Creative Nonfiction

Something Greater Still - Charlie Kay ‘23

To grieve for someone who you’ve never met is a unique thing. Sure, we all grieve for celebrities and icons who we know of and, at times, worship or idolize. But there’s a kind of grief most people never experience—that for someone who you cannot know, but to whom you owe your life. It’s not a tangible feeling, really; there is not a handbook to look to for guidance in such a loss. I suppose the only way to describe it is as a phantom connection that lingers like that of a severed limb. It appears only when the moment calls for it, and otherwise remains unacknowledged, silently fading back into the wind like the whisper of an infrequent visitor.  

I often try to muster in my head what having a sibling would be like, how my life would be different, and how I, as a person, would be different. I often take for granted the fact that I am an only child—something a vast majority of the population is not. I savored every minute of the favoritism given to me, not only as an only child, but as the youngest of fourteen cousins.  

I struggle to see myself as anything other than an only child. It’s generally just a fact of life—you either have siblings or you don’t.  

There are times, however, that I remind myself that I am one of two. I rarely address this fact; it’s something I prefer to keep close to the vest, since I myself don’t always know how I feel about it, and I tend to safeguard my feelings from the public. I am, indeed, a twin. I couldn’t tell you much about my sister, other than that she was very aptly named “Hope.” The fact of the matter is that I never had the chance to meet her, nor her me; however, I do know that I, at least in some small measure, owe my life to her. Be it God or some higher power that decides or simply fate, I was the lucky one. The complicated medical details aside, I like to think that I was afforded the chance to live out my life because I had someone looking out for me. I was given Hope.  

It’s hard to miss something you’ve not experienced, but I still find myself often wondering what it would be like. What would she think of where I am now? Where would she be? Would she look like me? What type of person would she be? I see the strong relationships my parents and their siblings have, the close connections and the unrivaled familial relationship they have. I look upon the blowing out of cheap wax candles at family birthdays we celebrate, the loud banter at holidays we share, and the vociferous debates and discussions we have each week because of their common parentage, and I often wonder what I will miss out on. True, my relationship with my cousins and my other family members is close and cordial, but the connection between siblings is something entirely unique. I may lack many of those fraternal connections, but I carry with me something greater still—Hope for a future that I can be proud of.  

Though I never knew her, or what she would have been like, I can say that she fulfilled the pinnacle of what any sibling could do for another—save the life of the other at the cost of their own. In a certain way, I owe my life to someone who I do not know, yet knew me only enough to save me, even if it meant I would be the only one to be born.

My Flesh and Blood - Jack Kepner ‘23

He lay at my feet, face down, in a pool of his own blood. I shouldn’t have been surprised. My brother and I rarely see eye-to-eye on anything, and this darkness he inherited from me has become his alone. This hand-me-down shadow of darkness stalked him. For me, this shadow was a furnace, my greatest source of motivation. For my brother, it was a lake of fire, his greatest source of torment.  

We have always been opposites. My brother is an introvert; I’m an extrovert. He’s strength; I’m speed. He forgives; I resent. His shadow of self-doubt cripples him, whereas I use it as motivation to do everything I can. With all these differences, a good brother would try to find common ground, but my actions only widened the gap between us.   

My brother and I used to play many games together, and I would handicap myself to seem fair. We used to play “Scott Sterling Mini-Basketball'' all the time (where I was on my knees, and he could foul me as much as humanly possible without any penalty). We used to play “Boulder Football'' in the backyard (where I would, once again, be on my knees to give him an advantage as we played American football). I forever thought these games would cement our relationship. I was wrong. They only cemented my own idea that I was better because I won with odds stacked against me. In my eyes, I was a winner. In his, I was a pretentious older brother who used him as nothing more than a trophy. Even gestures like brotherly advice were just ways for me to show off how much more I knew and much longer I’d lived. We’ve never found any common ground because I used him as a winner’s podium. All that frustration with our differences, and I was to blame.  

Whenever I felt this shadow looming over me, I developed a habit rooted in my own insecurity of biting the flesh off my inner cheek. I bit my cheek whenever my brain saw fit. Called on in class, I would bite my cheek. Reminiscing insults for fitness motivation, I would bite my cheek. Seeing the rubber ball enter my stick as I load for a shot, I’ve taken countless times before, I would bite my cheek. Years upon years ravaging my cheeks left me with a lot of scarring, invisible to most, but tangible to me (especially with hot foods). They were clear marks of the insecurity that I used others to heal. 

One day, when playing Boulder Football in the backyard, my brother slipped on the dewy grass and crashed face first into our deck. He lay on the sharp, oak edge for what seemed like forever. It was then, towering over him with my feet frozen and my eyes glued to the pool of blood that I rejected the position I spent our whole lives attempting to secure. I lowered myself to the ground he lay on. He gathered the energy to lift his head and his trembling eyes found mine. As I stared, I glimpsed at my own reflection. I saw a piece of me within him never once uncovered. I finally saw that shadow haunting someone other than myself, but unlike me, he is bold enough to wear it on his sleeve. Conveniently for me, this shadow is marked invisibly on the inside of my cheek. His is marked as a string of stitches on the outside of his face. The shadow has faded in time as our scars continue to mend our once broken bond. The blood I thought was his alone is blood, as brothers, we share.  

The Cushion Assault - Michael Webb ‘24

I didn’t think that it was an issue: taking someone else’s cushion. The kind that spectators purchase for the Penn State football bleachers because some can’t take the acute pain of metal on their tailbone for a couple of hours. That cushion sat right in front of me, and my mom and I asked around if anyone was using it, and no one answered, so I wasn’t letting the opportunity go to waste. I took the cushion, sat on it, and watched the pre-game shenanigans with no thought of the cushion.  

Then, I saw a woman looking around for something in front of me. I assumed that it was the cushion she was looking for, so I offered it up. In a split second, she took it, and started hitting me with that cushion. I was fake laughing because I thought it was a joke as she scolded me for taking it, which I was laughing at, too. But the joke turned into reality when she was still mad at me and pointing in my face. My fake laughing changed into cringe, as my face turned red. My mom and I were claiming no malice, which there was none, as my assaulter took her seat. I saw my mom turn into a Mama Bear defending her cub. She stared down the woman. This was just the beginning. 

My brother was now in the mix, offering reinforcement in this war. My dad was oblivious, which may have been intentional, as he watched the band play the Penn State fight song. In fairness, he was the farthest away from this interaction, so he could have been just an invested spectator to what should have been the focus of my life. But my focus wasn’t on the band; rather, I was reeling from my cushion assault. The families around us were still confused whether it was a joke. That fact of “joke or not” became even more confusing when my assaulter gave me a thumbs up, as maybe a way to apologize for her impulsive act.  

