"Did you regret it?"

"E-Excuse m-m-me?"

"I'm saying did you regret putting a knife in my daughter's throat, you son-of-a-bitch?"

He stood up and thrust his hand around the stranger's throat, slamming him into the wall. The other man desperately scrabbled at his fingers, but the alcohol was molten steel through his veins and his grip squeezed all the tighter.

"P-Please, I-I...I d-didn't...didn't k-know..."

Saliva flew out of his mouth as he spluttered. His face turned purple. With a sudden wrench, the policeman threw him into the ground and kicked him in the stomach. He doubled up and gasped for air.

"You didn't know? You didn't know? That's a nice joke, you son-of-a-bitch. I guess you didn't know all the way up to slashing her throat and hiding her body in the dumpster." He slammed another steel heel into his stomach. "I guess you didn't know it was her seventeenth birthday today. I guess you didn't know she had been looking for ward to meeting her daddy. You didn't know, so everything is forgiven." He laughed and kicked him again. There was the crunch of ribs. The stranger's shirt was a mess of blood, flesh, and bone splinters and all he could do was curl up and sob.

"I didn't think I'd find you," the policeman said, walking circles slowly around him. "It's been a week. What were the chances the murderer would still be sticking around? The chief was just about ready to continue the investigation into the next state. But I'm a lucky man, John. I'm a lucky man."

"I'm...I-I'm s-sorry...P-Please, l-let me...l-let m-me..."

The policeman smashed the heel of his boot into his face. His nose exploded in a fountain of blood. The policeman bent down over his broken face and started to laugh, spit flying in his face. The stench of alcohol was overpowering.

"Seven days, John. Six hours of sleep in seven days. The only thing keeping me was five packs of whiskey and the desire for revenge. And would you believe it, it is so, so sweet." He pulled a picture out of his pocket. It was a picture of a young girl standing with flaming red hair. Her almond-colored eyes crinkled with her smile. The policeman pushed the picture into the stranger's face. It came away smeared with blood.

"Take a good look at the girl you killed. It will be the last thing you ever see."

There was the sliding of metal against metal and an audible sharpness that vibrated in the air. The stranger's breath caught in his throat and his words came out faster than ever.

"No, no, nonono, please no, I promise, sorry, really sorry, no, no - "

"I managed to swipe this from the evidence chest. Poetic, don't you think? The killer's weapon used against him. God knows you deserve a far worse death."

"Please please please, no - "

There was the sound of metal ripping flesh and a scream through the night air. Then all was silent save for the sound of rain.

Structure of Civil War Land in Bad Decline

Point of View: 1st person

Tense: Present


The story is told completely chronologically, with almost all of it taking place in the present, one event after another. The very, very rare instances where the narrator breaks from the present is when he explains something to the audience, i.e. when he describes Mr. A's past and when he describes how they got their fake church. For the most part, however, there are no deviations from complete chronology.

Major events in the story are broken by page breaks. They are, in order:

1) Before narrator talks with Sylvia Loomis about the gangs

2) After the narrator and Mr. A give Quinn the job of dealing with gans

3) After they deal with Quinn's attack by the gangs

4) After Mr. A tells the narrator about the recent troubles in CWL

5) Before they hire Samuel

6) He goes home to his cheating wife

7) Narrator finds severed hand of the boy

8) At Halloween

9) He takes the boys home

1-9 is all rising action. Each event is more extreme than the last, escalating to the climax: his wife leaves him with his sons. The denouement is everything afterwards: him going to Mr. A to find out that CWL was going under, seeing the McKinnons' deaths, meeting Samuel alone at night. There is no resolution to speak of; the story ends tragically, with the narrator losing everything he's ever loved.

Elongating Dreams

On the first night he dreams of a single day.

In his dream he can fly. Two great pairs of red feathery wings sprout from his shoulders, and with these he flies the Earth's circumference. He flies ten thousand miles above the surface. He flies ten thousand miles above the placid oceans and the mottled patchworks of land and the hard outcrops of civilization. In twenty-four hours he has circled back to his starting place, and suddenly his wings begin to melt, feathers disintegrating one by one into the salty sea and he plummets straight down. A second before he hits the water he wakes up, the roar of the waves pounding in his ears.

