Non-Fiction

Summer means different things to people. For some, it means that school is over—giving way to the indulgence of tantalizing s’mores eaten around a campfire on a warm, starry night. For others, it means spending more time with loved ones through family vacations and Fourth of July barbecues. For me, it means all of the above and so much more.

One of the most memorable aspects of my summers was floating paper boats with my brother. Near my house, there was a pristine and clear river with numerous, jagged rocks jutting out of the water and oak trees adorning the sides of the river. I remember bringing stacks of notebook paper with us every summer, which my brother and I folded into paper boats. I always colored my paper boats with a dark blue crayon while my brother colored his with a bright yellow crayon. Afterward, we would set the boats afloat on the river and watch them flow slowly along the stream, seeing which boat would go the farthest. After a few minutes, the boats would always get stuck on a protruding branch or rock. Back then, I always wondered why my boat could never avoid all of the obstacles and reach the end of the river, which led to a large, turquoise-colored lake. Over the many summers that I went to that same river, not once did my boat ever reach the lake without getting stuck at some point along its voyage.

Now, when I think of my boat getting stuck in front of a rock or a fallen tree branch, I cannot help but compare life to those paper boats that were floating along the river. Like a paper boat, people face numerous, different obstacles at some point in their lives. Some obstacles are small, like the rocks that were barely breaking the water’s surface. Other obstacles are big, like the thick branches that manipulated the river current. Like the paper boat, I have had plenty of small rocks blocking me, but I have only had one branch stand in my way: celiac disease.

Celiac disease caused intestinal damage every time I ate gluten, which prevented nutrients from being absorbed properly. I was diagnosed with celiac after the Thanksgiving break in my junior year. Before knowing I had celiac, I felt as if there was an invisible, unyielding tree branch that I was constantly pushing against. It drained my energy and incited headaches and stomach aches throughout my sophomore year and a quarter of my junior year. It became so difficult to concentrate during my classes that I stopped taking notes and resorted to merely listening to the lectures in my classes. I kept feeling as if there was something hindering me—blocking me from my full potential—but I did not know what it was.

There had to be a reason why I felt too tired to play my favorite sports, such as soccer, and had severe headaches that discouraged me from reading my favorite novels. The only remedies that helped me cope with this were to get nine hours of sleep and maintain an optimistic outlook. Fortunately, after my diagnosis and adhering to a strict gluten-free diet, I saw the tree branch for the first time and watched it become completely submerged under the relentless river current. Like a boat being liberated from the grasp of a branch or rock, I was able to flow freely, but I was still far behind the other boats.

In order to catch up to the other boats, I had to toss overboard some of my most prized possessions—Speech/Debate and Men’s Chorus. My gastroenterology doctor recommended that I utilize senior year to recuperate, as my immune system was drastically weakened. Thus, after this year, I believe I will be caught up with the other boats as we diverge into different paths towards our respective colleges.

 

 

Shivam Patel is a freshman at the University of Southern California and attends as a Presidential Scholar. He graduated from La Cañada High School in 2018. He has interned at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, worked as a courtesy clerk at Sprouts, and volunteered at USC Keck hospital for four years. He is a celiac disease student ambassador, and was in choir and on the speech and debate team at his high school.

The first memory I have with the concept of fasting, was when I was younger, maybe three or four. During the month of Ramadan, my parents woke to eat sehri at three in the morning and refrained from eating or drinking anything until eight pm. They crept out of their bedroom and into our small kitchen like clumsy thieves in their own home. Drowsily, I would wake to the sound of their quiet, almost non-existent whispers. In a state between awake and asleep, I would follow the sounds of their voices to the end of the carpeted balcony overlooking our uncharacteristically tidy living room. I watched them from the balcony with my head pressed between the old fashioned wooden rails. My sister discovered my parent’s ritual before I did; she would routinely watch them. I would locate her in the dark with her legs dangling off the side of the balcony and her chubby fingers tightly gripping the rails that prevented her from falling. We watched them together: me rubbing my eyes in a struggle to stay awake, and her with an unblinking gaze directed toward the soft light in the kitchen.