But that thumbs up was quickly thrown out the window when she started taking pictures of me. It was in secret too, as my aunt, who was the closest to the woman, noticed her espionage. I had no clue why she would do that. Maybe she was trying to report me to someone, but her actions were worse than mine. The pictures were the line crossed for my mother. While I can’t quote what she said because I want to keep this story appropriate, it wasn’t kind. It led to a verbal brawl, with the woman’s family of about six people in the seats directly below us. My mom and the cushion assaulter were the center of the action, and my family surrounding were the reinforcements.  

This wasn’t a one-on-one battle. Our family had our allies. The allied forces for us in this war of defending me included the family in the row in front of us, which was next to our opponents and the family in the row behind. The family in front of us were recruited by me talking with a kid my age about this interaction, and my mom and aunt got the family behind us with their sister connection, where their similar personalities draw people in. The family in front of us were pretty similar, being a family of four. The family behind though, they were the real deal. Six people from New Jersey—all looked like they had ties with the mob, maybe even being the head family of the mafia. 

As our allies defended me, everyone screamed. The next place to go from verbal abuse was physical abuse. The cushion assaulter came one step too close to Mama Bear, and she attacked, using her paw to hit her face as the cushion assaulter tried to fight back. Next to my mother and not wanting her booked in jail on our trip, I broke it up, as did our allied members in the row of the cushion woman. My aunt delivered some final blows, and I thought the war was over. 

But then, the atomic bomb was dropped. I assume this man was the husband of cushion woman, so I’ll call him cushion man. He committed a crime which was throwing his drink at my mother and aunt. With my dad and brother now moved over and focused on the fight that just occurred, they didn’t hesitate to attack cushion man, as the mob boss also joined, coming down from the row behind us to attack. They converged on cushion man and took him down over the other row as now a quarter of the stadium watched the bombing turn into the battle of the century. Punches were flying. Other families came to try and stop the madness.

I felt obligated to step in, so when I saw my brother punched by another member of the opponent, I tackled the man. I threw  a punch before being pulled off by another man and my mother. Chaos surrounded me, as now the security of the stadium came in. Everything slowed to a halt when that happened, with my side being the victors going by the injuries taken from the opposing family.  

In the end, the opposing family had seven people, who all had injuries from our tenacious group of family and allies. This didn’t end up being a good thing with legal fees and court issues, but what I can say is that you should never take someone else’s cushion.

No More Neighbor - Zeek Jackson ‘23

“Car!” Marco says. 

I turn to the right of me as the car’s headlights point their blinding gleam directly to my face. I can feel every single muscle in my toes as my foot feels cemented with the concrete.  

“Get out the way! A car is coming,” Marco says.  

I hold the round orange ball close to my chest, just as I did with my pet animal when I was younger to obtain comfort. My heart skips a beat. I stand beneath the stars like a deer in headlights.  

“I’m serious, Zeek, the car is coming in fast,” Marco says. 

The streetlights shine down on me, the headlights are pointing directly at me, and the moon is glistening with the stars. It seems like all the attention is on me when all I wanted to do was play basketball. Perhaps, this is happening to me because my mother told me be inside the house before the streetlights came on.  

“Just move Zeek,” I think to myself.  

The car slows down, and you can hear the brakes screech as loud as ever. I run to the sidewalk to safety as the car continues down the street.  

“Why didn’t you move out the way?” Marco says. 

“I have no idea. It felt like I was in quicksand,” I say. “I have to head home though so I’ll catch you tomorrow. Same time for hoops?” 

“Of course,” Marco says.  

I walk across the street to his house every day for the rest of the summer. Sweat drops continually. The amount of water that we drink could possibly be enough to fill a whole pond. Marco is my friend. I never had a friend like Marco, but I love him.  

The next week there is a sudden knock on the door. My mom opens it and finds herself dropping her eyes to a little boy standing at the doorway. 

“Is Zeek home?” he asks.  

“Yes, he’s home. Is everything okay?” my mother asks. 

“Yes, I was just wondering if he can come out to play basketball right now.” 

“Well, he’s eating right now. He'll come out right after he finishes eating.” 

My next-door neighbor is my best friend, or at least was. After that summer, Marco leaves. He leaves without notice or anything. One day he’s there, and the next day he’s not.

The basketball hoop is gone. The car is gone. Everything is gone, without trace.  

My best friend is gone and I can do nothing about it. My neighbor is no more, and there will be no one else like him. 

Everyone is way older than me now. There is no connection to be made. My first best friend is gone, and I will not have a neighbor anymore. 

Laughing as I Fall - Zach Lyons ‘23

The smell of boiling garlic and tomato sauce stuffed the room—the steam blurred my vision. My judgment was clouded and for a second the earth stopped revolving. There was this tenseness built up in my muscles that seemed to magically relieve itself all at once. All at the cast of a few short words. 

“I’m committing to my sobriety,” Dad said. Mom gave him a hug. She still loved him from a distance. Divorce doesn’t destroy the feelings you once had for someone; it only blocks them. Me though, I was just excited. And happy too. I was happy that things were going my way for once. And maybe there was still time left to fix things. 

***

Once, I was browsing the web when I read that alcohol causes over a hundred thousand deaths each year. I like to tell myself that statistic when I think about the time I was playing U-7 baseball and Dad stomped his way toward me at third to call me a ‘fucking pussy’ for being scared of the ball. Or when we argued about politics and words turned physical. When I tell myself that statistic, it helps. When I tell myself it’s the alcohol, it allows me to love him still. At least, in the way that you love someone you hate.

***

But yes, there I was, sitting at an oval mahogany table with a plate of homemade chicken parmesan in front of me. For the first time in months, he looked good, clean even. His hair was cut, his beard groomed, and his eyes were bright and full of energy. He looked in my eyes, in my soul.

Two days later he called me in the middle of the night, drunk. He was slurring his words. It was so bad it sounded like a bad impression of a guy acting really drunk. I could make out a few things though. He kept repeating the word “sorry.” After a few minutes of what felt like talking to a toddler, I hung the phone up and went back to sleep.

One thought kept me awake: What does it mean to actually be sorry? Is it enough to just say it, showing some basic level of remorse? Or does it require action behind words, a proof almost? I like to think that he is sorry in his own way, that his bullshit surprises him the most, and he wants nothing more than to change. That if he could, he would do anything to not lust for ethanol the way he does for breath.

***

I hate that occasionally, I cave into peer pressure. Every now and then when I’m out at a party or something, I’ll sip some suds to not look like the pretentious asshole who’s too good to drink. Although, I don’t like the taste and the smell makes me want to vomit. But I’d rather hold a room-temperature beer than stick out like a sore thumb in a crowd of lonely kids all seeking approval from no one and everyone at the same time. That way, when the other kid who has an alcoholic for a parent looks at me, they don’t hate themselves. Or at least, that’s what I tell myself when the beer is in my hand.

