“I was never the kid to get tangled up in chatroom relationships and online communities like many of my friends in middle and high school. I repent now, for the way I invalidated, even in my own head, the authenticity of their attachments. Laughter over Zoom is still laughter.”
Since the beginning of time, editors at the Nassau Weekly have taken their pens to each other’s Common Application Essays. And yes, the Nassau Weekly has been around since the beginning of time.
To telescope, we begin with 300 words, then slice the word count in half for each successive section. We stop when the numbers stop dividing evenly. Looking around and beyond us, this week we telescope “space.”
“He wouldn’t have taken it normally, but there was a girl at Lincoln’s shoulder, a fiber science major who kept touching his button-down to inspect the weave, and he couldn’t tell afterwards whether she’d only kissed him because it was 100% cotton.”