Category: Essay
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Attic
All day I have been hearing jazz faintly playing in my room. It does not seep through the wall nor does it rise from the chambers below. The riffs are generated within my mind. My ears glimpse phantom sound waves—unseen, invisible. Their nonexistence will startle me any longer. For I am a music box of…
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Penned Out
Ideas, once inked in permanence, are now buried beneath an ever-growing, pixelated timeline. (Is it so much different than having them closed between bound pages and set up on rarely visited bookshelf, the stacks in the library surrounded by thin carpet tread upon no longer?) They are suffering silent agony in the bottom of a…
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Radical Writing Mantra
Plunge beyond the blue yonder. Sail high. Shoot visible tingles out of your fingernails. Explain an event. Order disorder. Keep the details to a minimum. Do not provide a frozen description or a still life. Provide action. Zoom in while walking backward. Invent the compression shot on paper. Purger thyself.
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Askers and Tellers
A thought on verbal conversation. It is a noticeable aspect in conversation that when one party offers a piece of information the other party will either respond with an inquisition about said tidbit of personal data or reply with tangential information from their own experience. Reflection on exchanges where one type of response outweighs the…
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Depressive Tempests
“The madness of depression is, generally speaking, the antithesis of violence. It is a storm indeed, but a storm of murk.” – William Styron, Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness It is never so simple to say, “listen here, this is an exact depiction of mental illness,” as is it not simply the case in…
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Sixth Floor Paradise
After ascending a slew of concrete stairs, you reach this door. Throw your shoulder into it or else you won’t get it open. Once you do, though, you step through this threshold that separates the desolation of the staircase column from a plateau of peacefulness. You could turn to the right and trot into the…
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You Better Run
When you go for long runs, moments become monumental. After a while, you finally hit that temperature when the pores on the crown of your head open like infants’ eyes, oozing the byproduct of your stamping feet’s toil. Their opening is the moment you desire from the time you take your first stride. Hammering the…
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Stigmas, Silence, and Schooling
After almost nine years, I still cannot get a clear sense of what happened during the months that followed my high school graduation. The diagnosis that has become a descriptor of my identity fogs up the lenses of self-retrospection. Concepts like failure, accomplishment, becoming well-adjusted, figuring out the next steps in life, getting knocked down…
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The Pebble Drop
I am bipolar. Not like in the slang sense of the word. Not like just on bad days. Not like how people describe random eruptions of anger. Not like what you hear in that Katy Perry song. I have credentials. After I got my diagnosis, my father used to explain having a mental illness as…
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Icy Wind
Reader, I wrote this a little over 10 years ago. I was in my junior year of high school. Reading it now makes me smile, cringe, laugh, and wonder – simultaneously. I know it was only ever shared with one other person, who was also from “this little town in this little state,” so now,…
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The Life Age Declares Us
Now I sit among those who return my loud smile. They rest gazes upon me, swirling their eyes around my head, which remains fixed in the stationary center of the circle. Back in the sub-cultural social geometric shape I’d run away from a year before. Once again a part of the clan. Whatever threads hold…
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Story-telling Self-talk, or Overcoming the Nothings
There is this story in my mind and there it seems fated to remain. I cannot determine whether that’s because I read too much or if I do not write enough. Or do not talk enough. Or do not feel enough. There are these stories in my mind. Some might call them memories. Unreliable, jumbled,…
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Romantically-Inclined Commuters
Public transportation, while physically wall-less and barrier-free, will agonize one’s sense of stability within their social world. To experience this sensation to the fullest extent, it is recommended for one to use public transportation at least twice a day and a minimum of five days a week. Travel alone for maximum observation time and tend…
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Ride the Clouds, A Eulogy
You’re not haunting me, you’re reminding me to breath fresh life into my days. The sadness vines itself into a ball in my chest when I think about the man he would be today. I want to call him up, ask him what he’s been getting into lately, plan a trip to the mountains. I…
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A Quick Introduction
It was recently suggested that I begin blogging. Two of my closest friends used to josh by saying that they had me pegged as one who would have a blog, which had not been the case until now. So here I am, typing for whomever to see. I used to be an avid writer of…
Sophisticating the Rudimentary 