by Elaina Bayard 

courting

I spent my summer in the big city, the Big Apple, New York. (Imagine I’m saying it in the accent.) And it was, indeed, big. Very big. Overwhelmingly big, in the best way. Unfortunately, I didn’t know many people who were there that summer. Some acquaintances, some friends from class, but none of my partners in crime from Providence, the people who expect me to throw rocks at their window and drag them away from homework without warning.

So I took myself on solo dates. I didn’t want to spend my precious free time lingering in that tiny Brooklyn apartment. It’s a little scary, I will admit, asking for a table for one or sitting alone in a theater while everyone sits around you, chit-chatting, waiting for the show to start. But somehow, my little budding romance survived. Me, myself, and I made it to a second date, and then a third, and then a fourth. I treated myself to free museum nights and wine bars and student-discounted plays.

Now, keep this to yourself, but I think I’m going to try and keep this relationship going. Don’t tell her about it yet; I’m a little shy. But there are lots of places in Providence I’ve been meaning to check out, and I have a feeling she’ll want to come along.

by Sasha Gordon

running out of runway 

Around the age of five, I began to believe that grown-ups could read minds. I would agonize over this issue frequently, unable to let it rest for fear that I was right. Maybe they’re just really good at keeping it a secret, I’d think. The chances were slim, sure, but any chance greater than zero meant I was at risk of psychic penetration. I didn’t concern myself with the mechanics of the process. And I still don’t—it’s never been about that. But I really believed this to be the truth, my conviction such that I would “think mathy thoughts” even when I didn’t understand the assignment so that at least my teacher would think I was on track. I’d try not to think about white lies I’d told or naughty things I was doing, lest they be read straight from my brain by a disapproving authority. 

As part of this belief system though, I imagined that at some point I, too, would learn to read minds. It was just a matter of time until I hit the magic birthday that would unlock the “real” world. You’d think that I’d either manage to set this quandary aside or finally disprove it at some point in my teenage years, but it truly only happened this summer. I’d waited expectantly for years. I remember thinking that my 10th birthday would be the magic one, and then my 13th, 16th, and yes reader, even 18th. 

But they all went by, and I still can’t read minds. And I now have no more milestones of that nature to reach. I’ve turned twenty, already long in double digits, and I’ve run out of stakes to lay this claim on. My 30th birthday feels too arbitrary to be the one.

So though I still have no concrete proof that there isn’t a magic age after which the mind becomes legible, I’m laying it to rest. I’ve run out of mind-reading runway. I’m a summer baby, and this summer I learned that there is no golden moment to wait for. I just get to make up something else now. 

P.S. PLEASE tell me if you can read minds before this goes out. I’ll be so embarrassed. 

by Chloe Costa Baker

growing like a breeze

One of the most peculiar things about turning into a peach is the way you still view your flesh with a fruit-gatherer’s gaze. After hours inspecting those buoys in the branches for discoloration, insect bites, scratches, bruises, sun damage, or blemishes of any kind, you cast your field of appraisal upon the two single-creased bundles below. Or at least their surface. Decently fuzzy, with a protective coating of soft fur, but oh dear, certainly some insect damage, and even a few patches where the skin has broken. And you need a mirror to check for signs that the pit is still symmetrical, the seed intact.

Around the dining table one night, we sing “Take Me Home, Country Roads”—it’s one of those English songs that everyone inexplicably knows. While the rest of us pull up the lyrics on Google, our Japanese host intones every word from memory, unmistaken and by heart. 

I get emotional over staggered cascades of goodbyes. As a parting gift, they present me with a peach of my very own, the size of my two hands cupped together and arched at the fingertips. At my changeover in Kyoto Station, sixteen stories up, I consume the memory, tanned skin and white flesh and deep red core. Near the pit a tang of sour maroon, then the hard center is pulsing in my hand, blood and viscera cooling on my lips and running down my forearms. The opposite of cannibalism can be grief.

At the next farm, I will hold a sanshō peppercorn buzzing on my tongue for nearly ten minutes. I will be awkward and uncomfortable among new living quarters and people and routines until they become a home, a perfectly predictable process that my stubborn body never remembers. On my next-to-last night, I will stay up talking with the new worker from the Netherlands, who will remind me to look at the stars.