On a typical night, my mother would always enter first, turning on only the most necessary light as we heard the pop of the fridge opening. She’d turn on the stove and pause to yawn as it slowly came to life. My father would trudge into the kitchen next, his footsteps dragging on the carpet as he headed directly for the coffee. My mother always made eggs. She prepared them in different ways in hopes of not boring herself into eating nothing. The smell of egg would reach us on the stairs causing my nose to wrinkle and a gagging feeling to go up in my throat. I choked it down not wanting to alert our parents of our eavesdropping on their meal. My mother never toasted herb bread for fear that the toaster “bing” would wake us up, but she stopped when she discovered my sister’s legs peeking out from the end of the balcony. After that she never bothered to keep it quiet as she cooked, casually banging the cupboard drawers and noisily washing her frying pan.

My father preferred one cup of water filled to the brim or a cup of coffee now and then. He would bring it to his perch on our then new couch and sip it quietly. They ate in almost silence, but on occasion, my father would make my mother sputter out in laughter the way he always does. When it came close to sunrise, my mother took her coffee cup and sat beside my father on the couch. They watched the clock and calmly took their last sips. After the time for eating ended, they sat there for awhile. My mother looking off into space; my father with his arm stretched, drumming his fingers on the stain free couch. Slowly they crept back into their room whispering for us to do the same. This meal fascinated me. It seemed so different from what my dining experiences had been. They always ended with me content and eager for the next meal.

It seemed daunting to fast from sunrise to sunset. It wasn’t until I had reached the age of eleven that I realized the power of food. When I fasted my first day, the hunger I felt tore through me, and I took deep breaths to avoid thinking of my favorite food. Walking beside my mother in the grocery store, I felt hungry for the strangest things: lime soda, pastrami on seed buns, grape popsicles, chocolate rice crispy treats. I could feel the texture of them in my mouth, and walking past them was almost impossible.

When it came close to sunset, I sat at the kitchen table watching my mother place steaming plates of food on the table. I sat on my hands, for I didn’t trust them to obey the determination of my mind. Instead, I pictured myself piling up all my mother’s hot dishes and eating helping after helping (she always made the best food when she was fasting). However, when the water hit my throat, I knew I wouldn’t need it. I drank that first glass of water within seconds, my only goal being to quench my thirst. The second glass of water I took my time to feel the taste of it as it slipped from the cup and into my awaiting mouth.

At the first bite of food, the wave of fatigue floating around me instantly disappeared. I no longer felt like slumping down into my seat. I ate my meal taking in every flavor, the carefully seasoned chicken, the luxuries in the thick crust of bread. The simplest meals were the grandest; spaghetti and meatballs turned from boring to an adventure of silky noodles and chunky, rich meatballs. Never have I ever appreciated marinara sauce more in my life. The delectable treasures of dessert in all its glory. Thick cake that melts in your mouth, the chocolate frosting oozing along the side.

On the evenings we joined my grandmother to break fast, I would eagerly bounce in my seat as she served us. Mountains and mountains of rice mixed with meat and spices and vegetables. Hot garlic bread crowded the table as did several jars of spices, a tomato dish concoction, butter chicken, and as always my mother’s favorite okra cooked indian style with every flavor. The entire meal was nothing short of heaven.

You have never tasted food until you have tasted the food after a hard fast. To realize this is to recognize how the simplest of food tastes to the majority of the world. My parents knew, that’s why they woke at three, and fasted till eight, they knew it was worth their hunger to experience the hardships of other people. That’s why my mother never made a lavish breakfast but rather a simple egg. It’s why my father drank only his cup of water. It’s why I now know that to start my fast I’ll only need a simple egg or a cup of water. The meal before the fast was not the one I was most excited to eat when fasting. But something about it was so fascinating years ago on that carpeted balcony.

 

Kiran is a fifteen-year-old aspiring writer and self-proclaimed history nerd who enjoys reading, babysitting, and annoying her little sister. She is also passionate about gun control and pursuing her dream of living on the beach.

Many children dream of the novelty of pulling over on the highway and standing on that specific point that would enable them to have their two feet in two different states. There is a certain exhilaration that comes with conquering the phenomenon of physically being in multiple places at once. While many people have experienced having one foot in two places at the same time, the vast majority of the world population has never had this opportunity before, and the very concept of being in two places at the same time may come hard to wrap one’s head around. All my life, I have had one foot in two different places, one foot in touch with my American upbringing, and the other in touch with my Chinese heritage.

I grew up in Hong Kong. I went to a local, Cantonese-speaking school for pre-school, and it was clear, given my home background, that I was dissimilar to the other kids. There was one other girl with light brown hair and hazel eyes, a British father and a Chinese mother. We bonded over the fact that we were the only ones who spoke English as a first language, and while we both were the receptors of funny looks, I was the one that the looks were more directed at because of my pitch-black hair and darker-than-hazel eyes.