On the second night he dreams of a single month.

It is Christmas, and he has finally returned home after a long chain of final exams. He returns home like a triumphant hero, the winds of college braved. His family and friends greet him as if he has never left. He knows it will not be long before he departs again, but the thought just makes him treasure the present all the more. He uses the time to catch up with old high school friends, to shop for Christmas presents, to sleep until noon every day in his own room on his own bed. When the day finally comes, he bids everyone a teary farewell and steps into the car, but as he turns around for a final goodbye his vision dims and he wakes up.

On the third night he dreams of a single year.

He wakes up on a deserted shore, choking on spluttering sea water, clothes torn to shreds by the currents, hair soaked with brine. At first it is hard; the nights are cold and lonely, the animals ferocious and uninviting, the hunger ubiquitous and sharp. But he learns to adapt. He manages to find a stock of natural flint and makes himself a fire. By sampling only a few new plants at a time, he manages to eat without poisoning himself. The small rodents look nutritious enough, so he sharpens a stick and thrusts it clean through the chest of a small mouse. Within a year he has built himself a new home from palm leaves and tree trunks, and loneliness no longer stabs him in the gut every night. One day he spies a dark mass on the horizon, black silhouette against a burning sun. It is a ship, he realizes, and before his hopes could even soar he wakes up with tears in his eyes, in his own bed once more.

On the forth night he dreams of a century.

He is on another planet, not himself but something larger, covered in a foul slime, sliding aimlessly across the landscape. He devours anything he finds in his way, and for one hundred years he subsists. On the last day a strange object arrives from the sky, streaking a trail of fire before finally landing. A strange, bipedal organism emerges from within wearing a gleaming suit. The alien steps forward, reaches out an appendage, and then he wakes again into darkness, fingers desperately clawing at his own skin.

On the fifth night he dreams of an epoch.

Ceaseless waves, furious lightning storms, superheated pools of magma spouting from deep within the Earth's core. All it takes is a single instant - a flash of lightning into the water - and a bacteria is born, struggling forward on shaky, amoeboid legs and he remembers nothing else about those ten millions years but the sensation of being ripped from time and place into a stranger's body. His eyes open wide and he does not know who he is, where he is, when he is.

On the sixth night he dreams forever.

Mark Doty Reflection

I have always hated it when my teachers said, "Read your essay out loud. It'll help you catch mistakes." A written work is meant to be read, not spoken. It's possible that something, when spoken aloud, might sound strange, but if on the page it looks perfectly good, why should you change it? After all, the reader won't be speaking the story aloud. How many good written lines, I wonder, would be lost if their authors had decided to read aloud their works beforehand?

This was more prevalent in Mark Doty's reading than in all the readings before that. Prose writers, at least, have the advantage that there is not too large a discrepancy between what they write and what people normally say; prose, after all, is written in the common language of the people. Poetry does not have such a luxury. Its very form elevates it above common prose, to be seen and not heard. In a work where even white space is important, reading aloud a poem destroys its very essence.

This is further complicated by the fact that Doty's poems uses uncommon and foreign words generously. "Lumina, aurora, aureole?" "For a forest by Faberge, all cloisonné and enamel". When spoken, these words lose much of their impact. If we see the word on the page, we can be certain that it is exactly what it is: an uncommon word, deftly chosen for its purpose. But if we hear it spoken, suddenly we are not so sure. Does he pronounce it differently than we do? Did he say another word, but a trick of the ears made us hear something different? Am I supposed to understand what that word means?

"(dis?)guises; poetry" - and how does one even begin to speak aloud the parenthesis, the question mark mid-word, the semi-colon?

Nonetheless, despite the fact that his poetry was ruined by narration, I understood that his works were top-quality. The mark of a great work is that lines just pop out at you, sticking in your memory even long after the author himself is forgotten. The fact that his works are free verse yet still managed to make me like them is an even greater feat. "Brass buttons tumbling to the floor. Who's it for?" "plain prose, exquisite (dis?)guises; poetry, music, clothes." The rhyme is wonderful. It comes at the most unexpected times, yet the syllables fit perfectly together as a key in a lock. This is yet another problem with reading aloud poetry - much of the rhyme is lost when the words are subject to the reader's murky and imperfect speech.

