aSoSS 52 | Gradient

Do you know anyone in high school right now?

Yeah, my sister.

Is she a tweaker or is she normal? My brother’s normal.

Science Learning Center, 5:00PM, 2/19/2025

imagination is a gradient of experience charted against naïveté. it is the tightrope between consciousness and fear, where a knife is seen as shiny instead of sharp. to be able to listen to a house and hear the laughter through its membrane. to be able to look at a cloud and see a cloud and not a butterfly, or a hibiscus, or a tragedy. a contraction–a contradiction–in a mirror we crystallize infinity and sell it back to ourselves. in this crystal, a tombstone: you are a name, and then a last name, and no more.

I’ll be doing a lot of things this weekend, and by a lot of things, I mean doing nothing.

Chem Building, 10:30PM, 3/23/2025

there is a summer hidden behind the curtain of a weeknight, an eternity nested within itself. every day is a sacrifice and every sacrifice demands a savior. the sky opens like a slit throat, warm and gushing with the promise of a sunset, a scar that will wrinkle in the sun. in the shadow of the moon–in the interval between now and never–you will disappear into the black and i will not even have the thought of your face for comfort. oh, martyr! on that summer weeknight you became a hero to the world and the memory of a hero to me.

With this message, do you think you are blessing him or do you think you are cursing him?

Palmer Commons, 4:00PM, 4/9/2025

and then suddenly, a tilt of the head and the heart is gasping for air. each sentence a slipknot: a mouthful, or a minefield? a rose, freshly cut, stem against cheek, dying between breaths–who is the one dying? how easily the words spilled from my fingers and onto the page. the ink bleeds transparencies, truths unveiled and secrets deciphered. your glance dissolves muscle and unzips bone, a medusa in media res, where serpents shatter glass with their tongues and turn beads of sweat into reams of stone.