I moved to an international school from kindergarten to grade ten, and everyone there was just like me: Chinese people speaking English. This was my bubble, my safe place, my home. I was on the inside, those who were different from me, were on the outside. Anywhere outside of those school walls, I became the odd one out.

This was always hard for me. Whenever I would take taxis, I would say my address in Chinese, and they would make some snide comment under their breath about my tones being off. When I would yell for the minibus driver to let me off, the whole bus would turn and look at the Chinese girl who spoke broken Chinese. Even our family friends would prod me to speak Chinese to tease me for my American accent. Whenever my mom would take me to get my hair cut, the hairdressers would talk to me in Chinese, and I would act like a clueless English-speaker because I was embarrassed by my American accent. I could understand them when they expressed their disapproval to my mom for my inability to speak Chinese.

Last year, I took an internship at a nonprofit, English organization that strived to teach English to local kids. It was to my surprise that everyone in the office spoke Chinese with one another, and again, all eyes were on me. I became friends with the other interns, though much of our friendship was built upon finding humor in my “foreign Chinese.” Although I found a way to laugh it off, I always felt excluded and emotionally looked down upon when they all spoke in extremely fast Chinese with each other at the lunch table, and I could not keep up. I felt belittled when my boss spoke Chinese to me, and another intern had to translate for me. The shock in their eyes when I opened my mouth and spoke English only emphasized the piercing words that came out of their mouths, telling me that I was “not Chinese enough.”

There is great emphasis placed on grades in Chinese culture. At home, I was told that I didn’t care enough about grades, and it was in fact, everyone’s obsession with comparing their grades to mine that made me want to leave my old school.Because my mixed ethnicity had always been “the norm” and embraced at my international school in Hong Kong, I came to the US with the hope that my American-ness would be ever so slightly more embraced, that my apparent lack of care towards my grades (in Hong Kong) would be okay.

When I came to Proctor, I was told that I cared about grades too much. In part, it was that I unexpectedly felt that the expectations were higher for me because I was Asian, and I have always been one to conform to meet expectations. I was afraid that if my grades weren’t at the top of the class, that I was somehow a disappointment to Chinese culture. I felt that as a minority, it was my duty to represent my country and make Hong Kong proud. At the same time, people were surprised by how “non-Chinese” I was, with an American name, American accent, and traditions to celebrate American holidays. My mere ability to speak English came as a surprise to many whom I met.

When I was fourteen, I had my first full immersion in a gymnastics camp in Pennsylvania. I was the only Asian there. The girls were taken aback when they found out they I knew how to use a fork, that I could see when I smiled, that I had eaten ice cream, that I had never eaten dog (and in fact owned a dog that I love very much), that I wasn’t a kung fu prodigy, and that I wasn’t an A+ student in math. My last name “Ho” was the ongoing joke of the cabin for two weeks. This was the first time I was asked what my real, Chinese name was. They did not believe me when I told them that Lauren was my real name. Most of the other girls caught on, but for the sake of the ones who didn’t, I told them my name was Ping Ping Ding Ho, and so I was for the rest of the camp. I can laugh about it most of the time, but when it comes down to it, sitting in the dining hall with my friends at dinnertime and hearing them talk about American shows they watched as children still does make me feel excluded as the Chinese person.

When I tried to mask my Chinese side and “be more American,” it raised eyebrows. With my dark hair and eyes, I could never be “American enough.” When I tried to embrace my Chinese side, it still raised eyebrows. With my American accent, name, and mindset, I was also considered “not Chinese enough.” I could never be accepted as fully American because of the way I looked, but I could never be fully Chinese because of the way I was raised. Much of my life, I have had the blessing of being able to be in two places at once. The trouble is that my two feet are welded down to their respective sides and no matter how hard I try, I will never be able to be in one place fully. This made my identity frustration hard for people to understand because it’s hard to wrap your head around unless you’ve experienced it.

One day, someone told me I was not a “real Chinese.” Given the persisting struggle of finding myself that I was already facing, this comment stung and made me question my identity like I never had before. Looking in the mirror, I didn’t see a Chinese girl or an American girl. I didn’t know who I saw. It hurt because I knew the comments at lunch or dinner tables weren’t intended as attacks. It hurt because they believed that I was not like them. Suddenly, I didn’t have my two feet on either side of the border; I was floating somewhere in the middle, alone.

