Issue Nineteen

It is only 5 PM but I already know with certainty that the day will end not in a period or exclamation point, but a sigh. I stare with wide-eyed dismay at the disarray of papers upon my desk. 3.8. 63%. 1490/1600. 10^th place. $50,000 per year. The clock in my heart is sprinting at twice the speed of the one on the wall; my hand, frantically trying to maintain pace. My mind stumbles into dark labyrinths, only to meet with dead ends and closed doors; thoughts tangle themselves into Gordian knots. Logic disintegrates. What is the integral of tan(x)? How much energy is dissipated by friction? What is the optimum annealing temperature for PCR? My mind is shrieking, screaming. I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t know. Pain saturates my veins as a cold fear drenches me, until slowly, a paralysis grips my muscles up from my toes until all that remains moving is the rapid quivering of my pencil, my cramped fingers begging me to

Stop.

My shaking mind slows. Somehow, somewhere, it finds an unlocked door amidst the pitch-blackness. It takes a while of groping around before my fumbling fingers find a doorknob and twist it open. Beyond it, I am greeted by a flood of light. I lift my face to embrace the sunshine, to allow myself to imagine—

What if?

I picture before me a sunset. The sky is awash with color— the sun bleeds scarlet, trailing in its wake bright oranges, warm yellows. Along the horizon, it peeks out from behind the silhouette skeletons of trees throwing their wild, flickering shadows across a wide expanse of grass. I stand, in the midst of a field, a field with no end, no limits, no boundaries. Surrounding me stand acres upon acres of shoulder-length grasses swaying their heads to the rhythm of the breeze, stretching in all directions a patchwork quilt made of all different variant shades of ochres, of umbers, of greens, illuminated by the orange light of the dying sun. As the last rays of its brightness fade first into soft lavender, indigos and ultramarines, finally into darkness, it scatters its ashes in the form of stars. I can see, in my mind’s eye, a resurrection, for the next day the sun will, like a phoenix, rebirth from the very ashes that mark its grave. The next day dawns a new day, a naked and innocent child untouched by the stress of the past.

In this world within my mind, I am content. I spend many a day setting my easel on the banks of a small babbling brook. Shadows flicker, bright stars blinking in and out of existence against the darkness of the stream. Time evaporates as the clouds drift by, as transient as my thoughts. The day wanders away as my paintbrush strolls across the canvas, light and springy on its toes. Birds take flight, mere specks wiggling like tadpoles across the cerulean sky. In this place, no worries exist. It is here where I am completely immune, completely invincible to doubt, to negativity, to the stubborn chains which have clung to me for so long, weighing me down. Here, the burdens of my past release their grip on their emaciated prisoner imprisoned too long in an inescapable reality. Nothing in the world could matter to me: I am completely carefree.

In this world in my mind, I am happy. I have left that world— I belong to another. There is no pain, no heartbreak, no death, no destruction, no desire, not even love. It is a world in which disease and famine have been cured and war abolished. I dwell in a small cottage by the brook. Each day, I am awakened by the chorus of birds, by the first few slanted rays of sunshine dancing across the floor. I can see my late grandfather, resurrected from the depths of his paralysis from Parkinson’s. He sits across from me in a magnificent library, impressive for our small cottage, and sways back and forth on a rocking chair. My sleeves rolled up, I am beside a small wooden table, pondering the meaning of existence as I stare out an illuminated window, my hand gently pressing open a book upon its spine. From the other room I hear my sister echoing my heart with a tune bursting with exuberant joy and unrestricted hope. Many an hour I pick up the clarinet and admire its silvery keys glimmering in the sunlight. My fingers flit up and down the wooden holes as I breathe soul into the instrument, infusing into it a life which reverberates past the walls of my cottage and resonates for miles around. It is as though I am speaking to an old friend, one who also speaks through my mouth, as though I have never left his company. In my mind, he is immortalized as that forgiving old friend whom I have never neglected to a corner to accumulate dust even as others were prioritized above him.

I want to remain there, in this wonderful season of eternal spring.

But alas, I at last am forced return to that lonely reality.

