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Amongst the Smiling Cypresses
Dawn Wendt
“Life is solitary confinement.” Was the advice my mother had to offer me, from the time I was five years old, playing in the front yard amongst the smiling cypresses. She had been alone ever since the winter previous, years ago, when the horses had frozen over and her hair stood up. Her lover had electric hair, too. So they understood each other. It’s been years since I saw a smile come to her face. Before, she believed that we were all confined to our own prisons within our bodies. Now, she confirms that those prisons are eternal.
She is the ‘bah humbug’ of the south, the raising voice of the hikers in the mountains who call out for a lost companion in the rain. Her negative words bled bruises into my five-year-old brain. It’s not her fault. She didn’t choose to have the parents she did.
“It only takes once.” She told me, looking up from her knitting. “You’ll see.” She shook her head and clicked her tongue at me. She was all-knowing. You could tell, by her tattoos, and
the scars she wore openly on her body. She had been through hell and survived, and so it was easy enough for me to take her word as truth.
Her hair falls completely flat now. You can tell it’s disappointed her, by her expression in the mirror. She warns me because I’ve fallen in love, something she told me not to do. I tried to get her to meet him, once. I tried to explain that he was a nice boy – that even if he wore clothes that she didn’t approve of, that he didn’t shake her hand when he met her because he didn’t realize he had to, that he was still nice.
“He will leave you,” She tells me. “If you don’t have sex with him. He’ll leave you.” She was sewing a hem when she said this. She missed the fabric and pricked her finger. We watched the blood fall on the tartan lace garment. She looked at me. “You bleed when you have sex.” At the time she said this, I hadn’t had sex. So I believed her, and I told her I wouldn’t have sex until the summer at the very least. So we watched the snow in the comfort of our living room, until I had to go away for school again.
“You’ll be confined to your pain for the rest of your life.” She told me. “That’s what life is. You fall in love, and you are scorned. Then you have to live with knowing you weren’t enough for him.”
I met him at school. He is brown-eyed, and bushy-tailed, and he tells me that he thinks I’m sweet. He puts his arm around my shoulders when we walk together.
“You’re setting yourself up for heartbreak.” She scoffed at me. “Don’t come crying to me when he breaks your heart.”
“My heart beats for him.” I tell her. She doesn’t understand the hope I feel when I looked at him, that someone has finally cared enough about me that they wish to understand the inner
workings of my soul. She confines herself to that frozen-over mansion, where it is always winter- thumbprickingly icy cold, frostbitten and bitter. There hasn’t been leaves growing in our orchard for years now, and I don’t know when they’ll start to grow again. She isn’t taking care of the yard. She walks around those halls like a ghost, as if she lost her feet and the sound of her footsteps.
The sky still hasn’t stopped crying loveless snow.
When I was confined to visits with my mother for extended periods of time like this, I would go for walks along the property, bundled up tightly in sweaters she had knitted in her solitude. Once upon a time, apples grew on these trees. Their tops were well-nourished, green, and tall, and enjoyed being climbed. They whispered secrets in my youthful ears. They would tell the secrets of the birds, and how they are not always as sweet as they seem.
“They dance for their lovers to impress them.” They told me. “What a pleasure it is that you never have to go so far out of your way for the approval of someone.” I would cradle myself in their arms when my mother was off with her lover, and the wind rocked me to the sound of Spanish lullabies. They sang me songs, and gave me their apples when they were ripe. “Always treasure this.” And so I did. d
But now they can no longer speak, and I press a hand to throw frozen stumps and I can feel their heartbreak, their voices that are strained and frozen shut. I can feel their lack of freedom, their pounding heartbeat beneath the surface of the ice – I yearn to touch them, to feel the grooves of the stump, the sap of the trees, to feel the support of their heavy limbs as my feet clad in trainers step up, and up, and up, until I reign over all that I can see.
“I am powerless here.” I told them. “I have tried to convince her that the world isn’t as scary as she believes. But I think she refuses to believe there is any happiness left for her to consume.” I have no way of knowing whether or not they truly understood, seeing as they were frozen shut. I heard the whinny of a horse. I look towards the east, where the stables were. Since she hasn’t the energy to put the horses in their stables at night, she lets them go free – something that I’ve come to detest, considering she’s let it be cold all this time.
“If you had an apple to give her, you might change her mind.” The horse scared me with his sudden presence, but I was happier than ever to see that they were still able to survive in this cold. He wore a thick wool blanket across his back.
“Do you think?”
“You can’t blame her for the way she treats you, dear. She’s been scorned.” He said this with a mouthful of grass. “When the people we love are cruel, we have two choices: become frozen to the touch, or avenge ourselves. Your mother, it seems, isn’t the avenging type.”
“What if I did it for her?”
The horse blinked, huffing air out of its nostrils. “My dear, she wouldn’t deserve such a kind gesture.” “She deserves to have her cold heart melted.” “Do you speak with anger, angel?”
“Not at all.” I glanced towards the mansion. I had always entertained the idea of escape, running away from home. But I feared that she would be alone for all eternity then, and even though I wasn’t great company, I was company nonetheless. Her feet don’t touch the ground anymore.
“How could I leave her like this?”
The horse scoffed, but he nonetheless stepped closer to me. “You will pay for your kindness, my dear. Shall we go and find an apple?”
“In this cold?”
“I am well acquainted with the intimacies of the forest. I know where we’ll find one.” We rode deep into the orchard. Branches scraped my cheeks, and against the cotton of my coat.
“The only ripe apple in the forest.”
A drop of blood fell onto the back of my hand. I looked at the tree – a measly tree, not quite as tall as the others. It wasn’t the kind I’d pick out when I was a child, running along the trees and deciding ideas for my future. It was the kind of tree you’d read against, and it would comfort you, and read the story along with you, telling its friend, the wind, to turn the page even if you hadn’t finished it yet. The branches were all dark and dim and seemingly weak. There were only three apples on the tree. Two were frozen into ice blocks, impermeable and stuck in time. I tapped against the ice block with my finger, and watched as the apple icicle started to swing and fell to the forest floor. It fell with an unimpressive thud to sit comfortably in the dirt, remaining locked in its cage. The horse inclined his head to look back at me. The only ripe apple in the frozen over first stood eight feet up – too tall for me to grasp at, even on horseback.
“Wouldn’t it be easier to melt that one?”
“Now how do you think that’d taste, my dear? Thawing once-frozen things leaves them never the same again, you know that.” He was right. Mother would be disappointed.
“How do I get it?”
“I can see how far we can get if I jump. Hold on tight.”
He thrust himself on his hind legs, lifting himself up an extra foot or so in a beautiful statuesque pose of beauty. I grasped onto the branch right below it, and added my second hand. If I could balance and get my hands on the next branch above, I could get the apple. But upper body strength was never quite my strong suit.
“I’ll catch you if you fall.”
I reached for the branch quickly, feeling sticky sap and rough bark against the soft skin of my delicate palms. Moving quickly would be my only saving grace, to catch my balance. I barely missed it, but my right hand found the thicker branch carrying the only thing that could save my mother. The second hand followed after, and I looked to my right, to see the apple dangling at the end of the branch. I inched my hands, little by little, towards the end. The horse walked below me, looking up at me with interest, though he offered no advice. It was shiny, and red, and gleamed from the unforgiving light of the winter sun. It seemed bruiseless, and untouched, and it was a wonder to me how this apple could be sitting at the end of the branch, so untouched by the world around it, so unaffected. How could life persist in such cold, unforgiving conditions? How could something persevere so completely?
I was afraid the second I let go of the branch with my right hand to reach the apple, I would fall. It was inevitable, I figured. I got as close as I could, feeling the branch dip towards the earth with the added affect of my weight upon it. The apple spun by the force, but it stayed tact to the tree.
“You are stronger than you think you are.”
I believed the words of the horse, hushed, as focused as I was on our prize. I reached for the apple, feeling the firm skin in my hands and felt my body fall to the frozen floor.
I came to in the den of our house, with the fire lit and raging. Night had fallen. “Mother?”
She floated into the room, hair flat and traipsing behind her like the dress of a bride. it was so long that when she left a room, her hair would stay behind, and would take a few seconds or so to keep up with her body.
“You’re an idiot.” She told me. “Going out in that orchard alone? You know it’s dangerous.” She’s the one that made it so.
I looked toward my hand, to show her the apple, to give her the one prize that would help her bring her back to her normal self. To have her static, vertical hair again…to have it floating against the ceiling as it once did before. When I was young, and she was in love, her hair oozed electricity. It stood straight up and crazed. It was as captivating as the smile that never left her lips. She was so much happier then. Now, these rooms feel empty, even though they are filled with her body, and the length of her hair as it falls behind her.
The apple was in the pocket of my sweater, with a note from the horse.
Sorry for the fall. I caught you.
Best of luck.
I would hold the note dearly for the rest of my days, I was sure of that.
“I can’t believe your audacity.” She continued.
“I have a gift for you, mother.”
“What’s this?” She turned to me, eyes blinking and green. She lost her pupils along with her presence.
I presented the apple to her, small, though mighty. Red, and gleaming, a bright, warm light in a room full of muted cools.
“An apple? From the orchard?”
I nodded, watching as she took the apple in her palm and examined it in her palm, turning it around. Her long fingernails easily surcompassed the entire fruit.
“What is this supposed to solve?” She cried. “Why have you given this to me?”
“I wanted you to see that there is still life, when it is cold, and dark.” She blinked at me. “It has been winter for years, mother! There is more to this life than wallowing.”