Problem Child Review

Nothing in life is perfect. You must take the good with the bad, and in Problem Child you must take the good with the forgettable. Some of the works in the literary magazine are undeniably top-notch; like most amateur literary magazines, however, these gems share company with works that don’t quite compare.

Starting off strong, the magazine opens with “Sicily,” a prose poem that splits all the differences between Cuba and Sicily into cigars and pizza – and, amazingly, succeeds. Two complex cultures broken down into common household items. “Sicily” evokes simple pleasures, creating images of Sicilian pizza and Cuban cigars so real I could almost smell the bread rising and taste the ashes on my tongue. Unfortunately, the rest of the poems in the magazine go downhill from there. I have told you before of my dislike for free verse. I was disappointed to see that the rest of the magazine contained nothing but that, with none of the treasured forms I hold so dear. That is not to say the rest of the poems are completely devoid of merit – “Never Never in Neverland” and “Common Ancestry” stand out as the other two excellent poems – but the magazine reaches its poetic peak with opening “Sicily.”

It is in its short-short stories that the magazine truly shines. Unfortunately, “The Memory Man” is the first that pops up, and although its premise is great, the style is overstated, too much is said. The author has too little faith in his reader. Instead of taking a melancholic stroll down memory lane, I trudged through it under the glare of the summer sun.

“What Kills You” is the second short-short in the magazine and by far my favorite. The beginning is all mystery: who is Yemeni (a vaguely Middle Eastern name, but another paragraph in the reader realizes they are not in the Middle East)? Who are the Guardians? What world do they live in? Like all short-shorts, very few of these questions are answered, except for the first, in lovely detail. In two short pages we come to know all of Yemeni. We see his past relationships through the lens of the contemplative present and mourn with him all that was never meant to be. A true testament to the skill of the author is that I never felt sad at the death of such a sympathetic main character; his life had been one long chain of tragedies and his death, inevitably, had simply been the final link.

Not all the short stories in the collection are as brilliant. “Sweet” fails to truly communicate the intricacies of the narrator’s parents, “Two Tickets to Warsaw” never quite achieves the humdrum, regretful tone it imitates, and the premise of “Something Dirty for My Wife” is slightly too contrived for the story to stand alone, but even these are worth a read (and certainly more so than the poetry). The other short-short I enjoyed a great deal was “Remnants,” but it, too, suffered from problems of overstatement. The overstatement, however, did not take away too much from the story’s plot or tone, and the ending will always be a dark, deliciously unexpected twist.

One final note: the magazine is sloppy. I do not expect The New Yorker levels of attention to detail, but its systematic problems are too pervasive to ignore. Several times the spaces between words were not present, the font was inconsistent through the piece, and even some phrases were duplicated right next to the original phrase. I would not call these huge problems, but when they did appear, they detracted from enjoyment of the story. I was more amazed than anything else that mistakes that should have been eliminated on just a cursory proofreading still appeared.

This Minute, This Hour

I grab my coat and head outside. It is a clear day, warm, sunny, moderately windy, the kind of day that you wish for on rainy Mondays as you lay your head down on the school desk. Dead leaves crunch underfoot with every step: ba-dump, ba-dump, ba-dump. I take my time; there is no use in hurrying.

John's voice had been urgent enough, but I knew him well enough to know that it was probably his typical overreaction. He had always been a passionate, excitable boy. In our freshman year of highschool, he once convinced the teacher to let the whole class outside to look at a dinosaur fossil he "discovered" on the baseball field. It turned out to be several mud-encrusted coat hangers a janitor had forgotten to clean up. His face had turned as red as his hair.