I still keep the hard pit, and the soft seed within. It is a reminder about change. The unfamiliar morphs into something I can’t help but sink my teeth into, and lick the grooves clean.

by Hallel Abrams Gerber 

scheduling space

my musings on the “1” bus

This summer, riding back and forth on RIPTA, I learned how possible it was to lead my own schedule. This sounds a little ridiculous—almost everyone I know has a colorfully packed Google Calendar, myself included. The idea of making plans, accomplishing goals, and having autonomy is what college is all about. But I spent all of my spring—and much of June—apologizing for always being late, having packed too many commitments on top of each other. I sat with friends at lunch, only to think about the next commitment I was running toward.

But my schedule became more flexible, and I found myself spending more time with nowhere to go and no one to see. I spent a lot of that time wandering around. I learned that, without a car, I could get to Wildflour and back in twenty minutes. I became familiar with my favorite parts of India Point Park, something I had been wanting to do for years. I finally went to Symposium Books. At the same time, I found myself actually developing a schedule that worked for me, asking people to meet at the time that actually worked, even if that was half an hour later than they asked. People, to my surprise, always said yes. I didn’t realize that was something I could actually do.

The school year is starting, and I can already see myself getting frantic and busy and booked. I don’t think there is any avoiding that. But I am still listening to what I want and taking that time alone. We’ll see how long that lasts. At the very least, I’m trying to remember that I am an active figure in my own plans, who can express wants, needs, and limits (while knowing every therapist and mentor in my life has been urging for this for years).

by Gabrielle Yuan

slow moves

I don’t claim to be a perfectionist, but the tendencies are there. I spent the majority of my summer in Hartford, CT, and while not the most glamorous city in which to spend three months, it was one worth the growing pains. 

Within the corporate sphere, repetition of any kind of task was the norm. Presentations were drafted countless times as I was sent back to my cubicle to fix the smallest details—all the way to reconfiguring corporate colors in some miscellaneous slides. Inevitably, my frustrations grew, but, I realized later on—not from the task itself, but the unfamiliarity of it—that maybe I’d been avoiding. What I noted after this rhythm of assignments was that the impatience eventually dissipated. The growing weight of wanting to move onto the next task, just to mark it off of the mounting to-do list, fizzled. I realized my inflamed desire to complete, to finish, to move on, could be temporary. While my patience expanded, my desire to slow down grew too, to feel the process, to listen, to implement. 

Not even two weeks back, these changes have persisted. I allow myself to walk slower from south to north campus, no longer finding shortcuts just to shave three minutes off of my walk home. After moving into my first apartment, I’ve had to reorder and rearrange plenty. I no longer feel an acute awareness of being meticulous, but can move my too-heavy bedframe inch by inch while taking plenty of bed breaks in between. Perhaps the source is more communication with myself, the removal of blame and buildup. I have learned, and more importantly accepted, that promising results often come after more than one attempt. 

by Tarini Malhotra 

cobblestones

A brief cobbled road, jutting out of concrete—glistening in sunlight, unmistakably out of place in an ultra-modern medical complex—led to the path I took to work every day this summer. One of my favorite memories with my high school best friend was stumbling around in our six-inch heels on the cobbled path from the beach during our senior trip, tipsy with whimsy and whispered secrets and promises for the future. I should probably call her. We’re both real and proper adults now; I learned to live independently, truly alone, for the first time this May–July. 

My days were filled with taking the T, helpless before the green line. They were redolent with the shared glee of coworkers discovering that our highly-funded lab had been using the same sheet of black paper to visualize brain sections swimming around in solution for years and were inexplicably attached to it. They were full of “corporate-slop” lunches, PIs mourning their emotional support World Cup teams when they lost a game, and little trips every weekend because New England summer can be really charming, and it was my first time experiencing it. 

As I reflect on summer now, I am reminded of the little moments pebbling the journey: an elderly couple watching France vs. Norway with us on a laptop in the Tatte near Boston Common, little sleepovers with friends in grown-up apartments, and getting woefully lost in Fenway with a local who should have known better. I claim that it was a productive girlboss summer, but more than that, it was an experiment in being an adult. After all, if you put me in six-inch heels now, I’d probably still stumble over cobbled streets. The only difference is that this time I’d be stumbling back to a home I created for myself.