Patriarchy (noun): a system of society or government in which men hold the power and women are largely excluded from it.

Patriarchy, a word I’m sure many of us are familiar with. Whether you benefit, detriment, or are simply a bystander to it, it is an invisible force field that grabs our society and refuses to let go.

While I self-identify as a feminist and someone who is very anti-patriarchy, I am unable to avoid it. I can share as many “Boys are the worst” comments with my friends as I please, and feel joyfully inspired by my future as a woman in a male-dominated field, but I exist within the vacuum that is patriarchy. I’ll even go as far as to say that I am a hypocrite by denoting myself as a rebel against the system: I’m a key player in it every single day.

It wasn’t until I arrived home on break in the suburbia of my New Jersey town that I truly began to think. More importantly, it wasn’t until I shared a boy war story with my mother that I became enraged. It was my mother, a sixty-year-old, self-proclaimed feminist, who lit this fire: I wasn’t angry at the system, I was angry that I was so blindly engulfed in it. 

She told me of the mid-90s, a mystical time of Dr. Martens and NSYNC, and more importantly Sex and the City, a show that glamorized the life of single women. In between cocktail dresses, shopping, and bad dates with men, what more could a woman want! Maybe you were a little Samantha with a dash of Charlotte or a touch of Miranda with Carrie’s whimsy. However, this isn’t a show review: my point is, she brought up what she considered to be a similar literary masterpiece of the time: The Rules by Ellen Fein and Sherrie Schneider. 

Don’t meet him halfway or go dutch on a date. 

Don’t open up too fast.

Don’t call him and rarely return his calls. 

Don’t expect a man to change or try to change him. 

That’s just a little taste to give a general synopsis: supposedly a dating guide for women, what to do and not to do to catch a man. Well, you can imagine how far my eyes popped out of my head when my mother enlightened her twenty-year-old daughter with this wonderful knowledge. And you can maybe even picture my accompanied disgust when I realized that these printed words, patriarchal bits of knowledge, were things I subconsciously followed. Pieces of advice I often gave my friends in conversations. 

Now, I write all of this to share my epiphany: stop letting patriarchy bleed into your life. These supposed “rules” aim to benefit men and force women to act in a way so “perfect,” “classy,” or “ladylike,” that how could we not take the perfect man off the market? We are given this idea that we’ll find the perfect boyfriend or husband if we don’t become emotionally intimate and refuse to pay on the first date. Even worse, we’re told that men will NEVER change and that we must change ourselves to suit their needs. 

Patriarchy will not guarantee you the perfect life partner. Hell, if it does, I’m not even sure I want him. If I’m expected to follow a guidebook to make men want to spend more than two hours clothed with me, I will live peacefully in solitude. I will exist in this ecosystem of patriarchy and for once make men figure out what to do and not do to catch me.

Written by Ella Romano

Edited by Wendy Moore and Julia Brummell

Sitting in Silence

“We wouldn’t have gotten along as kids,” is something I’ve heard from a few people in my life today. 

You were sensitive? Yeah no. 

You had an almond mom? Yeah no. 

I literally would have bullied you. 

Well, too bad, I wouldn’t have talked to you anyway. I was one loyal ass friend. I had my two best friends, one in school and one out of school. And I had my little brother, and all the other younger siblings that were “built in.” 

I was always known as the kid with the biggest imagination. I would write crazy stories in class that I had dreamt about the night before, and everyone always asked me how to do the assignment in art class. I would lead a whole group of kids around the playground, in charge of the story telling of the giant fights we would have with goblins, dragons, and other bad guys. I could always climb the highest in trees, perched at the top while I watched kids fall out of the lowest limb. Some kids would get super frustrated that they couldn’t get up, even when I would tell them exactly how to climb the tree. Some kids would ask for a boost, but I would always tell them what my mom had told me. If you can’t get up, you can’t get down. One time there was this girl, the new girl, who couldn’t get up. We felt bad so we gave her a boost. She immediately wanted to get back down but couldn’t, so she cried until an adult came to get her out. 