Once, I went to a party and a kid spilled a beer on me and didn’t apologize. It was the same can of miller light tucked away in my dad’s fridge. I was going to yell and cause a big fuss, but when I looked into his eyes, I saw my father. Half of me wanted to punch him and the other half wanted to cry. I really did think about it at that moment, the fight. He had a couple inches and about thirty pounds on me though. It wouldn’t have been my best decision, but it wouldn’t have been my worst either. In the end I walked away. I didn’t feel like fighting. 

I don’t know why but I felt really calm. I was confused, tired, tipsy, but I was calm. I had this idea that I would stay that way as long as I kept moving my feet. I imagine that’s how Icarus felt before he died. Calm through all the chaos, accepting his destiny. I think if I was Icarus, I’d laugh through the fall, at the irony of it all. At least I’d be free. 

***

The morning after I received the disorderly call from dad, I was fussing over the Idea of telling Mom. Eventually, I broke. She dropped her fork into her maple syrup and hung her head in her hands, her long brown hair falling through the crevices of her fingers. Tears slowly began to run down the sides of her face, and she whimpered just loud enough for me to hear. After, she laughed for a few seconds. Then she got up out of her chair and hugged me. We stayed that way until our food got cold and the orange juice got warm. While she hugged me, I couldn’t help but remember the look on dad’s face that night. When the three of us enjoyed a good meal together for the first time in years and the entire world around us seemed to stop. Sometimes I really wish I could go back in time. In fact, I’d give anything for it. I wouldn’t change anything though. I’d just really like to feel some things twice.

Sea Glass - Andrew Hill ‘23

I carried only a red solo cup with my name written on it in Sharpie.

My mother dressed me earlier that day. I wore teal swim trunks and my favorite gray swim shirt with a picture of a shark on it and the word “Jawesome” underneath. I stared down at my bare feet and the beach beneath them. The sand here contained more shells and rocks than the beaches I was used to. I bent over to pick up one of the shells off the ground, one of those twisty ones with a point at the top, before adding it to the growing collection in my red cup. It was cracked, like all the others.

I looked out over the gently crashing waves into the clear water off the coast where my sister had found all her picture-perfect shells the day before. I pondered venturing into the waves myself; however, my fear held me back. It was not a fear of drowning. No, it was a fear of whatever creatures lied out of sight, hidden in the depths. Two days before, I discovered a drop-off roughly twenty feet offshore. As I sat in the sand, I gazed past the drop-off point. Through the waves, I thought I could make out the shape of fins circling. I quickly pulled my feet back from the approaching surf as goosebumps rose across my arms. I determined that any journey to the drop-off would result in certain death.

Still, I knew I needed to search the sea.

With my cup in hand, I waded through the shallow water. I caught shells as they glided by on the tide, and I watched as the shells I missed disappeared with the waves. For thirty minutes, I stood in the shallows. I listened to the call of seagulls overhead, and I waited patiently for each wave to present new prey to trap in my plastic prison. The newest wave, however, brought forth a foreign sight. Through the clear water, I saw a rounded, green shard of glass, about five inches in length, and after a quick battle with the tide, I grabbed the shard and added it to my collection.

The next morning, after my mother lathered me in sunscreen, I sat on the beach. The sun beat more heavily today, but, the ocean was still cold. I stared down at the green, crystalline shard I had discovered the day before.

Sea glass is what my father called it.

I stood up, grabbed my little red cup, and set off to discover more. I labored, slowly discovering more of the treasure I sought. I found several pieces in green, a few that were clear, and one special brown piece of glass with a braided design going down the middle. Everything tossed into my cup. I noted that while my sister was once again out in the open water, now body surfing the small waves with my father, I was amounting a collection that I thought would leave my parents stunned.

Eventually my search was cut short by a call from my mother to eat lunch. I absentmindedly set my cup down in the sand and rushed as fast as I could to the umbrella to eat my diagonally cut peanut butter and jelly sandwich on white bread. When lunch ended, I meandered back to a tragedy. My red cup, my chest of unimaginable treasure, was gone.

The water, still sinking into the sand, revealed my culprit was the sea. I glanced into the surf and there, bobbing up and over the waves, was my cup, partially tilted to the side, but upright enough that I knew my treasure was still safe inside. I waited, hoping that because I solved the case, the ocean would return my prize. I watched, as the cup grew ever closer only to turn once again to the horizon and float further away. I resolved to end this vicious cycle.

I pulled my neon green swim goggles down over my eyes and sprinted into the water. As the shore descended from my feet, I dove into an oncoming wave, before quickly surfacing to shoot the salt water out of my nose. I could still see the rim of the cup, floating, about fifteen feet away, my splashing only serving to jostle it more. I kicked and paddled with fury towards my goal until I reached the cup. In my haste, the ripples had overturned it and my red cup was empty. Taking a deep breath, I plunged beneath the waves.

I quickly recognized I was past the drop-off area. The sloping sand, now ten feet behind me, faded to the oceanic void. The water seemed darker and colder around me, and a tightness grew in my chest, like a python constricting the air from my lungs. Out in the distance, I thought I saw a flash of scales, the result of some leviathan hiding beyond sight. It took the extent of my will to prevent a gasp escaping my lips. As I turned to swim back to the safety of the shore, I saw my prize out of the corner of my eye. Sinking slowly in the darkness, like a leaf falling from a tree, was the piece of brown sea glass with a raised braid down the middle. Pushing my fear into the depths of my soul, I dove further, before finally grasping the piece of glass in my small hand and kicking towards the surface. Once I was above the water, I could see my mother running towards me in the sand, my father and sister running behind her, no doubt shouting at me for my recklessness.

I didn’t mind.

As I looked out over the water, it seemed calmer than before. The sun was shining above me as I gently bobbed up and down in the waves. Despite the apparent danger I had just faced, I smiled. Staring down at the sea glass in my hand, I placed the piece inside my cup and began my trek back to shore.

Much More Than a Court - Sebastian Sessa ‘23

I looked across an overgrown, unkempt basketball court, littered with Colt 45 beer bottles and weathered cigarette butts. A foot-wide crack split the court in two. Half-dead, three-foot-tall weeds grew in the cracks. The faded three-point line and missing basketball hoops told a story of what this court used to be. A rusted child’s bike sat in a mound of ivy, right next to a tire that usually filled with water after a heavy rain. It was dirty and abandoned: the perfect place for a skatepark.  

