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2020 Article Contributing Writers Pandemic

The Country of FKK

Posted on December 1, 2020

Written by Bojana Stojcic

At first glance, it’s a regular day at Englischer Garten in central Munich, one of the biggest urban parks in the world—some are playing card games, others are reading, the elderly respecting social distance, Weißwurst and  Helles being passed around friends and family—until you come closer and see butts and torsos sticking out of the high grass like little rock islands.

Don’t let the cool temperature fool you because you’ll be seeing them here all year round, regardless.

Three letters are all you need to know upon landing in Germany to not be surprised like me when I came to live here some nine years ago, three letters allowing all free-spirited people to get naked in designated areas—FKK, which, you may rest assured, has nothing to do with KKK. It stands for “Freikörperkultur” or literally “free body culture,” which is Germany’s nudist culture. 

Where some find this attitude to nudity refreshing, others consider it shocking. Either way, one thing is sure—you will not and cannot be indifferent to it because it’s everywhere you turn.

In another part of the city, on the banks of the Isar, unusually large groups of people peel off their bodysuits to reveal naked skin before dipping their toes into the freezing cold river, with or without a mask on. 

Apparently, nudism is on the rise these days not only in Germany but in lots of countries worldwide, which many link to coronavirus confinement. Now that plenty of people work from home, they seem less burdened by what to wear, or don’t bother with clothes at all. Perhaps a strong desire arises to experience a new sense of freedom after months of lockdown. 

If you’re new around here and happen to have the same attitude toward stripping off, there are several “where to get naked in Germany” websites, with useful information on nude sports clubs, nude beaches, and mixed-gender saunas, including all pandemic updates you need to know to feel safe. 

Before long you’ll realize Germans are born ready and there’s nothing to stop them from feeling good in their skin. Seriously, though, not even deadly viruses, let alone wild boars that occasionally steal naturists’ clothes and laptops in parks.

Communal public stripping came into practice in Germany in the late 19th century when clothing styles became less restrictive, with women tossing aside their corsets and men getting rid of their multi-piece suits. While FKK was banned in the German Reich, it came to life again after World War II, being associated with physical fitness, oneness with nature, and freedom of movement, and flourishing mostly in the East.

And while nudism is a popular pastime for people of all shapes, sizes, and ages in Germany nowadays, it is mainly the middle-aged and elderly who have the guts to strip down to their birthday suit.

Down south, hundreds of miles away in Serbia, where I come from, while it’s not uncommon to see bare breasts on the beach, it is primarily younger women with nice curves who are confident enough to sunbathe topless, which is the furthest they are willing to go. 

The reluctance to go nude there can’t be blamed on bad weather, though, as they do in Scotland, but has everything to do with unwritten norms, dictating appropriate behavior.

Most people back home don’t have a laid-back attitude to nudity in times of a pandemic, or whenever, as Germans do. Not only because they would probably be accused of being pervs but also because most aren’t sworn enemies of convention.

Me, I was textile-free on a deserted beach in Greece once, hiding behind my toddler as stiff as a statue at first. Although I’m not German-born (read: I seem to have a problem stripping down in public), for a couple of hours I felt like a God, or at least an ancient Greek, and it felt damn good.

Bojana Stojcic comes from Serbia and has been living in Germany for quite some time. She agrees with Simone de Beauvoir that nudity begins with the face.

2020 Article Contributing Writers Pandemic

Restless

Posted on September 13, 2020

Written by Ange LaGoj

I cannot sleep. It is 2 AM, I am exhausted, but a hot, screeching, soul agonizing scream wants to burst forth from my chest. After months of washing my hands, wearing a mask, avoiding unnecessary social gatherings, I am being called back to the classroom. I’m confused. What changed? Has the virus dissipated? Did its mode of transmission change? Did the school buildings that the governor deemed as obsolete and/or unsafe for children change shape? How is it that some educators can teach remotely from home, but I am denied that privilege? Is their life more valuable than mine? 

The virus “that has changed the world” prevails. There are upticks in Europe – Italy, Spain, France. There is a new hot spot – India. Thousands of tests come back positive daily in the United States. Clusters of infections arise throughout New York. 

As I attend four days of professional development in preparation for one hundred and eighty days of uncertainty, anxiety, and risk, college campuses in New York have opened and shut down in a matter of a few days.