“I know that.” She dug a fingernail into the skin of apple, watching a droplet of apple juice fell down into her palm. “But there isn’t much more to this life than love. And I have lost that.” She glared at me. “Just who do you think you are, some kind of hero?” I watched as she walked towards the front entrance of our home, and threw the apple out into the snow, where it rested – red, pricked by my mother’s claw-like fingernails, in a nest of snow. I watch it bleed red onto the icy white.
My Sister’s Undead Cat
Katia Taylor
“Do dogs die when people smoke around them?” Vera tugs my arm down. The eight-year-old girl watches a beagle in the World Trade Center subway station. Its owner, a stocky businessman, is smoking a juul.
“I think dogs are like people,” I say, “over many years, they can get very sick and die from the smoke. But it’s not like one dog sniffs smoke and dies on the spot.”
“Oh,” Vera replies. “Did you hear what Katia said, Natalia? Dogs are fine.” Natalia, Vera’s classmate and friend, smiles up at me in relief. The beagle is safe from imminent death. The little girl wraps her arm around Vera’s as we walk up the stairs into the construction fumes of Fulton Street.
“Our uncle smokes,” Vera continues, always ready to divulge what she views as family gossip. “Remember when I told you about the cat we had when I was five years old? The big, fat one? Well, we brought it over to my uncle’s house, and he smokes a lot there. So the cat died.”
Wait, what?
“What do you mean, a cat we had when you were five years old?” I inquire with a confused smile, “as far as I can remember, we’ve never had a cat. Or any pet.”
“Yes, we did,” Vera insists, blood rushing into her cheeks. Then she whips around to her friend. “We did, Natalia. Katia doesn’t know anything. We had a cat, a fat cat, and now he’s dead.” Natalia glances at me, then at Vera, then at me again. She doesn’t know what to think.
“Yes, I know you had a cat,” Natalia breathes out, making up her mind. “Everyone knows that. And then you were sad when he died.”
What?
I am tempted to pull out all the evidence that this cat never existed. But then the teacher calls out for silence from the front of the line. The woman in her twenties politely asks all the 2nd graders to pair up, hold hands and walk next to the adults on the Brooklyn Bridge. Then she tells all the field trip chaperones to implore our children about the history of the bridge to see what the students can remember from their social studies class.
Our children. I bristle at the phrase. Even though I’ve been a (much) older sibling for eight years now, I’m still not used to being treated like a parent at times. The fact that my own sister — a person in my own generation — is still in the throes of childhood fills me with bitter nostalgia. Sometimes I wonder if we are all psychologically wired to never be satisfied — with children constantly wanting to be older, and adults wanting to go back in time. It feels like a slap in the face when I’m reminded that I could be a teenage mom in a different world.
“What was the cat’s name?” I suddenly ask Vera, before my negative thoughts begin to spiral.
“I don’t remember,” Vera drags out each word. She’s flustered. Natalia looks confused. I’m disappointed. Suddenly I want to teach my little sister how to become a better liar. If she is going to do it, she better do it right. My first lesson would be: don’t lie in front of someone who knows the truth and will call you out on it. In the spirit of mentorship, I decide to let my sister’s lie go for now.
The sky is overcast, so I make sure Vera’s jacket is completely zipped. Holding onto each other’s hand, we begin our trek down the Brooklyn Bridge.
—
Before my sister was born, my family used to listen to a French opera CD in the car. One of my favorite songs on it was a cover of the musical number Memory. When the first few notes of the song would play, a deep sense of melancholy would nestle in my chest. There was no tangible reason for why it made me feel that way, nor did I understand what the foreign lyrics meant. But I felt as though, for a moment, I was sixty years older — and that transformation was weirdly magical.
Imagine my surprise when I recently found out the original song in the Cats musical is sung by, well, a cat.
The feline character Grizabella was a glamorous star in her past, and now she sings emphatically about her glory days. The memory of that time belongs only to her now, she repeats, and her despair echoes in every vocal tremor. It is beautiful, but also odd. Why must she be a cat? While it might be true that the composer Andrew Lloyd Webber likes cats a lot, many critics of Cats have argued that there is no real reason for the show to be about the animal.[1]
I disagree. Cats are among the most peculiar of animals, mysterious and dreamlike. Sometimes one of them can make us feel ancient with its sad, powerful voice (or, more likely, with its athletic capabilities). And — if we really, really want it, a cat can just materialize itself in our memories.
—
Throughout the day, I wonder about my sister’s nonexistent cat. What color was it? Which room did it live in? What kind of personality did it have?
On the drive home from the elementary school, I ask her why she told Natalia we had a cat in the first place.
“I told everybody,” Vera replies. “What’s the big deal?”
“It’s a lie, and you and I and everyone in this family knows it.”
Vera’s lips purse. In a deeper voice, she states: “It’s not a lie.”
“Yes, it is.”
“No, it’s not!” she screeches. “We had a cat. I don’t remember its name, but we had a cat, and now you’re just trying to make a big deal out of everything I do and say, like you always do! Why do you have to make a big deal out of everything?”
I don’t know how to respond. For a few minutes, the car is silent and tense.
Confused, my mom in the driver’s seat inquires about the argument. I explain the situation.
“Maybe she’s not lying,” says my mother. “Maybe she genuinely believes that we had a cat when she was five years old.” My sister in the backseat grunts in frustration.
I laugh. It has only been three years since my sister was five; surely, she remembers that we had never had a pet in our lives. She also brags about her ability to lie; honestly, the boy who cried wolf has nothing on her.
“After all,” my mother abruptly continues, “you also believe that you went on that Brooklyn Bridge field trip when you were in 2nd grade, don’t you? I talked to your dad today, and he said that never happened. You were sick that day. So, he took you there the summer of 2007.”
What? For a moment, I refuse to believe that. I feel like I can still recall everything from that day. The field trip worksheets we did on the bridge. The conversation I had with my best friend about how we would construct the bridge with wooden blocks at school. The sunburn I had on my arms at the end of the day.
I’m about to protest, but I hold back. The truth is, these memories are not very accessible; it’s not like recalling what happened yesterday, or even last summer. There is a thick fog around my childhood memories, so it is entirely possible that I made them up. I might have looked at photos on my school website, and mentally photoshopped myself into the experience. Maybe I filled out those worksheets on another day and talked with my friend in a different place. As for sunburns — that probably did happen on the Brooklyn Bridge, only during the summer with my dad.
When I turn in my front seat to look at my sister, I see that Vera’s brown eyes are red and puffy. She leans on her cheek and looks out the window morosely. It isn’t like her to be so easily upset. Still a little suspicious, I ask what color the cat was.
“Brown,” she mutters. “With white stripes. It was fat, too. That’s all I remember.”
I look for her tell-tale signs of lying: repeating “um” over and over, glancing everywhere but at me, persistent fidgeting with her hands. But she shows none of the signs. For the first time, I actually believe she might be telling her truth.
“I’m sorry,” I say, with genuine guilt. “You might be right after all.”
—
Cheshire Cat, my favorite cat in literature, is famous for asking more questions than he even bothers to answer. He also just likes to be creepy. When the little girl Alice tells him that that she doesn’t want to be around the crazy people of Wonderland, the blue Cheshire Cat smiles its signature disturbing grin. “Oh, you can’t help that,” he says. “We’re all mad here. I’m mad. You’re mad” (90).[2]
When my family finally returns home from the field trip, I think about how memories shift, and twist, and evolve. How nostalgia only works because we forgot the bad parts of childhood. How the stories we create are often distorted by our own flawed perceptions of the past (and by our ultimate page count). Maybe, I realize, madness stems from the belief that truth is objective and stagnant. The belief that a nonexistent cat never lived.
My sister made up the lie about the cat because she always wanted a pet. She talks about it often, and the walls in her room are decorated with photos and drawings of dogs and cats. After months, and possibly years of lying at school, Vera started to believe in a cat in her past. Who am I to call that mad?
After all, I remember going on a 2nd grade field trip to the Brooklyn Bridge. It might be that my “field trip” happened another time with another person, but that’s not what my memory tells me. Sometimes it is possible to just will things into existence because of how badly you want it. Only, you can only will something to happen in your past, or, I suppose, in your future. The present is not magical in that way.
After the Cheshire Cat answers her question, Alice asks him how he could possibly know that she is mad. He responds: “you must be, or you wouldn’t have come here” (90). Here can only refer to Wonderland, otherwise regarded widely as the psychological world of dreams and flawed memories.
—
A few days go by. My sister barges into my room on Sunday without knocking. Jumping on my bed, she holds a physical photo album in her hands, an odd relic I had not seen in a while.
“Look at this,” cries Vera, jubilant. She opens the red album to a page she bookmarked with her thumb. “There’s a cat in that picture! I told you that we had a cat! Maybe it was a long, long time ago, but we did have one!”
I stare at the image behind the plastic cover. A little blonde five-year-old girl plays with one brown-and-white-striped cat in an enclosed outdoor garden. I recognize the black table and the grape vines in the back.
“That’s me,” I breathe out, “when I was five.” I brace for Vera’s disappointment.
“What?! That’s so cool. Why didn’t you tell me you had a cat when you were little?” She looks up at me with a cheeky pout. “Did you lie to me?”
“No,” I say, “that was my cat in Russia. That’s a different story.”
“Tell me!” Vera bounces on the mattress.
“Well, it was a nice cat named Marissa. Then she got sick and died. The end,” I summarize.
