“In my desperate search for a ‘cure’ for my concussion, I experimented with the outermost fringes of the medical world: the truly punk-rock subculture of medical science.”
His face was well-preserved, but the body was so frail. The outline of his ribcage protruded grotesquely against his sunken stomach. He was dead, and he looked it. A warm tear ran down my cheek as I read and re-read the placard standing next to the coffin: “Here lies Dayton Martindale.” I was sad, and I was scared.
To telescope is to slide concentric components within themselves, to shrink sequentially, to densen. It is also a means of interstellar discovery, of flooding, of applying pressure. In the succeeding entries, we telescope the weather by precipitating and saturating our memories. Each succeeding memory of a series is composed in exactly half the number of words of the previous. Condense with us.
“Looking back, I feel the peculiar embarrassment of having been a teenage girl with teenage girl concerns, but the lives and concerns of teenage girls are often dismissed as trivial things, and if I could tell myself at 13 what I know now, I would.”
“In December of last year, I finally looked into alternatives. Part of that might have been motivated by an uptick in national conversations around accessible birth control, and part of it might have been that more of my friends were having these conversations too.”