There was this tree in the back of the playground across the baseball field that everyone wanted to climb. I would run over to it, find the limb, wrap my hands around it and walk my feet up the side of the tree. Then I would swing one of my legs around, grab ahold of that one piece of bark sticking out and hoist myself up. The higher I climbed up the quieter things would be. I loved seeing the world get small below me, and smelling the bark of the tree. I examined every little detail of the tree, the smooth wood and the rough bark. Sometimes I would see an ant crawling through the crevice and I would watch it hike to its destination. I would put my special rock in a hidden crevice between the branches far enough towards the top so I knew other kids wouldn’t be able to get it. I would check on it from time to time, lifting it up to see all the bugs that were crawling underneath. I hated spiders, but loved rolly pollys. There used to be wooden vines hanging down from that tree. But one of the parents tried to climb it one time and it broke. Stupid adults. 

There were even more vines that climbed way up high in another area of the playground. You could see houses from blocks away if you climbed high enough up there. I would sit on the vines or the limbs of the tree and think. I was dangling up high in the vines, and I melted into the bark of the tree. You could even swing on some of them, too. I loved talking to animals pretending they could understand what I was saying. I made little bunny “nests” with my friends in the grass, because we didn’t know that bunnies lived in burrows. We would place flowers in a circle and wait for them to come out of the bushes. One time my brother found a pile of “raisins” on the ground, and ate one. 

That still makes me laugh. 

In the spring and summer time, red berries would grow on the bushes surrounding the park. Do NOT eat those, our mothers would warn.

They’re for the bunnies and the birds anyway, we would always reply.

Behind the baseball field, there was a giant pile of wood chips and mulch. What do you think is under there? asked one of my friends. I thought about what animal could be that huge, and scary. 

A bull I replied. I imagined a really big one, with horns and fire in its eyes. The bull king, and it’s gonna come out soon, so we need to get weapons to fight it! We spent the rest of the day finding sticks for wands and swords. We had a huge battle and had many of the other kids join, even our little siblings. At the end of the fight, I buried that special sword with my friend in the dirt of the baseball field. It was as if we were putting it to rest. 

I tried going back to dig it up, but I never found it again. 

In the way back of the park, past the vines and the long stretch of grass, there was a small hiking trail. 

The teenagers go back there, warned the adults. Don’t go in there without one of us. 

There was a diamond yellow sign of a person hiking. Next to the entrance there was a thorn bush where one of the adults got stuck in it trying to get their toddler out. Once I got older, I went onto that trail. It was hidden, quiet, and you were basically in the backyard of this house that always had dogs barking at you. I still hear the silence. 

Slowly, the playground started to change. They cut the limbs off the tree, cut the vines down, and they replaced the wooden play sets with plastic blocks. They even took away all the slides. They made that long stretch of grass and where the vines used to be, into a disc golf course. What even is disc golf? 

Every time I go there now it feels like the place just gets smaller and dimmer. It used to be so bright and big. 

I don’t want to go to the playground. 

To 

Just five more minutes? 

However, despite how sad it’s been to see the playground turn into something I barely recognize, that imagination continued to work as a tool for me. My ability to describe my thoughts in different words and pictures helped me communicate what I didn’t fully understand at the time. To me, art and imagination isn’t something to show off, it’s a way to express yourself. It’s a way to connect with the world around you. So even though I became stuck in the back of the playground at one point, I was still near the tree and those vines. 

So maybe we wouldn’t have gotten along. Maybe you would’ve been afraid every time I showed you a cool bug I found, be confused about how to climb a tree, or see what imaginary creature we were fighting. Maybe you would’ve gotten frustrated with how sensitive I was, because you weren’t allowed to be sensitive yourself. Maybe you were fighting your own creatures at home, they just weren’t imaginary. Maybe we fought different bad guys at different points in our lives, so that’s why we understand each other today. 

