Though I’d hoped to say to my parents, in some wimpy grown-boy type of way, how this morning I’m feeling vaguely miserable— I realize when I arrive upstairs that there’s no one to speak with. The house is empty. My brother’s working in Chicago, my sister flew to Las Vegas with her boyfriend yesterday, and […]
Staring at my code, it glares back at me with errors. The answer I’m looking for is somewhere between the lines but I just can’t seem to find it. I diverted my gaze from my computer for the first time in hours and checked my phone. “6:09 PM” I read aloud. The clock on my […]
I share invites to protests on facebook and never leave my house. I watch Derek Chauvin’s trial from an apartment in a white-flight suburb of Detroit. In swanky Ferndale coffee shops I wear a Black Lives Matter mask, but I don’t when I visit my dad. I buy a “Defund the Police” t-shirt from a […]
Usually sweat begins to form on my forehead by the first 15 minutes of my shift. Certified Nurses Aids (CNAs) are notoriously considered to be underpaid, overworked, and not in high enough numbers to be anything other than short staffed. My facility, which is both long-term and sub-acute care, in the middle of a pandemic, […]
At every school I’ve gone to in my life, there’s always been a graveyard nearby. First the tiny church cemetery that lay just past the playground fence in elementary school. Then the one shaded by trees along the bus route to middle school. The one down the street from my part-time job throughout high school. […]
Last fall, my roommate Alex worked hard on his senior design project. As an aerospace engineering major, his project was, unsurprisingly, a plane. Made out of styrofoam, measuring at about five feet long with two long wings sticking out the sides, the plane was quite a significant structure. Between my room and Alex’s is a […]
“It’s not that bad.” I’m standing in my bathroom in front of a sink filled with hair. My voice is desperate. Shannon, the friend who lent me the hair scissors, doesn’t say anything. The ends are okay, but the bangs are choppy and flat. It looks horrible. Instead of the face framing layers I was […]
The damn key fob was dead. There was no manual lock that I could find and even then, I wasn’t sure if the car would start without the remote juiced up. Fuck. It was 3:45 pm. I was supposed to be picking up a pizza order that had been set for 3:40. I had class […]
As I was driving home from Trader Joe’s, my roommate sent me the text: I think I’m going home for a week or two. As I spied my phone lighting up, I quickly peeled my eyes away from the road. Disordered, my stomach solidified and plummeted into my abdomen knowing what had happened when she […]
My parents and I arrive three hours early, to make sure everything goes smoothly. I keep my fish tank in the car, and ask my parents every few minutes if they will be okay. They reassure me that the August heat won’t harm them. We walk to South Quad and down State Street to calm […]