I sat in a classroom with nine of my colleagues – mask and shield on, 6 feet apart –  listening to half-formed directives about teaching live and at a distance simultaneously, keeping accurate attendance records of 3 groups (hybrid live, hybrid remote, all remote), maneuvering two devices in order to share my screen with the students in front of me and those permitted to stay home without revealing confidential records, providing high-quality instruction as well as social-emotional learning, identifying visible signs of COVID in our students, maintaining constant communication with parents, devising ways to assess students equitably, fulfilling IEP accommodations, allowing students mask breaks periodically throughout the day, directing one-way traffic in the hallways while reminding students to face front and pull their masks up, cleaning the desks in between periods, covering classes and monitoring students while our colleagues are out getting tested for COVID. 

My mind is in a fog. I read commentary online about how teachers like me don’t want to go back to work. We are lazy. We like sitting at home in our pajamas. We don’t understand that our role is to monitor kids as their parents work. It’s unjust that we have been doing this job for years and now we don’t want to do it anymore. 

We are misunderstood. The truth is that I love teaching so much that I cannot sleep over what is happening to it. I was upset that I could not plan my units and lessons this summer. (I was not sure about what I was teaching until two days ago.) The truth is that I miss interacting with my students. This year, I will not be able to approach them to help with their work, encourage or comfort them. I cannot give them prizes or share celebrations with them. I cannot provide paper or pens. I will be 6 feet away and on the other end of a Google Meet. I will not be able to see their puzzled frowns change to enlightenment. They will be smiling behind their mask or maybe at home. I will continue to miss them. 

I will also miss my niece. She is two months old; a premature baby. She doesn’t have all of her vaccinations yet. Her immunity is low. I will be babysitting high school students while she grows up. When I see her – 10 months from now, after a 2-week quarantine and a COVID test, she will not recognize me. 

I am hoping to have children of my own someday. I am turning thirty-four in October – one year before any potential pregnancy is deemed high-risk. I am on fertility medication that will have to be suspended if/ when I contract the virus. I wonder and worry about the possible long term effects that COVID has on bodily functions. While I am teaching/babysitting, I may be risking the lives of my possible future babies. 

I will miss my husband if and when I contract the virus. He is immunocompromised – a type 1 Diabetic. COVID might be inconvenient, a little flu, for ordinary people like us (K-12 teachers and students) but for him, it could be deadly. 

I need health insurance. I cannot quit a ten-year investment and find work “at McDonald’s or Dunkin Donuts” as some people have suggested to teachers who are worried about returning to school buildings to watch over teenagers as their parents work “essential” jobs. 

Therefore, I will report to the school building in a couple of days. I will sit in a classroom (will it be disinfected?) with my colleagues, wearing a mask and foggy glasses under an echoing shield. I will know that our counterparts – ten teachers from a nearby school-  who were supposed to be sitting in a similar configuration are now at home, in quarantine, because they have already been exposed to the virus. I cannot make sense of this situation. This defies logic. The tormented scream lives lodged in my throat. It wakes me up at night.

I was once bright and enthusiastic about teaching. I loved World Languages (my subject) and adolescents (my target audience) so much that I invested thousands of dollars and years (fertile years) of my life to nurturing this career and serving the society and the community that demands my presence in the building while the pandemic rages on. I am deeply disturbed. I am fighting the shrieking scream of logic. I cannot rest.

Ange LaGoj is a high school Italian teacher who majored in English years ago, and wrote for her college newspaper. During a recent bout of spiritual restlessness, she found her way back to writing.

2020 Article Contributing Writers Pandemic

A Love Island-Based Quarantine

Posted on August 15, 2020

Written by Maeve Barry 

I’ve spent quarantine in my childhood bedroom, surrounded by dolls and dog hair and relics of my twelve-year-old self that now smell like mildew; only disrupted by the addition of a heavy-duty vibrator and a pack of cigarettes hidden in my desk drawer. Conversely: I have spent my quarantine in a self-proclaimed ‘luxury villa’ that is certainly large, yet filled with obscenely tacky signage, hot pink throw pillows, and highly unflattering, neon lighting. 

My luxury villa is in Spain. It is supposedly proximal to a glamorous beach, but we only ever swim in the pool. We spend the majority of our time in a makeup room, crowding around personalized vanities, gluing on our drooping lashes. Any conversation of consequence is held in an unmarked and dreary hallway that no one has bothered to decorate. It is only a staging area. 

