by Mariana Meriles I start my day with coffee. Black. And if anyone has ever told you that they genuinely enjoy the taste of black coffee, let me be the first to say: they’re lying. Or the coffee has burned off their taste buds. Still, I don’t think I’ve put any milk or sugar in … Continue reading
Category Archives: Zooming Out
Notes From 3rd Grade
by Tilda Wilson This morning, after 20 minutes on hold, I spoke to a woman in the Cornell financial aid office named Karen. Had she used a different name, our conversation would not have felt so much like a foregone conclusion. A ‘Susan’ or even a ‘Sharon’ might have lulled me into wistful imaginings of … Continue reading
Unmasking My Identity
by Bex Pendrak I sat nervously on my porch, staring out across the backyard at the line of trees shielding my house from the rest of Ithaca. What if I had made a mistake, if my impulsive decision would lead to months of regret? My legs began to bounce in a futile attempt to release … Continue reading
As We Move Into the Evening Hours: thoughts on classic blue
By Stephanie Tom When we talk about targeted advertisement, we usually talk about college students being consistently barraged with YouTube ads for Grammarly and Chegg. Or parents of young children being assaulted with ads for Disney+. Or Americans with McDonalds. But we never talk about Pantone, which is why, when they dropped their announcement for … Continue reading
The Marvelous and Indestructible Water Bear
By Zahavah Rojer All across the world, there are invisible immortals. Tardigrades, also known as Water Bears or Moss Piglets, are a phylum of plump, microscopic invertebrates that live pretty much anywhere and everywhere on earth. They eat plants or other microanimals, have four pairs of stubby legs, and can reproduce asexually, sort of like … Continue reading
Life Frozen in Time
By Jamie Anderluh We think of glacial water as iridescent, turquoise, glassy. In reality, it’s often thick and cloudy and filled with sediment. They call it glacial milk. It carves. It unfolds into rivers and lakes. It carries the weight of its age–all of the stories, the afterthoughts, the warming. Glaciers are translucent, with breathing … Continue reading
Quick Little Story About Me Falling in Love
By Evelyn Kennedy Jaffe He’s lying next to me and my chin is resting on his shoulder when I have the urge to tell him that he has pretty eyes—and he does, they’re rich brown and I want to keep looking at them for as long as physically possible—but something makes me pause. A familiar … Continue reading
Memories of Something Calm and Constant
By Emma Goldenthal For most of every year, the ocean exists only for me in photos, memories, and scattered conversations. Yet in all the strangeness of these past weeks, I have found myself paying early visits to the Westerly beaches I grew up alongside. They feel exactly the same, yet also different, distant. The sand … Continue reading
Crater Lake
By Eve Hallock To be distant and vast is to be blue Just like sadness and distance, there are infinite shades of blue, and they can change in an instant in relation to surrounding factors. Clouds, rain, steps forward or backward, time, light, emotion, and connection all affect your perception of blue. When I first … Continue reading