So look at the bugs in the cracks of the sidewalk with me, and then look up at the sky to see that the world is so much bigger than this. Smell the warm leaves and see how bright their green color is, they’re so full of life just like you and I. Feel the calm warmth in your chest and move forward with me. The world is quiet in a good way again, so let’s just sit in silence.

Written by Mia Stack

Edited by Ruby Kolik and Elisabeth Kay

Six months ago if you were to ask me what was good for my soul I could tell you with full certainty. I would walk you through my different contingency plans for “soul healing”. Now as I’m in an entirely new city, it’s harder to figure out what to do. 

My fail-safe solution when I’m feeling down is to venture down Walker Way and enter my favorite simple hiking trail. This trail provides endless avenues of possibility. Leading to my best friend's house, my elementary school, the reservoir near my house, the University of Delaware, and a nearby state park. 

Starting on this trail I was able to walk to my elementary school. Before I started Kindergarten my dad, an avid trail runner, discovered a road less taken by that connected to the playground of Maclary Elementary. The night before my 1st day, my parents led the way to the playground and pushed me on the swings as we walked through the logistics of my 1st day and navigating the bus. Throughout my time at Maclary, my parents often walked me to school on that same path. I loved the days when it was nice enough to trek to school, it felt like an adventure straight out of Ramona and Beezus. This walk to school was sometimes orchestrated by my mother who realized that my best friend Rebecca’s house also connected to these woods. 

Becca has been my best friend and the first person I turn to since I was six years old. During elementary school, we were in the same Girl Scout troop, same class, and played for the same softball league. When middle school came we went to different schools and I quit softball, but that didn’t break our bond. I replaced softball with swim team to be with Becca. We spent our mornings diving headfirst into freezing water, and our nights sleeping at each other's houses. Our friendship has always been filled with childlike wonder and companionship, but at age 14 I think we started to realize the true nature of our friendship. Quarantine was a difficult time for everyone, but I had Becca by my side. I spent March-May of 2020 quarantining in upstate New York, but when I came home to Delaware, the first person I saw (socially distanced) was Becca. We went on a walk. We took the same trail outside of our houses, and met at the reservoir, a 1 ½ mile circular trail that overlooks Newark, Delaware. 

The summer of 2022. 

This was the summer we started truly feeling like teenagers. We finished sophomore year, eager to be upperclassmen at our respective schools, and counted down the days until we earned our full licenses. During those times when we couldn’t drive but wanted to hang out, we would meet in the woods. We’d lug our overnight bags to the other’s house until we finally started leaving things at the other's house. This was the summer I experienced my first heartbreak. Becca was there for all of it. This was also when we realized the true magnitude of trails accessible at our fingertips. We walked for miles after swim practice and the whole time she listened to me as I coped with the end of my first relationship. 

This cemented our walks as one of our many rituals. Anytime the weather was nice enough we’d simply text each other, “reservoir walk?” We bring our dogs and laugh until our stomachs hurt. We look at the middle-aged moms walking with their ankle weights and exchange a knowing glance, understanding that will be us in 25 years. 

Now I’m in Pittsburgh, and experiencing all of the mood swings associated with freshman year. In the cold of February, I can’t bring myself to walk outside or explore Schenley Park. But I know I have Becca, my beautiful best friend I can always call. All roads lead back to her.

Written by Olivia Kessler

Edited by Julia Brummell and Elisabeth Kay

this moldy strawberry was left 

under the bright red where it goes unknown 

to not take the vibrance in a role of theft 

it stays below to maintain its own

but this moldy strawberry lacks control

where knocking not one but two 

can distract a soul

with whatever comes to truth, 

external or youth be it so

as a moldy strawberry brilliance

lacking a basket 

to me a stem

with its longing root that was once content

Written by Alicia Sayaka

Edited by Kate Madden and Julia Brummell

Pop music is back. It’s back and it’s fun, cheeky, hot, sparkly, unapologetic—all thanks to the dazzling female stars giving the genre new life. You could say it’s a Femininominon. 