It was not an isolated incident. For as long as I could remember, ever since grade school, John had been like that. My earliest memory of him was him agreeing to eat a live earthworm for ten dollars - ten dollars had been a lot back then. In middle school his antics escalated, resulting in him almost being expelled from our school for passing around pills he told us would allow us to see aliens - it turned out to be LSD. I don't think he knew about it, for he was not a malicious person, but I suspect that even had he known he was handing out drugs, he would not have cared.

People have wondered why I was friends with such a boy. My parents lived in constant fear of me inviting him to our house, and more than once the school guidance counselor asked me if I was being coerced into hanging out with him. I myself am not sure of the reason we are friends, for I think his antics as stupid as everyone else does. If I had to pin it down to a single reason...well, if there was one thing good about John, behind his stupid recklessness, behind his desperate desire for attention, behind his disregard for the well-being of his friends, it was his tenacity. Our sun would have gone supernova by the time John learns from his mistakes. Because despite continuous streams of disappointments, he was always convinced that he was on the verge of a great discovery, that he would be the first to do it, that his next prank would garner the adoration of our highschool's girls. He blazed as brightly as a comet.

I have not seen him for several years. After highschool, I had gone on to college and he...our last conversation together, on that last night of summer with the crystal palaces of our childhood trembling before us, he had said to me, "You do well in school, man. Me? I'm bustin' outta this town. Las Vegas, LA, Hollywood, who knows? I'm gonna strike it rich. In a few years, everyone'll know my name, you'll see - and then you can tell all ya university pals: 'I knew that man. I grew up with him. We were best friends.' "

And that was that. We had each other's phone numbers and email, but it had just been too much. After a few sporadic attempts to communicate in the first semester of college, we stopped contacting each other altogether. It seemed painfully sad to me, now, how we had drifted apart, but I do not remember ever feeling so sad back then.

I glance at my watch. 3:00 p.m. The minute hand overlaps the hour hand exactly, and as I continue to stare it moves further and further away, past the four, the five, the six. Once it reaches the nine, I smile, for now it has reached the end of its journey and is now going back to the way they once were, the minute and hour hands of a clock, diverging and converging and diverging again...

I pull up into his driveway.

An Izze Can

Izze can

1) A perfect cylinder, slightly taller than a Coke can but much thinner.

The producers of the beverage went for a more original design to hide their true intentions: the can is sleek and pretty to look at, but by my estimation it only holds about 80% the volume of liquid as a regular soda can.

2) "Sparkling Clementine," the tagline promises.

A rather bold boast. "I taste so good I put regular Orange to shame," the can says. "I sparkle like a beauty pageant winner. Clementine. Have you even heard of it, you poor clod? Exotic, we know."

3) It is as cold as ice. Water droplets cling to the side and slowly drip down.

It looks delicious, so delicious. Refrigerated Izze on a hot summer day, a better thirst quencher I cannot imagine. How daring it would be to lick the condensed water droplets along its surface, tongue darting out to catch a single bead of water on its tip. Simply holding the can makes you feel refreshed.

4) The logo is simple, but very hard to describe. It looks like a six-petaled flower. Each petal is smooth wedge, perfectly equidistant from each other.

Logos are important things. I know some companies spend tons of money on such things; Pepsi, for example, spent several million of their red-and-blue logo. I wonder how much Izze spent on theirs.

5) You know that fizzy taste sodas have? The malty, slightly numbing taste? It's the taste of carbonate, and Izze tastes like that, only five times more fizzy, five times more malty, five times more numbing. Its sweetness is subtle, like the makers added fruit juice as an afterthought. The sweetness complements the fizziness, not the other way around.

It holds up to its boast. I drink five of these things every day, and writing this makes me want to pop up another.

Beneath the summer sky, a field of wheat,

Golden sheathes grown and cut by sweeping blade,

Full and bright, what you sow is what you reap.

Once men were little bothered by the heat,

And when snow falls they hibernate and fade,

To wait the summer sky, a field of wheat.

We dance and sing to a different beat,

Pounding drums of gold and cymbals of jade,

Gold and green, what you sow is what you reap.

Devotees call our buildings no small feat,

Fat metal giants, preferably made

Over a summer sky, a field of wheat.

