Love Story
By: Lauren Viola
Part 1:
I feared commitment, feared its consequences, feared its requirements. I never considered love, but it happened so suddenly I did not have time to defend myself. It was like Vesuvius erupting and destroying the innocent and unsuspecting citizens of Pompeii. It was my biggest fear come true. Peering down at me, her eyes showed nothing but love for me; yet, I was still terrified of handing my heart over, terrified of being powerless. How do people do this so easily? After a few painstakingly difficult moments of hesitation and deliberation, I said it. “I love you.” The words tumbled out of my mouth, causing my chest to ache--no not my chest, my heart--with terror. I had stopped breathing. Fear is a funny thing isn't it? It brings even the most powerful people down to their knees. Having seen this fear flash in my eyes, her face showed understanding and she spoke, her voice laced with concern, “It’s okay to be scared, to be vulnerable. I know you think you are weak, but giving your heart to someone and trusting they will not break it makes you strong--the strongest person I know.” As I stood there‒-vulnerable and naked, stripped of all protection--my body violently shook, trembled even, with the fear. That’s when my life was given a purpose and reason. It was finally worth living.
Part 2:
Love--it’s a four letter word that brings about so much heartache and pain. There is an eternal struggle in Shakespeare’s question: is it better to have loved and lost than to never have loved at all? The optimists, the naive ones, they will answer the former of course; at least we felt something and lived it. The pessimists, or the realists, will answer the latter. They have been hurt too many times to place their faith in the pipe dream that is love. The intelligent ones will not answer such a question. They know the truth: love is unfair, messy, heartbreaking; but it is spectacular, warm, full of awe. In short, the answer is both. We can only know the true value of love once we have felt it, experienced it, lived through it. It’s a catch-22; once you have fallen in love and had your heart broken, only then can you answer the question, and anyone who has done this knows that all of the pain and agony is worth the fleeting moments of love. Love is worth experiencing even if time and again it is the biggest of our tormentors, the ruiner of our happiness. Because at one point, love did not dare ruin any happiness, it was our happiness.
Part 3:
There is a sense of indifference after you let go of someone who once was your entire life, and you accept the loss. The feeling I’m referring to comes after the grief and after the pain, when you no longer hurt. I suppose it is a feeling of acceptance; all the sadness is gone and you feel empty. Now that you no longer have the person who you handed your heart to, and you no longer feel the need to grieve, what comes next? How does one handle the emptiness? The loss, the heartache, all of it is bearable, but the loneliness, the hole inside your chest--that is the killer. No one tells you that once you survive, you are left unknowing and confused on how to proceed. So I beg the question, what now?
Figure 3
My Death Sentence is Lifelong
By: Abby Dickerson
The day I died was August 24, 2016. The unofficial cause was takotsubo cardiomyopathy and the official cause was a sentence spoken by a man who only cared about statistics.
Two weeks prior the day that I died, I was sick. Weak and tired, it took an effort just to get up or walk. The softness shielding my organs vanished and my bones created sharp angles where there used to be curves. Leggings hung loosely off my body and every shirt I wore seemed to drown me in fabric. My cheeks hollow and my eyes sunken in, I resembled a malnourished zombie. My parents decided to take me to the doctor when I had thrown up and couldn’t swallow. We had hope that the doctor would fix what was happening to me.
The doctor I saw that day was distracted by something. I don’t know by what or why or how, but even I knew there was something not right and I’m just a kid. In retrospect, I had all the classic symptoms of this disease pre diagnosis. Maybe he saw the fact that I was exposed to mono a month before so he paid more attention to my inability to swallow. He drew blood to confirm that I didn’t have mono after barely examining me and sent me home. “You can do a salt water gargle and take cough drops if you want,” was the last thing he said as his foot was already in the door.
A few days after I was misdiagnosed, I had gotten worse. By some dark magic my condition was starting to deteriorate. My head pounded every time I tried to stand, my breath was shallow, rattling around in my chest. Breathless at every movement, merely moving an arm took all of the effort I had. When the phone rang on the morning of August 24, 2016, I was floating in and out of consciousness and struggling to stay alive.
I don’t remember who answered the phone. I remember my mom saying we had to go to the hospital and my dad carrying me to the car. My dad was driving, my mom next to him choking back tears, my brother and I in the backseat.