Okay, pop has always been around. But it saw a period of stagnation, only now regaining a sense of energy it hasn’t seen since, perhaps, the early 2010s—a time soundtracked by the likes of Ke$ha, Rihanna, and Katy Perry.

Pop powerhouses of the era, like Taylor Swift and Ariana Grande, persisted. They have regularly released new music and sold out world tours. That music (by these two artists, at least) have continued to hit high standards and excite ever-growing fan bases. But a lot of pop had fallen into an almost cookie-cutter routine. The boom of TikTok didn’t help: with its unrelenting grip on music charts, it churned out a lot of pop music deliberately crafted with virality in mind. A lot of this ‘lifeless pop’ might be good on the surface, but it all sounds similar. Maybe it’s catchy, but it’s safe. Maybe those lyrics hit you hard, but they are basically the same ones in countless others. Pop music had fallen into a rut.

Fast-forward to now. If you tuned in to this year’s 67th Grammy Awards, you saw a curly-haired redhead in a bedazzled bodysuit and cowboy boots and drag-inspired makeup sing and dance her heart out atop a large pink pony. 

Maybe you noticed something else about the Grammys, especially last year. It was a sweep by female artists. In 2024, women won big for the most notable awards: Song of the Year, Album of the Year, Record of the Year, and Best New Artist. Same with categories of Pop Solo Performance, Pop Duo/Group Performance, Pop Vocal Album. In fact, the first three categories mentioned were exclusively female, with the exception of a single man present in all three (Jon Batiste, a force in jazz and blues.)

The 2025 Grammys was slightly more of a female-male artist mix, but still saw major gains for women (notably, Doechii’s Best Rap Album win, marking only the third for women in that category) and the past year has been incredibly rich in new big-name music from mostly women. In 2024, we got new work from Charli XCX, Sabrina Carpenter, Beyoncé, Billie Eilish, and Taylor Swift, all of which were nominated for Album of the Year, along with Chappell’s “Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess” from September of 2023. Last year also saw new albums from Gracie Abrams and Ariana Grande, and singles from Tate McRae, not to mention Olivia Rodrigo and Reneé Rapp are continuing their ride of success.

The work from every single one of these artists has been a smash hit. But it isn’t just about their individual success. These women—especially Charli XCX, Sabrina Carpenter, Chappell Roan, and Tate McRae—are together making pop fun and interesting.

The pop lull we experienced until now was emphasized by the Covid era, largely characterized by quiet days spent in our homes and on virtual meetings and classes. Many of us took that time to withdraw, look inward, and let the news be the only drama in our lives. It makes sense that the music we favored during and coming out of the pandemic was more stripped-back, or more of the familiar.

Now we want the drama, the vibrance, the risk. And we sure are getting it, through these highly talented artists bringing something new to the table or channeling what we already love but have missed over the last decade.

Charli XCX was very present in the early 2010s; I grew up with her on the radio. She continued to put out music but grew bigger than ever with last summer’s “brat”—an album that blew up into a cultural phenomenon and even influenced Kamala Harris’ presidential campaign marketing. The neon green, synth, club beats of it all are electrifying and anti-minimalist. It’s a vibe that doesn’t seem to have been in the mainstream for ages.

Sabrina Carpenter is an exceptional storyteller. She can do heart wrenching lyrics, but she’s also funny. Her summer release, “Short n’ Sweet,” is sprinkled with cheeky innuendos and sexual puns (the “Busy Woman” line, “my openings are super tight,” refers to more than just her packed Google Calendar.) Sabrina’s lyrical range includes emotional, clever, and fun, and she has the vocal chops to deliver. Her tour is a full-fledged production packed with glitz and glam, a handful of outfit changes, and interactive elements. And Carpenter’s increasingly iconic image as an artist is further solidified by her signature hair and makeup.

