“Everyone is adopted,” I announced to my kindergarten class on the first day of school. To 5-year-old me, this was as normal as sharing your birthday or favorite color. 

After school, I spotted Prudence with her little brother, Miles. Their identical shade of brown curls and slightly tanned skin caught my eye. “The agency did a great job matching you two,” I observed. When Prudence’s mother frowned, I explained that all families were created through careful selection. My parents, brother and sister sent their photos to China, and the adoption agency found me — their perfect match.

The other children’s confusion soon escalated into what my teacher later coined “existential crises.” Confused by their reaction, I face my own crisis.

II.

My parents had always told me my adoption story. When we were stuck in Michigan traffic on the way to school, I’d beg my dad to tell it again. From my booster seat in the back, I’d kick my legs against the leather and clap my hands, giggling in anticipation. My mom, who grew up in Taiwan, would chime in with her favorite details — how she spoke Chinese on the phone with the adoption agency. She translated everything for my American dad, who, even after 10 years, could only ask where the bathroom was.

“Tell me the part about the twins again,” I’d prompt.

My dad would explain how the agency initially matched them with twin girls, but they declined, hoping for just one baby daughter. Then came the waiting. Months of silence. My parents wondered if they’d ever hear back at all.

After a long camping trip through Arizona and Utah’s Red Rock, my parents came home to a blinking light on the answering machine. The voicemail played in rapid Chinese. My mom pressed her ear against the phone, translating in real time, until her voice caught and her eyes widened. 

“We have a match!” she exclaimed. “A baby girl!”

Soon after, they flew to Nanchang, China, where I had been left on the orphanage steps at around four to six months old. The orphanage staff told my parents that I had cried so inconsolably that they placed me with a foster family, where my first word was “Gege”, older brother in Mandarin.

The moment my parents entered the room to meet me, my mom rushed forward with outstretched arms, making silly cooing noises. In response, I screamed. Not just a momentary cry. But hours of relentless wailing, so intense that my exhausted parents eventually hid in the tiny hotel bathroom, exchanging bewildered glances as they waited for my tiny lungs to give out.

Once I finally quieted, my mom tried to give me a bath. I thrashed so violently in the hotel tub that she gave up and resorted to the sink instead. At dinner, my dad offered me Cheerios, which I threw on the ground. Later, I picked them up off the floor, one by one, and fed them back to him, eyeing his unfamiliar face with the caution of stranger danger. 

My parents brought me home to Michigan, to my brother and sister. That’s when my dad would always say, “The end!” And I’d shout, “Again! Again!” — already giggling before he could start over.

III.

As I grew older, cracks began to form in the fairy tale. Back in kindergarten, other children started asking questions I had never considered: “Why’d they give you away?” “Why didn’t your real parents want you?” 

Their words confused me, but more than that, they left a sting I couldn’t explain. I felt exposed, like there was something wrong with me. Not because of anything I’d done, but simply because I existed in a way that felt off. I couldn’t name it or point to what exactly set me apart, just that the feeling made me want to curl into a ball in some dark corner until I disappeared.

One afternoon in second grade art class, my friends and I were shaping lumps of clay into animals. Kayla, remembering I’d once said I was adopted, looked up and asked, “So… who are your real parents?” A tightness rose in my throat, dry and aching. My clay turtle smushed between my fingers. “Oh my God, no,” I choked out. “I was joking about that.”

IV.

The only time my birth mother was ever mentioned was on my birthday. My mom would remind me that it wasn’t my real birthdate. It had been assigned by the orphanage. “But you’re very lucky,” she’d say. “Just like your birthdate. Eight is a lucky number in Chinese tradition.”

Around my seventh birthday, we were standing outside under the night sky when my mom pointed to the moon and remarked, “You know, your birth mom is looking at the same moon right now, thinking of you.”

I scowled, forcing out a laugh. “She probably doesn’t even remember me.” 

