RAINCOAT 

In late August 2014 I packed up and moved from Seattle to the small town of Görlitz, in Germany. I knew almost nothing about the town before my arrival save for its geographical location (located in the former DDR state of Saxony, the town is the easternmost point in Germany and faces Poland across a small river) and its popularity amongst film directors. Undestroyed in the Second World War, the town’s colorful old buildings have featured prominently in films including The Bo

*trigger warning: eating disorder *** Before, when passing a mirror I would lean in, gazing at the soft curves of my eyes, and think in a shameful whisper to myself, ‘I am beautiful.’ The Body Mass Index (BMI) provides a reliable indicator for body fatness. The formula for BMI is weight in kilograms divided by height in meters squared. Example: Weight = 68 kg, Height = 165 cm (1.65 m) Calculation: 68 ÷ (1.65)2 = 24.98 ‘Did you notice how much weight she gained?’ My mother an

On my 26th birthday, a few days shy of 2015, I broke up with my boyfriend of almost three years, acting mostly on a gut feeling that it was the right thing to do. In the months since then, I’ve been coping the only way I know how: by developing a New Plan, which alternates between feeling like the crystallization of my heart’s truest desires and like I’m frantically hurling ideas at myself, hoping something, anything, sticks. A few weeks ago, I flew from L.A. to Maryland, whe

Adhering to the destiny of her name, Stella felt content flying through the sky. She read a Murakami novel, turning bleached thin pages and sometimes pausing to look out the window. The plane coasted above cotton clouds through solid blue, and time may as well have stopped, like a suspended note in a song. Only when she glimpsed outside again and saw land rather than sky did she realize that six hours had passed, and she would soon land in Honolulu. This journey marked severa

Winnie saw the Grand Canyon in real life for the first time when she was 9, the summer after 3rd grade. Her mother had been a ranger there for a few years before Winnie was born, and made a long-awaited return to work as a human resources associate at the Grand Canyon National Park HQ, a beige slab of a building to the western edge of the park grounds. They drove up for the first day in a park jeep along a service road, and got out for their first shared view. Her mom had thi

Okay, sweetheart, just lay on this table right here. Oh, wow, you’re so red! You’ve got a sweaty forehead, there! Are you sunburned? Did you walk here? No? You drove? Is it that hot out? Allright, I’ll just dab this off for you. So, how long has it been since you’ve been waxed? Never? Not even tweezed? Wow, wow, so that’s why your eyebrows are so thick! Very full. Ver-r-r-y long. Kind of shapeless, like caterpillars. After a few minutes they’ll be butterflies, don’t you worry

Though by day we are architecture students, we took on a little side project where we applied architectural principles to the world of clothing. For this collection, we sought to rethink the functionality of fashion. MorF is an architecturally conceived line of transformable apparel that focuses on expanding the function of each individual piece in order to maintain wearability through changes in environment and circumstance. These fashion pieces facilitate ease of travel by

1. There is whiskey in my cup and everyone’s mouths are moving, just not in my direction. I’m about to take a sip when someone sits on my lap and orders a beer. They drop a spare penny between my legs and knock my knee with theirs on the way out. The whiskey in my glass has been replaced with sour air, oozing out of the rim in diptych waves for fun. The music, with all its sweaty percussion, suddenly comes to a sharp silence but no one has noticed. They twirl and twirl.

I'm fairly certain it is stitched on a pillow somewhere that life happens in all those in-between moments when you're not making massive decisions or submitting that confirmation of enrollment or accepting that job offer. So much happens so fast when you graduate from college that it's easy to see things as happening only from one benchmark to the next. I recently discovered a folder of my father's photos that he took in 1995 when he was working as a photographer for the LA T

Tuesday Home, smoking, with two friends. Friend #1 (female) leaves. Friend #2 (male) and I sit in silence until he slides over and hastily presses his lips into mine. Unexpected. Friend #2 has only ever been friend, has serious girlfriend. Friend #1 returns. Feeling apparently dissipates. Vainly admiring features in mirror later, suddenly sickened by them. Waves of insecurity, humiliation, sweat, nausea. A human (non-demon) person once told me I wasn’t thin enough to be depre