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After a very busy half-semester of rewatching all of Bridgerton and Emily in Paris while studying for my organic chemistry midterms (I am only half-kidding), I got to spend a glorious nine-and-a-half days frolicking around London and Paris with two of my best friends and my mom.
Presence is such an elusive thing. It should be there under any circumstance, except we know that it isn’t.
It was a pleasure speaking to Mrs. Henry. She has a unique message to tell, because she wanted to teach the world about some of the harder parts of the past, not just the good. When you think about it, we really have come a long way. Even when times seem hard now, her message gives me hope for a better future.
I wonder what place cells fire when I think of "home."
19 is such a “middle child.” You’re past that initial excitement you had at 18 of technically being an adult, but you’re also still mentally a teen because your age doesn’t start with a 2. Yes, I’m turning 20 in about three months, and it feels very strange, but let this piece be something I can look back on years into the future.
I’ve been wanting to write an article for my mom, but never know where to start. An anecdote would be reductionist. A compliment would feel flattening. Any rendering would be static — and maybe that’s at the heart of it, that writing commits something to paper and necessarily asks us to draw pieces together into a neat picture.
In the wise words of the Floral Designer Kristen Griffith VanderYacht, “Flowers are not supposed to last. Their job is to help us to stay in the present. They grow, they blossom, they thrive and then they’re gone.”
In early spring, advertisements for dating apps start appearing everywhere. They promise efficiency. Compatibility percentages. Personality models. They reassure you that somewhere inside a black-box algorithm, someone has already calculated who could love you best.
While brainstorming for my first Voices article this semester, I found myself rereading the pieces I wrote when college was still new enough to feel like something from a movie. One line from the first article I ever wrote stopped me: “I entered college believing in my ability to create and reinvent myself.”
Twenty is a decidedly consequential number by convention. It marks two decades of time on earth, which means that by now, I must have collected a lot of important things that offer me instructions on how to live, and that these things must make me more differentiated, more intelligent and more sensible.
Take a look at this laundry list of notes on love. Sit back and enjoy the ride.
To raise this younger generation to see snow only as a source of wet socks and chapped faces would be something of a tragedy.
Last weekend, I was convinced (read: dragged) to go out by a high school friend who was in town. So I left the comfort of my stuffed-animal-filled bed and put aside my sacred 9 p.m. bedtime to go out on the town and relive my undergraduate days for one night only.
In the midst of the crowded Rec Center, there is one place that contrasts the noise of running treadmills, shoes squeaking on the court and weights clanging together: the pool.
My lunchbox has gotten heavier since sixth grade. Alongside the sandwich, the chips and the juice box I now carry the heavy knowledge that every choice I make has roots and ripple effects: a history and an origin of production, a contribution to climate change and gender politics and fair labor practices and the ICE raids.
I just have to remind myself that calcification is a good thing — setting in stone a 20-year old me doesn’t mean that I can’t grow a new layer of “Shreya”-ness. Maybe “finishing” a layer of myself doesn’t mean that I’m “finished,” too. Maybe it just means it’s time for a new layer.
Maybe I should use that train voucher. But I kind of just want to play The Sims.
It scares me to think of the possibility of never properly celebrating the New Year again, as irrational as it may be. It feels like the older I get, the further I’m slipping from my heritage.
So I find that sometimes the “making” of life is the act of sitting in the dark and trusting that we are becoming something better as time moves on. The blender eventually went silent, leaving the kitchen in a ringing quiet. Then, the jars were lined up like soldiers, ready for their long winter wait.