Five miles down the line, the train hits concrete,

Screaming wheels cannot move past the blockade,

Twist and turn, what you sow is what you reap.

To render pain and labor obsolete,

We gather ashes of the Earth to trade

Acres of summer sky and fields of wheat.

By then our transformation is complete,

A thousand dreams cannot stop the decay

Eating the summer sky, the field of wheat,

Beg and plead, what you sow is what you reap.

----------

I chose a villanelle because the repetition is wonderful. The position of the refrains brings so much cohesiveness to the piece, and at the same time lessens the work the poet must put into it because 9 out of the 18 lines are already written. My first favorite poem - the first poem I ever read and thought, "Wow, this poem is awesome" - was Dylan Thomas' "Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night," a poem also in villanelle form.

There is something about the repetition and rhyme scheme of formalist poetry that strikes a chord in me - indeed, I believe, in all of us. The man who first conceived the complicated structure of the villanelee must have been a genius. The repeating pattern of refrains and rhymes, tied together at the end by a quatrain, brings shape to the poem. When I first read "Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night," I wasn't aware that it was written in decades-established structure. I simply knew that here was a poet who knew how to compose a poem.

Writing free verse if easier than writing in a formal structure. You don't have to pay attention to rhyme, meter, or rhythm. Writing GOOD free verse, however, is harder than writing in formal structure for the exact same reasons. There are over 170,000 words in the English language and simple mathematics tells us that there are a near infinite amount of combinations in which to arrange a subset of those words. Formal structure, by virtue of its strict meter and rhyme scheme, cuts those combinations down, even if just slightly.

Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night

Death seldom comes with easy grace,

Grasping at the seams of well-worn life.

An end to a beginning is not out-of-place,

And all things, eventually, must fade from sight.

So, poor poet, take pity on your father,

Who, having lived long, now waits to start,

A journey he cannot undertake with another.

Weep quietly, poor poet, and play your part.

David Gessner Reflection

Like the Tayari Jones reading, what was most fascinating about David Gessner was not his writing but himself. From the very first moment he got on, when he showed us the "trailer" to his newest book, I instantly knew that here was a man who was infinitely more interesting than anything he could put on a page.

Gessner has a talent for story telling. His talks to the audience like they are old friends. Each word flows from one to the next like current in a river. When he is describing the river he paddled on or the bar he attended, I could picture them perfectly in my mind. When he described the picnic he took with his friend, holding his hand up to chest level and saying, "The grass was yeh-high," I felt as if I was there with him, wondering on the dangers of hidden ticks. His language is simple and void of ornament, accentuating his earnestness and the down-to-earth feel of his stories.

The thing that struck me the most was his story about going down to the Gulf of Mexico. He talked about how it was like its own country, with BP employees in hazmats everywhere cleaning up the oil spill. I am working on it. Me. On the project to clean up the Gulf. The research lab I'm a part of is analyzing the damage done on the corals in the Gulf as a result of the oil spill. I was tempted to raise my hand and tell him, but ultimately refrained.

Capricorn

Twin twisting seashells spiraling

With fleece as flawless as the first footprint

In virgin snow. He comes with hooves trampling

The stars like they are grass, in solitude swimming through deep sea,

In tranquility careening through vast swatches of galaxy.

Revision

Original

About an hour after we arrived, we came upon a line of people. I didn’t think much of it when I first saw it, figuring that it was probably people buying ice cream or something. As we walked on, however, I began to realize that the line was huge. Take every rollercoaster line at the amusement park and sum them all together, and maybe they will sum to half its total length. I walked for thirty straight minutes alongside it and couldn’t see where it started or began. The people in it were more often sitting down than standing up. I studied them, trying to understand what was worth waiting tens of hours under a summer sun.

“It’s the line to enter Mao Zhe Dong’s tomb,” the tour guide said. “People from all over China come here to pay respects to him.”

A tomb. The heat was well past ninety and people voluntarily waited hours to see a dead man reviled by most people around the globe. It was bizarre. Mao Zhe Dong was a tyrant, I learned in high school, who unwittingly killed millions of his own people. His policies eradicated academia in society and raised to high positions the uneducated poor. He destroyed Chinese artifacts and oppressed Chinese history in pursuit of modernity. He killed anyone who disagreed. And here, now, right in front of me, were thousands of people who walked straight into the oven to lay flowers at his grave.