“Oh,” my little sister frowns.
“I know. It’s really sad.” It’s been years since I’ve thought of Marissa the cat, and I can’t remember playing with her at all.
“Was she like my cat?” Vera looks up at me with innocent puppy dog eyes.
It’s a test. I know it is.
“Well, she didn’t die of smoke,” I say. “But I guess they both liked to swim, which is kind of weird for cats.”
“I don’t remember my cat swimming.” Vera pinched her eyebrows. “Huh. Guess I don’t remember everything.”
—
In order to explain a concept in quantum physics, Erwin Schrödinger devised a thought experiment asking what would happen if you put a cat, a flask of poison and a radioactive source in an enclosed metal box.[3] The answer is simple; at some point, the cat will die when the radioactive source decays and causes a poisonous explosion. However, since the initial decay happens randomly, there is no way to predict when the poison will explode. Until you open the box again, it’s impossible to know the cat’s fate. Therefore, Schrödinger proposes that the cat is, at least to us, both dead and alive at the same time.
But what if the cat, the box and the poison in this case never existed? What if they were completely made up to begin with? In an empirical sense, that would mean that my sister’s cat was also neither dead nor alive. Now that Vera is convinced the cat truly lived, however, she breathes life into the lie. I can’t dispute that, nor would I necessarily want to. After all, I don’t want to get in the way of creativity and imagination, which are just other words for lying.
Should the day ever come that my sister wants to know the truth, then I’ll tell her. I doubt my sister ever will, though. Just like how I remember the Brooklyn Bridge (except not really), she’ll remember the cat too (except not really). Or, she might be too wrapped up in nostalgia to ask.
Until then, that memory is both dead and alive, and as her older sister, I am not about to change that.
Author’s Note
I originally wanted to write a literary analysis on Angela Carter’s Lady in the House of Love, but I switched topics for two reasons. One, I realized that I had another analytical paper due within three days of this one and writing two analyses did not seem all that exciting during finals season. Two, this story with my sister kept bugging me for some inexplicable reason. It felt like it had the potential to fit the prompt, so I switched.
Writing this creative nonfiction narrative opened up a whole new can of worms because I couldn’t figure out how I wanted to write it. At first, I thought I would take on my relationship with my sister in Yiyun Li’s style, but that fell apart when I realized how awkward it is to write about yourself in the third person. Then I contemplated the crux of this story, which has to do with dreams, flawed memories and cats. That’s when I remembered Carmen Maria Machado’s The Husband Stitch, and how she spliced short familiar stories into a broader tale to drive her point home. I thought about some fictional cats that might convey the theme, and decided to feature Grizabella from the musical Cats, the Cheshire Cat from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Schrödinger’s infamous cat. I liked how all these examples illustrate the weird dreamlike status cats have in our culture, and also in our understanding of dreams and philosophy. I thought these stories worked with the general theme of my sister’s imaginary (but also very real) cat.
My role in this story is a little weird, because all I do is react and prod and react. I think of my part as embodying the uncertainty of the journey in hindsight. I come to the realization that some of our memories are false, due to past forgotten desires, and how that’s ultimately inevitable and okay.
The greatest challenge I had with this essay was figuring out why I’m writing it, and what I want readers to get out of it. It’s a little all over the place, because the themes vary from my relationship with my sister to a general discourse about flawed memories, and then to fictional cats. I hope I was able to weave these ideas in an organic way, but that’s what I feel the least confident about in this essay.
While writing this piece, I learned how to make a small anecdote seem really big. Also, I’ve never spliced loosely-connected short references into an essay with a broader theme, so that was new. Lastly, I learned a lot about the lore of fictional cats, which, suffice to say, was not what I was expecting when I started this essay.
[1] Russo, Robert. “NOTES: In Defense of ‘Cats’, Why You Should See This Iconic Musical before It Closes on
Broadway.” Stage Left, Stage Left, 12 Nov. 2017,
www.stageleft.nyc/blog/2017/11/12/notes-in-defense-of-cats-why-you-should-see-this-iconic-musical-before-it-closes-on-broadway.
[2] Carroll, Lewis. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. Lee and Shepard, 1869.
[3] “The Physics Behind Schrödinger’s Cat Paradox.” National Geographic, National Geographic Society, 14 Aug. 2013, news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2013/08/130812-physics-schrodinger-erwin-google-doodle-cat-paradox-science/.
Songs in Her Head
Claire Kowalewski
It hit her like the wind of a passing train. As if stepping over the bumped yellow line, a few knuckles from death. Wild unearthly exhilaration is what she felt. Hold on, she told herself, afraid of floating up and up. It started with a drink at the bar. “Rum and coke,” Val said, and Michael handed her a vodka soda. She glanced at the clear soda, sparkling like something celestial. Perhaps a divine signal that she was meant to take it, this drink, from him. A holy Eucharist. He watched as she swallowed.
They talked for a long time about family and labor. The kind their fathers did, with calloused hands and sun spots beneath bright orange t-shirts. Val thought of the gray reflective stripes that cracked after too many washes. It touched her, knowing that Michael understood those gray stripes too. They shared the fear of disappointing their fathers who worked to the bone, and other things too (sipping from the same straw, flirtatious glances). They complained about the simultaneous dissatisfaction and ecstasy of life in the city, of this post-modern condition in which we spin in circles of desire and consumption. They bonded over the treacherousness of being twenty-something.
Everything Michael said was charged with sex in some way or another. He touched her wrist and his eyes were dark. Val felt things boiling inside of her, a white frothing madness. She was drunk on the way he saw her. He complimented her and used words like cute, funny, and wild. He wouldn’t stop laughing at her jokes, he made her seem endlessly interesting and awfully intelligent. Val felt all the right words slip off her tongue.
She wanted to sleep with him.
“Are you seeing anyone?” he asked. He had a smirking, almost viscous smile.
Val felt blood rushing to her ears. “No, I’m not,” she said, smiling up at Michael and sucking on her straw.
She thought of Leo, the one she loved, asleep in her bed with a head cold. He wasn’t feeling well and decided not to go out with their group of friends, all of whom had left her at the bar. Her love for him was warm and soft, a constant glow. He made happy sighs, patted her knee, and kissed her on the forehead when she cried. Her bedroom was laced with the entanglement of their lives: worn down pillow cases, his piles of clothes in her closet, brown rings of coffee on the window sill, a lingering smell of ash.
The comforting familiarity with which she pictured Leo was in the place of her once electric infatuation with him. When he touched her, she could think about it for days after and still feel that rising, helium feeling inside. She couldn’t eat properly when struck with such excitement. She sang songs in her head. They sounded like the faraway crooning of love songs played in the living room, her parents moving slowly together, wine glasses on the mantle. They always left red rings on the wood. Love is found in circles: glass marks, the spinning of two dancers, widened pupils, the shape of your mouth during orgasm, wedding rings, a record playing in the living room.
It was a whirlwind chaos of pleasure and uncertainty. The honeymoon period, they call it. More than that though – a cosmic alliance of time, space, and energy in her chest. Val believed it to be the height of human experience.
Now she had become accustomed to it all. They were comfortable. Their love was weighed down by feeling safe. Safety, however, brings boredom when stretched out far in time. She moved through the days like clockwork: foggy mornings, clicking computer keys at her startup job, small talk with Leo over lukewarm takeout dinner, and having sex every once in a while. Their sex was all push and thrust and the routine mundanity of making each other cum. To Val, Leo was like a Ken doll, his body all muscles and mound. A sexless form except on the rare occasions in which they both searched for thrills of the past. Sex was like excavating for ancient, broken remnants – trying to piece together and recreate something that once was, but can never be again. They slept each night in her bed, two lumps of flesh on either side. Rising and falling lungs but no beating heart. Over and over, spinning off into nothingness.
—–
Eventually Michael invited Val back to his apartment. As they walked there, she felt that with every step she was venturing to some place from which she could never return. His eyes grew more and more wicked and her legs began to weaken. Outside of his building, the lobby glowed with yellow light and beckoned her entrance. An oasis of temptation, a hidden garden.
“Mind if I smoke?” Michael asked. He held a cigarette in his teeth ready to light. She realized that his wickedness was just an overpowering expression of youth. He had a sort of juvenile deviance to him, there was no malice.
“No, go ahead,” Val smiled. She leaned against the iron fence of his building and looked out at the street, feeling very, very far away and unlike the person Leo knew.
Val was of the disposition that yearning is an inherently feminine trait. Femininity and its flimsy modern empowerment are no match for loneliness, she believed. To be a woman is to constantly yearn for more and to live life in a state of eternal incompletion. That seed is sown in early childhood with whimsical fairytales and made-up stories. Poor girls, raised on the idea that love will find them. They gorge on love and sex as teenagers, in television shows and romance novels and, most powerfully, in their dizzy punchdrunk heads. Love must not only find them but complete them, too.
Val yearned for a version of Leo not unlike Prince Charming, who worshipped and lavished her with rose petals and gold jewelry, wet kisses and barefoot dances. She yearned for spontaneity, unexpected sex, meaningful sex, filthy shameful kinky sex. Standing outside of Michael’s apartment, on the precipice of infidelity, she cursed Leo for being so beige. He drove me to this, she lied to herself, knowing it was her fault, all her fault, and that if she just went home now all would be forgotten. But she stayed, feeling the night at the back of her neck and at her ankles, breathing in the smell of Michael’s cigarette smoke.
Most of all, she yearned to plunge into something dangerous.
