The way the last words spoken at a sleepover hang in the darkness. How it feels to wake up first. How your sleeping bag feels itchy-hot in the morning. How your insides feels itchy-hot, too. How your friends breathe in their sleep. Their messy hair. How the morning light is so orange-pretty you could cry.
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Ren Hang
Fiction By Ellen Chai: Misfit
"Misfit" is one of Lidia Yuknavitch’s favorite words. In her beautifully harrowing, unabashedly celebratory TED talk, she says that she likes the word because it’s so literal: "it’s a person who sort of missed fitting in. Or a person who fits in badly." The weight of her past, of her string of conventionally framed failures (e.g., reeling from the effects of growing up in an abusive household, having two failed marriages, flunking out of college twice, her daughter dying the day she was born) could be assembled, isolated, symbolically deployed with one word: "misfit."
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Rachel Lauren Photography
Fiction by Lydia A. Cyrus: Lycanthropy in Appalachia
I am a werewolf of sorts: awakened at night by a hunger and a desire to roam. I have spent most every night in the rain, snow, or just plain quiet walking alone in the dark. In Appalachia, we don’t talk about lycanthropy: we don’t talk about the crossing of identities where wolf meets woman. And yet, the people here will talk about me—will talk about the way I walk through the night and my darkness—and they will call it by any other name, any other affliction.
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A Brief History of Your Bathroom Mirror
You start with water. The stream ripples your skin with its current, warps your eyes, leaves you colorless. Water leaves you colorless. Motionless water is better, you discover. A puddle, a lake, a shallow bowl. You obsess over your reflection—the curve of your jaw, the speckles on your cheeks you never knew existed. You sneak glances at yourself in the black pits of someone else’s eyes, the tiny round distortion, the tiny colorless you. These are your first mirrors—the water like a cup of liquid glass, the spheres that sit in your lover’s skull like two black moons.
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Heather Simonds Photography
Fiction by Lydia A. Cyrus: Coyotes
All coyotes are memories. With their skinny bodies and hungry mouths, they exist as a precautionary tale. They eat calves on my grandfather’s farm, or they used to anyway. I’ve never seen one outside of photos before, but I know that they are tricksters: they provide the world with chaos and fury. The men in my family have shot coyotes for nothing less than being seen. Like foxes, the coyote is a symbol of invasion or peril and they must be purged from sight. Coyotes steal bullets and memories. Coyotes eat youth and hide in dark, discrete areas sometimes never revealing themselves to the light of day.
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Riccardo Melosu
Fibromyalgia: Three Instances Of
I think about how people usually only preach mind over matter when they don’t understand how to explain what’s going on with the matter.
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John Fournelle
Depression: Fear and Loathing in My Prefrontal Cortex
Six months later, I clawed myself again. This time I drew blood – real blood. I fought depression, and I lost. Again and again and again.
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Guy Denning
Darrrryl
The way that Darrrryl appears to you is special. Each of these drawings embodies one person grappling with a powerful entity. Each of them is sacred. It is a gallery with one subject.
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David Popa
This Is Why the Holidays Are Awkward
I distinctly saw one candle burning in a vacuum of blank, claustrophobic matte blackness. I watched it flicker in some unseen wind. I felt tears, real, definite and unasked for, well up in my eyes knowing it could go out at any time, that existence was not something promised, not something to be taken lightly, passed over and wasted. That it was something importune but given nonetheless. I watched the flame dance the fire’s sad, triumphant waltz, alone but shining, a slow-dance in motion only and couldn’t breathe.
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Rosita Delfino
What You Can Do
When your best friend is in a coma you can drive out to the suburban hospital after visiting hours; five weeks later, they know you're the closest thing to a husband she might have. After all, you two are not religious and only 23, sharing a February birthday, yours the 15th and hers the 21st. You can close the door of the room and scream wake up wake up wake up wake up. The way when she used to visit, you’d turn over your plump happy body towards her in the mornings, and wake her up by sticking your naked finger in her nose or ear, until she made that crying sound and stuffed her head under the pillow. The way you showered and then dripped wet hair into her open hand. Her tiny palm which you now squeeze, saying do you feel this do you feel this do you feel this; the way you too have lost feeling with her. The way you always told yourself you'd die if she died.
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Kwok Mang Ho
Perpetuity, Non-Fiction by Sarah Carson
"We were in love," I tell the state patrolman who is sent to take my name and phone number. "No, wait, I was in love," I correct. I clarify. "But that was months ago now."
"Are you sure you aren’t just angry?" he says, taking my hand in his hand, watching my eyes like we’re in the final scene of the kind of movies my grandma watches when she drinks lots of wine.
"I am angry," I will learn not to say.
The lady cop will walk circles into the floor of my kitchen. She will memorize the ceiling tiles.
"Take off your shoes," I won’t say to her. "You are tracking mud across the floor of my home."
"This is not your home," she won’t say back. "I’ve stood here a million times before you arrived. I’ll stand here for a million more girls after you’re gone."
I will go see a therapist who will try to hypnotize the memories out of me.
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via Pinterest
The Nuance of Guilt When You're Part of a Jury
In this room full of strangers we are dominos: like first pairs with like. The least dissimilar pieces connect over the obvious and arbitrary. If our identities possess any intricate craftwork, it has been blurred and obscured and forgotten. Now we are distracted by the markings on each other’s faces, by the brushstrokes that have painted over all of our messy and complicated humanness.
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