I got to work. On frigid winter weekends I swept, pulled weeds, and shoveled dirt off the surface of the court. I spent spring afternoons sweeping leaves off the court. Progress moved as slowly as the seasons changed. After weeks, the dry ravine that split the court in two was still covered in dirt, leaves, and towering foxtail. Poison ivy choked out the 12-foot-tall chain linked fence and turned the court into a jail, but I could not lose sight of my goal. I doubled down and spent every day after school sweeping, shoveling, and cutting. As the spring evenings became long summer nights, the court was entirely clear, and I was entirely covered with poison ivy. Even still, this blank slate did not resemble a skatepark in the slightest.  

After I spent what little money I had on concrete and the proper tools, with what little knowledge I had, I met my saving grace. He was 6-foot-3, wore half-broken eyeglasses, a shirt that was too small for him revealing his gut, and a grinning smile. Gino wanted to help me build a skatepark. He brought all the necessary tools: A wood float to start; next an aluminum float to smooth out the blemishes; finally, a magnesium float to give the concrete a smooth, seamless finish. It was 102 degrees in the middle of August. On the hottest day of the year, we were about to conquer our most ambitious project yet: a measured, curved ramp that had a foot-long deck at the top to stand on. We mixed and poured one-thousand pounds of concrete. It was an unequivocal success. This accomplishment ignited a flame inside of us. We were hooked.  

That summer Gino and I built five other obstacles and word got out. On any given day, four or five skaters would find their way to our oasis, hidden in plain sight. Maybe they knew each other; maybe they didn’t. Maybe they were of the same race and sexuality; it didn’t matter. The sound of hot metal grinding on fresh concrete, of wood smacking the ground after a failed trick. After many months of just me alone on an old basketball court, it was music to my ears.  

An entire town of skaters devoid of a place to skate, devoid of a sense of community, and devoid of a place to express themselves, found a home that I managed to build with my hands. By creating lifeless obstacles, I revitalized an entire community. The suffocating chain linked fence that surrounds the court cannot contain the acceptance and kinship that resonates on this repurposed slab turned skatepark.

When I Got There, It Was Cloudy - Joseph Balto ‘23

In May of 1922, the International Astronomical Union convened in Rome for their first general assembly. They argued the merits of constellations and their meanings, before settling on a list of 88 officially recognized configurations. However, 86 years later, as a delirious preschooler, I almost certainly knew none.

*

For days in New Mexico, we hiked and complained with no end in sight: two weeks in the complete wilderness will do that to you. We quickly got into a rhythm of waking up early, hiking ten or so miles in the devastating sun, setting up camp, and going to bed as soon as possible. When I walked, I dragged my feet everywhere: exhaustion never left my aching feet in a way I’d only felt once before.

The Harford County Astronomy Club met on a hill every second Saturday of the month, no matter how cloudy it was. When they met, my dad brought out for me a navy blue puffy jacket, a red Mickey Mouse knitted hat, and the most incredible light-up Sketchers a four-year-old has ever seen. I crawled into the backseat of a 2000 Honda Odyssey, and the cold of the torn leather seats brought chills to my bones. With my head lying awkwardly on the seat belt as a pillow, I always tried to fall asleep during our journeys out to that hill.

It usually felt like a cross-country expedition. For what seemed like hours, the horrible cacophony of excited gravel on deflating tires blasted like TV static. Upon arrival, my dad shook my knee and took my hand as I climbed out of the car, up the hill, across the gravel parking lot, towards a crowd of headlamps pointed downward. A small, plastic, foldable table offered visitors hot coffee (and for the only four-year-old in attendance, hot chocolate), which all the older gentlemen on the hill sipped slowly between astonished gasps, gathered around an array of expensive telescopes.

Accidentally, I’d smudge the lens with my fingers, which warranted a quick lunge from whichever gentleman was generous enough to lend me his “toy” Maybe, I’d twist a focus knob instead, erasing the delicate image expertly placed there. I never bothered to understand the specifics of their meetings. I could never point out a constellation or a moon phase or a planet or the Milky Way, but I’ll never forget falling asleep standing up, my father wishing his friends goodbye, and him carrying me in his arm back to our vehicle.

Since then, my excitement for space has never been lessened. When I was older, I did learn those constellations and moon phases, plus every detail possible about The Big Bang, supernovae, gamma ray bursts, and black holes. I watched live streams from Fort Lauderdale of rocket launches and stargazed from my driveway in the hopes that clouds would fail to obscure my view of eclipses and blood moons. I watched and rewatched Interstellar, Gravity, and The Martian endlessly, dying to understand every minute of science and engineering. I frequented online astrophotography forums and watched every educational video or documentary I could find: it bordered on obsession.

It only made sense, then, to see what stargazing opportunities would be available in New Mexico. With each mile my crew trekked, we distanced ourselves further from nearby Cimarron, the only source of light pollution nearby. Day 9 was a new moon, meaning there would be nothing to detract from the true beauty of the cosmos that night. My crew designated me, as resident astronomer, as the leader of a midnight hike into a clearing to stargaze, and it was really all I’d thought about until that night.

For nine days so far, I’d slept in the same blue tent. It was a small dome, barely fitting two high school boys and our heavy bags. Luckily, a small canopy covered our stench-ridden hiking boots, or else they would have made our tent that much smaller. Weeks before we left, camp authorities declared that hammocks would no longer be viable, since their increasing popularity left many trees scarred, meaning that we’d instead be on the uncomfortable, unwelcoming ground. Perhaps, out there, I was an astronaut aboard the ISS, sleeping in some claustrophobic closet, suspended in zero gravity.

My immature palette handicapped me significantly on the hiking trail. When we stopped for our meals, we’d throw our bags on the side of the path and sit on them. Eight crew members split four bags of dehydrated rations. We boiled the water pot, poured it into our bag, and shared “Biscuits and Gravy” or “Mashed Potatoes” or “4-Cheese Mac & Cheese.” Often, I traded my portion to crewmates with little repayment: say, 800 calories of tuna for 150 calories of water flavoring powder. It was better than nothing, but it broke my preconceived notions of mealtime as an opportunity to relax. People idolize their “lunch break” as a suspension of their busy working lives, but I couldn’t wait for a “hike break” between our miserable meals. Still, I’d imagine that’s what they probably eat up there in space. It’s all freeze-dried. Have you ever tried astronaut ice cream? Did the Apollo missions have air fryers?

Since I was born, I’ve always suffered from sunburn, and in the New Mexico summer, the lingering reminders of my risk of skin cancer intensified in my mind. So, I wore long-sleeved shirts the entire time. I had two light blue ones and two gray ones. They were light and moisture-wicking, and my mom loved them since they had an SPF value on the plastic package we picked up from Walmart. After I’d worn one for three or four days, I threw it away, because I couldn’t wear it any longer on the trek, and there was no use lugging around extra weight that I’d almost certainly never wear back at home—especially not after those three or four days. I did the same with my socks and wore only two pairs of shorts the entire time. A wide-brimmed hat stayed atop my head for as long as the sun was visible, which was always. There simply aren’t clouds in New Mexico, I must’ve thought to myself. My hair was flat and sweaty, but my neck was still pale: I was willing to make that tradeoff. In the wilderness there, my shirts potentially saved me from weeks of stinging and peeling and pain. They saved my life out there, like a spacesuit for a spacewalking astro-man.