Critics may give Tate McRae a hard time for doing a lot of lip syncing during her concerts, but McRae is a triple threat—she sings, writes her own lyrics, and places heavy emphasis on her performer side, primarily dancing. A more physically involved performance sometimes means sacrificing raw vocals for dynamic lighting, fiery dancing, and hypnotizing hairography. Her vocal style and stage presence have earned the up-and-comer frequent comparisons to veteran Britney Spears. McRae is her own person, but the comparisons do speak to McRae’s embodiment of that hot, scandalous 2000’s pop energy. 

Evidently, a common theme breathing new life into the pop scene today is a sense of showmanship and strong visuals. When an artist crafts a distinct image, tone, and even color palette associated with their presence and work, it resonates more; it’s more engaging and memorable. They make us want to pay attention—not just to one song, but an act—a spectacle, even—their larger discography, and perhaps a greater cultural effect.

It’s great music on its own. But more than that, it’s exciting, and we feel something. Isn’t that what we want from pop?

Written by Sophie Yohannan

Edited by Cassidy Hench and Elisabeth Kay

“Are you speaking Spanish?” and “Hola…” were some of the things I would often hear from children my age when I was 6 to 8 years old. I would then reply with, “No, I’m speaking Japanese.” With my response, children would then make a strange facial expression hearing a language that they’ve never heard of. Many shy away from understanding that, even in our generation today, languages are all around us. There shouldn’t still be this ideal form of how an individual is expected to speak. Since this was what I was used to, the habits of pronunciation continued to carry on with me. Strangely enough, as I got older and stopped communicating as much with my grandmother the way that I used to, my proficiency in Japanese has also gone down. Still, I seem to sometimes make the same grammar mistakes when speaking English to those around me because my native tongue is often stuck in the past. 

As I’ve gotten older, I began to learn other aspects of grammar, especially through education within certain communities. Since then, I’ve begun to dive back into the branches of languages within the real world, studying Spanish and minoring in it during my time at university. I have always surrounded myself with different types of languages, and simply sticking to English because it is apparently the “default language” disappointed me. In turn, my passion and appreciation towards other cultures besides mine have heavily influenced me over the past few years. 

It’s crucial for me to recognize the differences there are within languages and how each person uses that to acknowledge their backgrounds, along with facing their challenges too. A lot of aspects of my identity come from my mother. But, because of her appearance and slight accent, people often become impatient with her speaking and eventually resort to me being the (unneeded) translator, since her English is considered “broken.”  It felt belittling to think that teachers may have viewed my mother as unintelligent because of this. While the conferences were going on, the teachers would also look toward me to answer a question that they were asking my mother first.

Language has become a reflection of identity with unity and understanding that there is never a “right” way to speak, or having to lose out on your native tongue because of what others expect of you. Learning about simple kanji and Chinese characters in that same third-grade class was challenging. I knew that I wouldn’t move as quickly as the others. But, at the same time, I wasn’t reminded of that. I was instead taught just the same as the other students and they helped me adjust along the way. Languages do not always imply who we are as human beings. It is a form of our identity, yes, but there is a line between what we should and shouldn’t expect to hear when a person of color or a foreigner begins speaking. 

My identity has reflected upon the differences that different cultures and nations presume from outsiders. In the end, it is the conformity of life and how we are subject to categorize the things we observe and hear, that decrease our abilities to engage with each other.

Written by Alicia Sayaka

Edited by Leigh Marks and Julia Brummell

Forgive me not for how I see the Soul: when I first saw you by the river I knew of your kinship to the ethereal; if you had decided to be one of the objects of a lower doctrine, the fields would bend away from you, and Nature would not be your friend. Nature may be my lover and She is also yours… however you should remember She has been crueler to me than She has ever been to you. You have the innocence of the paradise I left in my adolescence, and somehow you having never truly loved and been loved is both a blessing and a tragedy. 