It is my mind who forges these fateful chains of reality, but also my mind alone who can shatter them. It is a fatal error belonging not only to me but to our generation. We have bound ourselves to the unending yet meaningless pursuit of success, denied ourselves the right of taking refuge in our own minds, the time to respite, to lose our minds into that terrifying prospect and wilderness of reverie. We have all confined ourselves to numbers, simple delineations between right or wrong, to reality, as a result elbowing out the possibility of imagination. We have deemed daydreaming a delusion, a delirium entertained only by the insane. We have rejected the childish immaturity of our youth out of fear that reality will disappoint expectation. And while these thoughts may be lies now, there is solace in knowing that perhaps there is still time yet to convert the fantasies of our dreams to reality.

I look down at the unfinished paper clenched in my fist. What is your dream college?

I answer with a serene smile.

I don’t know.

Adele Peng is an incoming freshman at Princeton University, where she plans to major in neuroscience. She is an avid biology enthusiast and aspiring visual artist/writer. She believes that love as we know it is nonexistent and has made peace with the fact. Find her at adelepeng.com and on Instagram @linaria17.

~This story was previously appeared in Threshold, the literary magazine from Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology. ~

If you’re one of the legions of high school students who have read Robert Frost’s classic poem, “The Road Not Taken,” you probably view it simply as a philosophical poem about making difficult decisions. Think again.

Many people are oblivious to the fascinating history behind this famous piece, involving the tale of two best friends that ultimately ends in one friend indirectly killing the other through this poem. Not quite what you were expecting, huh?

Here’s the poem for a quick refresher:

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;

 Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.

 I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

Without any further research and on the initial reading, this poem doesn’t seem particularly sophisticated. Put simply, it’s about the poet’s choice to take the less-worn road over a well-worn one, on a trip that he’s taking. If a little bit of a metaphorical magic is mixed in, it then becomes about the choice the poet has made to make a unique decision, over a choice that the majority of people would have made, in an important moment on his journey of life.

However, a little research reveals that Frost dedicated this poem to Edward Thomas, who happened to be his best friend and to have also been a poet and an Englishman. The story behind that friendship sheds an entirely new light on this poem.

Hold on, I hear you questioning, wasn’t Frost an American poet? So how did he have an English bloke as his best friend? Well, Frost began his journey as a poet while he was living in England, and returned to America shortly after the first World War.

Like any other best friends in the roaring 20’s, Frost and Thomas took frequent nature walks, where they would admire the beautiful English landscape and try to identify interesting birds and other fauna and flora. During these walks, the friends would choose a path at random to venture down, and being the person that he was, Thomas would be constantly regretful of the paths that they missed out on and often blamed himself for not finding any particularly interesting birds (this strange obsession will be explained later). As Frost once said, Thomas was “a person, who, whichever road he went, would be sorry he didn’t go the other.”

On one particular walk, the pair were impeded by an aggressive gamekeeper wielding a shotgun. Frost, in true American fashion, bunched up his fists like a professional boxer and was fully prepared to start brawling with whacks and thwacks in a gun fight but ceased when he noticed Thomas hurrying away before the situation could escalate.

Afterwards, with Frost in the lead, the two friends marched to the gamekeeper’s house. Frost banged on the door, verbally assaulting the gamekeeper upon the door’s opening. The gamekeeper was probably mauled by Frost’s powerfully poetic voice, which prompted him to hide behind his shotgun again, but was too scared to point it at the fearsome Frost, so he directed it towards Thomas. Like any other sensible human being, Thomas engaged in a tactical retreat, but Frost firmly stood his ground yet again, like the Statue of Liberty standing against the dark depths of oppression.

After this harrowing experience for Thomas, he was deeply ashamed of having acted like a coward. On top of all this, the incident took place while World War I was being fought, and all of Thomas’ friends had gone to war. Additionally, at the time, Britain was advocating for “pal battalions,” which meant that the people who you grew up with, laughed with, played football with, gone fishing with, and shot guns with, would be guaranteed to be grouped together, and to fight and die together in the front lines. Thus, Thomas must have felt rather excluded and even more of a coward.