Now, do you see the picture I’m trying to paint here? I was an astronaut out there, in a void of emptiness and mundanity. There was no cell service anywhere on the trail, nothing to eat or do, nowhere to hide. In that endless sea of Ponderosa Pines, I felt the vastness of space, the distance between places, just how small I was. I’d spent eight days calibrating equipment and working through every issue that appeared, of which there was no shortage.

Now, space movies absolutely love this trope where the protagonists, despite all the chaos around them, look back to Earth or into the stars and proclaim their beauty. Now, despite the obvious shortcomings of Gravity as a film, it undoubtedly executes this cliché to perfection. When George Clooney’s character floats away into the vastness of space towards his cold and lonely death, he doesn’t fight or scream or cry. He simply says, “You should see the sun on the Ganges right now.”

*

Our campsite, Dean Skyline, sat above just about everywhere else at the ex-cattle ranch. It was covered by trees in every direction, so we had a terrible view of the stars there, but as we ascended the mountain earlier than morning, we spotted a clearing a half-mile away that would perfectly allow us to see the stars.

Day nine presented me this opportunity to “look at the Ganges.” We woke at 1:30, carefully zipping our tents up and tying the shoelaces on our heavy boots. We covered ourselves in as many jackets and sweatshirts as possible. I handed out the North American constellation pamphlets, and I did my best to excite my exhausted crewmates about the magnitude of the opportunity we had before us. When the time came, we put on our headlamps, pointed them down at our feet, and began dragging ourselves toward the clearing.

It felt like a cross-country expedition. For what seemed like hours, the horrible complaining of delirious teenagers blasted like a news program with miserable pundits. In this moment, I remembered my time with the Harford County Astronomy Club. I missed the taste of hot chocolate and wanted nothing more than to fall asleep in a car against a seat belt. For nine days, I’d been waiting to look out of my spaceship, into the world, so maybe I could realize just how lucky I was.

This night provided me the chance to think about home, to feel at home, to feel my dad’s hand in mine along the midnight trail. With my feet dragging on familiar gravel, I remembered a David Bowie lyric: “Though I’ve crossed one hundred-thousand miles, I’m feeling very still / and I think my spaceship knows which way to go.” In this moment, I understood exactly what he meant.

When I got there, it was cloudy … but I’d never been happier.

The Girl Who Changed My Life - Kyle Powell ‘23

Savanna was born on February 5th, 2016. She was born prematurely after her birth mother's placenta ruptured due to a cocaine overdose. Her birth mother left the hospital without even bothering to name her. My parents were called on February 10th and asked if they could care for a five-day old baby girl who had some complications. They didn’t hesitate to accept, and my mother rushed to the hospital. The nurses called the newborn “Baby Grace” while waiting for the court to name her legally. My father instantly fell in love with her, and said she looked like a Savanna. The court agreed and named her Savanna Grace. 

My mom went to the hospital every day to hold and feed Savanna. Three months later, Savanna had recovered enough to leave the hospital. Due to her mother's lack of healthy habits, we were told that Savanna would struggle with health problems for most of her life. We took those issues head-on for the next nine months while was home with us. After hearing that her mother did not want custody, we went through the process of adoption. 

My parents sat my four siblings and me down and made sure we all agreed to bring a new person into our already crowded life. Initially, I was the only one who hesitated. Our family has always been a single income household, and at the time, we were struggling financially. My mother was homeschooling five children, while my dad worked as a teacher in a private school. After a long talk with my parents, I eventually agreed that we should go forward with the adoption process. That was the best decision our family has ever made.                                                 

We officially adopted Savanna on December 5th, 2016. She is the smartest, most talkative, and most loving child I have ever known. She and I have always had a special connection. She can make me smile when I'm feeling down, and she makes me laugh when I'm stressed. She is the first person I want to see when I walk in the door after a long day. She is my best friend, and I would do anything for her. Savanna has also brought the rest of my family closer. 

When I was 16, my mother and I got matching tattoos of the adoption symbol, mine on my back, and hers on her wrist. The tattoo reminds me every day that adoption changed my life forever, and it can change others, too. I would love to adopt when I start my own family. 

Adoption changed my life for the better, and the world should know that.

Sacrifice After Sacrifice - Mac Sawada ‘23

My father, Ed Sawada, suffered at the hands of the world. His father, my grandfather, immigrated to America from Japan to escape World War II. He joined the military to avoid internment. His mother, my grandmother, killed herself when he was only two years old, leaving my grandfather to be the sole caretaker of him and his two sisters. He was neglected by his sisters, who instead would physically abuse him, and his father was too busy with work to care for him. At the age of five, he had to learn to cook for himself because his dad was a hoarder and no one else would cook for him. During his childhood, he spent his summers on army bases alone in empty concrete barracks. As a teenager, he would bike five miles to and from school because no one would pick him up. When he went to college, he worked late night shifts to pay his own tuition because his father had accumulated so much debt. After college, he worked for two decades at a job he hated vehemently, just so he could support his family. When his father died, the only thing he had to leave in a will was his house. I was an infant at the time when my grandfather died and my aunts sued him for the house. He had to pay several hundred-thousand dollars, which he earned through his hard work and expert investing, to his sisters in legal fees.

When I was five, my father encouraged me to play the sports he always wanted to play. He spent his time and money to encourage me to play lacrosse, a sport I never quite picked up. Even so, after playing the games, I knew I could go home to a home-cooked meal. During my childhood, I was given the opportunity to go to summer camps where I made many friends and had lots of fun. Not once did I spend a summer on a military base with nothing to do.

Now, I’m a teenager. My parents drive me to and from school, and I don’t ever have to worry about commuting by bike. With the extra time I have not commuting by bike, I participate in many extracurriculars which my father has supported me in. I have been doing scouts for years and my father has been very involved with my troop as a scoutmaster when it was most needed. He would tell me that being a scoutmaster was like working a second job but without any pay. Regardless, he did the job because he wanted to see my success within the troop. At the age of 17, I am preparing to apply to college. 

I know that when I am in college, I will not have to work nearly as hard as my father did because of his sacrifices. He has had a college fund which he has slowly been accumulating a fortune in for years. While I still want to work jobs in college so I have some spending money, I will not have to worry about paying for college all by myself like my father did. He has given his all to ensure that my sister and I can live the life that he wished he could have lived. He is a role model who has worked harder than anyone I know. He has taught me how to make sacrifices and one day, I hope to be able to make the same sacrifices he did if I need to. I doubt I will ever be able to fully amount to him because he has ensured that I don’t have to live through the suffering that he did but I hope that I can at least become someone he is proud of.

