When it came time for me to decide what I was going to do for 2021, I decided to push the amount to 365 New Year’s Resolutions. — “Five!” I hear a distant cheer emanating from the television sitting across the room. My eyes open to catch a screen scattered with a few faces half-covered in brightly-colored and sequin-filled masks. “Four, three, two, one!” I spot the enormous glittery sphere descend from the top of a pole in…

Beethoven absolutely loved and cherished nature, and thought of nature as a holy thing. It’s in the spirit of Enlightenment, this music… — It was under cover of darkness just before the twinkling growing light from early dawn when I decided to grab my nylon bag filled with hiking necessities and headed out my front door. I tossed the sack of supplies into the passenger seat of my car, which let out a…

An organized chaos of chemical explosions has erupted around you in less time than it takes for you to blink an eye — then vanishes. — An organized chaos of chemical explosions has erupted around you in less time than it takes for you to blink an eye. …

At times we see the worst in everything because we’re only looking from a very limited perspective. We forget how far we’ve come. — My heart races as a rush of panic washes over me like a flooded stream after a torrential downpour. I feel the sharp inhalation of limited breath as it shoots in and out of my nostrils as though it was a frigid beverage traveling through a straw with a wide…

The most important thing that I had found among the forgotten items was a lost old letter addressed to me. — I spent the better part of the day rummaging around through piles of forgotten things in my old bedroom. I had broken down the task of cleaning up after decades of memories to a few hours here and there that were taken away from occasional visits to my last childhood…

There were many stories involving me with groups of crows that were seemingly either warnings or causes of a series of unfortunate events. — That morning I had woken up before my alarm to the sound of a cat dry-heaving in what seemed like the dead of night. I sprinted out of my bed and quickly turned on the kitchen light to find the floor tile void of hairballs. I looked down at the…

I fell into an adventurer’s trap and became unstoppable because I never wanted to be held back from doing something because of fear. — My boarding time had inched close enough to the present that I began to sweat a little. It was only after I had to remove a pair of shoes from my oversized travel bag at the check-in counter that I became nervous. “See, I told you taking out the boots…

I mostly take the trek as a cautionary tale portraying the unpredictability of life and all the chaos within it. — On a hot sunny day in July, I took my sister into the woods to hike for her birthday. I understood that she probably wouldn’t care for it, but everything was closed due to a global pandemic. I knew she loved seeing beautiful waterfalls and what she referred to as…

I become my own constant reminder of a system of inequality, and my beautiful melanated skin gets dragged back to conversations about race. — When I go outside, the light reveals my truth. I cannot take it off, nor do I want to do so. However, at times the heavy weight of the pigment in my skin bears a toll. At times I want to take a break from all of the negativity and…