The Breath of Summer
I took a breath as I stepped out into the light. A familiar scent of dust covered asphalt gently baking like a sheet of homemade cookies in an oven brushed by me as I began to exhale. The subtle scent would sit on the tip of my nostrils as I walked to my car that was strategically parked under the eve of a nearby building’s roof. I felt a heaviness in the air as I sifted through the barely noticeable light summer breeze. It was undoubtedly warm outside, and the thermometer I saw, after I finally climbed into my car and turned on the engine, indicated that it was steadily growing warmer. (more…)
Anonymity In Art: Novel House
There’s an abandoned house tired with cracks that reveal its age. It is wearing thin of its drywall, and the structure seems to degrade and crumble right before the eyes of onlookers. It’s abandoned—but full. The white walls filled to the brim with large black letters, characters and shapes that have been strung together into a novel. The Chongqing Novel House in China draws hundreds of wanderers to the house that has itself become a story.
Scrawled on the walls by an anonymous hand is a tale of adventure and heroism. As you move within the house, you see diagrams and images which correlate along with the themes and the messages within the story, and by the house’s end, you’re left wondering, why? (more…)
I Nearly Killed You
I almost ran you over—but I didn’t. It wasn’t you, but the person who was walking across the street in that strange way that you used to walk looked just like you.
I only had a moment to look at that person’s face as I quickly rounded the street corner in my car extremely late for work. That person had no idea what thoughts ran through my mind.
That person was oblivious to how close I was hitting them. They looked back to me just as I looked back at them through my rear-view mirror, and all I could think in that swift glance was that I almost ran you over—but I didn’t. (more…)
Timelessness
I had a read a text riddled with anxiety and worry. The words pushed for a more detailed answer and begged for better news. “We have plenty of time,” I texted my best friend, “the wedding is months away.”
My friend quickly typed back as if to shake me back into reality from a distance. “Yeah, but it’s already May.”
May? What had happened to the rest of the year? One moment I was thinking about the end of February, and within the next blink of an eye it was the end of May. I had so many other things that I had planned to do by the end of the year, and the world was already spinning into the second half of the calendar. (more…)
The Digital Footprint You Leave Behind
When I was a child, I became obsessed with the idea of leaving behind a piece of my life after my death. I thought seriously about time capsules, taking ample amounts of photographs, and recording the major events of life while I was alive from my own perspective.
Too many trips to the library and a newfound love of pushing my nose into the insides of the “Dear America” books had made me believe that I could be like one of the lead fictional characters of those books who detailed incredible events that occurred throughout the course of history from their own viewpoint. And it was at the age of eleven that I had begun writing in a diary.
One of the first events that I recorded in my diary after receiving the blank wide-ruled diary with an obnoxiously bright blue fuzzy cover came just after the two World Trade Center Towers were struck by planes in a terrorist attack. I felt, in that moment of jotting down my thoughts and feels on 9/11, that my decision to keep a diary like the fictional children in the book series that I had come to love was the right choice. How else was I going to look back on the important times in my life?
Then came the birth of social networking and blogging. (more…)