-------

Revised (Point of View Change)

An hour after they arrived arrived, they came upon a line of people. He didn’t think much of it at first, figuring that it was probably people buying ice cream or something. As they walked on, however, he began to realize that the line was huge. If every roller coaster line at the amusement park was added together, maybe they will sum to half its total length. He walked for thirty straight minutes alongside it and couldn’t see where it started or began. The people in it were more often sitting down than standing up. He studied them, trying to understand what was worth waiting tens of hours under a summer sun.

“It’s the line to enter Mao Zhe Dong’s tomb,” the tour guide said. “People from all over China come here to pay respects to him.”

A tomb. He could not understand. The heat was well past ninety and people voluntarily waited hours to see a dead man reviled by most people around the globe? Mao Zhe Dong was a tyrant, he knew, who unwittingly killed millions of his own people. His policies eradicated academia in society and raised to high positions the uneducated poor. He destroyed Chinese artifacts and oppressed Chinese history in pursuit of modernity. He killed anyone who disagreed. And here, now, right in Tiananmen Square, were thousands of people who walked straight into the oven to lay flowers at his grave.

-----

Changing the point of view was a terrible idea. The essay was explicitly written with first-person view in mind; in third-person, it was simply impossible for me to convey my emotions and thoughts because a third-person view is much more limited in scope. It was not as easy as simply changing all the I's to Him's and My's to His'. I was forced to change some sentences around so that they better fit the more limited third-person narrator, and in the process lose quite a bit of the meaning I was trying to convey.

Tayari Jones Reflection

What I found most fascinating about the Tayari Jones reading was not her reading but Tayari Jones herself. Her reading was fantastic, don't get me wrong - the flow was superb and the dialogue was some of the most natural dialogue I've heard - but Tayari Jones herself far outshadowed her own work.

It was after she finished reading, when she was taking questions from the audience, that I really started to become interested. Her humor, her tone, her answers - they were fascinating. From the way she immediately jumped into her reading with barely any self-introduction, I was not expecting her to have such a casual, humorous personality. I lost track of the number of times she made the audience laugh (her recollection about the "damn good knife" her father bought her mother still makes me smile as I write this). Perhaps more importantly, however, were her actual answers. She answered each one with honesty and deftness, telling us about how she comes up with her dialogue, how symbolism is innate to a work, how nobody around you will ever read a novel you wrote but they'll sure damn say they did and proudly display the book in their homes. Tayari Jones herself was much more alive than any of the characters she wrote.

On Realness

How real is fiction? When we read a book or watch a movie, there are times we feel the characters right next to us as living, breathing humans. They all have their dreams, their fears, their own personalities. Yet beneath it all, perhaps even dominating this feeling of realness, is the knowledge that they are not real - they are the product of the author's imagination, conjured to the likeliness of life, but at their heart have never really existed. It is sad, almost, to think that no matter how great the trials a fictional character overcomes, at the end of the day they are forever bound to uselessness simply by virtue of never having existed.

But have they existed? Undoubtedly not - there will never be a Darth Vader or Sherlock Holmes. What matters, however, is not their existence to the world at large but their existence to the reader. As long as their was once a point in time where the reader believes them, where they feel their heart ache with their sadness, where they feel their spirits soar with their jubilation - that is enough. For the reader, for that one moment, the fictional character is real.

There are 6 billion people in the world. They are all real. This is undeniable fact. Each of them leaves their imprint upon the world, a trait unfortunately not shared by fictional characters. But let us think for a moment. How real is your family to you? Your friends? Your teachers?

Now let us ask some other questions. How real is the boy in Africa to you? How real is the young businessman in China? The Hispanic gas station attendant on the other side of the country? The president of the Langcolm Republic? They are indeed real people, but have they impacted your lives? If someone told you that the existence of the president of the Langcolm Republic has been a huge prank constructed by everybody you know for the sole purpose of deceiving you into believing his existence, would you believe them? How real is reality?

