Personal Essays / Journalism

i think 
BY ANONYMOUS

​                 I sink back into the embrace of the green armchair. My grandfather is holding me and holding me. The steady thu-thump, thu-thump of his heartbeat echoes in my ear as I lean against him, taking in the scent of his minty cologne and his soft skin. He is timeless and immortal, an unshakable rock in a restless sea. I murmur softly to him as I tell him about my day and he listens so attentively, breathing in every word.   

                 I am not sure if this moment actually happened or if I just concocted it to fill that void that was supposed to be my grandfather after he died when I was in 7th grade. Whether it was stitched together from the dozens of memories of hugging him at my grandparents’ house or if in his absence I made it up entirely. 

                 Alison Bechdel’s memoir, Fun Home, follows Bechdel’s relationship with her father while he is alive and her reevaluation of it after he dies. Bechdel’s father is abusive and a closeted pedophile. However, at the same time, he is also the one who teaches Bechdel about many authors and fosters her love of literature. While my grandfather was not in any way an abusive man nor did we have the same relationship-dynamic as Bechdel and her father, one key similarity is grief and how it distorts memories. When writing about the effect of her father’s death, Bechdel writes his “absence resonated retroactively, echoing back through all the time I knew him. Maybe it was the converse of the way that amputees feel pain in a missing limb” (23). Bechdel shows how the death of her father caused her to realize that she never really knew him at all in the first place. She tries to reconstruct him through reevaluating memories and looking for pieces of evidence in the various things that he left behind. 

                 After losing my grandfather, I experienced something like the phantom-limb syndrome that Bechdel describes. Bechdel lost her father only to discover that what she’d had was not quite real to begin with, a prosthetic she’d mistaken for flesh. While I never really had the limb at all, I began to feel its absence everywhere. My grandfather and I had never been that close when he was alive. We did go over to his house as a family at least once a month. However, I never talked to him on the phone every day. I didn’t ever explicitly ask my parents to see him or light up when I got to talk to him. He was just someone in my life. I hugged him, maybe because I wanted to, but also because of obligation. He was my grandfather after all. But I didn’t even know his favorite color, how many siblings he exactly had, or what his job was. After he died though, he seemed to loom so much greater in my mind. He no longer was just my grandfather, he was my best friend. He was my rock. He was everything. 

                 This shift first really happened after I saw how distraught my father was over his death. I had never seen my father cry, but in the weeks leading up to my grandfather’s death, he seemed to cry every night. And one night, my dad just crumpled. Crumpled like a candy wrapper and I held him in my arms, as he sobbed and sobbed for what seemed like hours, running out of air. I desperately wanted to do something to help. Anything to make his grief feel smaller. But I knew I never could. So I sat beside him and just wrapped my arms around him, holding on as tightly as I could. His red puffy eyes were seared into my memory. And while my father cried because of how much he missed his father, I was scared that I missed the idea of my grandfather more than him himself. 

                 In the months after his death, I found myself looking for pieces of him wherever I could find them. He was a brilliant cardiologist who immigrated from India with nothing. He relentlessly crawled his way through the world and left his mark through his love of medicine. And now, I am also thinking about a career in medicine. While he was alive, I never asked him about his career, but now that it seemed to link us, it felt integral to his identity.

                 Yet even as I found myself thinking about him more and more, my own life remained largely unchanged and unburdened. I went to school, laughed with friends, worried about my grades, and planned for my future. This realization was filled with guilt. I felt guilty for not feeling devastated enough. But as I used his death for inspiration for poems in 7th grade, I felt even guiltier for writing about it as though it had shattered my world.

                 It is June 26th. My grandfather’s birthday. I set the table and my dad, my sister, my grandparents, and I all sit down. The candles are alive with fire and my mom slowly carries a cake adorned with strawberries and Happy Birthday Krishan to the table. My grandfather takes in each of the 8 candles, one for each decade, and blows them out. 

                 After he died, I found all of these patterns. I took the Hunter test on May 26th, my grandfather’s birthday was the 26th and I won a math competition on the 26th. Therefore, my lucky number was 26. I was beaming with pride, as I told this to my parents, satisfied that I found a way to remember my grandfather. However, when he was alive, I didn’t even know his birthday. It wasn’t until I was at his cremation and staring so hard at the programs (with his birthdates and deathdates) to avoid looking at the machine grinding him up into ash that I knew he was born on June 26th. 

                 Similarly to Bechdel who analyzes evidence to find who her father was, I constructed my grandfather out of these shards of memories that I collected. And we are both equally obsessed with the objective truth. Bechdel writes: “How did I know that the things I was writing were absolutely, objectively true? All I could speak for was my own perceptions, and perhaps not even those” (141). In turn, she develops a symbol to represent “I think.” She knows that the truth and objectivity of things is of the utmost importance. In a similar way, I used to get extremely mad when I was younger when people misspoke about events that had passed. If my parents remembered a vacation differently than I did, I would sprint to my room and frantically rummage through my drawers until I found the exact date in my faded composition notebooks. My diaries were filled with weather reports and timestamps including the minutes. It was as though I wanted to pin every memory to a page and stop it from changing.

                 While I have all of these memories of my grandfather, I don’t know how much of them are true. How much I can trust them. And I need an objective truth. However, my grandfather’s birthday isn’t even his real birthday. We don’t know the date. Nobody recorded it when he was younger. The more I grapple with this uncertainty about my grandfather, the more I become unsure about how real my memories are. I feel guilty for not knowing him as well as I wish I could have when he was alive, for not making an effort, and for continuing my life with relatively no cost. I feel even guiltier though for even writing about these memories that might be concocted. That might be fake. 