—–
Michael’s apartment was gray, black, and white with little variation on the theme. It was sleek, with sharp corners and lots of empty space. It was also spotless in a vacant sort of way. He got it cleaned once a week, he said. Michael was dominant and mischievous, and she submitted, as if dutifully, to his body’s desires. Bending and stretching. Reaching and contorting. She felt that rush of wind, that feeling of being close to death.
She woke up next to him, his chest softly rising and a little tattoo on his ribs moving along with it. Val traced the lines of his jaw and nose, his collarbone, the veins on his forearm. It didn’t feel like touching Leo. When you’re with someone for long enough, your body becomes their body. No one likes caressing their own body.
She crept into the bathroom and looked at herself in the mirror. Her makeup was streaked black across her eyelids, her hair knotted and frizzy. Val blinked away the sting in her eyes.
She stepped into the shower and turned the faucet all the way hot. Steam billowed in the bathroom. Val scrubbed her body raw. She scrubbed the insides of her thighs hard. Then she stood beneath the water as it scalded her upper back numb and traveled down to her ankles, stinging each notch of her body along the way. When she stepped out her skin was tight and pink like a newborn baby. Val remembered the hospital picture that hung on her family’s cluttered fridge as a child, she was red pink and writhing – a creature unhuman with its wrinkles and scrunches. She longed for that untainted state of being, the sterile hospital green in the background.
Val thought about newness, softness. Everyone loves babies because they’re innocent. She read somewhere that babies are so cute because it makes us protect and care for them. But unhinged women drown babies in bathtubs, she thought. The life and death of water, from baptismal font to dirty tub.
—–
Guilt followed Val home like a slithering trail of snakes. She opened the door of her bedroom to see Leo, her Leo, watching a movie on his laptop. He looked up at her and smiled. “How was last night? Did you stay at Sarah’s?”
“It was good,” Val said, swallowing what felt like shards of glass. “Yeah, I stayed at Sarah’s, didn’t want to wake you so late.” She plopped down on the bed beside him, her shoulders folding in.
“That’s nice of you,” he replied and turned back to his movie.
“Of course.”
Val looked blankly into the distance between her and the wall. She listened to the music play softly from Leo’s movie. A faraway love song…she could hear it from the past, haunting her with echoes.
A Tourist in My Own Country
Celine Sawiris
“Yalla, yalla we’re leaving!” yelled her mom, storming into her room. She was standing at the tip of the balcony and in front of her, she saw her whole life. She saw buildings slowly tumbling down, she saw the innocent turn guilty, and she saw her family torn apart like never before. All her life she imagined what it will be like growing old in this very same spot… but before she knew it, it was all just a dream, rudely interrupted by sirens. She heard the voice of the Muezzin and recognized that it was time for their prayer. But something seemed off this time. Every day she had been woken by the same sounds. She’d had the same routine. And she never expected anything less; until suddenly, prayers turned into warnings: “Live from Tahrir Square, the biggest Revolution in the Arab Spring since 1952.”, she heard the TV shout from next door. With no explanation, separated from her family, the next thing she knew she was in a car full of strangers, supposedly there to protect her. Each going into different cars, as it was too risky to all be in the same one. The naive little eleven-year-old girl with wet cheeks looked outside her window and all she could see were hopeless faces standing in the midst of destruction. Leaving family and friends behind with no warning and no time to say goodbye, she waved naively at the streets.
That was five years ago. And at the time, she would have never imagined that she would be put in such a helpless position. She wanted so badly to be part of the change, to help her country, and to prove to the people of her worth. But she couldn’t. “People stare and wait, wait for us to mess up, as if their happiness depends on it. Today is that day,” her mother told her on the plane ride to the unknown. Her family fled, and along with them she went. She knew she wasn’t coming back. She never understood what it meant to be privileged until she was forced out of her own country. She became a tourist in the city she called home. Next thing she knew, she was in a new country, new city, and new school. And the same little naive girl now stood on her own, on a different balcony. Unfamiliar.
That little girl was me. People tell me to forget about the past because as we say in Arabic, “Elle fat mat” which means what passed is gone and you can’t change that. This new life always reminds me that my choices have already been made by others and in order to move on I needed to accept that. “تحیا مصر ”, “Long live Egypt”, they said, not knowing that it had died long before it was able to live.
Family Lore
Amanda Braitman
The two of them sat alone at the dinner table. The girl was fifteen. She’d only just lost the baby fat and was still figuring out her hair. It would be a long time before she figured it out.
“Can you tell me one of the stories about my dad?”
“Harry? Which one? You want the toothbrush story?”
“No, not that one—”
“Oh, I know which one you want.”
The girl’s grandmother was delicately-boned and vain. She dyed her hair dark brown and complained bitterly of her chubby youth. Really she was beautiful still, and everyone knew it. Her name was Dolores, and since she was a little girl everyone had called her Doe. Nicknames like that were all the rage when she was young. Doe, like a deer. It was fitting; she had large pudding brown eyes.
The girl, Samantha, hadn’t inherited those eyes. She hadn’t inherited anything from Dolores; not her eyes, which were small and pale and blue, or her hair, which was thin and golden and always shiny with oil, and which slipped annoyingly out of ponytails (Dolores’ hair had been thick, chestnutty and voluminous when she was Samantha’s age). Not anything. That was why Dolores liked Samantha the best. The other grandchildren reminded her too much of herself. She didn’t want to see her pudding eyes or chestnutty hair belonging to anyone else, especially when her eyelids now drooped and wrinkled and her hair had long ago thinned and whitened.
Samantha must have gotten all her genes from the other side of the family.
Anyhow, Dolores liked Samantha best. And Samantha and Dolores were sitting at the otherwise deserted dinner table, everyone else having gone off, the plates having been cleared, and Dolores was fingering her wine glass, which still held a sip of Pinot Grigio (Dolores rarely drank anything other than Pinot Grigio; it was her go-to).
“Well, you know how it goes,” Dolores said. Beatrice often requested the story about her dad that wasn’t the toothbrush story.
“Yeah, but I want to hear you tell it.” Dolores just loved hearing that. Samantha knew she was the favorite; she knew how to play Dolores.
“Well, we were down by the shore one summer. Your grandpa always insisted on wearing that ridiculous Speedo… No man should go near one of those things, in my opinion… There were seven of us. Your Uncle Ronnie must have been thirteen, which means Harry was fifteen. Helen, my sister—”
“I know who Aunt Helen is, Doe” Samantha interjected, rather brattily.
“—Of course you do, dear—and Nathan, and the Benjamins, who were very close friends of your grandfather’s—goodness, what a shame; Marty Benjamin died just a year after that summer down the shore. Perhaps the adrenaline had something to do with it…”
Dolores’ doe eyes lost focus. She was remembering how Marty Benjamin used to look at her, how his hand used to linger at her waste, how his green eyes twinkled when he played all those practical jokes. She was remembering that terrible sunburn he got, red and ugly all over his back, and how, when everyone else was at the beach, he’d asked her to rub aloe into his skin, to take the sting away…
“Grandma?”
“I think Don must have been about thirteen as well! He was there too, of course.”
Two children ran into the dining room and crawled underneath the table. “Shhhh,” they told Dolores and Samantha from behind the curtain of the tablecloth, and the women nodded solemnly in response, though the children couldn’t see them do it.
“Well, you know how your father liked to swim,” Dolores continued. “And he was such a strong swimmer. We never could figure out who he go that bit from.
“So we were down the shore, all of us, and one morning, Harry went for a swim. It was a gorgeous morning, I remember I’d looked out the window when I’d gotten up for a glass of water. It had rained in the night so the air was fresh, and the little shore animals had just begun scuttling, but the seabirds hadn’t caught on yet. Not a squeak or squawk out of any of ‘em.”
Samantha, in her mind’s eye, saw a lightly lapping pastel sea, a bright pale sky that hadn’t decided what shade of blue of it was going to be yet, and a hermit crab or two on the beach, scuttling, as Dolores had said. Soft yellow sand that looked white in the early light. A lone umbrella, striped and beachy, stuck lopsidedly in the sand, with her father’s flip-flops abandoned underneath. She could smell the salty sea air, feel the salty sea breeze stirring the downy golden hair on her shoulders. All she could taste was the bitter Pinot Grigio, which Dolores had let her sip.
“He’d told Don; Don was the only one up when he left. He’d said to him, ‘I’m going for a swim, Don.’ That’s all he said. Don couldn’t remember what time that had been. All he knew was that it was early.”
Samantha, in her mind’s eye, saw her Uncle Don, thirteen years old, kicking a soccer ball in the scruffy yard of the rental house. She heard the thwack of his bare foot against the—
“Have you seen them?” a flushed child rushed into the dining room and inquired in a loud and breathless voice.
“Seen who?” Samantha asked. She felt a small hand squeeze her around the ankle.
“Jessie! And Marissa!”
“Who’re those goons? I’ve never heard such ridiculous names in my life!” At this, Samantha felt someone sharply pinch her calf, and she sent a soft kick in the direction of the suspected culprit.
“You’re no help at all!” said the bossy child, and she huffed away.
Samantha went back to imagining the thwack of the soccer ball against her Uncle Don’s thirteen-year-old foot, and Dolores went on.
“God knows your Grandpa and I were still sleeping soundly. Anyway, Harry went out for a swim, and no one knew except for Don, and soon everyone woke up and started putzing around, and it was a little while before anyone realized that Harry wasn’t there. You know your father—he mostly kept to himself, especially around Ronnie.