My mother paused, her eyes lingering on the moon. “A mother never forgets her child.”

“But I’m your daughter,” I snapped, frustrated by the idea that this unknown woman could somehow still be a part of me.

“Yes,” she replied gently, “but when someone gives birth, there’s always a connection. We all share the same moon.”

V.

Being visibly Chinese in my predominantly white elementary and middle schools only deepened my sense of otherness. My mom and I looked alike by default, only because she was the only other Asian person around. Beyond that, I saw no one who looked like me — not at school, not at church, not anywhere in our little Michigan suburb.

In third grade, classmates asked if I ate dogs, laughing as if it were the funniest thing. Then came the sing-song names, “Ching Chong Chang,” mimicking what they assumed a Chinese name should sound like. I laughed awkwardly, confused, unsure how to respond. My last name was Ukrainian, inherited from my white, European-American father.

Looking in the mirror became complicated. Staring at my black hair falling just past my shoulders and the dark eyes that turned into little crescent moons when I laughed, I didn’t see someone Chinese or white. I saw someone who didn’t belong. On standardized tests and school forms that asked for race, I never knew what to check. Sometimes I marked “Asian,” sometimes “White,” sometimes both. Most often, I circled “Other.”

At home, my parents often reminded me how lucky I was. If I didn’t finish dinner, my mom would say, “Children in China are starving.” If I misbehaved, she’d sigh, “We’ve given you so much. Imagine your life in China — being in an orphanage.”

My parents told me I came from an impoverished village, hoping I’d feel connected to my roots. But instead, I felt guilt and shame. When they offered to take me back to my birth city, I recoiled, “I don’t want to see poor and dirty people.” 

After my eighth birthday, I never spoke about my adoption again.

VI.

When I transferred to my new high school, I looked like everyone else for the first time. Yet, I felt more out of place than ever. The school had a larger Asian population, and on the surface, I blended in. In my advanced classes, teachers automatically grouped me with other Asian students, assuming I fit the same “traditional Chinese girl” mold: quiet, bookish, another one-dimensional overachiever. 

My ninth-grade honors English teacher was known for grading Asian students harder, pushing us under the guise of “expecting more.” Looking back, he was just plain racist. 

One day, after receiving a disappointing grade on a paper I worked hours on, I asked him how he came to that decision. My teacher barely glanced up from his computer. “You guys have parents who push you. I’m just trying to push you too.”

“Excuse me, my parents don’t push me,” I sputtered, barely hearing whatever bullshit justification he tossed back. “I’m not Chinese like that…” My cheeks burned. My mind scrambled, searching for something — anything — to make him see me differently. “I’m adopted,” I blurted.

For the first time in almost a decade, I publicly claimed my adoption. And, for the first time, people wanted to learn more about me. They leaned in, listened intently, asked questions. Being Chinese had never seemed cool or interesting to anyone, but being adopted? That gave me unexpected social currency and a way to escape the stereotypes that eclipsed my individuality. 

Classmates approached with the same hushed voice, eyebrows slightly furrowed: “Sorry if this is too personal, but… do you ever want to find your birth parents?” “Who do you consider your real parents?” “I’m not sure how to ask this one… do you know why your birth mom gave you away?” I developed a repertoire of smooth, practiced answers: “Finding my birth parents would be unrealistic, impossible. Basically a needle in a haystack.” “My real parents are the ones who raised me.” “I was probably given up because of the one-child policy. Adoption was very common back then.”

The questions never changed. Neither did my answers. At some point, they stopped feeling like pieces of me and started feeling like lines — the kind you repeat so often you forget they ever had meaning. 

VII.

Then came college. For the first time in my life, I wasn’t the high-achieving, composed version of myself I’d always been. I struggled with chronic health issues, difficult relationships, excruciating pain. Eventually, I took time off from school. For a long time, it felt like no matter what I did, I couldn’t fix anything — not my life, not my body, not even myself.