However, Thomas was an anti-nationalist. Although he often discussed politics with Frost on their leisurely nature walks, he was disinterested in the politics that started World War I and he despised the propaganda and blatant racism that were denouncing Germans at the time in Britain. He was more interested in enjoying the beautiful English countryside and the birds who called it home. In fact, he was even quoted as saying that his “real countrymen were not Englishmen, but the birds!”

Thomas proudly took a stronger stance against racism, violence and bigotry than before and, continuing the war analogy, he dug deep trenches and stationed plenty of machine guns in his fight against racism – similar to the trenches and machine guns that Thomas faced on the front lines. Wait … what was Thomas doing on the front lines?

Turns out Thomas had chosen “The Road Not Taken.” Even though he was an anti-nationalist and had two children, Thomas decided that the politics behind the start of the war did not matter as he had a burning desire to protect the beautiful artwork of nature against the foreign German invaders.

Before Frost sent him this poem, Thomas had initially planned to depart with Frost to New Hampshire in America to escape the war and begin a new life farming, writing and reading poetry with his bestie. It’s hard to imagine a more idealistic and pure life than being able to hang out with your best friend for the rest of your life and doing what you both love together, whilst surveying the beautiful rural landscapes.

Although to be honest, while things may have been different back then, going to live with your best friend seems a bit far-fetched. I’d understand the occasional couch surf, but actually moving in with your bestie shows just how close Frost and Thomas were. In fact, later in life, Frost reportedly said of all the people he had met, the only person whom he could truly call a friend was Edward Thomas. Therefore, Thomas’s decision to abandon all this after Frost sent him this poem undoubtedly demonstrates the power four five-line stanzas can have on an individual.

In fact, it was this poem that pushed Thomas off the edge to finally make a choice. After a full year of indecision, Thomas had to juggle the two ideas of whether he should emigrate to America with Frost or fight for his beautiful landscapes against the dreadful invaders.

Usually, when faced with a tough set of options, we will brood over it for perhaps a few minutes, maybe even a few hours, at most a day or a week. Sitting on the fence must have been uncomfortable at first, but excruciating after a full year for Thomas.

Frost, superhero-of-sorts, courageously swooped down and saved him by plucking him off the fence and setting him gently on one side, with his trusty side-kick “The Road Not Taken.” However, in reality, Frost had set his best friend on a metaphorical bear trap, which would cost Thomas’ life almost immediately, by a stray concussive blast wave from a shell, shortly after he was deployed in France.

There could have been no conceivable way for Frost to have foreseen such an event, and I’d imagine he was filled to the brim with regret for quite some time, always questioning himself about what if Thomas hadn’t taken “The Road Not Taken.”

Now, after all that, I bet your perspective of this poem that you thought you knew so well has radically changed.

David Lu is a student currently in his twelfth year at Pinehurst School from the North Shore in Auckland, New Zealand. He is currently taking computer science, literature, maths, physics and chemistry. Although his favourite subject is computer science, he thoroughly enjoys history. His favourite author and book series is Rick Riordan’s Percy Jackson and the Olympians.

Writing, for me, is not easy. Is that a bad thing to admit? Whenever I picture a writer, I see two thin white hands: one curled around a cigarette, the other scribbling with a pen across their notebook— all of their thoughts pouring out of their heads and onto the paper instantly. Or sometimes I see my sister’s wild excitement, the way she spills over with her ideas and then runs off to write them down without hesitation. It is somehow harder to imagine my own brown hands hovering over the keyboard, willing the blank document to fill with words that are somehow immediately beautiful and perfect and necessary.

I started writing when I was five years old. My sister would spend hours in front of the large family computer, editing clunky WordArt titles for her stories. And I would watch as younger sisters do, with jealous admiration, until I decided that I would be a writer as well. As an origin story, it feels rather embarrassing. Writing wasn’t a part of me naturally. I willed it to be so. Now whenever I sit down to write, my heart starts to beat too quickly and I have to stop. I hit the backspace key one too many times. If I manage to make it through a first draft, I check it over once, twice, and then a third time until it feels like I’m trying on somebody else’s clothes that don’t quite fit me right, and then I start to think that maybe that is what I have been doing since the beginning. Since I was five and jealous and hopeful.