“I think it was Ronnie, actually, who realized Harry wasn’t there. I just remember him stomping up the stairs and barging into our room, saying, ‘Harry told Don he was going swimming but Don thinks it must have been two hours ago and we can’t see him anywhere.’
“It was eleven o’clock then. The sun was already beginning to burn the sand—it was the middle of summer. The dead of summer. I remember because I’d grabbed the binoculars and run out of the house in my bed clothes, without bothering to put on shoes, to try to see Harry in the waves.”
Now Samantha saw her grandmother, attired in her elegant pajamas—she imagined a silk paisley sleeveless top and matching silk shorts—rushing through the scruffy yard and over the path on the dune that led to the beach and the sea. She saw the lifeless, empty sea beyond, the calm waves of early morning now frothing under the nearly-midday sun. The sky had decided on a deep, shiny blue without clouds, and the sun was beaming down on everything and making it all too bright, too hot. The scene was muted—the sea’s frothing was a whisper, and no one else was saying anything. That great big sea, whispering its secrets. Had it swallowed Harry? Dead before the sun reached its zenith?
She saw her grandmother wading into the water, waves crashing against her legs and soaking her paisley silk pajamas, cramming the binoculars to her face. She saw there was no wind, and that her grandmother’s naturally dark hair (she would have been in her mid-thirties at this point) hung still and lank against her neck. The soft sea breeze had burned off with the nearly noon sun.
Samantha saw, through the lenses of the binoculars (so it was blurry around the edges and rimmed in black darkness), the seething, empty sea and she didn’t see anything resembling Harry’s bobbing head or his strong, swimming limbs.
“Then Jimmy, that is, your grandfather, went barreling past me on the hot sand, stumbled through the surf, and dove. I watched him through the binoculars, all his inelegant splashing, until someone grabbed my arm and pulled me away. I only realized later it was Mrs. Benjamin. My sister and Nathan had still been in bed, they had no clue what was going on, no one had woken them up and they’d slept through the commotion.
“Mrs. Benjamin took me into the house and closed all the blinds. She made me a cup of tea that I didn’t touch. They all thought someone had died. They thought someone was going to die. Harry, or Jimmy, or Mr. Benjamin, when he went in to save Jimmy when Jimmy was flailing and gasping for breath thirty feet from the shore (it was a cramp, he told me later, trying to be heroic).
“Mr. Benjamin dragged Jimmy onto the beach and no one noticed when Harry came back. He just walked right out of the water, like a phantom, like some creature of the sea. Jimmy was the first one to see him, and he thought he really had drowned, and then he thought Harry was a ghost.”
Samantha saw her fifteen-year-old father, gangly and awkward like the boys in her class, rising from the sea. She saw it from the perspective her grandfather must have had at the time—lying down on the beach with everyone crowding around him, blinking sand and salt and sun out of his eyes and coughing up the sea. And there was this black, glistening shadow, and the shadow stood over her, blocking out the sun…
“Harry was fine. Not a scratch on him. He even thought he might have seen a sea turtle. He said he was sorry; he’d swum very far without looking back, and when he had finally looked back, he couldn’t see the shore in any direction. So he turned right around and hoped he was going in the right direction. That had spooked him a little bit. When he’d caught sight of land, he’d relaxed and slowed down. Taken his time, he said. He promised he’d never do it again, but then he went and moved across the country!” Dolores clenched her fists in mock anger.
Samantha laughed at this.
They sat quietly together at the large wooden dining table, in the large wooden dining room, listening to the clanging of dishes and the running faucet in the kitchen. Dolores had finished her wine at some point during the story. Samantha was glad. She didn’t like the taste but always felt compelled to accept whenever Dolores offered a sip.
Dolores liked Samantha because Samantha, unlike the other children, didn’t feel the need to fill every waking moment with chatter. The truth is, though, Samantha thought she should probably say something to fill the silence; she just couldn’t figure out what.
“You know, Samantha, I have a theory,” Dolores was the one to break the silence. She had both her hands wrapped around her wineglass, and her head was tilted down so she looked at Samantha from under her finely-tweezed eyebrows. It was a knowing look.
“My theory, is that every person has this one summer. This one, incredible summer, during which all of their dreams come true, and they have no worries, none at all, and they’re surrounded by their favorite people, and the future looks bright and full of promise. And they spend the rest of their lives trying to replicate that summer, trying to live up to it. That golden summer. Their golden summer. Do you think that’s true, Samantha?”
“I dunno, Grandma. Maybe.”
Samantha bent to look under the table. The children, Jessie and Marissa, were fast asleep on the hardwood floor, curled around each other.
“Of course you don’t. You haven’t been on this earth nearly long enough to understand what I’m saying. But what I’m asking you, is, do you think you’ve had your golden summer yet?
Samantha thought back to last summer, the summer after her freshman year of high school. She certainly hoped never to recreate that summer.
“No, I don’t think so,” Samantha said.
“No, I suppose you wouldn’t have.”
When Samantha didn’t ask, Dolores explained, “Mine was when I was twenty-one, just after I married your grandfather.”
Now Dolores saw herself as she had been fifty-five years ago. Bronzed, perched on the precipice of her newly married life. Jimmy was there too, also bronzed, somewhere in the background. There was a swimming pool. She stood tall on the diving board with her arms out, face towards the sun, eyes closed, wearing a content, close-lipped smile.
“What happened that summer?” asked Samantha.
“Oh, nothing much,” Dolores said, and she pursed her lips.
A Tale Of Time and Space Compression
Anjali Mehta
The cold wind bit into my lungs as I pushed harder and went faster. My feet pounded across the pavement as beads of sweat rolled down my forehead.
Upon reaching a dead end, I decided to run back. It was only 3:36 p.m. yet a cloudy darkness had settled across the sky. I was at a stoplight holding onto a frosty metal pole. I had arrived at the intersection of Division, Catherine and Chatham Square. In front of me I saw a maroon board and in large white letters, it said “貢茶 Gong Cha.”
Tears and sweat dripped down my face. People rushed past me to cross the street but I stood in shock. There was a five-story brown brick building with a rusty maroon fire escape. On the street level, there were several stores with bright yellow boards and in the mix of navy blue Chinese characters I had forgotten, there were two which stood out, 貢茶.
The warm aroma of oolong and tapioca flooded my nose as I walked in through the sliding glass doors and into the small and cramped tea shop. There were two brown tables with matching chairs. An old Chinese lady sat in the corner while a couple sat on the other table. He had his arm around her but she was too busy drinking her bubble tea. The decaying cream walls were covered in brown and white posters with facts and information like how many Gong Chas there were in the world. It still listed Singapore as one of the locations. There were maybe 4 or 5 employees who stood behind the black countertop at the front of the store. They wore red aprons and looked at my tear-soaked face in a sympathetic yet slightly confused way.
As I watched the familiar fortune cat wave its arm up and down, I was transported to the Gong Cha 9521 miles, 3 oceans, 4 continents and a 21-hour plane ride away. I was back in the basement level of Great World City, my neighborhood mall. Opposite a sushi restaurant, Ichiban Boshi, and a Nike store, there was a maroon board and in large white letters it said, “貢茶 Gong Cha.” There were no seats or even walls, it was an open cafe with nothing but a dark brown counter. Brown and white posters lined the front of the counter displaying facts about Gong Cha and the various locations it was in. I guess I never noticed that New York City was one of those locations. There were only 2 employees and it always had a long line unlike the Indonesian confectionary store beside it.
I closed my eyes and inhaled that perfect blend of oolong milk tea and delicious black tapioca pearls. I was back home. The grey concrete floor underneath me turned into the yellow marble floor in Singapore. The walls, couple and elderly lady vanished. The black counter turned into a higher and more dark brown counter.
When I used to live in Singapore, my brother and I used to spend our Sunday afternoons walking to Gong Cha and updating each other on high school stress. One day, we were disheartened to see the simple white letters of Gong Cha replaced with the big, bold, bulky bright red letters of diarrhea-inducing Li Ho. To then see this Gong Cha, in another continent so far away, my mind was racing with emotion.
Time-space compression is a concept Doreen Massey maintains in her discussion of globalization and its effect on our society in her essay A Global Sense Of Place. She states that because our world is “speeding up” and “spreading out,” time-space compression is more prevalent than ever as internationalization takes place. People are able to connect with those across the world as easily as they are able to connect to those across town. We can experience different cultures without ever leaving our country. You can experience authentic Taiwanese bubble tea without ever having to go to Taiwan. Time and space have been erased.
I slowly walked up to the counter and in a shaky voice, I echoed the same words I did with my brother “may I please get a medium milk tea with pearls 50% sugar, less ice.”
I was transported to a time before Li Ho and a time in Singapore with my brother and feeling of longing crawled over me. My mind raced with thoughts and emotions filled my headspace as my excited taste buds danced with each flavor of sugar, Oolong, and tapioca.
Seeing that Gong Cha reminded of what I left behind. It reminded me of where I wasn’t and the people I wasn’t with. I couldn’t help but be reminded of my previous life. I remembered my friend telling me about how nervous he was to serve in the mandatory Singaporean military, I remembered when my friend came out as bisexual, I remembered stress-drinking bubble tea while studying for my AP Biology mock, my father’s first time trying bubble tea, my brother telling me about a nasty rumor, the day my best friend moved back to Houston, getting lost whilst on a treasure hunt with my oldest friend, being sad after a terrible after prom. It was a stinging reminder of the time before Li Ho and the time before I moved here, the time before I was alone.