This pain cracked open parts of me I had long kept sealed. Through a depth of suffering I never imagined I could endure, something unexpected emerged, a deeper capacity to feel. Grief, despair, tenderness. Empathy, not just for others, but for myself. And slowly, without meaning to, I began thinking about my birth mother. 

I imagined my birth mother holding her baby for six months before laying her on the orphanage steps. I pictured the moment she let go. Her arms reaching for her daughter one last time, then falling limp at her sides. How did her heart feel? Did she call out my name? I wonder what she called me. For years, I buried these questions before they could fully form. Believing she didn’t care felt safer. It was easier to hate her than to open myself to the possibility that she might have loved me.

Letting her in felt like betrayal. My adoptive parents had done everything for me. They chose me, raised me, stayed. Acknowledging the woman who gave birth to me felt like rejecting all of their efforts. Wanting more felt ungrateful.

Love was who showed up. Storytime during car rides to school. Cooked dinners every evening. Arms wrapped around me when I cried. But grief taught me love isn’t only about presence. It’s about absence too.

In allowing myself to feel her pain, I began to recognize my own. Grief softened into a love shaped by empathy. A love that saw another’s suffering and ached alongside it. A love that hurt. 

When I looked in the mirror, I saw long, straight black hair framing crescent moon-shaped eyes, a small nose, a mouth that twisted slightly whenever I was thinking. I wondered what it would feel like to see my face in someone else’s. The closest I would ever come to seeing my birth mother was through my own reflection.

VIII.

As I try to write these words, my tears come in uncontrollable streams. How do you mourn something that happened before you could understand it? How do you miss someone you’ve never met?

I used to think sadness needed a reason. But some losses live in the body, even when the mind can’t trace their exact origin. The sadness I feel around adoption is not about something that happened. It’s about someone that never was. I was too young to remember my birth mother, too small to know her consciously. But a child doesn’t forget her mother. There’s a little girl in me who’s been heartbroken for as long as I can remember. In loving my birth mother, I’m letting that little girl mourn. Letting her speak. Letting her heal. And I’m learning to love her too.

On nights when sadness comes, I think about the moon my mom once pointed to on my birthday. Though my birth mother and I have never met and likely never will, we share more than blood and distant memories. We share this moon. Perhaps we share this ache — an invisible thread connecting us across oceans and lifetimes.

The post The Moon We Share appeared first on Yale Daily News.

My name is Madison Butchko, and this column is a space for reflection, for pulling apart the thoughts that resist easy answers. Here, I write to question, to challenge, to sift through complexity in search of truth. Some ideas shift when revisited, others hold steady, but all are worth a second thought.

She looked about sixteen. Old enough to tie her own skates, yet she let her father do it. There was something about the way she sat still, her foot resting on his knee, his hands working the laces with practiced familiarity. He tied them without looking, the way you do something you’ve done a hundred times before — steady and careful, firm but not too tight.

I watched from across the bench, my own skates half-laced. It had been years since I last went ice skating. The last time I did, my father had tied my skates for me. Now, I watched another father kneel before his daughter, his hands moving just as my father’s once did. 

As a child, I never let my father have it easy. “Too tight.” “Not like that.” “Again.” And still, my father would tie them — undoing and redoing the laces, adjusting the tightness, long after I had learned to do it myself.

Maybe that was why I loved skating so much. It wasn’t just about the ice. It was the routine, the precision, the way every small motion added up to something deliberate, something more than a sport. The sequined dresses, the soft scrape of blades against ice, the way Olympic skaters formed calligraphy, tracing elegant loops with their edges. Figure skating was elegant.  Refined. Even in an action so simple as tying the skates.

At nine, I had already begun to develop a wariness for sports, preferring books and drawing instead. Then the Winter Olympics changed everything. I was mesmerized by the way skaters cut across the ice — fast, fluid, unbothered by physics, as if the laws of motion applied only to normal people. It wasn’t just a sport; it was an art: storytelling, musicality, fashion and expression tied seamlessly into movement. 