In its twisted way, sharing commonalities with more than one group of people made me different. People tried to tell me that being multicultural was a gift, that it made me more worldly. However, how could they understand the curse in this blessing if they had never lived it? I grew angry, sad, frustrated, and lonely. I would look at this angry, sad, frustrated, and lonely girl in the mirror, and the emotions would only amplify themselves. I started to withdraw more and more, isolating myself to hide from the embarrassment I felt by the eyes that were following me, as the American in Asia, and as the Asian in America.

The last few months have been the peak of my battle with my identity, and as I reach the falling action of my narrative, I am starting to see the resolution, the light at the end of the tunnel. But I’m not there yet.

Sometimes I try to focus on the perks of being multicultural. While I may not always feel like I belong or like I am included, being multicultural has given me opportunities to pursue things that I want to pursue. I have been lucky enough to have the chance to teach Mandarin to a group of local kids at Andover Elementary School. While this does help, I am in the process of learning a much more important lesson. Who is on the outside and inside is a notion created within our subconscious intelligence, because really we all just exist in this space. We all just exist in this beautiful, magical, wonderful world.

Looking in the mirror, I don’t see a Chinese or an American girl, I just see me. I see me, constructed and built from all the treasures of a Chinese culture intertwined with the riches of an American upbringing. I see me, shaped by the memories, loved ones, struggles, and joys. The fact is that this blessing in disguise will always keep me from being fully and wholly a part of one group, but getting to live this surreal phenomenon of being in two places at once is a truly beautiful thing.

 

 

Lauren has just graduated from Proctor Academy in New Hampshire and is headed to Middlebury College in the fall. However, she was born and raised in Hong Kong. She has always loved writing from a young age, particularly discovering new words that help her find beauty in her day-to-day life.

There is a field ahead of me, stretched wide, colored brightly, bedecked with flowers. I run, frenetic, fervent, towards this glamorous carpet, this bountiful gold mine, searching, yanking cornflowers from stems, azure petals falling, torn violently, dust on my clothes, petals in my hair. I have not found it yet.

There is a vault ahead of me, untouched, secretive, not a soul in sight. Gemstones glitter, rubies glint. I am drowned in a waterfall of gold; the gleaming coins bury me, consume me, strike my head – and yet I pay no heed. It isn’t there, either.

I am surrounded by mahogany; I am sick of it. I have the urge to topple the bookshelves; perhaps it would be a small mercy for the books to rain on my head, denting my skull, extinguishing my fire. Pages scatter everywhere; ink is bleeding; I want to gouge my eyes out with that pen – that pen. Oh. The pen. I’ve found it.

I am victorious, fists thrusting into the air. I possess the pen. It is mine; it belongs to my soul. I sit down, triumphant, pen poised over a blank page. I wait for my personal sovereign, my priceless pen to guide me.

It does not. It is only a pen.

I am seething, incensed. Fire dances in my eyes, the product of an untamed beast, an enraged demon. The pen is white-hot in my hands; the tip glistens with blood, devoid of its standard ink. The sharp point seems more suited to piercing through flesh rather than paper. I imagine it skewered through me, ink bleeding out of my chest, a utensil that is proficient at betrayal. How could you do this to me, I wish to rage, when I gave up all the world’s riches for you?

The pen appears to smile, a malicious grin, the Cheshire Cat of utensils. I cannot guide you, it whispers.

All this effort, and even the pen cannot help me? I have been waiting far too long – how am I supposed to write, how am I supposed to compose a story – wasn’t the pen the most integral gear for my machine?

I suppose it isn’t, and I suppose I knew that, deep inside the recesses of my mind, but then there were other voices protesting, “I am too afraid,” or “I do not have a real story to tell,” and perhaps I took them to heart more than I desire to admit. I waited in vain for the pen, expected, or wishing, more likely, that when the tip of the pen touched paper, and the ink spread out, crisscrossing, blotting clean sheets, the magic would have been stimulated and the story produced. This was why I sat in front of a paper for hours on end without a single word to present for myself.

What was I afraid of – failure? Certainly, fear consumed me – I was too afraid to publish my writing; I was too afraid to make that one leap forward – because I was waiting for the day that I would be unafraid, that magical moment when all my fears would dissipate and thus, I would step out of the shadows into the clamor of the literary world.