During the Coronavirus Pandemic, I’ve been watching a truly abhorrent amount of Love Island UK. I left Brooklyn in March to quarantine with my mom in the house that I haven’t lived in since I was twelve. I’ve now been here nearly four and a half months. Four and a half months, during which I’ve spent roughly 271 hours in a luxury villa, or eleven(ish) entire days. I gained access to my villa through a friend’s Hulu Student account. I found my villa after taking an edible, feeling hopeless and terrified and like I (and the world around me) was spiraling out of control. I wanted something that would make me feel nothing. And so I found myself saying ‘litchrally’ and ‘baantor’ and ‘mugged off’ for four and a half months, surrounded by men whose veins contain not blood but Creatine and women with gravity-defying tits. I found myself on Love Island. 

Each episode of Love Island UK follows a distinct and predictable rhythm. An episode never leaves me anxious, but ends with enough suspense that I continue to click ‘Next Episode’ without hesitation, without ever waiting out the credits. Like chain-smoking. The narrator makes the same jokes every night. He is barely funny but makes me smile. He mocks the contestants just enough so I don’t feel crazy; I am not alone in the madness. 

The premise of the series is that it barely has one. ‘Hot’ ‘Singles’ live in a house together and hook up and accuse one another of “playing a game” which is literally (litchrally) what they’re all required to do. They are dumped and recoupled and all want to stay in the villa for as long as possible. Because the longer they stay in the villa, the greater their chance of being involved in an Instagram pyramid scheme after leaving, or of winning 50,000 euros. 

Here is the beauty of Love Island UK: I am not even remotely interested in participating in the world it presents. In fact, I am thrilled to be far away from a villa with migraine-inducing lighting, filled with enormous and terrifying men who seem mere seconds away from punching a hole through any available walls. The Islanders are constantly sunburned, consistently in conflict, almost always yelling. They are surrounded by people and exchanging fluid and I am not even remotely jealous. I am, for a change, thrilled to be shut away in my room and removed from these shockingly toned, relentlessly confrontational individuals. 

When I began my Love Island journey, I found the contestants to be refreshing. They are unconcerned with pretense or with appearing mysterious and restrained. They are loud and bold and unabashedly proud of their bodies. They appear to have healthy levels of serotonin and don’t feel that they must be missing something in order to feel happy. Thus, I am not tasked with ever having to watch or reflect upon myself. I hate my body and consistently worry about seeming stupid. I think about the bars at which I stood uncomfortably in Bushwick, prior to Covid, surrounded by very mean boys wearing very small hats. All they want is to seem like they don’t notice people and to smoke cigarettes very quietly. 

On Love Island, all anyone wants is to be noticed. In the first seasons, before it was clear the show would become an enormous commercial success, before anyone was concerned with Instagram deals or regulations or privacy, contestants chain smoked and drank and sobbed and fucked constantly. They were entirely unconcerned with ‘holding back.’ They bought each other tacky and earnest anklets before tearing them off and hurling them into the pool. 

This suited me well at the beginning of quarantine. I smoked and cried most of the time. I could hardly make it through the day without an edible. No matter how terribly I was behaving by my parent’s standards (which I was now required to live by), someone on Love Island was behaving even worse. I was a voyeur of their misery, but they also never seemed to feel that miserable. They bounce back quickly because that is simply the arc of an episode. I attempted to follow suit. 

During those first few seasons, everyone had sex on camera. I felt like the man in Rear Window as I watched synchronized, thrusting sheets filmed on a grainy, infrared camera. The beauty of these sex scenes is, to me at least, that they aren’t even a little bit erotic. The sex is almost always hurried and missionary; sans meaningful glances, mood music, a lingering hand. It is the kind of sex I’m glad to no longer have the option of participating in. 

This stood in stark contrast to shows like Normal People, which I also watched during quarantine, which made me absolutely miserable. In Normal People, the sex was well lit and romantic. It was motivated by feeling and intimacy and complexity. It reinforced every feeling I was attempting to turn off. I unblocked the phone number of an abusive ex for the first time in six months after watching a single episode of Normal People, months of progress spiraling down the drain. I saw my depression and trauma and past relationships and the kindness that I wanted and never received, and during a pandemic could not receive, blaring through my laptop into my lonely childhood bedroom. I clicked out and went back to my island. 