I begged my parents to sign me up for ice skating lessons. They rolled their eyes and  muttered something about me being dramatic — I preferred impassioned. After months of relentless pleading, they finally caved — figuring I could use the exercise and some fresh air before I fully fused with my books.

I hated it at first. I was the antithesis of the Russian figure skaters I idolized — clumsy, overstuffed and entirely earthbound. I’d wobble forward, arms outstretched, a human traffic cone buried under too many layers of clothing. My snow pants were so thick that bending my knees felt like my Olympic equivalent of a triple lutz. And then there was the helmet — strapped too tight under my chin, making it impossible to turn my head without shifting my entire body. 

But no matter how ridiculous I looked, my father was always there. Every lesson began the same way. He’d kneel in front of me, tying my skates. Twice a week, sometimes three. I’d pull my skates from my backpack, slide on thick socks to avoid blisters, push my foot into the boot, then prop it onto my dad’s lap for him to tie. He never rushed, never told me to do it myself. He just tied them — patiently, perfectly, every time. 

It was part of the routine, like him waking me up at 6 a.m. for school or making my breakfast each morning — the quiet ties that hold a life together. If I complained, my dad never argued. We never spoke much during those minutes. During the time I was learning how to skate, my father and I were also dealing with more serious challenges. My grandmother, his mother, was dying. My grandmother on my mother’s side had passed away when I was four, but I had barely known her. This would be different: the first real loss I could understand. Soon, her cancer became a part of my daily routine: hospital visits, whispered updates, hushed phone calls in the other room. 

Maybe that’s why I clung to skating. I could trust this routine. Every lesson followed the same script: my dad driving through rush-hour traffic, bundling me in layers, kneeling to tie my skates. At the rink, if I fell, I knew why. If I stumbled, I could trace it back to a misstep, a shift in weight. Skating had rules, rhythm and reasons. The rink became its own world, a place where I moved in familiar circles, occasional falls on my butt included. And my father was always there. 

Even when my grandmother got sicker, nothing about him shifted. He still drove me to practice. He still made my breakfast. He still sat through my piano lessons, deaf in one ear. He gave updates about my grandmother, delivering them like weather reports. Some days were clear — she was stable, doing okay. Other days, storms rolled in — complications, setbacks, a shift for the worse.

 I knew I was supposed to be sad, but I didn’t know how. My dad, on the other hand, wore his grief like a well-worn coat— neither shed nor acknowledged. He didn’t talk about how he felt. I never saw him cry. I wasn’t five anymore, young enough to sob without hesitation and collapse into my parents’ arms. But I also wasn’t old enough to carry it in the way my dad could. 

I was beginning to understand that childhood had an expiration date. On the first day of fifth grade, I filled out a questionnaire with silly icebreaker questions. One asked: What’s something you once believed was true but isn’t? I wrote: That my parents know everything. Now at ten, I was beginning to realize they didn’t. What was “cool” suddenly mattered. The simplicity of being a kid was beginning to fray, and with that came a new kind of feeling — a lingering, unnamable loss.

The loss of that childhood simplicity seemed to go hand in hand with the loss of my grandmother. At the time, I thought I understood sadness. I thought it had a shape, a sound. I thought sadness meant crying. And because I never saw my father cry, I assumed he wasn’t sad. Maybe adults processed things differently than kids, and that was what it meant to be grown up. 

One night, over dinner, my dad told me we wouldn’t be making cookies with Grandma this year. When we visited, I shouldn’t ask about her hair — the hair she no longer had beneath a knitted flower hat. He said it with the same casual tone he had used to tell me Grandma had gone swimming at the local pool, her favorite activity.  If I hadn’t been listening closely, I might have missed the words entirely and gone on with my day, assuming nothing had changed. His voice was calm, collected. But the words carried a new weight. 

