Category: Uncategorized
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Balancing Act
The steel girder juts out high above the ravine, like a tightrope suspended between mountains. The river carves an ancient path beneath the bridge, aided by the snowmelt from our unusually mild winter. February’s sky is sleepy and thick, and its matte gray surface appears to swallow any ray of sunlight. My best friend is…
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Writing Prompt: High School Days
This piece is from a creative writing prompt exploring the chaotic feelings from one’s high school days. We were just kids, scared to death of our own shadows and unsure of who actually controlled them. We cast them against walls, projections of what we hoped others would see. We claimed them as ours, but the…
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The Green Spark of Envy
The green spark of envy—a feeling I despise but can’t seem to shake. It arrives when I encounter another’s work leaping from the page like some lyrical sculpture. I want their cogency, their craftwork, and every damn bit of their patience. My jealousy, my envy—I want it gone. Bury it deep below the foreign sands…
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Edging Closer to Nature
When was the last time you watched the celestial brilliance of a starry night? Or the last time you witnessed clouds peeling apart like curtains in a theater? Have you sat and watched the moon recently? Or have you taken a walk through the woods? I’m home for the holidays in Northeast Pennsylvania, and like…
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Comfort and Fear
I spend much of my time wondering what constitutes the “right” way to live. I ask myself what counts as wasting my time and what metrics, if any, matter in life’s measurements. To clarify, the “right way to live” should obviously feel subjective, and it’d be shortsighted and egotistical to suppose a universal approach. But…
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Bhutan — Part 2
I’m alive here. Mountain air rushes through the caverns and folds of my chest with each inhale. The pinch in my upper back has finally released and it feels like I’ve stolen the shoulders of a younger man. My mind is light, as if the strings of attachment have been snipped from the world’s yanking…
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Morning in Kathmandu
It’s 2:44 a.m., and shifting my weight from shoulder to shoulder refuses to lull me back to sleep. Jet lag has shut the doors to my dreams, telling me it is time to stand and face the day. I’ve collected fragments of sleep en route to Kathmandu from Denver—dozing off somewhere over Greenland, and once…
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Live Now, Live Today
On the morning of October 30th, 1995, 13-year-old Mark Vetsey of Arrowhead Lakes, Pennsylvania, reached for a shotgun stashed below his father’s bed. It was late autumn, and most of the red and yellow leaves from the nearby beech and oak trees blanketed the forest floor. The wind was crisp with decay, and as the…
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Reflections
It’s been two weeks to the day since I returned to U.S. soil, and already, I find myself reaching for memories that are starting to fade. Faces and names from Morocco and Algeria are slipping through my fingers like grains of sand. Three months ago, their voices filled my days as hospitable hosts and partners…
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Conversations with Walid
Note: This short piece sidesteps the chronology of my present journey and profiles a Moroccan man I met two and a half months ago at the start of the trip. We are all broken records to some degree. We hitch our carts to ideas we identify with and repeat them to each other, ad nauseum.…