A personal trainer recited a five-line, rhyming poem about dating and pie. Everyone cheered and called him a genius. I was okay again. I have never once unblocked an ex’s phone number watching Love Island. 

As the show gained widespread public attention, its budget increased and the series became more polished. It lost the chain-smoking and the drinking and most of the fucking. But by this point of quarantine, so I had I. I had found a way to be palatable. I accomplished this by becoming numb. Love Island’s repressing and regulating coincided with my own quarantine transition, one marked by the collective realization that this would last, that our profit-hungry society required that we be ‘productive’ while people died and hurt and were gone without recognition or eulogization. I upped my dosage of Prozac and put on pants in the morning. I re-entered a routine of making phone calls and waiting. 

And Love Island was waiting and it stuck to its routine and rhythm and ritual. What I could count on Love Island for was ensuring that I never need feel ‘too much.’ 

I began quarantine attempting to watch movies with subtitles and the movies that won awards that I pretended to have seen when talking to a condescending former film major in Greenpoint. I’ve always been inclined to rewatch movies and TV shows, to the extent that I have most of my regular rotation memorized verbatim. I always say this is so I need not worry whether they are good. More truthfully, this practice allows me to ensure that a film or show won’t force me to sit and watch my own depression or loss or trauma. If I’ve already seen something, I never run the risk of mistakenly watching an episode that includes sexual abuse and me consequentially spiraling for the entire, following week. 

I read on Twitter that re-watching movies/television at this obsessive amount is a symptom of anxiety, which makes sense. It also mirrors my cyclical and obsessive thought patterns that are a result of my persistent OCD. My thoughts cycle to avoid triggers. Cycling through TV/films serves the same purpose. During Covid, however, even my usual cycles of sitcoms felt risky. I’d remember someone terrible who I watched them with or I’d think about an episode I watched while getting ready for what turned into to be a terrifying or glorious night out. My mind wasn’t safe, and neither was most television. The only thing that felt consistently safe was Love Island. 

Contestants weren’t furious with themselves for not writing or applying to graduate school or calling their friends back or being in love. They were satisfied doing exactly as they were. I watched parents come to the villa towards the end of each season and cry and tell their children how proud they were of them for chain-smoking and screaming and throwing lawn furniture into pools. I found this to be incredibly reassuring. 

During every episode of Love Island, contestant’s very best friends and the potential loves of their lives are kicked off of the Island. Everyone is initially very sad, and then they bounce a scene later. They aren’t allowed the time to repress or to bury or avoid. They are sent into their confessional for a tearful interview, to identify their feelings, to leave them there and behind. 

We are living in, and over the past months recognized that we have been living in, a system that not only accepts but necessitates that human lives are disposable and expendable. Contestants on Love Island (of course to a less violent or dangerous degree) reflected this practice of disposing of humans and abandoning empathy in order to function within a game, status quo, or system onto our television’s and computers for the past four months/ten years. 

There is a fine line between healthy escapism and numbing ourselves into complacency. The fact of the matter is, there is nothing ‘natural’ or ‘healthy’ about cycling through people like expired cartons of milk or a face cream that ‘just isn’t the right fit.’ 

Although Love Island is reality television and is obviously not intended to serve as a blueprint for healthy human existence, the reality is that its contestants are people. And I finish each season, I find their Instagrams and learn that Islanders are no longer ‘madly in love’ and that their relationship lasted two months following filming in the most successful of cases. I’ve watched these contestants eat and sleep and fuck and cry for roughly forty-five hours. I forget about them just as quickly as I found them, in the amount of time required to backspace an Instagram handle in a search bar. 

Love Island UK began in 2015, but somehow those early seasons feel like they belong to an entirely distant and distinct decade’s past. Season six caught up with me and I was in 2020 on my island and I realized that the host, Caroline Flack, who I love because she always sided with the women Islanders who men called crazy, had killed herself. I then did some Googling and learned that she was the third Love Island cast member to kill themselves this year. Even Love Island was not immune to the loss and the reckoning associated with a year that continues to remind us that there is nothing healthy or safe about our ‘normal’ modes of existence. 

After learning of the suicide rates among Love Island contestants, it became more difficult, required more of a conscious effort, to lose myself into Love Island, and to briefly feel okay. Watching the living, former contestants travel to Ibiza and frequent night clubs and dine in restaurants on their Instagrams was no longer silly or charming, but actively violent during a global pandemic that requires distance and staying put. 