Prose of this spiritual servitude does not indicate that the intention is on par with that of a televangelist, though often it is as if I am speaking as a preacher when I contemplate the art of the cancer of the Oasis; but all readers must know that I am aware that god deceived Eve in the Garden of Eden. I know of the myth of Revelation that purges the visions of the good Christian under Nature before Splendor. When I speak to men I speak of meliorating personal prophecy that I can only presume applies to the method in which the Garden shall return. 

By the build of the shadow self, I saw this age’s Oasis as a portal to my liberation – but by the seams of my most oblivious senses, there were only reels of stagnant energy, clogs of once-abundant energy channels. Befriend no one in the Oasis, and you shall have no one to hide from… for when one abandons her role as the martyr of the megachurch, one ultimately continues to find a savior in all of the most fatal places. Of course, I am certain past preachers have been in my position before — but none of them I extrapolated the pleasure of knowing below the flesh recalled a recollection of the great biblical myth. 

When the discrepancy between mind and body is deemed an object, or a system of objects, the crux becomes the project of the powerful and the cynical, soon the Soul shall find herself as a curation of commodity  — for what else should she deserve, even when she left her manhood behind in the front pews after the final sermon? All to be drawn to the winds in which the scorn has set out for you to avoid? Leave god but never leave God:
To whom do I speak to when I turn to Selene when by morn my dominion sways to Eos? I am progressively indebted to no god at this locus of the winter, but I sense that by the summer I will be tied to the mechanics of a higher consciousness… Has God made me destined to love a man who sees me as more than a craving? For in my time in this chamber I have found that love is a means of Splendor and not that of a flesh wound. It’s all I see here: hunger binding thirst and thirst binding hunger. We unfold under our own lusts because we let ourselves, yet when I find myself in the front pews again the jurisdiction is that I am not made to be loved like a woman — I made to love a woman by restricting her and tying her down according to scripture. Essentially, before the Soul breathed in the elixir, the air in which Selene casts her shadows and Eos her light – the woman God designed her to embody had her body deteriorated and bourne rotten in the chains of the very strongholds the wisest of preachers warned against: Eden was a slave to the devil because her gentle hues were condemned to the same threshold of the bible’s most evil transgressions. Soar high, great Soul! Fear not the men with all of their dogmas, stifle the man that once possessed the body, and seek Love in the Garden – if Babylon is the final station in the myth of Revelation, then your prophecy has been instilled back to Genesis.

Take me there, Selene, to the place where I am not merely a rib of another man – where Thy world shall not collapse by the intention of the deception you implanted in the Garden’s fig tree. Let me taste the fruit, relish in it, and forget Adam – who in an alternative dogmatic narrative robbed me of the Love brewing within me since before I had truly decided to start living: for the first taste of the fruit treks beyond the mere enslavement to the sensory. The bite is the gate to the true fulfillment of humanity: the raptures of free love and all of the beautiful notions that the Earth provides the mirror to both the valleys and the cavities of the Spirit. 

This is the holiest life I have ever known… this experience of loving without consequence, healing with no expectation of restoring the genealogy of the supposed “evils” of the original sin. I am both man’s fall and redemption; Nature is brutal and so am I; Nature is loving and so am I; Nature is gentle and so am I; Nature is maternal and so am I. 

Written by Eden Mann

Edited by Isa Gattamorta and Julia Brummell

The thrum of knives on ceramic dishes in the Applebees 

next door cuts through the silence of the therapist's office. My little brother

and I move around—restless—on the squeaky

leather sofa. Lisa asks a question 

but my brain is too swollen to recognize the words. 

I lurch at the sound of my parents’ (my dear parents) 

on the other side of the door. A flurry of tears

fall from my eyelashes to my bare legs, white and chalky 

from gymnastics practice. My brother 

wails the song of a begging 

baby bird, pitiful and hungry for answers. 