Hold the Line - Liam Brune ‘23

As I looked though the drivers’ side window at the gorgeous expanse of green – a fleeting facet of near pure, perfect nature in an industrializing world that seeks to destroy it, all I could think was, Fuck this place. Fuck Delaware. This is a Shithole and a hellscape and I hope I never come back.  

I say “think” liberally because I can’t be sure that I didn’t actually yell these things - to an audience of no one - in some kind of psychotic solitary manifesto because the memories of desperate times are hard to decipher. They exist as a flow of frantic thoughts that all meet in the same well. And in this particular well exists a simple truth: I was driving through rural Delaware, and I really, REALLY had to piss.   

It was day three since the predictably enthusiastic, not-at-all-despondent DMV worker handed me absolute freedom adorned with an unflattering picture and an exaggerated height. It was day three since I’d been given free rein to the entire world. It was day three and days one and two had passed. They were done, over, gone. They were set and ready to fade away, but they wouldn’t leave me alone. Both continued to exist in their own way: Day one as a joke and Day two as a phantom specter that shrieked shrill songs of my untying from far in the great green distance. 

It was day three and my overdramatic internal thought was losing out to my lizard brain because, to reiterate, I really, really had to piss.  

Day 1 

I walked out of the DMV, hot-shit that I was, and got into the car that I could drive all by myself. Then I drove home with absolutely no problem because I was invincible and infallible.  

Day 2 

It was day two and this driving thing hadn’t gotten any harder. All the cowards who claimed I was irresponsible for lying about how many hours I’d driven on my learners permit would be eating their words if they could see me now, driving sixty in a forty for no apparent reason other than I could. I stopped at an intersection and eyed down the red light with predatory ferocity as if every millisecond past its leaving where I sat motionless was poison. Then the light turned green and I, Earnhardt incarnate, stomped my right foot halfway down to the floor. But this time, my reckless, disdainful demeanor disappointed the man downstairs. 

For the milliseconds that it existed in my right peripheral, I thought it was a shadow. It’s movement, which was somewhere between the speeds of sound and light, compressed it to the size of a large dog. Because of this, my brain came to the logical conclusion that Cerberus, the three-headed hound of hell, was bounding toward me.  

My subconscious, animal lover that it is, didn’t want to hit Satan’s puppy, so it screamed at my foot for pause, and my foot responded by abusing the brake. My upper body lurched forward toward a clearer scene. Cerberus was a black sports car, now directly in front of me, driving eighty miles per hour, so close that its sideview mirror cast a shadow on the hood of my car. And then it was gone.  

I didn’t have to take my foot off the brake. It slipped off. And as I inched forward, my conscious took control and realized: The very corner of my shoe was all that caught the brake. A corner so small that it couldn’t keep its grip for more than a second was all that stopped me from entering a competition of vehicular stupidity that I would have lost by eighty-five miles per hour.  

It was the kind of common occurrence that a 25 or 40 year old would have screamed at and shrugged off, but I wasn’t 25 or 40, I was 16, pimple faced and naïve enough to be knocked on my ass by reality. And reality hit hard. 

I didn’t breathe for a full fifteen seconds. When I took in my first ever dose of real air, the solitary breath came in three sporadic stages. The rush of unfamiliar oxygen was accompanied by a wave of adrenaline, which sharpened my focus to unnecessary levels. My eyes darted back and forth, mapping out anything and everything that existed around me. I took note of every car, every person, every sound. I’d become prey in a predatory environment.  

Day 3 

I was supposed to drive to Ocean City. I couldn’t even look at my car without my heart dropping into my stomach, and I was supposed to drive to Ocean City. Fortunately, however terrified I am, I will always be more stubborn than I am afraid, so I packed my car, grabbed a king-sized water bottle for the drive and, against my better judgment, began an adventure so treacherous Tolkien himself would have been left speechless: I was going to drive… in a car. 

The familiar roads around my house were easy to get through. So was the highway, which was nothing more than staying in between the lines – I was always good at staying between the lines. But eventually, everyone has to leave familiar, pass predictable, and end up in a more uncertain place: Delaware. I was once again frantically scouring the surface through my side windows, searching for predators, Instead, I found thin, windy roads surrounded by empty fields, rusted, brown trucks, and single-floor ranchers covered in chipped white paint. 

I would look at the road, and from the corner of my eye, I would see a figure in the distance, eyeing me back with bad intent. Every time I turned toward it, it would vanish, but I still knew it was there. I could feel its hum in the back of my head and my breathing would become more stressed. Nothing could drown out its cries, except for the contents of my now-empty king-sized water bottle.   

The sensation hit as hard as the hellhound would have. My bladder begged for a release that I couldn’t provide. I wasn’t looking for possible sources of death anymore, I was just looking for a bathroom, and I found nothing – because that is all that exists in the state of Delaware: A sliver of beaches and an expanse of nothing. No gas stations, no rest stops, none of the beautiful fast food restaurants that pepper the civilized world. 

I would have pulled over to the side of the road, but for some reason, people willingly chose to live in this void, so there were just enough houses to make this a dangerous affair. What if somebody saw me? – The thought of a child and a coward, yes, but I didn’t know any better.  

I began to scream the lyrics to whatever song was on the radio because I thought it would help; How? I don’t know. Maybe my hysteria ridden mind figured that ‘if something was going out the top…”.  

I wriggled my lower half like a coked-up Michael Jackson, and my fear drowned under sixty four fluid ounces of water. The specter in the distance, his haunting hum, was dulled by my deafening war cry, “SOMETIMES YOU FEEL A STRANGE SPOT IN THE SKY!!! A HUMAN BEING THAT WAS GIVEN TO FLY!!!” 

It took twenty minutes to find a gas station. I bolted in frantic and walked out relieved. I got back into my car - A phoenix devoid of piss and fright. There was no reason to be afraid of a car accident. It would be nothing compared to the harrowing experience I’d just gone through.  

It’s impossible to know what effect that ridiculous situations have on us. Maybe my ‘triumph of willpower’ was as profound as therapy. Maybe it doesn’t matter. Maybe there is no effect. No message. In the end, maybe it is all just about piss. An absurd concept, I know, but absurdity is the most necessary distraction that comes with consciousness. Without it, we’re just helplessly hoping for things to get easier.