Watching ‘haul’ videos in which pretty people unload their boxes of luxury dog treats became less comical when placed in proximity to infographics regarding the countless Black people murdered every day by police and people forced to choose between housing and food and healthcare, if afforded the choice at all. And of course this had already been our reality. The contrast was simply highlighted when the collective consciousness of our media made a miniscule, yet notable, step towards reflecting it. 

None of this is to say that I have stopped watching Love Island. 

I currently fall asleep each night to women complaining about ‘blokes’ or to the slurping noises of ‘pashing.’ We are still in a pandemic and I still have anxiety and therefore return to my predictable island that always opens with a recap of the last episode and then a shutter- speed-close up of a distraught Islander’s face and then a still image of a consistently full moon. Love Island continues to serve its purpose of structure and release and escape, and also remains really fucking good TV. I am reminded, simply, that it should not and cannot act as an end-all escape or solution. Nothing can; whatever it is we’re avoiding will eventually come creeping back up and into our screens, like weeds, until we uproot them. 

Maeve Barry (she/her) is a writer and artist who moved from Los Angeles to Brooklyn last year. She teaches creative writing and painting to kids during the day and hangs out with her dogs most afternoons. You can find her on Instagram @maeveharkinscowboyatgmail.com  or Twitter @maevethecowboy!

2020 Article Contributing Writers Pandemic

The Birth of Society’s Creativity in the Midst of the COVID-19 Crises

Posted on July 6, 2020

Written by Amanda Alysia Daniels

Creative ideas manifested into action may be deemed a survival mechanism.

In a crisis, creativity and innovation reign supreme. One becomes sparked in accessing a new path of ideas that were not previously considered. Meeting a newly developed demand whether externally or internally, requires being stirred to act. These moments are where creativity’s potential transitions into a solidified existence.

Today’s climate has initiated creativity from all walks of life by way of existing challenges in safety precautions and social isolation, due to an unrelenting virus. According to Erika Alvarez of Fremont, California, “It feels like a third world war. How do you fight against an enemy that you cannot see? It’s hard to combat something you can’t see.” COVID-19 appears to want to dominate the lives of the living while remaining undetected. However, this virus also stimulates minds into seeking a way to endure safely in a less than traditional manner.

When COVID-19 arrived, social isolation came along with it. From school and business closures to cancelled entertainment events and social connections, this virus impacted how we as humans interacted with one another. Society took to getting creative in how social distance was maintained with strangers as well as with those we love. In practicing social regulations, physical contact was strongly discouraged. What was welcomed? Facetiming. Some individuals went so far as to set “Netflix dates” by utilizing Facetime and streaming Netflix together from separate homes to continue social connections and dating life.

To keep physical distance in practice and the virus at bay, students from all grade levels and colleges attended instruction via online platforms. For example, elementary school teachers from New Haven Unified School District located in Union City, California reported to empty morning classes in order to video lectures for their students. Teachers were still teaching and students were still learning. While some classes were held online for older individuals, younger students at home required supervision and creative stimulation, like 4-year-old, Prakash Vindero of Fremont, California. Prakash was in preschool and according to his mother Indira, Prakash needed constant engagement as he grew bored easily. Because Prakash enjoyed plants, Indira created a mini garden in the family’s backyard to facilitate Prakash’s learning while also engaging him in something he loved.

Another challenge encouraging creativity due to COVID-19 was seen within entertainment venues, bars, dining, shopping, concerts, and festivities. According to, San Jose Mercury News, to further prevent the spread of the virus, California had become less restrictive on alcohol. The golden state also lifted a ban on alcohol sold through drive-thru windows. This method allowed for businesses to maintain some form of financial earnings in the wake of COVID-19, while also complying with emergency health order. With that nice alcoholic drink for pick up, arrived an alternative form of musical entertainment to go along with it, some recording artists offered in-home concerts for their fans. Hip Hop Hollywood said that Neo-Soul artist, Erykah Badu would perform a “Corona Concert” from her bedroom and would cost a $1. Another entertainer offered to Facetime interested individuals for $950. However, she was later criticized for attempting to exploit a health emergency situation for financial gain.