What was I waiting for – a real story? When would I create it; when would the ideal pieces fall into place, click like the perfect key for a lock, fit like the matching parts of a puzzle – what time would be best to write, to fashion a flawless, criticism-free story?

Never.

I was wrong – so wrong, in fact, to presume that fear vanishes. Fear does not ever completely vanish from one’s soul; one cannot stamp out fear, it cannot be made extinct. Rather, fear is always present, and the true conquerors of fear are those who, despite their fear, keep pushing hard, or channel it into their work to create something extraordinary.

I was wrong – so wrong, in fact, to believe that I did not have a story to tell. For this is my story, right now, and my pen did not guide me in writing it. It may be easily criticized, but that is storytelling’s inherent nature. It need not be flawless, because nothing ever is.

But it is my story. No pen can ever claim it as theirs. And I am proud of it.

 

Ayesha Asad is an aspiring writer and a high school senior with an eclectic variety of interests that include painting, reading, and singing. She lives in Texas, and is particularly fond of watching (and playing) soccer games.

Bunk beds are the staple of childhood and every night at the top I laid on my back, looking up at the mosaic of constellations that my snoring brother had puddied to our ceiling. Glowing, five-pointed, plastic, light green stars watched me nightly while I slept. I always thought it was strange that they were five-pointed and that they were green. I mean, I had seen real stars before. I knew they were not green; scientifically they can only be red, orange, yellow, white, or blue. Basically, every color but green. And they were not five-pointed, they were dots. But it wasn’t the differences that made them so hypnotic, it was the one crucial similarity: they glowed in the darkness.

***

I learned very early that you’re able to withstand most discomfort for a large payoff. That’s what it was like when I was about six years old, laying on top of my dad’s black CRV, stargazing for the first time. My pigtails stuck out of my knit hat, I was bundled in blanket after blanket. I felt the bars of the roof rack trying to rearrange my spine as I sprawled out next to my dad. He was twice my height, and his legs from the knee down hung off the back of the car. Above, a twinkling canopy spread in every direction. I realized why glitter was always so fun; it mimicked the stars with its shine and sparkle. Questions bubbled up inside me like I was a mini Plato or Galileo.

“Why do stars flicker?” I asked. “Because the temperature of space between us and the star changes”

I thought that made sense, they shiver and shake.

“What are shooting stars made of?” “They are rocks that burn up when they get close to earth,” Dad pointed to one as it streaked across.

“What is that purpley stripe down the middle?” “That’s the Milky Way, it’s what we call a galaxy.”

“Can we get to them? What do they look like up close?” Dad sighed into a small laugh, “We can’t get close because we don’t know how yet and they’re really really hot, hotter than the stove. But, we can see them with really cool, big telescopes.”

“Do they have five points and are they green?” “They don’t, Silly.”

He answered best he could. When he was little, he’d wanted to be an astronaut, but time and a bad case of motion sickness stumped him. Instead he was content with a fascination for space, a programmable telescope, and star chart apps.

From that night on he’d wake me up and carry me downstairs for meteor showers and eclipses. He pointed his telescope and held me up to the lens until I was tall enough to lean down. At the end of high school, we packed up the car and the telescope and trekked to my aunt’s house to witness 7 ½ blissful minutes of a solar eclipse.

***

Dressed in ripped jeans and a grey hoodie without shoes, without socks, without parents, without plans, my swing launched into the air and back again, over and over. The swing set was cool–the air cooler– and I swung through twilight into the Milky Way. My mile walk had helped clear my head. Behind me, frogs gently croaked and the creek gently danced. When I was little, I loved swing sets because they gave me community.

As a teenager I instead loved them for the solace they gave me from my crowded house and crowded thoughts: a chosen isolation. The wind made my nose go numb a little bit and I wondered what it would be like to swing up to the stars, to grab a handful and stuff them into my hoodie pocket. The masses of incandescent gas held a companionship for me, one that didn’t require clarity or appeasement. Stars were so unlike people.

In unchosen isolation I wanted to pull the stars out of my pockets as I sat at lunch with only my PB+J for company. With a star in my pocket, I could touch heaven at my uncle’s memorial, maybe I could briefly tell him hello. I could be swallowed in a star’s gravity when I was blown around by my first broken heart, when I wasn’t asked to Prom. I could feel far away and powerful because I had space with me.

