric-blue kickboxing wraps I twine around my knuckles, from the accelerations and decelerations of the car, which stoplight we’re approaching. ...
If you cannot find me, look for me in the grass. In the rich green patches of earth, where the clovers grow, I am seated as I search for lucky four-leafs of my own. I sometimes feel guilty for uprooting the magic for the sake of my own collection. But then I stumble upon a little boy crying, and as ...
As the theater shook with the shouts and crashes of the brutal action sequences, my parents and I sat in taut silence, broken only by the occasional crunch of popcorn and slurping of an extra-large Coca-Cola. The audience was entranced, eyes glued to the screen, even when the protagonist broke his leg ...
Sun streams in through the dirty windshield of my green Subaru. I prop up my knee as I drive, and if my mother saw me, she’d be upset. But you are the one in the passenger seat next to me, twiddling with my phone to pick a song on our nine-minute drive to Michael’s.
I used to think rain wasn't real. Growing up in Los Angeles, famous for its year-long summer, a rainy day was a special occasion. Rain sparked a butterfly effect with far-ranging consequences—from causing distressed drivers to lose all coordination to inspiring elated jubilation from all the young ...
I make a precise fold in half. I repeat with the same scrutiny, the same exactness, the same force, again and again. With a pair of safety scissors whose unused blades glimmer in my intent eyes, I calculate a snippet of the corner: Four thin, white triangles swirl down into my lap. Another cut at the ...
Autumn
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My feet swing under the chipped wooden table. I soak in the smell of sizzling tomato sauce. My grandmother’s hands—soft from Pond’s hand lotion but aged from years of hot oil splashes—are a blur. I watch her float from oven to stove, guiding raw ingredients into a meal. Unwashed vegetables, ...
Dearest Mathematics,
Sitting in the art-deco-meets-botanica Domain Café (understood to be the Andrews of downtown Manhattan, given the prevalence of Asian-inspired food options), I feel exhausted. A frontal lobe headache is developing, and my eyes just can’t seem to adjust to the light. This is partly because I got up ...
There are not many things in this world that I, with time, cannot overcome. If it’s a homework assignment, I can escape the all-consuming mindset that one assignment will affect the trajectory of my career. If it’s a disagreement among friends, I can find ways to view multiple perspectives, finding ...
If there’s one thing to know about me, it’s that there are actually eleven (and counting): Paul Ryan, Frederick, Stacey-Maurice, Jerry, Bridgette, Gordo, Deena, Milo-Jordan, Billy Joel (a.k.a. Ol’ Bluegrass), Dickens, and Bixby. These little guys are my whole world, and they fit in the palms of ...
Solutions by The State News
