There is a stain on our wall in Wilson and we haven’t spoken about it for a few days, my roommate and I. Streaked and coarse, a stain ground into the whitewash like graphite. It’s not visible if you don’t look for it, not something Building Services would fine us for. A stain, the length of two bobby pins held end to end. The diameter of a champagne grape. It doesn’t come out with Windex or Seventh Generation dish soap or OxiClean, left instead as a perpetual effigy of my fury and my guilt.
I’m sitting on one of the loveseats in the Starbucks on Nassau Street, weirdly conscious of my calves sticking to the cold leather seat covers, experiencing what I imagine only certain paparazzi have felt at the peaks of their careers. The strangeness of spending years seeing someone in two dimensions, only to have them sitting across from you, alive and fidgeting. Lorena Grundy gestures at my coffee cup.
Did something happen again? she asks. She sounds concerned and I don’t want to make her concerned. Also I really don’t know how to answer her question.
Watch the balloons sway in the center of the slick dance floor. You are here and you are not here, swaying yourself on too-thin heels and much too much mixed drink. Tie your hair back. You’re hopped up on hoping the ending of your night will deliver what the beginning has promised since you fished your junior prom dress out of the dorm closet you’re sure has moths.
For as long as women feel weird talking about their periods, The Vagina Monologues will still be relevant. I hope it won’t continue to be. For as long as there is violence against women, the Vagina Monologues will still be relevant.
Any place that is affectionately known as the “Best Damn Place of All” cannot continue to be when bad things happen behind the FitzRandolph gates, and it gets even more difficult when the buildings themselves start yelling back.
The Prince article on the death of Tobias Kim does not speak about him as a person so much as a story pitch, someone whose meaning was apparent in the story he could provide. “Argentina”—Where? Why? To say it was sensationalist would defeat the purpose; I am not here to write about what the Prince did wrong, nor am I here to correct it.
It is October in Chicago and somewhere in the Susquehanna River a salmon is preparing to die. It has spent the last few years in perpetual transit, wandering the yawning expanse of the Atlantic and its arctic abyssal plains, upstream through currents and wave crests and darkness of unimaginable depth.
