After I got kicked out of camp, my mom wanted me to learn the ways of Man, so I moved in with my dad.

“Our silver is also called the White Bride, lying on the bed. Together with her husband, the Crimson King, who rises from the coffin, they enter Mary’s bath, in which through primeval Dampness they will conceive a Son, who will surpass his parents in all things. Look, here the Father upon his throne devours his Son and profusely sweats, to which sweat the Ancients had given the term …”

Grete lived in the same multi-story residential building adjacent to the shopping center as Arve but on a different floor. This floor wasn’t serviced by an elevator, so one had to make one’s way up there on foot. For this reason, the local government built a wheelchair ramp specifically for the disabled Grete so she could access her floor.

It was hard to imagine, but many years ago, their mother had been a little girl. That was the first thing Erika said when Amy picked up the phone.

“We shall not cease from exploration / And the end of all our exploring / Will be to arrive where we started / And know the place for the first time,” wrote T.S. Eliot (whose 133rd birthday is this Sunday). If art and education are both explorations, transitioning anew to in-person from online learning is proving to be quite the adventure. Columbia’s campus is now, for many of us, a familiar and unfamiliar place, a landscape that we are in the process of discovering.

I am two things: a prince and a little man. No one believes me when I say that I’m a prince. I notice that because they start grinning or flat out tell me I’m not. One boy asked me where my palace was.

Sally Rooney is back and for sale. Her third novel, Beautiful World, Where are You, came out yesterday at the peak of a marketing campaign that seems to be more focused on distributing swag and “experiences” than getting books into hands. For an author who once said “I am very skeptical of the way in which books are marketed as commodities…almost like accessories which people can fill their homes with,” it is hard not to wonder if Rooney is living through her own personal apocalypse as bright yellow Beautiful World bucket hats are sent out to celebrities for photo ops.

My friend Cassidy has a new boyfriend and I’m very happy for her, because I love to be happy for people. Except, of course, for my enemies, whom I love to hate. I don’t actively tend to these grudges all the time, just once or twice a week, like my houseplants. Just enough to keep them alive. Just enough to burn some calories. I’m not even jealous that she’s sharing her love with someone else because who would want to be the sole recipient of someone’s love anyway? It would be so much work.

Pierre is short, almost squat, with thick ropey legs that remind Mike of a WWE wrestler, one who uses their thighs to choke the shit out of people. Mike is short himself, brushing against 5′3″ when he puts his thick-soled loafers on. Pierre has a raspy-whisper voice, and Mike thinks it’s all those Pall Malls he smokes, one after the other, piling up in his ceramic ashtray on the coffee table. Over dinner, Pierre tells Mike that he used to own lovebirds, but the cigarettes kept killing them, so he decided he better stop. His cats seem to handle it better.

I knew I woke up early since the light outside was lime. Most mornings I slept in till grapefruit. I’d been having nightmares I didn’t want to explain to Angel. Best avoid sleep altogether. I hopped out of my pod, slipped into my robe, and shuffled to the star salon.

After twenty-five years, my mother is having the third dinner date of her life. The first was an Italian man with a motorcycle. Second, an American who gave her a great wedding, dual citizenship, two children, then left her for an American woman. This time it is a Russian man with only one eye.

We went to the track before I went to camp. Every summer I shipped out to a Jewish camp on a lake, had my Jewish friends, my Jewish life, my Jewish girl, Talia. At home, we were unreligious. If anything, we were a little Christian, with the tree in December, the egg hunt in April, the Eggos. We were one of the few Jewish families in town and rather than the scarcity bringing us closer, it brought us a certain spiritual sleepiness. My going to camp every summer was our most Jewish tradition. This would be my last year as counsellor. My mother suggested that I spend some quality time with my brother before I left. I wouldn’t see him for six glorious weeks. I was eager for this reprieve. It was the only time I felt like I got free from myself. I was ready to appease my parents in any way, lest they keep me home. When I asked Alex what he wanted to do, he told me: the track.

In high school, he was one of three linebackers. All three wore good names on their backs. Sword. Seabolt. King. Strong side. Middle. Weak. Being part of a triumvirate meant something to him. They didn’t win all their games but were second in the state of Texas senior year. He got an offer to play in college—a D3 in Kansas, but still.

Chancey learned about the missing neighbor girl from the flyers stuffed in her mailbox. They were written in the kind of English she understood best: basic, with pictures. The girl’s name was Amal; she’d recently turned six; and, in the up-close photo, Chancey made out thick, dark eyelashes that framed enormous brown eyes. She stuck the flyer to her family’s refrigerator.

When there was nothing else they could do and Dad was discharged, I thanked the doctors with a weak handshake. Then I went downstairs to the hospital cafeteria and stuffed my face with two servings of ravioli with tomato sauce. Mom came down a bit later and ordered a coffee, which she stirred with a spoon for what seemed like an eternity. She drank the coffee cold in a single gulp, and while signaling the waiter for the bill, she asked me to take care of the transfer arrangements. She was beyond handling things.

Laura opened the kitchen cupboards and threw pots and pans across the room. She dropped plants into garbage cans. In the living room she pulled drawers and dumped ballpoint pens, electrical cords, and dead batteries onto the floor. She wandered through the rooms examining things, tossing them aside. In the bedroom she opened the closet, where sweaters, T-shirts, pants, skirts, and jeans were packed together on hangers. She tugged at a blouse and all the clothes together flexed toward her and away, as if some great creature, startled to life, had begun to breathe. A shoebox at the corner of the upper shelf caught her attention. Inside, she found the bag.

On January 24, 2021, Word Up Community Bookshop/Librería Comunitaria in Washington Heights hosted an open conversation about the nuts and bolts of translation contract negotiation and the critical importance of finding a community with translators Julia Sanches, and Umair Kazi ’16 (Fiction). Writer, translator, Word Up volunteer and Columbia alumna Daniella Gitlin ’12 (Nonfiction) moderated the event. Kianny Antigua and Dominican Writers Association founder Angela Abreu also participated in the conversation.

We’ve changed. In May, it hadn’t yet happened; in May, we hadn’t come so far. But now we know how we can use the summer: to create good window seats that look out into the garden, which we seldom enter, and then only in rubber boots. And only if we have to reposition the dolls after a night of wind or rain. The largest doll that we could find rests in the hammock. If you look at it through the wrong end of the binoculars, you can deceive yourself well enough. It seems as if a child really is dangling in the net stretched between the red maple (whose leaves are enormous this year of all years!) and the eastern white pine.

To take responsibility for your life is a middle class concept, I said to Kristina, who was grimly eating a box of Cheez-Its with her arm in a sling and trying to convince me not to go over to KJ’s apartment again.

You shouldn’t be here, but inside your head you’ve already escaped, that’s what you tell the other inmates, but they just snicker like they’ve heard that before, so you tell the concrete wall that the cops arrested the wrong girl and you just happened to be at the same party, a little fucked up but basically in control, dancing to Common in the living room while your two best friends made out with the Brezinsky twins from Saginaw who love no one, not even themselves, but you’re no gangbanger, you don’t even know how to shoot a gun, you don’t trust them because guns make efficient divorces, they kidnapped your papa and made a Christian lunatic out of your mama, in fact, if the police did their fucking research, they’d know you abhor guns and the idiots who use them to feel in control against the criminal world inside their own heads