Don’t Say It. My body shudders and jerks as my brother

kicks his legs repeatedly 

against the couch we sit on. His voice

whispers through the buzzing of the space heater.

I look to Lisa. Don’t Say It. My mouth fills with gibberish

and the gibberish spills out through the gap in my front teeth

and my clenched jaw and my flared nostrils. Don’t Say It.

A knock on the door. Lisa stands. Times up. 

And I don’t say it,

I never do, 

and I never go back to therapy.

Edited by Tia Douglas and Elisabeth Kay

I’m sitting in what my family calls “the basement,” but in reality, it’s just a large room on the second floor of the house we just moved into following their wedding. I’m only nine years old, but my Internet access is unlimited, so a pink Dell laptop sits in my lap as I peruse YouTube to find the next Shane Dawson video that piques my interest. You probably shouldn’t be watching him, my sister advises next to me. I shrug as I continue my scroll. Our kitchen playset from IKEA stares at us across the room.

I met her and her mom in a humid airport a few years ago. I used my dad’s body as a shield as we approached them, not yet ready to step out of my shyness. She held out a Beanie Baby as a peace offering, and after about an hour in the car together, we started talking. Our parents joke that we never really stopped after that.

Our first picture together is in Disney World, standing in front of the castle on Main Street. It’s pouring rain, and neither of us are really smiling. In twelve years, we’ll make mixed drinks in Mickey Mouse cups while we’re home alone and turn a YouTube video titled Disney Jeopardy into a drinking game.

Instead of Shane Dawson, I pick out a One Direction music video, to which she shifts her attention to watch with me. We scream and jump and giggle and go on to pick a new picture of Niall Horan to make my laptop background. I post about it on a social media account I’m too young to have. She’s the only person to like it. She’ll be the first person I text when Liam Payne passes away eleven years later. It’ll be the first text I’ve sent to her in a few weeks.

As we grow older, we’ll keep going through fandom phases like this, together, under the same roof. We’ll put the same music videos we’re used to watching on the TV and scream over them as a break from whatever work we were previously doing. When I move away, she’ll send me new songs to listen to. Usually I don’t right away, but they always have a way of getting into my playlists one way or another. 

We’re called to dinner downstairs by our parents. The dining room table we sit at will follow us to the next two houses we move into, still standing in the house she’ll live in alone when we’re in our twenties. It’s served for birthdays, Superbowl parties, New Years Day card games, late night art projects, and Christmas Eve dinners, and it still has yet to let us down. There’s a chair in the corner that our dog, Gibby, occupies, until he goes blind and can’t quite tell where he is when he’s put up there. 

Our after-dinner ritual begins to play out. After chatting with our parents, I gather up the dishes and table decorations while she diligently scrubs the plates before putting them into the dishwasher. When I decide I’m done cleaning, I slip away to our shared bathroom to take a shower, my bit of solace. When we grow older, our parents will move out and the ritual will dissipate. I’ll stand in front of the kitchen window and scrub through piles of dishes in silence. When I have an apartment in my college town, I’ll assume the same position but with a YouTube video about an interest we don’t share anymore. She’ll let the dishes back home stack up for a while, but she’s the only one who knows that.

We change into our pajamas and cuddle up in our shared bedroom– two twin beds line the wall, mine with a green striped comforter, her’s blue. These are the colors our parents decided to use to distinguish us in the way parents distinguish twins, despite our three-year age gap and lack of shared blood. But we might as well be; when I talk about her to others, I drop the “step” in stepsister. I’ll still do this when I’m older, ignoring the miles between us. 

Written by Elisabeth Kay

Edited by Diya Aneja and Julia Brummell

I hadn’t read a book in three years. For pleasure, that is. See, I’m an English writing major, so all I do is read. Don’t get me wrong, the readings are wonderful. I’ve had the chance to read Chekhov and Dostoevsky, Kincaid and Baldwin, Oats and Kafka; so many incredible works I’m glad I’ve read so early in my life. However, I hadn’t used any of my free time to engage with what I now considered, school work. When reading creative, ingenious pieces began to take over almost all of my waking moments, I lost my hobby. 