When you are young, you do not have enough sense to be insecure. You are far too busy believing that because all of your thoughts are new to you, that they will be interesting to everyone else. I cannot recall a particular moment when someone read my work and said, “Hey, this bad,” compelling me to hide all of my journals and pencils and files. I just grew up. I preoccupied myself with the things I could prove I was good at. An ‘A’ on an assignment was an indisputable fact. My confidence was hardly strong enough to stand as an opinion.

If I found anything I didn’t like, I deleted it. I have lost so many pieces of myself this way.

It was either through God’s grace, a glitch in Google Drive, or a combination of both that I was able to recover several stories I’d written in middle school. And I surprised myself by reading every plot hole, every poorly written scene, every shred of immature dialogue with incomprehensible joy. All of them to an extent were poor imitations of stories I’d read, but they were mine. Isn’t that good enough?

I am always seeming to answer this question when I write. Is my writing good enough? The question is incomplete. Good enough for who? I’ve circled around this a few times, attempting to answer if it is for myself, if it is for others. But it doesn’t matter. It will never matter until I answer the real question that has sat in the back of my mind since even before I was hovering outside of the den doorway, quietly watching my older sister. Am I good enough? I believed it then. I was certainly capable of spelling words on the computer and constructing a simple story. I was even capable of creating those unappealing clunky WordArt titles. However, as I grew up, writing became less about the sheer capability and more about me. Were my thoughts and ideas worthy of being shared?

The only appropriate answer to this question, I feel, is nobody knows. But more importantly, who cares?

I didn’t write those stories on Google Drive when I was in middle school because I saw myself as a literary genius with new and sensational ideas. I wrote because it was fun. Because it made me fill up with the same excitement as my older sister when I had stories rush in my head faster than I could type them. I wrote for me. And when I found those once lost pieces, it brought me the same overwhelming happiness. Because at that moment, I was good enough for myself.

This is how I write: I turn off all sounds and shut the door. I stretch my fingers after I’ve written a paragraph without stopping, breathe in and out as a way to congratulate myself. I was afraid to admit my insecurities with this art form, my art form, because I felt as if it could not rightfully belong to me. How could I be a writer who curls up at the mention of writing?

However, this thought too is incomplete. I am not at all appalled by the act of writing. It was simply that I could not stand to be a writer who wrote anything unimportant. I had not grown yet to realize that writing is a deeply personal, self-indulgent task. Which is just a nicer way to say that it is selfish. Nor had I realized that there was and is a great possibility of me never writing anything that mattered much to others. But also, that it is okay. It is okay to write something half-decent. It is okay to fail. It is okay to look back at something and cringe. It is okay to be imperfect. It is okay. It is okay. It is okay. And more importantly, it is enough.

Yes, a writer can be a deeply intellectual white man with a leather-bound journal and a nicotine addiction. But a writer can also be me: a black girl who has enough courage and humility to keep writing when it isn’t easy until one day it is.

Justice Hatcher is from Jacksonville, Florida but now lives in Concord, North Carolina where she attends Cox Mill High School. Although she has yet not had her work published, she has always found her sanctuary in language. Since childhood, she has been an avid reader and writer but was unsure of how to share her creations. After receiving local recognition in middle school from the Cabarrus County Soil & Water Conservation for an essay contest, she began her journey of finding her voice, which she is now beginning to release.

It wasn’t until I was nine years old that my dad finally let go of the handlebars. One second, his fingers were clasped so tight around mine they were turning white, and then the next they were gone––and I thought, then, that this was flight, all fast and light and airy: A feeling that wound up in your chest like thread, and slowly unraveled the farther out you got. The faster. The older.

I had checked behind me then, grinned at the man a couple yards down the pavement; “Look, Dad! I’m moving all on my own! Look, Dad! Do you see me? Do you see?” Turning back and checking, I was looking at him with my eyes open wide, feeling the wind bite into my scalp, my weak little wings outstretched. He gave me two thumbs up, nodded back to the road. I turned, still smiling, and ran right into the car parked up ahead, my hands held out to block the fall.