Learning about Language - Jonathan Owusu-Boahene ‘23

Mrs. Smerskinski, my speech and language teacher in elementary school, kept me two years longer in lessons than I needed. Her guidance in fleshing out my “sh” and “th” sounds with precision, helped resolve my challenges with fricatives and sparked my passion for words and languages. When I struggled with articulating words, I subconsciously separated “good” words from “bad” ones. “Thursday,” for example, made the bad list because the “th” sound caused me to occasionally bite my lips. I also questioned why the letter “C” was ever needed in the English language. Spelling “cake” as “kake” would have been just fine.  Unlike me, my twin brother James was an articulate chatterbox. He knew what to say and even completed my sentences before I made them!  Professor Mabel Rice, a renowned linguistic anthropologist, calls this “late language emergence” and the “twinning effect.” I call it getting the short end of the twin stick!

Myths surrounding languages are hard to untangle. One such myth is the notion that exposing children with language delay to multiple languages is detrimental. My parents, who know their way around seven languages, spoke to me only in English, avoiding Twi, their native tongue. Twi—like the French, English and Greek languages I have studied—is an old language, structured around its own alphabets and tones. It reflects a rich Ashanti culture written in the sands of time. This was why my grandmother insisted I learn Twi. While I do not consider her a militant for guerre des language, she was dramatic about third-culture kids, like myself, stampeding from their native language. She once asked, “Jonathan, how do languages die?” I lacked an answer but her insinuation was clear.

So I was determined to learn Twi–its origins, witty proverbs and connection to the over thirty million speakers. I picked up words and phrases from relatives who visited our home. I carefully cataloged them into a notebook and soon had a personal phonetic compendium. I delved in with all my senses. But as with learning any foreign language, the real test came years later when I spent a summer in Ghana.

Ghana is a smorgasbord of over twenty-three languages and dialects, some with tidy distinctions but many with overlaps. Within this galore, Twi carries a linguistic advantage as it is understood by the majority. So when I approached a street vendor to buy bread, I assumed she spoke Twi. “Burodo no ye sen? (How much is the bread?)” She responded with the price, eager to make a sale. But when I awkwardly stuttered and pivoted to English, she retorted sneeringly in Twi, “that sounds Greek to me,” adding, “silly foreigner, you can’t even speak your own language.” That cut deep! 

Unlike my earlier battle with fricatives, Twi posed no such hurdles.  My challenge with this street vendor was different. I had the right thoughts but defaulted to English when my words became tangled. However, Twi was what I culturally needed. The ability to seamlessly toggle from one language to another happens every day, all over the world, but underneath the second language the first always seems to be operating. Did this vendor know that? If she did, would she care to know me better than a “silly foreigner?” After all, I am Jonathan in English and Jonathan in Twi. 

The idiom “It’s Greek to me” has curiously found its way into many languages. In a dismissive way, it describes one person’s failure to understand what the other is trying to say.  Ironically, I would start learning Greek two years later because of my TikTok podcast on biblical writings in their historical context and original language. My experiences have taught me invaluable lessons about the importance of words and language in telling stories, crossing cultures, and articulating ideas that can change narratives. Nowadays, people describe me as a chatterbox-a characterization I happily embrace. After all, words matter.

When the Watercolor Bleeds - Jordan Maglalang ‘23

The freezing misty air flowed throughout, but nonetheless, offered me a chance to wear the long sleeve shirt I’ve always wanted to wear under my jersey. Long sleeves made me feel as if I were there. Not where I was actually headed, but at the stadium in Seville, where Lionel Messi and F.C Barcelona traveled to weeks before on my living room TV screen.

As all my friends waited for me to lace my cleats for our pickup soccer game, the script from that game played in my mind. I was the director, or what my old Italian coach used to call me: the filter.

The rainstorm that followed helped me imagine myself in that very stadium. The winds whipped our faces while leather cleats tore and filled with water. We couldn’t run without sinking into the grass. The ball rolled into pits of puddles.

I remembered Messi facing those similar conditions in Seville. The score was 1-1, close to the halftime mark. I told myself I was there. The sheer excitement that jolted from my 9-year-old imagination kept rewinding the scenes. It just ran in my head. That exact play.

Before the ball hits the grass again, Messi strikes the ball into the corner of the net. An arrow to the heart of the home fans. 2-1 to Barcelona. Messi points to the sky in celebration, wearing the coolest red long sleeve under the Catalonian blues and reds of his jersey.  I could just see the Sevilla fans letting out a few Puta Madres and some drunken middle fingers.

When I scored, I didn’t score from outside the box like he did, but in my mind, I imagined it to be that way. My friend Kai passed me the ball from the sideline boundaries we made with cones. When the ball got to me, I timed my shot so that it slid into the net of the much smaller field hockey goal.  I pointed to the sky. Rain fell into my eyes. I am there.

Kai was from Germany and loved the game of soccer just as I did. He enjoyed watching more than playing though. We wore the jerseys of our favorite teams when hanging out after games. He would wear his German team, Dortmund, whose jersey features vertical patterns of black and yellow stripes. I wore anything of Messi’s.

I remember noticing his mother showed more interest in soccer than his father. My dad told me that his father worked for NASA and even lived in Antarctica for some experiments. He wanted nothing to do with Kai’s soccer games. That fascinated me because I’ve always thought of it to be common for the father to be more invested in their 9-year-old son’s soccer games, not the mother.

Kai’s mother lived out Kai’s soccer experience more than he did.  It was refreshing in a way. She found a way to get our youth team to lead behind the professional players before a match. I remembered walking through the player tunnel and having the D.C United players hold our hands at RFK Stadium.  The eyes and cameras that panned to our faces. Why were we on focus? We didn’t do anything. I was simply there.

***

The Monday afternoon in Arizona was colder than most days. Winds picked up again, foreboding to the dark clouds that stretched across the horizon.

There left no sight to the endless green of turf, which bled into the hazy array of canyons, faded into the storm ahead. Miles upon miles of soccer fields split into boundaries of white lines, filled with players so insignificantly placed into a complex that will inevitably leave them overlooked.

And I was trapped. Nothing could suppress the uncontrollable emotions of frustration and anger as I sat in the dugout holding back tears. I was at the point of my senior year of high school where my games could be counted until I could never be able to play again. I had no college offers, and I was left on the bench for almost the entirety of the second half. 10 minutes remaining.

“Jordan, warm up,” my coach said.

Unable to properly channel out how pissed I was in a controlled manner, I threw my warmup jacket off to the side aggressively.

“Do you not want to play?” my coach said.

We argued back and forth. He told me to sit down, and I knew that I was never going to step onto the field again.

The UMass Lowell coach was watching this game from the corner flag. I remember being so elated seeing the Division 1 labeled next to the coaches’ name on the college scouting list.

Regardless of my excitement, I always ended up in the same place. A place of inescapable anarchy, hitting myself in the head with the same broken records that every coach engrained within me. Pass the ball. Pass it. Play your teammate! Give it up! I never gave it up. Ignorance was what made me the player I was. And it worked for a while.