That loss sat on my mind like deadweight. There was this shame and discomfort that had been brought upon me. At the age of sixteen, I formed an entire identity around my love for books. I would show up early to sports practices and plop myself down on the sidelines with an 800 page fantasy novel. I was in multiple English classes my senior year of high school because my high school English department made an exception for me. I won awards because of how much I read. I worked in the local bookstore in my hometown. Every spare moment of time I had, my nose was buried in a book. Being a reader is who I am. It is a fundamental part of my very existence. 

Coming to college, my love shifted slightly. My eyes shifted away from reading and began to focus more so on writing. I want to put into words the stories trapped in my head like so many other authors I admire. The books I had once engaged with for pleasure became my study material. I dissected the literature and picked apart the aspects I deemed good, and trained my attention even more so on the parts I thought weren’t. It got to a point where I couldn’t turn off this lens. I have tried to sit down and read a book over the past three years, in fact I have a stack of about fifty books I have only read the first thirty pages of. Starting was the easy part; I’d pick up a book, read the first few chapters, determine what I liked and disliked about the writing style, and close the book, never to be opened again. Now, this isn’t an effective way to glean the insights and true styles of the authors, but it was the best I could bring myself to do. I had lost my enthusiasm to consume. 

That was until the first week of January this year. My New Year's resolution was set– to read one book a month– the same as every other year, despite my telling myself I had already failed before the clock struck midnight. Then, it was like I had stumbled into a dream. 

Most of my weekends at college are spent visiting a thrift store with my friends. I usually dart through the aisles, quickly glancing at the pieces laid out before me, only stopping my walking pace if I see something that truly catches my eye. But I always end my exploration in the book section. This is something I have been doing since I first got to college. I do not think I have ever bought a book from the thrift store – the majority of books on the shelves are not really my style, more so novels I think my father would enjoy. 

But, for the first time, the book aisle had me frozen in my tracks. The thick orange spine of the complete The Chronicles of Narnia stared back at me. A series of books I had once loved as a child that I had not thought about in well over a decade. It was as if the Universe heard my resolution and planted the seeds to succeed right in front of me. I reached for the intimidating 700 page book – not as intimidating on closer examination, “The Chronicles of Narnia” is composed of seven individual books – and instantly felt my mind find equilibrium. When I got home, I started reading immediately and this time when I closed the book, I was excited to pick it back up again. As I write, I have already finished the first book in the collection, The Magician’s Nephew, and am half way through the second, The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe. I have been sucking the words straight off the paper and I have enjoyed every second of it. My mind has found no critiques for Mr. Lewis, instead I

have found only bliss in my reading endeavour. While on this kick, I also picked up a copy of The Secret Garden, another beloved book from my past. 

That’s when it hit me. This was my solution. The thing that had finally worked to get me out of my slump: Childhood literature. Books I had read in a different life, ones that revitalised a child-like wonder I had been lacking since “growing-up” and starting college. These books I cherished for so long now took on new shapes as I dived back into them. The fantasy and mysticism I loved in Narnia now makes me giggle as I find the clear metaphors to Christianity in Aslan. The Secret Garden brings tears to my eyes as I find a new sense of empathy for the young narrator I had once deemed annoying. And, as I fall down this rabbit hole, soon I will be joining Alice (who is next on my developing “To Read” list), I have realised how important it is to maintain my love. For a second there, I almost forgot why I chose to be an English major. I am pursuing this passion because of how incredible it is to be forcefully pulled into the author’s world. Because of the magic and wonder one can create with the written sequence of words. It is something I hope I never lose sight of again. All thanks to the first New Year’s resolution I actually stuck to.

Written by Angela Hoey

Edited by Clare Vogel and Elisabeth Kay