Photo by Lauren Ariel 2024

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  • Trust This

    When I was seventeen, I was on a cross country team for the first (and only, so far) time in my life. I am generally ambivalent about running when I am not being chased, but ended up finding my center in running the course that snaked through the Pennsylvania woods of my high school campus.

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  • 10

    Hiding Places The fingers of the fir treeI named Thomasout in the backyard. A table in the cornerwith a beer and an open tabwatching everyone watchthe people singing in the bright lights. The closet in the laundry roomsmelling my mother’s dresseslistening to footsteps thunder ondown the hallway. A screen showing mesomeone else’s story,as if it

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  • 9

    Ways that Falling in Love Makes You More Creative With Language They challenge youthe way salt water challenges open sores. You work through itthe way a father works through the one weekendhis children are visiting. They are differentthe way life after a lobotomy is different. You learn independencethe way the tiny pink shoe on the sidewalkis

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  • 6

    Why She is Crying When she looks at himshe sees a bright red woundhe does not seem to notice he winceswhenever he speaks he clings to her so tightly that she wonders if she made itdeeperevery time she breathed she cannot breathewithout feeling guilty she is alonewith a wailing childhe cannot see her armsare so

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  • 5

    Thoughts on Silence 1. I remember reading that once you go from observing a conversation to participating in it,half of it is lost to you. The sound of your own voice ripples your vision, warps the picturebefore you. Your thoughts thicken like concrete. Certainty seduces you. You begin to forget how much you did not

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