I never wanted to admit I was wrong. Being in that denial gave comfort to the craft I spent my entire life trying to perfect, even when it wasn’t working.

No coach saw me dragging my dad out of bed before work, so he could drive me to the local elementary school on a humid summer morning to work on my passing. They never understood the reason why my head was so visibly low when they pointed out that my “refined” passing was poor just months later.

No coach saw me at the park before team practices, sprinting at every other light pole because I was worried my fitness wasn’t up to par. Or the week regiment I wrote in my notes for the summer, so I could try to be a step ahead of other players by August.

Running (6:00 to 6:30 am): Running the park route of Greene Tree. Jog at one light pole, the next sprint. Repeat the entire route. Lifting (7:30-8:00 am): 1. Benching x 8 reps, 3 sets   2. Shoulder press x 10 reps 3 sets 3. Bicep curls x 10 reps 3 sets. Breakfast and Break (8:00 to 10:00 am): Rest. Session training (10:30 to 11:00 am): Dribbling in a pit of cones and passing to wall (20 minutes), Agility ladder drills (10 Minutes)

My coaches never saw the regret I had when I was 7, eating mint chocolate chip ice cream before my game and feeling sluggish afterwards. They didn’t see me making a promise to myself that from that point on:  I would always eat clean, so that I wouldn’t have to go through what occurred that day.

Nobody saw the frustration I channeled toward my mother after picking me up from practices, because I was so worked up on the mistakes I made during scrimmages. She never understood why I was so angry. They never mattered to her. She only cared about how I felt about myself.

***

I remember being very young when I experienced a humid summer day coming to an end. A thunderstorm swept the outdoor festival. Everyone scattered to their cars, leaving the area flooded. My parents and I quickly made our way to the parking garage, where the overflow of water seemed not to surrender.

The level of outpour reached my small feet, soaking my socks as we all ran to the car. It was parked on a slight curve, which left the water running down the concrete floor. Litter flowed through the water run conveyer belt, leaving barely any remnants of what once was a functioning parking space. My initial reaction was one of fear, as if we would not make it out of the garage in time before the place filled.

But I remembered my dad picking up a vendor hat, which probably came from one of the food markets at the festival. He folded it slightly, forming a small raft out of the little hat.  He then let it take its course down the stream of the parking lot.

I was fascinated. As a child, I was transfixed by the inner workings of this street vendor hat, which decided to let the water direct its course. It zipped down the grassy slope, hitting the corners, moving to the lower levels of the garage.

I remember laughing at the idea that the hat was a boat setting sail. That it could possibly reach the street below, creating its own miniature voyage to wherever the rain takes it.

At the time, I never deeply thought why I was in such a feeling of awe. It was the unpredictability of its passage. The fact that there was no one steering the raft. The fact that it was guided confidently into an uncertain destiny, moving along the ramps without hesitation into the unknowingness of where it will end up.

I thought it could fall into the gutter, flowing through the sewage system. I thought it could race the cars on the busy roads. I thought it could flow down a river forever untouched. I thought of many possibilities. But not one of these thoughts were as interesting as the thought of not knowing.

***

After an unexpected call with a therapist, I went down to my living room, where my mom and dad waited in concern.

“How did it go?” my mom said.

“The first session is next Wednesday,” I said.

“What did you talk about?” she said.

“Just general stuff. How I was feeling, how school is going, what my main concern was.”

“How are you feeling?”

I thought for a while. I didn’t know how to feel. I told the therapist I was fine, and that I just needed to get over the big change of quitting soccer just like how everyone else gets over “their sport.”

But just like every failed athlete, or every reasonably reflective person for that matter, a part of me felt confused and overwhelmed. The essence of being able to let go of the script I put together for 13 years in just 30 minutes of negotiation, was an absurd concept which my head couldn’t wrap around.

What else am I good for? I thought about physical therapy. It’s somewhat related to professional soccer. I could work with athletes every day, making them practice injury-prevention stretches and run distances on the treadmill.

But I was never good in areas of biology or natural sciences. I remember getting C’s in freshman biology and the torture that was to learn the cell cycles of Mitosis and Nitrogen fixation.

It didn’t have to do with sports. But I could never do anything in engineering because I was bad at math and physics. I dreaded physics, especially the ridiculousness that comes with conceptually applied arithmetic.

Real estate intrigued me. But my mom wanted me to get a college degree, so those considerations were never even in question.

My contemplations that circled around the statement, how are you feeling, were only met by the emptiness involved with releasing myself from the one thing that I could identify with, at the worst possible time. A time that I thought was fixated around decisions set in stone. A time in which an 18-year old’s naiveness dictated jarring moves, bringing about life-changing consequences unjustly.

“I feel like I have to restart,” I said.

My mom, in her witty response, told me that it was just a new blank canvas to fill. I was terrified to paint on the canvas knowing I’ll find myself going over the lines again.

***

I was lost. Lost in the depths of the city park, dark and uninviting. Isolated in the fields of gloomy auras and straight tobacco, I found myself at the home for artsy creatives who lived and breathed vinyl records and wore leather jackets. I’ve never felt so out of place in my life.

But I gave my friend a chance and went to the field party. The cigarettes had a terrible, unpleasant smell which I could never get over. And the people. They seem to come from every direction, randomly appearing out of the woods as if they lived there.

As uncomfortable as I was, I wasn’t going to just sit in place. I saw this kid giving himself a lot of attention, running around different groups with a speaker and a trench coat. I assumed he was probably the party host, so I went up to him to try to grapple my way into the social environment.

“Sup. What’s your name?” I said.

“I’m Kai. What’s yours?” he said.

We had a brief conversation before he left to talk to other groups. At the time, I couldn’t recognize my childhood friend. I never took in the irony that we would become polar opposites, and that regardless of our winding paths, we ended up at the same shitty field party.

So, I just kept moving. Eventually I met P. Despite the darkness of the night, I loved looking at the different shades of blues conflicting in the canvases of her eyes. When we decided to leave the chaos that was the field, we got more lost in the park.

At the benches we talked about our contrasting music tastes, and my unfamiliarity to all the folk-rock artists she listens to. She talked about goals and aspirations—her desire to become a journalist and to publish her own book. P told me about her concerns in pursuing those ambitions, to which in my response, I told her to keep going, knowing in the back of my head that I couldn’t.

I was led astray in the hangouts we’d have. We found ourselves blindly walking around the boroughs of the city at night. We looked at the colorful designs that made up the different restaurants and row houses. We encountered that strange man on the street, awkwardly walking past him as he yelled at us to smoke a blunt with him. We found ourselves losing track of our cars and time, just so that we could be together in the intricacy of urban mazes.

My curiosity to know more about her, and the city around us helped me to appreciate what has always been there. I was caught up inside the lines, not knowing that I could feel just as I did when watching the hat—and myself, float downstream.