Walking into Gong Cha was not unlike me walking into a spice store at the beginning of the year. Inspired by Frank O’Hara, we were assigned to write a ‘walking around’ poem. A new friend, Alice, and I caught the L to Alphabet City. After updating our Instagram and Snapchat stories we arrived at E 6 st and Ave B when a pungent smell caught our attention. It almost smelt like my mom’s kitchen. Curiously we followed the scent and found ourselves in front of a quaint spice store. I wrote the following in my poem.
Then I walked into a small spice store
The familiar smell of cinnamon, nutmeg, mustard
The store was called SOS Chefs of New York. It was a very dimly lit narrow store. Mediterranean lamps and bottles of spices lined the walls. In fact, there were so many spices, there was hardly any wall. I closed my eyes and tried to decipher the smell. There was ginger and turmeric, which mixed together is my mother’s remedy for everything from a stuffy nose to a broken heart. There was cumin and crushed coriander, the essence of Khichdi, the most comfortable comfort food. Ajwain and tamarind which create a brilliant flavor in pickles and rice. Clove and neem, which are the heart of Ayurveda and a staple in every Indian household. There was also Egyptian spices and Moroccan spices. Spices from every corner of the world. Everything you ever needed all in one little spice store on 1st Avenue.
In that store, like Gong Cha, home had come to me.
In her essay, Massey discusses how local streets are now lined with global foods such as pizzerias and Kebabs. Our very own University Place has everything from Vapiano’s famous aglio-olio to Anita Dongre’s designer saris, to Ramen Takumi’s authentic sushi. Time-space compression, she says, is the “geographical stretching of our social relations.” You can go abroad and find the same shops, the same music, eat the same food as you did back home – and all of it is just “down the road.”
You no longer need to travel for days and nights along extensive trade routes such as the Silk Road or go to quaint spice markets in Marrakesh or herbal shops in Goa, you can just take a short subway ride to alphabet city.
As is with most Indian women when they get married off, their mothers will part them with a spice box. My mother’s is 4 generations old. Like the SOS Chefs, my mom’s box boasts spices from all over the world. Spicy chili powder from Everest, aromatic saffron from valleys in Kashmir, Harissa from the Mediterranean coast. These are used in everything from dal to shaak.
Massey’s claim about things speeding up and spreading out is not wrong, however, no matter how advanced globalization gets, nothing ever matches up to mom’s cooking.
In fact, even the most authentic south Indian food on Lexington avenue’s ‘Curry Hill’ can ever be as good as mom’s food. On the corner of 26th Street and Lexington Avenue, you’ll see Saravana Bhavan. It’s a brownish-red 3-story building. On the street level, there is a white store and in big red letters, it says “SARAVANA BHAVAN. INDIAN VEGETARIAN RESTAURANT.” It looks exactly like the one in Singapore, with the same strange green logo. As soon as you enter through the glass doors, fermented idli, hot ghee, and spicy sambar fills the air. The inside is completely white unlike the lime green interior in Singapore. The tables and chairs look elegant on the white marble floor. The one in Singapore is much smaller and in a 2-story Singaporean heritage shophouse. It is noisy and mostly filled with workers from Bangladesh. The one on Lexington has soft music and is filled with white-collar workers. .
This is yet another example of Massey’s time-space compression. In the last part of the essay, Massey discusses the introverted and extroverted sense of place. The introverted sense of place is one that provides stability and rootedness in the midst of change. We seek refuge in our sense of locality.
In Singapore, my family made it a point to go out for dinner or lunch at least once a week. More often than not, we would ditch the fancy restaurant and end up in little India at Saravana Bhavan. I was looking for that stability and just as Massey said, I found refuge in that Saravana Bhavan, in the same way, I did at the Spice Store and Gong Cha. In the midst of this change and madness, I found rootedness here. So many miles away, I was back in Singapore and forgot about NYC. For one quick second, I forgot how alone I was. I still pictured my family outside my bedroom door instead of a lonely Goddard hallway.
Earlier this year, we visited the Modern Museum of Modern Art and observed the aptly named City Dreams exhibit by Isek Bodys Kingelez. We saw stunning and intricate sculptures made largely of paper, paint, and glue. In the mix of the fantastical and utopian “maquettes,” “Ville de Sète 3009,” caught my attention. It is a city surrounded by water with towering buildings and futuristic structures. Electric lights glimmer by the orderly gardens and towering buildings, all constructed in buoyant colors and shapes.
The structures that composed of “Ville de Sète 3009,” are not unlike the structures which make up Singapore. One of the lesser known tourist destinations in Singapore, the Urban Redevelopment Authority’s City Gallery is a museum with 3 miniature “maquettes” of Singapore carved out of wood. It displayed everything from the large circular swiss hotel building to the concrete Central Business District, the 5 buildings of Suntec City, Park Royal’s vertical gardens to Hort Park.
In “Ville de Sète 3009,” Kingelez references Postmodernism with Japanese pagodas, Art Deco, Dutch gables, similar to the model of Singapore which has Japanese gardens, British architecture, and French rooftop bars.
This idea is echoed in Massey’s extroverted sense of place which discusses “place” and it’s links with the wider world which integrates the global and the local. She defines “place” as a unique point of social intersections and understandings. This is exactly reflected in the Kingelez exhibition. “Place” doesn’t need to have a fixed identity and definition, it can be progressive and changing. Massey claims that cultures and communities are merged during time-space compression because of rapid growth and change, as “layers upon layers” of histories fuse together to shift our ideas of what the identity of a “place” should be. This is reflected in Kingelez’s artwork and in Singapore.
“Home” and “place” are progressive words with progressive definitions. In this postmodern society and globalized world, everything is forever changing and in constant flux. Though Gong Cha and that Spice Store and Saravana Bhavan remind me of home, it is important to maintain an extroverted sense of place and recognise Massey’s understanding of place as immersed in global networks/processes, a product of interrelations and continuously changing. I may not like change, but I have to accept it.
When the changing gets too much, though, don’t worry, there’s always a Gong Cha right around the corner.
Bibliography
Calvino, Italo. Invisible Cities. Harcourt Books, 1974
Fusselman, Amy. “How To Make Rape Lemonade.” 12 April 2018. McSweeney’s Internet
Tendency, https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/how-to-make-rape-lemonade
Kincaid, Jamaica. A Small Place. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York, 1988.
Kingelez, Bodys Isek. City Dreams. 26 May 2018-1 Jan. 2019. Museum of Modern Art, New
York.
Massey, Doreen. “A Global Sense of Place.” Space, Place, and Gender. University of
Minnesota Press, 1994.
Mehta, Anjali. “Alphabet City Walking Around Poem ” 2018.
Singapore City Exhibition. 12 Mar.–4 Dec. 2016, Urban Redevelopment
Remembering That Overcast Afternoon
Isabella LoRusso
My dad was sunshine. He looked like Danny Zucko from Grease even though he was 49 and never made it to his senior year of high school. Passion burst out of him in invisible rays, piercing the air endlessly, and stopping only when they landed on something. Dad named his restaurant Isabella’s, meaning there was a big sign on the front of the building with my name on it. Dad was the most talented man I knew—I ate five-star dinners every night. All of our pride was in one another.
When I was ten I remembered an overcast afternoon from that year. I’m sitting on the edge of the rickety grey futon in our one bedroom apartment. Dad is standing in front of me in his white t-shirt and jeans—he’s one leather jacket away from singing “Grease Lightning.” At this point I’m in the four foot range, my hair still blonde, skin marshmallow soft, and I don’t need glasses. Good thing, because now I’m crying.
With tiny soft thumbs I wipe my eyes, mewling, “I feel sad.” Dad gently pulls me into a hug; my arms are caught bent against my chest as he presses me closer. But I don’t need them anymore to wipe away my tears. His sunshine keeps me warm and dries them all up.
Antonio, on the other hand, looked less like Danny Zucko and more like My Cousin Vinny. Antonio built a cheese factory in his 24-square-foot kitchen. Antonio once tried to use Elmer’s School Glue to hang a fifteen pound whiteboard. Antonio had a few screws loose.
When I was fourteen I remembered that overcast afternoon again; I’m sitting on the edge of the rickety grey futon in our one bedroom apartment. My eyes are dry when I mutter, “I want to die.”
Without moving forward or backward, Antonio just kind of stands there with his arms hanging.
After a while a soft gust of voice blows my way: “I had a friend once who wanted to die.” I am crawling my way out of a broiling desert, aching for another breeze of his voice to cool me down. But the air is stagnant.
I’m not used to the sting of disappointment yet. Immunity takes a long time to build up. Personally, it took four years for my sunshine to become my toddler-on-a-leash, my patient, my sign-language-speaking gorilla. Four years of, “You can’t go into the restricted section, Antonio,” and, “I’m not pretending to be eight for a discount, Antonio, it’s Golden Corral,” and, “Antonio, stop taking pictures of random kindergarteners, you pedophile.”
Maybe if I cry he will hug me, I think. And his sunshine will keep me warm, and dry up all my tears.
In hindsight, I shouldn’t have expected a toddler or a patient or a gorilla to start parenting or healing or speaking to me.
He waddles back into the kitchen. My eyes are no longer dry.
III. For the Last Time, When he is Anthony and I am Eighteen
Everyone calls him Antonio, but his real name is Anthony.
I don’t know anything about Anthony.