I was in a wheelchair being pushed through the emergency room by my brother, my mother limping behind us. Things were happening faster than I could process, I had barely wrapped my head around my mother’s cancer diagnosis a month before and now I was the one who would suffer a similarly difficult diagnosis. I don’t remember getting into a bed or how I came to be wearing a excruciatingly bright hospital gown, but now I was staring at the ceiling desperately trying not to look at the swarm of nurses frantically attempting to find veins in my severely dehydrated body that would support an IV. The conversations around me were muffled and distant like I was underwater, everyone above it. I remember feeling a sharp pain in my right hand followed by a rush of cold.
A man in khakis and a black shirt came into my ER room. He was bald and wore glasses, I remember there being a gay pride flag on his ID lanyard which made me warm up to him a little. I think his name was Tom, he was carrying a folder that said “Study Candidates” on it. Any warmth I had for him was gone the instant he spit out my death sentence like it was burning his tongue. The day I died was August 24, 2016. The unofficial cause was a heart so broken not even the most skilled cardiothoracic surgeons could have fixed it. The official cause a sentence spoken by an assistant in a study who didn’t even introduce himself before destroying any hope I had that I would be okay. “So, she has type one diabetes.”
Figure 5
Shattered
By: Graysen Montel
She looked
She looked by could not see
Thhe woman that she used to be
She looked
And saw in sharp shards of glass
Making a mosaic on the cold, laminate floor
A woman that was as broken as the mirror
With a withered ribcage and a fractured frame
Like fragments of a wilted flower
And emotions that fled long ago, like e-- tears that spilled on the floor
Hope and dreams locked away as tightly as -- freedom
She looked
And saw a woman with a sunken face and swollen eyes
A woman desperate and dirty
A woman as -- as the rusted shard clasped in her hand
Isolated and confined
Melted into concrete, disposed into various shadows
Raising the shard like an Olympic torch or a warrior's sword
She looked
But saw no way out
Her only escape was waiting herself out
Figure 1
Dreams and Nightmares
By: Lauren Viola
Dreaming has never been part of my personality; I am a realist, never really allowing myself to dream. However, recently I have permitted my mind to wander, to imagine a new and better world: to dream. In these dreams, there is a young girl whose mother quit smoking, no longer subjecting her children to the shame the smell causes. The scene shifts to a confrontation with her father, he no longer verbally abuses his daughter, he even hugs her. The dream rapidly changes, showing a young girl who is no longer emotionally hurt by her alcoholic mother; the girl is smiling. Another scene depicts her family not losing their home to a foreclosure and the young girl’s worries cease to exist. In these dreams, the young girl is liberated from her anxiety, and the scene brightens as if the sun is just waking up. Her world has not been this colorful since she was a naïve ten-year-old who still believed in magic and miracles. The young girl wakes up to a cloudy morning and to a mother yelling for her disgrace of a child to wake up and get to school. The girl realizes that dreams provide her with a false sense of hope, and she lets her dreams die. Surviving the only way she knows how, she grows an impenetrable skin and becomes a realist. I wish I could say I have dreams, but the truth is I have nightmares.
Figure 6
Falling
By: Abby Dickerson
I did everything in my power not to wake him up. His face was pressed deep into the surface of my right shoulder, his arms hung loosely around my middle. I could feel what he felt; I knew that day had ripped effort and energy from him. So, I did everything in my power not to wake him up.
We met the day after we moved into college. I remember the strain in my arms from carrying my boxes and containers to Dad’s SUV, I remember the pain in my fingers from trying to carry all those boxes, I remember the rainfall of tears that poured out of my eyes watching my family leave with one less person. Meeting him made the tears stop.
We had a homecoming event the night we met. I was rushing, trying to get ready as quickly as possible, sitting in the windowsill sweeping highlighter across my cheeks and combing mascara through my eyelashes. The event was intense for me since I have bad social anxiety. One component of social anxiety is that I. Don’t. Start. Conversations. With. Strangers. Especially not attractive strangers who happen to be adjacent to me on an overcrowded shuttle bus stuffed with chattering college kids. So then why, you ask, did I start a conversation with him?
By the time I was able to push my way onto aforementioned overcrowded shuttle bus, there was only standing room left. A boy sitting right around the middle of the bus caught my eye, and thankfully I was brave enough to cling to the railing in front of him, hoping that I had made my presence known (how could any boy not have noticed a pretty, giggling female basically in their personal space bubble?).
