Category: Reflections

Fage or the Highway

We sit by the window, eating Chobani with rigid, robust, black C-store spoons. “Did you know Chobani was actually founded by a Turkish dude?” I say. She is Greek, and I know some of the tumultuous regional history, but I am still surprised to see her eyes well with tears.

by on

The Pressure to Strive, Etched in Stone

“Always be happy, never be content.” Etched in pavement just a few steps from my dorm, the inscription never fails to draw my attention. I’ve always read it as a testament to Princeton’s hard-driving academic ethos: a reminder to students to always keep striving, never to cease pushing themselves to achieve.

by on

Clif Bars

I reach into my bag, the wrapper crinkles, and, suddenly, I think I want to climb a mountain. Well, I take that back. I’m rather un-athletic, my legs are disproportional to my body, and recently I’ve developed an incessant rattling cough, so I know that that’s a poor idea.

by on

Consider the Sea Urchin

On a map, the penobscot Bay in Downeast Maine looks like shattered glass. Rivers and inlets crack through the rocky coast, carving out hundreds of islands and peninsulas. A favorite of fishermen and vacationers, the Penobscot is the halfway point on the coast between Cape Cod and Nova Scotia.

by on

Obituary for a Lost Boy

When I called Rachel, she answered the phone cheerfully. I should have listened more carefully to that tone, should have let it linger longer before I brought the sky crashing down over her. Last year, around this time, just as the weather was starting to turn and leaves began popping up on all the trees, our uncle died in his sleep; our grandparents were visiting for the week and found him the next morning.

by on

Class in Session

I am in a jet somewhere over the Pacific, and a friend is offering me Grey Goose and cranberry juice. We are both seventeen, but no one is enforcing drinking laws—we are the only two passengers. This is a private plane, because the private island we’re heading towards doesn’t have a commercial airport. We sprawl across leather seats and continue to raid the bar and talk about college plans. We both want to go to Princeton.

by on

Mind Over Mirror

For a class called “Women’s Bodies, Women’s Lives,” that I took last semester, we were tasked with many activities meant to make us aware of what it meant to be a woman, and a woman in a body, and a woman in a body in a society alternatingly fascinated and disgusted with that body.

by on

Living On Prayer

Whenever i feel like I don’t know where my life is going, my father is there to console me. He tells me that his life—or at least the version of it that I know—only really began when he was 35. He reminds me that especially given his untraditional experiences, he and my mom have no expectation that either I or my brother follow the typical pattern of get a degree, get a job, get married, all right out of college.

by on

Hannah-Sophie Vester

I’ve never seen my birth certificate, but I know what it says. I can see the angular font in my head, bold blocky letters spelling out my name: Hannah-Sophie Vester. Perhaps the ink, thick and sticky, smudged just a little and that’s where that mark, printed defiantly between Hannah and Sophie, came from. Just a typo, a wayward smudge. Another look, though, and who wouldn’t recognize the hyphen for what it is?

by on

My Grandma, Sex Psychiatrist

“The madame will be joining us soon. Her horse sprained his ankle on the journey down Second Avenue,” my grandpa said in a mock British accent. My grandpa is a writer, and jumps at opportunities to knit fantasy into everyday experience, be it with affected accents or outrageously butchered attempts at Mandarin.

by on

A Bug’s Death

I am nine years old, give or take a couple years, and I have learned rage. Like a clumsy Hulk, I crush and I smash and I murder what must be dozens, if not billions, of ants.

by on

A Food Made from the Pressed Curds of Milk

For a person with dietary restrictions, food in America is like a dense minefield of things he or she cannot eat. Meat and cheese are everywhere, sneakily stuck in the most unsuspecting locations.

by on