When I was eighteen I remembered that overcast afternoon; I’m sitting on the edge of the rickety grey futon in our one bedroom apartment. Anthony is so old now. His skin hangs in bags under his chin and eyes and cheeks. He doesn’t look like anyone. Too shabby to be Vito Corleone, too hollow to be Geppetto. This is the clearest this memory has ever been, yet I know that shouldn’t be possible.
My back is haunched—I’m trying to hold back the floodgates in my eyes with my palms. Until a sentence my lips were virgin to slops its way out of my mouth: “I want to kill myself.”
If there is someone clawing at the other side of Anthony’s stonewalled face, I can’t tell. He marches around the corner to the closet—the only corner of the apartment I can’t see from the edge of the futon.
When he comes back, his right hand is clenching a silver and black handgun and his left palm is sliding the clip into it until it clicks.
By the time he stops in front of me, Anthony is holding the gun in one clutch from the barrel, presenting the handle toward me.
The weight of that gun is exactly the same as one jug of chocolate milk or half a watermelon. That’s what I calculated ten months before this overcast afternoon, after the first five or six times he wrenched my tiny fists open to wrap my fingers around it.
For the first time voluntarily, I take the gun.
No, no. He misunderstood. I howl again, but louder, “I want to kill myself.”
When he finally speaks, he says every word the way he spits on the sidewalk, “Huh- I had a friend who wanted to kill himself…he wanted to kill himself- wanted to shoot his brains out! But you’ve got nothing to be crying about- You’re spoiled!…
So here—take it—blow your brains out! Do it…You wanna do it?- Do it.”
The best grip my tender fingers can make is shaky and awkward; keeping my finger on the trigger is hard to do without squeezing it; I try to keep it a quarter inch away from my skin, but every time I cry it bumps into my skull. It is ice cold and getting tangled in my thin, blonde hair. “I’m gonna do it!…I’m gonna do it! I’m gonna kill myself!”
The cancerous feeling, the reason I’m saying these things, is rooting deeper into my stomach. It scares me to not know what it is. I wanted to ask him. I wanted to stop crying. I wanted him to be sunshine. Unfortunately, there’s a hereditary element to depression.
Anthony strolls back to the kitchen where I can still see a sliver of him in the dark behind hanging pots and pans. My arm is aching from the weight of the gun—the cycle of rapid debate on whether or not I should do it is ricocheting off the inside of my skull; it’s a tornado in a hamster wheel of incoherent thought; in my mind I pull the trigger: my brains are shot out my left ear, across the futon, across the dark hardwood floors, across the brown comforter on the bed, and then. I feel too nauseated from the spinning to kill myself. And lower the gun.
After finishing his last batch of cheese Anthony makes his way back to snatch the gun from me. Soggy drips from my nose and drool in my mouth are all that’s left of my sobbing. I inform him, almost asking, “You gave me a loaded gun.”
Anthony’s face curls up like he bit into a lemon before he uses his are-you-stupid voice on me. “Ta! Nooo. Are you kidding me? I would never give you a loaded gun.” He shakes his head, disappointed that I assumed he would be that crazy. He tells me he took out the bullets when I wasn’t looking.
I’ve stopped crying. The gun is back on the easy-to-reach shelf in the unlocked closet. Anthony walks back into the kitchen to cook us a five-star dinner.
“Curiouser and Curiouser”
The “Wonderland” of Dreams in the Context of Carl Jung
Diya Radhakrishna
Where would one meet a grinning cat, a despotic playing-card and a caterpillar smoking a hookah, except in the world of dreams? I’ve always thought that Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland shows nothing but the extent to which dreams can be removed from reality. Carl Jung’s theories caused a shift in my perspective – I began to notice how dreams may in fact reveal hidden truths of real life. Alice’s “Wonderland” may be what Jung refers to as a Big Dream, dreams that are “absolutely foreign to one’s experience of conscious, normal reality in wakeful life” (Collier). This is a dream that is usually memorable (Collier), and it is also referred to as an “archetypal dream” (Hurd).
The concept of the archetype is central to the Jungian idea of Big Dreams. Defining them as “psychic innate dispositions to experience that represent basic human behavior and situations” (“Collective Unconscious”), Jung says of archetypes, “We often meet these themes in the fantasies, dreams, delirious ideas and illusions of persons living nowadays” He notes that they are seen, repeatedly, in popular literature, mythology and art (“Archetypes”). I understand archetypes to be themes and ideas that seem universal to the human experience, represented in the individual context. It is interesting that this concept, when applied to Alice’s “Wonderland”, could create a meaningful and memorable Big Dream.
The first archetype I noticed in Wonderland was the Jungian “Persona” of Alice herself, as she appears in her dream. The archetype of Persona is defined as “our conscious presentation of the self” (Adams and Nelson, “Jungian Dream Interpretation”), referring to the social role we believe we are supposed to play. Alice’s social role is, in her young life, defined by her education, the knowledge she has acquired in school, the logic and the social and natural rules and hierarchies she has been taught about. The more I observed Alice’s behavior through the book, the more I could see evidence of her Persona in Wonderland –she tries to project a social image of being knowledgeable and wise, despite often having a limited understanding of many concepts both in the real world, and in Wonderland itself: down the rabbit hole, she speaks of geography with a sense of self-importance, but the reality of her knowledge is that, “Alice had no idea what Latitude was, or Longitude either, but thought they were nice grand words to say.” (Carroll 6) In her need to appear well-informed and erudite, she is hesitant in acquiring true knowledge when she has the chance. This may be seen in her encounter with the Duchess, when she says to herself: “And what an ignorant little girl she’ll think me for asking! No, it’ll never do to ask: perhaps I shall see it written up somewhere.” (Carroll 6) She is constantly applying the social institutions of her own world to Wonderland, eager to identify different members of a court of law, to talk about her school, home and even her cat Dinah.
Wonderland itself is not conducive to the development of Alice’s Persona – where she tries to apply logic, none exists; the limited knowledge she has is inapplicable; the social institutions she understands are proven useless and turned upside down. According to Jungian dream theory, the reason why Wonderland is so bizarre could be because the place itself is Alice’s “Shadow” – the antithesis of her Persona.
The Shadow archetype “refers to that part of the unconscious psyche that is nearest to consciousness, even though it is not completely accepted by it.” (Zweig and Abrams I:4) It could thus refer to one’s hidden fears and desires – something that is, in part, informed by the social context of one’s life. In the introduction to Meeting the Shadow, Zweig and Abrams say that “Many forces play a role in forming our shadow selves, ultimately determining what is permitted expression and what is not. Parents, siblings, teachers, clergy and friends create a complex environment in which we learn what is kind, proper, moral behavior and what is mean-spirited, shameful and sinful.” (Zweig and Abrams Introduction XVII) As the Shadow, this place of Alice’s dreams shows us everything considered unacceptable in the normal world: a woman treating her baby the way the Duchess does, the idea of schooling turned upside down by the Mock Turtle, a court of law as a place of chaos and disarray. Wonderland is the exact opposite of Victorian England, where Alice grows up, in how it is completely chaotic, devoid of the social conventions and rules that must permeate through every aspect of her waking life. She is annoyed when the Duchess declares, “Everything’s got a moral, if only you can find it.” (Carroll 53) – a statement that seems to satirically suggest the social attitude of Alice’s time. Perhaps Alice’s experience of Wonderland shows the yearnings of a young girl caged by the strict social order and moral conventions of Victorian England exploring a secret desire for freedom from these things.
Events in Wonderland mirror those Alice would experience in real-life, and her reaction to them shows fears and thoughts she may not acknowledge when she is awake. An example of this is in how the Duchess tells her, “You don’t know much…and that’s a fact.” (Carroll 49) – words that reflect her own fear of appearing ignorant, that her “knowledgeable” Persona is a farce.
Many children are overwhelmed by how quickly they are changing during adolescence. In Wonderland, Alice finds herself constantly shrinking and growing when she falls down the rabbit hole. When the caterpillar asks her, “What size do you want to be?”, she replies, “Oh, I’m not particular as to size,” going on to state, “only one doesn’t like changing so often, you know.” (Carroll 40-41) This experience and talk with a caterpillar, completely fantastical on a literal level, could reflect, in real life, the pains and fears related to the physical changes of puberty that a girl of Alice’s age would encounter. Adolescence also brings forth questions on life choices. Alice’s talk with the mysterious Cheshire Cat reflects an uncertainty about her purpose and direction – literally, as she asks him, ‘Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?’ (Carroll 53). Adolescent questions of identity that Alice might have when she is awake are also a part of the Shadow that is Wonderland, seen in her talk with the caterpillar and one of the most famous lines from the book: “Who in the world am I? Ah, that’s the great puzzle!” (Carroll 14) Thus, Alice’s many experiences in Wonderland can be seen through the Jungian lens of the Shadow archetype; they reflect the unacknowledged fears of a young girl changing physically, emotionally and intellectually as she grows up in the rigid social order of Victorian England.
Alice’s Wonderland also seems to depict other archetypes. The archetype of Anima in males and Animus in females shows “the internalized ideal images of the opposite sex” (Zweig and Abrams I:5) The Animus archetype, in females, is meant to depict the masculine aspects of one’s character and the way this part of us affects the way we live (“Animus”). Alice’s Animus might be represented by the character of the Duchess, who in many ways does not show behavior that is stereotypically feminine in nature. In a society with stringent gender roles, the somewhat violent, aggressive and volatile Duchess could be showing a side of Alice that wants to break free of the norms imposed on her as a girl and act in a primarily “male” way.