Further entertainment resources such as dining out for celebrations also had become impacted. Veronica Tolentino of Hayward, California, and mother of four stated that this specific Mother’s Day was celebrated with a home-cooked breakfast by her children at the family home. Esther Chavez and her family of Stockton, California appealed to creative actions when they celebrated their mother on Mother’s Day as well. Esther and family members fashioned handheld signs with flowers. They then drove by their mother’s home in vehicles and honked. Afterwards, Esther and her family left the memorabilia on their mother’s doorstep to complete the occasion. Josie Jugarap of Hayward, California could not honor the occasion of having been married to her husband of thirty-eight years at their favorite restaurant. Instead, take-out meals were ordered and their celebratory festivity with family members, cancelled.

Crises are inevitable. COVID-19 reminded society of that notion. Resourcefulness followed closely behind when a steadily increasing virus forced entertainment, work, school, store, and non-essential closures. By way of the challenges presented by COVID-19, all people were forced to think outside of their comfort zone, not only in the name of creativity but also for continued existence.

Amanda Alysia is passionate about law, justice, and truth. She is a current student of law and lover of positive vibrations and light, wherein all good things come about for the good of all those involved.

2020 Article Contributing Writers Pandemic Prose

On Seeking Joy in a Vacuum

Posted on April 20, 2020

Written by Madison Kerlan

I swallow joy in pill-capsules, two a night, hoping that while I sleep—if I sleep—the joy will seep into the empty cavities of my body and stop my bones from trembling in the morning when my dreams of somewhere else dissolve into the reality of here and now—of an entire planet perched precariously on the edge of collapse, gravity distended. Early, before my alarm prods the sleep away, my partner crawls over my blanket-coddled body, an apparition clouded by my night-swept eyelashes, drifting off to work in the remote office of our living room. I smell that smell belonging to only them and think they may someday be the love of my life; I hear a hush, go back to sleep. Go back to sleep, they insist. Joy should live in my chest, wrapped tight against the flesh and pulsing arteries of my heart, but it doesn’t. I lay in bed alone, wondering what the future looks like suspended in the abyss of uncertainty, eyes pointed at the ceiling till my alarm prods my body into mechanical motion.

Winter blends into spring. You can see the fault lines separating and binding them at once, if you look closely: early spring is cold as winter but more hopeful, usually. The tulips in the lawn of my childhood home will bloom soon, usually. Petals crack the skin of the ground. The skin of my knuckles bleed from too much hand washing and not enough lotion. I sit cross-legged with bandaged fingers in unkempt grass, in the lawn of the house I will inhabit for two months—till I have somewhere else to go. An empty carton of almond milk and an empty carton of cigarettes sit a few meters off. I watch the cartons in silence, feeling a beam of sunlight grace the back of my unshaven neck. I wonder who brought them here to commiserate with me and the broken lawn chair at my side, with the tattered seat. You’ve seen some shit, I offer. For a moment, the breeze rustles the dry twigs of the skeleton bushes. We all sit together, thinking about circumstance. Spring blends into winter. I’ve lost track of the days of the week. 

For years, I’ve been collecting joy in Polaroids, a jar of fireflies tucked away on the bookshelf for later. I shake the photo album out onto the carpet to remind myself of it. The joy seeps between my fingers as I hold the corners of the film loose and buzzing in my palms: joy is driving nowhere and ending up in another state just because you can—just because you’re young and the world can afford to unbuckle you from its machinery for twenty-four hours of wandering, of going somewhere else, says a photo of my best friends and I standing, arms raised, on the steps of the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Joy is a lonely vending machine on the outskirts of town, the pin in the map marking the origin of a proper, rural adventure, says a photo of my favorite person sitting in gravel, can of Sprite in hand, tab popped. Joy is a pair of gardening gloves, roller-skating pads, and a tangled heap of climbing rope, says a photo of a childhood friend crouched beneath the trestle of an abandoned canal bridge, victorious.

Joy is sitting on the balcony alone after midnight, eyeing streetlamps pinpricked along distant roads that curve out of focus.

Joy is in the pinpricks of the fading stick ‘n’ poke on my thigh, dotted by a friend of a friend while I crunched ice cubes horizontal on her kitchen floor. 

Joy is the slap of wet footsteps echoing toward us, a stranger in briefs with an invitation to jump into the lake and the exchange of silent, agreeing nods that follows.

Joy is the crackle of a blown car stereo, resilient against the crescendo of volume.

Joy is the orange of a stolen traffic cone peeking out of the trunk—that gleefully welcomed fifth passenger.