The only part of the conversation between the boy and his friend I remember was hearing him say “eh if he loses an arm he’ll be fine, I’ll just give him my arm.” I don’t know what possessed me in that moment but I turned towards the boys and said “excuse me, oh my god?”
Flash forward 15 minutes and we were deep in a playful argument about whether or not its possible to attach a severed lizard arm to yourself after you cut off your own arm. Flash forward an hour and I’ve nicknamed him Lizard Boy, violently blushing when his name pops up on my phone. Flash forward two weeks and we’re sitting on the bay window in my dorm grasping on to each other for support as we cry-laugh over the dumbest funniest pictures we’ve ever seen. Flash forward a month and we’re slow dancing to my favorite song at 1 in the morning telling each other how happy we are that we met.
It was the same night that he fell asleep on my shoulder that I started grappling with my head and my heart trying to rationalize how quickly we fell. I’ve come to the conclusion that infatuation and lust are to blame (alongside of technology which allowed us to talk to each other for about 7 days straight before we were able to be sitting too close to each other in the lounge on my floor the day we started classes and I could see in his eyes that he had fallen faster and harder than I had).
He fell asleep on my shoulder as I fell in love but, while he was sleeping the only thing on my mind was the backlash I would have to deal with once my family found out I had met a boy, I had let a boy into my room and onto my bed, and I had fallen for a boy I barely knew. So, while there was a thunderstorm of thoughts raging in my head, he was asleep on my shoulder, and I did everything in my power not to wake him up.
Figure 4
Childhood Games
By: Graysen Montel
I remember sitting on the driveway, Using chalk to draw stick figures of my ideal family using vibrant reds, cool blues, and warm yellows while watching the neighbors mow the lawn. The earth he sent a freshly cut grass wafting into our yard fascinated by the rapidly spinning turbine blades I stopped coloring with the grainy chalk and watch them turn like sideways windmills. I remember getting distracted and watching my neighbor mow the lawn going row by row slicing the grass down when my mother and father called me inside. I scrambled up the porch sat in the living room as they spoke to me real seriously with intense eyes filled with fret and fear. They told me how Aidan was sick in the head and had to go away to get better. They told me sending my little brother away was not only for his own good but for my own safety as well. I nod that I understood and as my mom teared up telling me how proud she was of me for understanding that this is best for Aidan at such a young age. I asked where he was going and when and my dad stands up and tells me he’s leaving for the doctor now. But he didn’t tell me where Aidan would be or when he’s coming back. My dad and my mom got in the car right after their talk with me with Aiden in the backseat strapped in place and locked behind a protective barrier like police use. My grandmother watched me when they took him away she was not as graceful or comforting as my parents and not nearly as shy about the reality. She told me that I was old enough to understand what he was wasn’t normal. That he was sick in the head, that something went wrong with the way his brain functions. She said that when he drew pictures of us all dying on the bathroom wallpaper or dismembered a rabbit in the treehouse and put cooking oil the staircase my parents knew he needed help real help not just meds and therapy but he had to be sent away. She said that someday he might get better but he’s dangerous and we have to be careful and that’s why he was sent away was for my safety. I told her I never noticed, but she said that was the thing about people like him they were very good at hiding they were good at pretending to be normal. Days, weeks, and months passed and I missed my little brother. I begged my parents as much as I could every breakfast and every time they tucked me in at night when Aiden would come back. They always said when he was better and I told them that I think he’s been away long enough and I miss him. So they let him come back but only after locks were on the doors, gates were around the house, and all the knives were hidden on the top shelf of the kitchen. But after the first few days of Aidan being back, all of the bad things started happening again. Dead birds with no wings or eyes ended up in his toy box, my mom’s rat poison for the shed somehow ended up in my dads cereal, and the neighbors new puppy went missing. My parents sent him away again to a new facility this time apparently a lot farther away. I remember him screaming and crying as they took him away in the minivan. It was hard to see him leave, and I wondered when he’d come back again. A few more months passed and after much begging and a birthday wish, my parents said he could come back and try again to be good. My grandmother told me that it was their son and that they would never give up on Aidan. But after a few days, again when the fish tank was filled of bleach and a stray cat was drowned in the bathtub, they said he wasn’t normal so they sent him away again. My mom and dad said be a longer while this time. It made me sad to see my brother leave because now I have to be good until he comes back again.
Figure 13