by Audrey T. Carroll
[Author’s note/content warning: As the title suggests, this piece does mention several kinds of trauma, including PTSD, childhood sexual abuse, medical trauma, etc. Nothing is graphic here, and these content warnings ended up becoming part of the piece itself.]
1. You pick up a glass baking dish fresh out of the oven with your bare hands. Your brain tells you it is too hot and should be released. You
Read More »by Julia Anderson
There’s nothing like a drought to make you apricate the miracle that is rain.Read More »
by Daisy Solace
It’s 2013. I’m 11, living in Saudi Arabia, and anticipating House of Hades’s release with bated breath, counting down the days. It’s all I talk about, my best friend is getting sick of me. I’m insufferable, and I like it. I haven’t been into Percy Jackson for very long — just about a month by this point, but it’s found its space in my head and settled there.
As a kid who had always felt ALONEALONEALONEalonealonealone, it’s nice to read about a boy who’d changed schools so much that he has no friends, except for the one whose job it is to protect him. It’s nice to read about a boy who knows the truth: that the best people have the rottenest luck. It’s nice to read about a boy who, despite this, fights. After rows upon rows of pleasant protagonists, there’s a certain level of solace (pun intended) in Percy Jackson. He’s not easy. He’s not agreeable. He’s angry, rowdy, and, as Percy would come to say in the musical, impertinent. As a fellow impertinent child, I’m delighted.
Read More »by Ebony Haywood
After sunset— after parking meters doze to sleep, after attorneys in starched suits snap their suitcases shut, after happy hour at City Tavern and rush hour traffic on Broadway, after tired fathers in high-rise condos feed, bathe, and tuck their children into bed— there is energy: emerging from the warm concrete to electrify the air across Figueroa, Wilshire, and Olympic, the heart of Downtown Los Angeles. I feel this energy pulsing through the lights of The Staples Center, swarming with Kings Hockey fans donning oversized black and white jerseys. Outside the Regal Movie Theater, men in their blue jeans and women in their high heels, looking awkward, await their dates. I see their eyes brighten and then avert with acute embarrassment from the gazes of passersby who don’t wave and smile back.
Read More »by L. A. Ballesteros Gentile
There’s so much in it—the word sometimes: nostalgia and yearning and tenderness and regret… And so simple, too, so obvious: two four-letter words past the stage of hyphenation that portmanteaus often travel in fright.
Read More »by Emma Bowen
On January 13th, 2022, I typed two sentences in a note on my MacBook.
“One year from now, my life is going to be completely different than what I’ve always known. I don’t know if that’s comforting or the contrary.”
Sitting at the same laptop a year and a half later, I can confidently say this prophecy is entirely true and entirely false at the same time.
Read More »by Ivona Bozik
What is it about that bubble we create when we get to an unknown place? The combination of the distance from the familiar and the newness of circumstances, conditions that make grow different aspects of ourselves. For some we knew they existed silently, some we ignored. During every trip, longer than a single weekend, something in me moves towards a certain direction, builds up another foundation in me, brick by brick, an understanding enriches its effects. Yet, I find it hard to pinpoint what exactly that means.
Read More »by Ivona Bozik
Beauty has always seemed delicate to me. Just as life, it is of an elusive and melancholic nature, even more, it seems to be built on a certain kind of weakness, maybe even helplessness. For me, there is always some sadness in beauty, just as much as there is no sadness without beauty. I once shared this belief with someone and he replied that was because we found beauty so much bigger than us. I felt there was more, though.
It is a paradox, yet this play of indirect contrasts shows us how profound joy and profound sorrow coexist in the world. How separating one from the other is somehow cruel and sinful, and most of all it is blind and sturdy.
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