That was the first time I saw pain: It was in the raw skin on my knees and hands, in the stars that swam into my eyes, in the throb of my shoulder where my body had met gravel. And my father was right behind me, holding out a hand and getting me to my feet. Be careful, he told me. Keep your head up or you’ll fall back. Stay in your momentum.

And so a sore ten-year-old me climbed back onto that bike, with her shoulder bruised up and her knees skinned raw, the girl who wiped away a tear on the back of her hand and pumped her legs harder against the wind. A little of the flight had gone out of me, my hesitant wings drawn back. But there was my dad right behind me––farther out this time, still in sight.

I pedaled down the street, an eleven-year-old and her brand-new bike, and I rounded a corner and suddenly he was gone; stuck somewhere down in the middle of the road, trying to keep up with me. But he was getting old now, older than he was just a minute ago, and I could tell by the gray in his hair that he wasn’t going to catch up any time soon. So I turned my head, and I kept on pedaling. Everything counted on it. Stay in your momentum.

I was getting too far and going too fast. That worried me a little, because at twelve I used to worry a lot, that maybe my wheels would freeze up, or I’d hit a branch in the road; I’d already fallen once today, and once was plenty enough for me. But I kept on pedaling anyway––what else was there for a girl on a bike to do? ––and pretty soon, the house was gone too, and somewhere a couple miles away Dad was heading back inside now, leaving my training wheels out for the garbage truck. Training wheels that had been screwed so tight to my bike before, it had seemed almost impossible my dad could undo them. But he worked magic with a screwdriver, my dad.

I decided then that I wanted to go to Rome, on my beat-up bike and everything. I loved the coast and I loved stories, stories my father sang to me about gods and soldiers and Renaissance, stories he kept bottled up inside himself, stories he swore he never had time to write, and––wait. Where had he gone again? Hadn’t he just been right there? I shrugged off the uncertainty because I was thirteen, after all, and I was big enough to go on my own. You could see it in my voice, in my walk, in the newfound angles of my face: Maturity, fast-approaching.

Fourteen, and I had forgotten how my street looked. Fourteen, and my earbud wires got tangled up in the spokes of one wheel, but I got up after the fall, because the whole world was in reach. It blew out one tire, scraped up my knees, flecked a little blood into my teeth. None of it mattered as much as the coast. Not a single second. Fifteen, and the hum of another biker’s wheels sounded behind me on the pavement. I held my earbuds in my hands and looked at him, and suddenly I was sixteen and I was in love, and I was certain that the world had it out for me, clutching my earbuds and clutching onto the back of his shirt as he sped away. Nothing personal, he told me as I wept. We’re just on two different routes, you and me. You’ve got your eyes on Rome and I’ve got my hands in my pockets. Seventeen and I was mending from heartbreak, but the ocean was something that could be crossed in seconds. It didn’t even matter anymore, now that I was eighteen and my bike had gotten so bruised up it couldn’t stand itself upright on its two aired-out wheels, and so I kicked it aside and shrunk into the gulf, and there it was waiting for me: Rome, in my sights. A little piece of the world, a little piece of Renaissance, in my hands. Someday, I would find my way back, I knew it––but it would not be on the beat-up bike I had once ridden, seven years ago, with my father clutching the handlebars. I realized, then, wading through the cypress trees, that I had left everything behind me some couple continents away.

And now I stood, five-foot-six at eighty-one, on the coast of it all. I touched the dead space between waves, saw my own face reflected back at me, and thought: Sometimes I wish that I had fallen down more often, if only to make the trip just a little bit longer.

Karma’s literary journey began in the second grade with a twenty-page My Little Pony fanfiction. Throughout the years, her passion for ponies has declined considerably, but her love and exploration of writing has never ceased. She’s now a high school freshman in Cleveland, Ohio, and has been penning short stories, poems, and novellas for nearly seven years––though this will be her first publication. When she isn’t writing, she loves to cook, listen to music, and discuss Victorian literature.