                 But at the same time the more that I grow older, the more I understand that objectivity is impossible. In Bechdel’s case, drawing her symbol of “I think” over her diary entries makes them nearly illegible (143). Bechdel even describes how as she got older: “hard facts gave way to vagaries of emotion and opinion…the truth is barely perceptible behind a hedge of qualifiers, encryption, and stray punctuation” (169). I now realize that memories are like this in some ways. They are subjective. I can’t exactly remember the details of my childhood bedroom or what I ate for lunch two weeks ago. I can’t remember what type of board I used to play chess on with my grandfather or the exact sound of his voice. While they do contain kernels of truth to them, they are ever-changing and altered by our minds and that’s okay. It didn’t matter that my grandfather didn’t know the exact day that he was born. We still had a wonderful time celebrating each year. And while I wasn’t as close as I’d like to believe with my grandfather when he was alive, I now have these memories, whether true or not, that will forever define our relationship. 

                 While Bechdel and I differ in many ways, we have arrived at a similar realization. We are both left searching for answers after death. Neither of us can ask the questions we wish we had asked or can fully recover the truth of who our loved ones were. Instead, we are left with fragmented, subjective, and constantly changing memories. 

                 Because of this, I no longer want to spend my time obsessing over whether a memory is completely accurate. My grandfather’s birthday was never recorded and some truths are just simply lost. I cannot become closer to my grandfather, but I can become closer to my grandmother. I can ask her the same questions that I never asked him and listen to her stories, while she is still able to tell them. And while I know that I might not remember every memory or moment objectively or know every question that I want to ask her before it's too late, I am trying to do better and treasure what I have while I have it.

                 So I sit back into the comforting embrace of the green armchair. My grandmother is holding me and holding me. The scent of her rosy perfume coats the air and her wrinkled hands intertwine in mine. The thu-thump, thu-thump of her heartbeat echoes and I lean into her, taking in every breath of her story.

An Ode to Bad Hair Days
BY VERONICA ROWNY

My mom told me that in the third grade, I wrote an ode to the rat's nest, and by that, I meant my hair —the stringy (some guy would go on to call me "string cheese") blonde with clumps of dust bunnies and vivacious purple-pink streaks. I still remember the sound— the dreadful snap and tug ripping through my knotted hair, the brush hurting too much. I remember yelling; the feeling was comparable to nails on a chalkboard or walking on Legos to my sensitive scalp. The mirror fogged with my nanny's exasperation, and my frustration formed from all things in my reach. That bathroom, where my hair was brushed, slowly began to smell like perfume. 

I knew who I was from a young age,

I would wake up to go to school with the atrocity and weight of a bad-hair year as my parents watched in horrified anguish of how I strutted confidently down the hall and into the gates of my preppy school. If someone questioned the birds' nest, I would, in my best Lord Business impression, shut them up (quite literally)—Can you tell my childhood icon was Boss Baby? I had embraced the life of a girlboss to the point where, in the fifth grade, the same boy who had ridiculed my hair had his face slammed in a cold, sharp-edged locker with the suave and slightly cringeworthy words of “In your dreams.” The metal slamming into its perfect frame startled the peers around me; some looked aghast, others snickered at this bodacious act, but no one said a word —that was my first taste of the isolation that words and power can bring.

I went through an 'I hate pink' phase. Meanwhile, my twin brother played with my newly disowned and abandoned Barbies and toy horses. I would immerse myself in the art of what my father called “being a provocative and argumentative brat.” 

                 “That is in no way how young ladies should talk.”

Now I beg to differ—

What I truly was is a master piece in the making, a stubborn story of gumption, and well, glitter

stuck in your Persian carpets (truly hell). I was that one dust bunny that you can’t seem to sweep off. As a self-proclaimed Division One yapper, I clung to the minds of others, leeching and becoming an unshakable spirit. I became a typhoon wrapped in tangled strands, a canvas like Picasso’s. Admittedly, a little rough around the edges, although unapologetically tangled. 

***

I'm sure from this, you can tell growing up, I wasn’t a quiet or neat kid. Society often wants its narratives sleek and tidy, like a smooth braid or a perfect ponytail, but I was never meant to be that way.

Instead, I was unfiltered, a little too raw for some people's liking. I would bring up genocide or politics at the dinner table; explain what is happening in the Congo, I would be met with uncomfortable stares; a room full of grown adults darting their eyes around seeking comfort within their food, they would say this isn’t the place for this conversation and I would say “Well I’m sure the people outside of your perfumed sphere don’t find this uncomfortable because unfortunately its their reality.” They would look at me as if I had said something pungent, repulsive to the taste, like I had just poured scotch down their throats and explained how the world is drunk on its brilliance.  

Although through this ‘girl bossing’— a term I have grown to hate— I was described as an Icarus. I flew admittedly too close to the sun at times. I didn’t know how to hold my breath while others around me waited for nothing ever to happen. But with this truth, I was relieved. Icarus fell from the sun, knowing that he once soared, he dared to try, and thus dared to fail. We have to try, or we all become monsters of our own creation. I realized, during this flight, when I almost touched the sun, that truth-seeking isn’t always received with applause; there was a cost to being outspoken, and maybe the bad hair was just a child's way of protest. But we all have it in us; as the shadows and comfort we live behind are moral, but the problems are a fundamental divide. 

“Truth is only harsh if you are unable to face it”  - Stewart Stafford.

We speak and we uplift those, 

Who are unable to,

Because of our own stupidity,

We talk on behalf of those who need to run,

And as a result, the perfume will dissipate.

I hold this truth to be self-evident —while I write with tangled hair.

THE MIRROR'S BLOOM

Short Stories