Awaiting Greater Storms

I hold the piece of paper with both hands. My heart hammers loudly inside my chest, drowning out the noise of the other kids around me. My face flushes red and my hands are slick with sweat. It is all right, I tell myself. Just one out of four. Only 25%. It will neither make me nor break me and there will be other chances, in the future, perhaps.

But my reasoning fails to convince me, as it always has. I vacillate between opening it now or saving it for home, where its trauma might be mitigated in solitude. If I open it at home, nothing will change save that my possible disappointment will be known only to me. But Courage seizes me at last. In a single foolhardy instant, the barriers come crashing down and the meticulous reasoning of hours vanish like smoke. I flip open the folded paper.

A row of A's march down the page. So there had been nothing to worry about, after all. A grin spreads across my face. It takes me a millisecond to absorb the information and half a second more for my breathing and pulse to return to normal. The storm as passed. The sky is bright and as blue as the sea. Giddy, I stuff the piece of paper into the bottom of my book bag and set my sights for home.

A Pool Reflecting a Starless Night Sky

She is in a pool, submerged from head to toe. The water is cold and murky and tastes of salt. At this depth no light can penetrate the water. All she sees is inky blackness spreading fifty miles in every dimension. She does not know why her husband left her. It is probably her fault. It always is. She had yelled at him too much for his affair, blamed him too vehemently for their crumbling marriage, refused too stubbornly to compromise. Every single mistake in her life had always been her fault, for as long as she could remember. She should have pleaded for him to stay. She should have tried to maintain their relationship. She should have worked overtime that day and not gone home to find them together on the bed.

Opening her eyes is no different from closing them, here, so deep in the pool. She would go see her psychiatrist, she tells herself. She would get up from the couch and walk over to her car and drive to her psychiatrist. She would go see her psychiatrist and ask him why nobody else makes mistakes.

The pool is calm. Like a mirror, it reflects the starless night sky without a single ripple to disturb its surface. She is still underneath the waves, holding her breath, unsure of how long she can hold it before going up for air. She does not want to rise. The night is cold and the water is warm. The buzz of the television rings in her ears. A tree branch scratches at her window. The room is fetid with four days worth of trash. The water envelopes her like a cocoon. She must swim deeper. A stroke of her arm, a kick of her legs - the water meets her like a lover. The pool is warm, the night is cold, and she does not want to rise.

[Headline: Depression Defies the Rush To Find an Evolutionary Upside]

Formal Wear

There are very few occasions that require me to dress up, but when I do it is invariably for the same occasion with invariably the same clothes. A white collared shirt and black pants make up the entirety of my formal wear, and the only occasions where I am forced to wear them is for my concerts. I've played violin for seven, eight, hinging on nine years now. For every single one of those years I remember fumbling with the top button of my white shirt or struggling to cinch the belt to my waist. Was my tie crooked? Was there bow rosin on my clothes? Did my pants get muddy on the walk to the driveway? That white shirt and black pants accompanied me on some of the most anxious nights of my life, were my sole companions in those long, solo recitals before scores of people, gave me courage during auditions where a single slip-up meant months of work down the drain. They are as much a part of my violin as my bow.

It is unfair of me to speak like I've owned the same pair of dress clothes for all nineteen years of my life. I eat, I sleep, I grow. What fit me in elementary school will not fit me in middle school, and what fit me in middle school will not fit me in high school. But the white dress shirt and black pants are so uniform, so constant, that I feel like they have been growing along with me, matching my every new inch with their own. Each white shirt I've owned always had eight buttons. Each pair of black pants I've owned always had a small golden clip hanging off a belt loop. I do not remember ever shopping for new dress clothes; they have always been sitting in my closet, pristine, waiting. It is only when, on my occasional sifts through the old clothes box in the basement, I happen upon an older set of dress clothes, slightly smaller but almost identical to my current set, that I realize how far I've come from the nine-year old who first laid his chin upon a violin and slashed the first notes to "Twinkle Twinkle Little Star."