Joy is a misplaced cigar on the dark and grassy crest of Flagstaff Hill, the smoke obscuring low-voiced stories shared in confidence.

Joy is a spoonful of honey and blackberry jam spread thick over buttery morning toast. 

Joy is my mother waiting for me at the edge of the airport terminal, the descent from the escalator and into her arms.

Joy is drive-thru sherbet in the insurmountable heat of summer; leaving pennies on railroad tracks and waiting, cross-legged for hours, ears tuned to the whistle of the next commercial train on its way somewhere else; a beer on the roof of the family bar, waiting up for the long-awaited Sunday sunrise after my last shift of the week.

I lay on the carpet like a chalk outline, lined with evidence of joy. Gathering the photos in my hands, I return the fireflies to their plastic album sleeves—all but one: joy is my grandmother’s wide grin, a black jellybean pressed to her front tooth, says a photo of us holding one another behind the bar counter. Today is her birthday and we are not celebrating this year because she has been dead for months. The illusion dissipates in a plume of smoke. I find the world still ablaze outside my window. I leave the bedroom to join the almond milk, the Marlboros, and the busted lawn chair, eating the blackberries I used to pluck from her garden bushes and watching over deserted city streets, the image of an impending dystopia, the air stale and timeless. To touch a memory does not emulate joy. It emulates the desire for joy. 

I wonder how my desire for joy fits into the puzzled frame of a global crisis; how desire spoils rancid when people around you are dying in the past and the present and the future. When the clouds loom and the city is painted in ruins, overcast and forgotten in isolation. When the grass reaches unkempt and untrampled around your bare ankles, pleading for company. When a centipede steals into the dark polyester of the bedsheets, seeking refuge from somewhere else: you’ve seen some shit, I offer, extending a broken hand. When the posters peel from the ceiling; a mounted record shatters against the dresser; the television grows fussy; the strings of lights swing from the doorframe during the night, which is too quiet even with the windows propped open. It’s an extended metaphor, my partner says. 

We sit on the third step of a wooden-railed staircase, an appendage of the deserted bedroom of a former housemate. Smoke twists and drifts in tendrils rising from a spiraled glass bowl, a potent dose of bud that could be medical grade but isn’t. Stars pocket the space of the sky and I lean back against the ridges of wooden planks, breathing. The constellations seem to line themselves tonight, stars extending, joining hands in a galactic game of connect the dots. My knees bump against the knees beside me, important knees, cherished knees, their knees. They have been talking for a while about the world and its intricate mechanics—about everything and nothing in particular at once—emptying vessels of thoughts like glistening nectar beneath the moonlight. I watch the way their mouth moves as they speak, their upper lip tugging, energized by the bud and a lowered guard. The canvas of stars lines the profile of their face, cross-illuminated by the lamp sitting warm behind the basement windowsill and the lights of tired trucks rumbling down empty 3am highways, en route somewhere else. This is a nice memory, they say at last, clasping my knee, head tilted upward. I feel joy for the first time in weeks and I hold onto it tight, arms wrapped around their shoulders in the silent hum of the evening, the soothing rush of the wind.

Every so often, joy turns up in the crevices of small moments, looking only slightly different from before. I can feel it in the familiar laughter of my therapist over the phone; in my professor introducing their dog in the last thirty seconds of a pre-recorded lecture; in wearing overalls and sandals on the porch; in the morning fire alarm sounding like clockwork when my partner fries bacon; in rolling over into them in the middle of the night and being lulled back to sleep by the rhythm of their rising chest; in the words I love you ringing from my best friend’s mouth; in smoking a joint with my housemates, wrapped in blankets from the couch; in watching the reliable sunrise seep through the bedroom window; in listening to music with the forgotten blades of grass and the trash on the back lawn. The world may feel different, but the air is the same and every evening the stars return to the sky again. Joy is tender, fragile, and fleeting, but joy is not gone. If you’re quiet, you can still find joy at the bottom of a pot of coffee or between the folds of fresh linens, in the breeze of a mild afternoon or waiting at the edge of the porch steps after rainfall, in the echo of a familiar voice and the brush of cherished knees against your own, nudging your mind alive, reminding you of what remains in the rubble. To desire joy amid suffering is to remain hopeful for all that is left.

Madison Kerlan studies non-fiction writing and gender. They are a staff writer for Sampsonia Way Magazine.