The Divine Child archetype is something that “not only symbolizes your innocence, your sense of vulnerability, and your helplessness, but it represents your aspirations and full potential.” (dreammoods.com) This could be the baby that the Duchess abandons – a baby that “would have made a dreadfully ugly child”, but could become, according to Alice, “rather a handsome pig” (Carroll 52). This pig-child could symbolize Alice’s innocence and imagination, something that is potent and powerful but does not fit into the real world that she’s growing up in. Thus Wonderland, a dream that at first glance has nothing to do with reality, may in fact provide insight into Alice’s subconscious conflicts in the context of the era in which Carroll’s book is set.
In interpreting Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Jungian psychology seemed to make sense of the fantastical. Encouraged by this, I decided to test Jung’s theories on my own dreams. I realized that like Alice, I have experienced “encounters with mythological creatures and strange, intelligent animals” – one of the indicators of a Big Dream (Hurd). Many of my dreams have left a profound impact on me that has made them markedly memorable, as a Big Dream should be. Graham Collier, in his article, “Dreams – Big and Little”, says:
“Jung regarded the Big Dream as a kind of ‘wakeup call’: as a means of alerting one to psychological imbalances in character development that are working against one’s wellbeing, and are therefore injurious to one’s positive and meaningful psychological growth. He also pointed out that such important dreams were not to be taken literally; could only be understood if ‘read’ symbolically.”
When I “read” Alice’s bizarre Wonderland using Jungian archetypes, it gave me insight into her fears and worries, her personality, in the context of her life. When I did this with my own Big Dreams, many elements of my dreams acted as archetypes and pointed to personal conflicts and weaknesses prevalent in specific situations in my life. For example, just recently I dreamt that I was back in the auditorium of my old high school in Bangalore, India, at an event called SING! – something that happens in my roommates’ school in Queens, New York. As I watched performances by a bizarre mix of Indians and Americans known to me, I was acutely aware that it would soon be my turn to perform. Suddenly, I was stumbling onto the platform with no idea of what the role required of me. I stood there confused and embarrassed as the spotlight shone on me and the audience simply watched from the shadows – the next thing I knew, I was waking up.
This dream occurred when I was staying with family friends in New Jersey over Thanksgiving Break. They were a conservative South Indian family, and I felt pressurized to play the role of the docile, conforming Indian girl around them. Although I enjoyed spending time with them, I felt as though I had to pretend to be someone I’m not. My failure to “perform” in the dream perhaps, using Jungian archetypes, showed my struggle to execute this uncomfortable social role in real life. The Persona here is the character I am in my dream-play, and like in real life, I am unable to keep up the act. Thus, using Jung’s archetypes helped me make sense not only of a rather strange dream, but also of my own struggles and feelings with respect to the social context I was in.
Another dream that clued me in on a social and emotional aspect of my life was one that recurred every night last summer. I dreamt I was desperately trying to evade a half-seen, silhouetted male figure who wanted to confront and capture me. This threatening man was often armed, faceless and nameless; even when I couldn’t see him, I was aware of his presence. Every dream was set in the stairwell of my apartment building – while I ran up and down, he was constantly one step ahead of me. I usually woke up panting and sweating, just before I was caught. This mysterious, frightening dream made no sense to me until I read about the Jungian Shadow archetype. According to Jung, the Shadow “represents everything that a subject refuses to acknowledge about himself” (Jung 284). This corresponds with my greatest fear, one that I have only recently come to terms with – the fear of making decisions.
I’m afraid of committing to one thing and closing out my options. This dream occurred to me when I had to make the biggest decision of my life: where to go to college. The figure in my dream was a literal, as well as an archetypal, Shadow. It symbolized a choice I was struggling to make: the choice between staying in India for college or coming to New York. I felt threatened by this decision, daunted by its immense consequences, but it was a situation I could not evade – just like the threatening men in my dreams. John A Sanford, in his interview with Patrick Miller, says of one’s reaction to the Shadow in dreams, “You may remember running very fast during the dream… and not remember why. But in the dream, you know.” (Miller). This relates very strongly to my own dream where I ran from this strange figure with a very particular reason in mind in the dreamscape, but with no idea of why I had done so, when I woke up. Jung says about confronting the Shadow, “To become conscious of it involves recognizing the dark aspects of the personality as present and real. This act is the essential condition for any kind of self-knowledge, and it therefore, as a rule, meets with considerable resistance.” (Campbell 145) In real life, I refused to acknowledge that I was struggling with my indecision, and this is seen in how I was constantly running away from my archetypal Shadow in my dream. Facing my fear gave me immense self-confidence; interestingly, after I made the decision to come to New York for university, I have never had this dream again.
I also found it significant that the person I was afraid of in my dream is male. The more I thought about it, the more it made sense that the male figure I was running from but could not escape may have also represented the Animus, the masculine part of my otherwise feminine self-identity. The man in the dream was always overtly aggressive and armed, and even though I often could not see his face, I associated with him a strong image of masculinity. The one time I identified the figure, it was a fictional character – Harvey Specter from the television show Suits – someone whom I have always considered to be a stereotypical example of male egotism, emotional repression and anger. Perhaps confronting my Animus shows a recognition of the fact that I have been repressing a side of me that is aggressive, that is angry and proud. In real life, I have always been afraid to express emotions of anger – both because I like to think of myself as a calm, composed person, and because it was often reinforced, socially, that aggression or pride are not characteristics that a girl should show.
In Meeting the Shadow, Zweig and Abrams say, “For different people, in different families and cultures, what falls into ego and what falls into shadow can vary. For instance, some permit anger or aggression to be expressed; most do not.” (Zweig and Abrams XVII) In my case, the characteristics that fell into Shadow perhaps also fell into the Animus archetype, for I could not, in real life, bring myself to express the “masculine” emotions that I felt, and this fear of showing such a side of myself manifested in my dream.
I realize now that my archetypes speak of my own fears and decisions as I emerge into adulthood in the twenty-first century, just like how archetypes in Alice’s dream speak of gender and identity in the context of an eleven-year-old girl in Victorian England. However, there is one archetype that has featured in a Big Dream of mine, but that I could not identify in Alice’s: that of the Self. When I was taking my final high school exams, I was under great pressure, from myself and society, to perform to my full potential. At this time, I would often dream of myself walking alongside a lioness. I was very aware during these encounters that I was in the presence of a dangerous beast, but I was not afraid of the animal – in fact, I felt quite at peace by her side. There was a strange sense of unity and calm in this dream that occurred at a time when reality was full of with anxiety and stress. After I read about the presence of the “Self” in dreams, a Jungian concept, the dream made more sense to me. Jung compares the experience of the Self to the “unified duality” (“Self”), like the Taoist symbol of Yin and Yang. It shows two separate parts of one’s identity coming together and has been likened to a half-man half-animal situation (“Self”). Jung says that “The Self appears in dreams, myths and fairy tales as a “superior personality””. I believe that in my strange dream, out of place with reality, I saw my Self symbolized by the image of my human figure walking alongside the lioness with a pervading feeling of peace, both of us aware of, but not threatened by, the other. In Vedic dream interpretation the lioness usually symbolizes strength, power and grace (dreamsnest.com)– all aspects of my personality that I was desperately trying to reach. In how this lioness was beside me, it seemed as though my subconscious mind was showing me a unified picture of the different parts of my personality that I needed in real life. It is also interesting that “According to Jung, the experience of the Self on the empiric plane is similar to a religious revelation” (“Self”): my dream was set multiple times in a Hindu temple.
In both the case of Alice in Wonderland and that of my own dreams, the dream itself seemed removed from reality. Yet, it was pertinent to the experience of reality because it revealed hidden truths about its subjects, Alice and me. I believe that Jung was right to talk about such dreams as “Big Dreams” for they are indeed pervasive, impactful forces. Different elements of the dream world, such as the archetypes of the Persona, Shadow and Animus, seem to form a looking glass that mirrors reality. I believe this goes to show that dreams, if interpreted with care and context, can provide access to meaningful insight into one’s personality; this would be a powerful tool to carry along on a journey of self-discovery. Opening the door to my dream world with a Jungian key has made me, as Alice would say, “Curiouser and curiouser!”
Works Cited
dreamstudies.org/2008/11/14/big-dreams-archetypal-visions/.
I wanted to be a white girl
from pre-school to sixth-grade
from classroom to playground
in Rolla, Missouri
where the white girls
sat taller, swung higher,
their skin smooth, bright,
clean.
I wanted the long blonde braids
that dripped down backs
like honey.
I wanted the soft cream skin
that wrapped around bones
without shame.
I wanted to be a white girl
like the ones I knew,
who went to Sunday services,
danced at the same studios,
ate at the same barbeques,
whose mothers ran school fundraisers
whose fathers went fishing on long weekends.
I wanted to be a white girl
but could never look like one.
The bleaching, prodding, plucking
did not make the hair on my face blend
like peach fuzz
into my cheeks.
The locker-room lotion, serum, sunscreen
did not make my brown legs shine
like ivory ribbons in the sun.
I wanted to be a white girl
but my mom had visa interviews
missed fundraisers,
and my dad watched cricket
having no patience for fishing.
We went to prayer on Friday,
not Sunday.
I wanted to be a white girl
because I believed white
was the only kind of girl to be.
I hated the valley of my body,
became used to hiding
its river of colored tenderness
until I took the train here and
it all spilled out of me,
as slow and sweet as melting toffee.
Now I live in the deepness of my skin
smooth, bright, clean,
and my dark glows
like the city streets after warm rain.