***

My eyes like saucers tried to soak up the lights of New York City. A million man-made stars flicked and glowed and danced when I looked outside the window. They wrote their own constellations. After four days at what felt like light speed, exhaustion and homesickness were deadweight in my bones. One last day in the city that never sleeps. The gravity of a final museum on a weekday afternoon sucked my mom and me inside.

Comfortable converse, with worn rubber soles, echoed across the glossy wooden floor from room to room as if they were clicking pumps. Frida Kahlo called my name, and Salvador Dali, Pollock, Picasso, Rivera, Rothko. I responded to each by examining their brushstrokes. Where the colors crashed into each other like cosmic collisions I saw the creation.

I turned to respond to another artist begging my attention, and alone, stars stared me in the face. “A Starry Night” swirled around my eyes and my brain. The painting captured the whole universe in blue and yellow lines, and I was alone here, observing its concreteness. Head slightly cocked, my weight leaning on my right converse, hugging my elbows across my body, I brooded for fifteen minutes. Without the frequent accompanying frustration, colors, thoughts, and feelings dashed through my brain, whirling like the paint itself. The stars we see in our sky take at least four years for their light to reach us. The stars in this painting take only as long as it takes us to blink. In another way, since it was painted in 1889, the stars took 130 years to reach me; Van Gogh sent them.

***

Newfound freedom is dangerous and filled with potential. A year into college, a car jammed with six girls, each under two sweatshirts, a blanket, hat, gloves, and boots, drove three hours to the Bonneville Salt Flats. We were armed with two boxes of pizza, a bottle of Mountain Dew, six camping chairs, a banjo and a telescope. The Salt Flats offered two things: 1) salt and 2) a big sky. After the sunset and an impromptu photo shoot, the sky aged into a dark, rich blue. The pinpricked sky was deep and I could feel the universe expanding as the sky rolled out, unobstructed, in every direction. It was like I was lying on top of that CRV again.

The salt had no animals and no bugs that I could see. Although the wind whipped our hair around, everything else felt completely still. My friend, Natalie, played faint banjo music that was whisked around in the air and carried up toward the stars. A stillness and silence settled into us. It is remarkably difficult to get six twenty-year-old women to sit quietly together for longer than five minutes, but we sat there for three hours with only a few scattered words between us.

There was one interruption to our nighttime daydreams. Red and blue lights spun in the distance next to Natalie’s parked sedan along the highway. I’m never going to space, but I felt like I got the closest to the speed of light that I could, that night, gunning my car across the barren flats toward the lights. As we got closer, the car came back to earthly speeds.

“Good evening, please don’t tow that car!” I called out urgently but respectfully as my car rolled up.

Sent from heaven above, the most handsome twenty-something-year-old policeman with striking eyes turned around and said, “Oh I’m not ticketing it, I just wanted to make sure everything was okay.”

He carried on, and we carried on. When we looked back at the sky, we saw those eyes and shooting stars spin like sirens.

Space had given me solace since I first met it, but it morphed into more. I could look at the sky and fall into it. My imagination played connect the dots to create any picture I wanted, so that night I drew constellations of banjos and eyes and cars.

***

My old childhood bunk bed was sold years ago, and we didn’t have the ceiling full of stars anymore. Time traded it out for twin beds in the same room, then a new room in a new house, then a college dorm. Six little green, pointed, glowing stars imitating Ursa Major sat above my roommate’s head. Only five glowed because the sixth was always lit up by the streetlight that snuck in through a slit in our blinds. They were stuck there from some other young woman trying to get a degree to propel her into her an uncertain future. Maybe she also had stars on her ceiling when the ceiling felt so much bigger. Maybe she feared the dark or had as many questions as I did on the roof of the CRV. Maybe she had just gotten them at the Dollar Tree on a bad date.

***

Stars are bright spheres of hot plasma, held together by their own gravity. My gravity came in the moments that I saw the how the world spun, why the world spun, and where I was, spinning. When you learn about space in elementary school most people either feel empowered or insignificant by the astounding scale, but I always just felt understood. There are approximately 250 million stars in our galaxy, let alone the trillions of other galaxies spinning and growing. There are approximately 250 million ideas that rush around my mind, let alone the trillions of other thoughts that run through it, spinning and growing.

 

Cecilee Henstrom is a Journalism student at Brigham Young University. She loves the power that words have to connect and inform people who would otherwise carry on unconnected. Some of her hobbies include: perfecting situational humor at 2am, re-watching CSI, and embroidery.