I wanted my dad to be upset, to react, to be angry, to feel something. Instead, his composure was silencing — if he wasn’t crying, why should I? I sat there, swallowing my tears like unspoken words. 

My grandmother passed away after falling down the stairs and slipping into a coma. I remember my dad’s voice when he told me — steady, flat — but he turned away before I could see his face. At first, I thought he was coughing, maybe even laughing. It was a strange, caught-in-his-throat kind of sound. So I laughed, too. I tugged at his sleeve, teasing, assuming it was some sort of joke. He moved past me.

His face was red and puffy. His breath, unsteady. His shoulders, shaking. He was crying. Sobbing. A deep, guttural choking. Grief broke through, floodwaters breaching a dam. My brain short-circuited, and laughter was the glitch. I tried to stop. But I was shocked—grief and confusion knotted together, impossible to untangle. What I regret about that night is that I didn’t do anything else. I didn’t reach out to hug him. I remember the way he turned away, the way his shoulders shook and the way I stood there, silent. 

The post ON SECOND THOUGHT: The Ties That Hold appeared first on Yale Daily News.

This changed recently as I found myself constantly retreating to bed. My body felt trapped by something heavier than normal fatigue. A persistent heaviness that dulled everything and made simple movements exhausting. Reading, once my comfort, became impossible. Opening books, my eyes would stare at unprocessed words. The struggle made me question my intelligence.

When I confessed to a friend about spending days in bed, she gently suggested “depression” — a word I still avoid saying aloud. Yet I laid horizontal for days, mindlessly scrolling through my phone, only deepening my stagnation.

During this low period, I remembered my friend Michael, who had always loved cinema. While I had secretly felt superior about my reading habits, he often shared fond memories of watching movies with his brothers. He had repeatedly recommended films, insisting they would make me feel better. I’d always politely agreed to try them someday but pushed his requests to the back of mind. 

Over spring break, every action required tremendous effort. Initially, rest seemed justified after traveling and working, but those days in bed multiplied beyond what felt acceptable. One day, while lying in bed, I finally tried one of my friend’s movie recommendations. At first, movies were simply an alternative to mindless scrolling — something to do while horizontal that left me feeling less hollow than YouTube videos.

When I found myself in a strange limbo — not tired enough to sleep, not alert enough for productive work, yet desperate for engagement — movies filled this in-between space perfectly. I began enjoying films because they offered meaning: complete stories with characters, plot, beginnings, middles and ends. Unlike the stream of random videos on social media, movies provided continuity and substance I could actually remember afterward.

I started with “Princess Mononoke.” The fierce struggle between nature and human progress resonated with me immediately. The complexity of Lady Eboshi — both destructive and compassionate — showed me characters could contain contradictions, just as we do. There were no simple villains, only people with conflicting needs.

“Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind” showed me courage and resilience in a poisoned world where understanding trumps destruction. “Howl’s Moving Castle” offered a portrait of love that values inner worth over appearances. “When Marnie Was There” spoke to loneliness and connection in ways that felt painfully familiar. Each film pulled me further into Studio Ghibli”s universe of intricate worlds.

“The Tale of Princess Kaguya” struck me particularly hard. The Japanese koto strings that accompanied her growth and inevitable departure created an unbearable beauty. As she struggled against expectations, I felt her frustration, pain and longing. The emotional journey wasn’t intellectual — it was visceral. The Japanese painting-style animations of her running, desperate to experience freedom before returning to the moon, captured a primal yearning I recognized in myself.

But it was “Whisper of the Heart” that found its way deepest into my consciousness. This story of Shizuku, a young writer wrestling with self-doubt as she attempts her first novel, mirrored my own creative anxieties. Her relationship with Seiji, a boy who dreams of becoming a violin maker in Italy, felt tender and inspiring — not competitive, but mutually supportive. When she discovers Seiji had checked out all the library books before her — his name stamped on each card — it stirred a memory of my own childhood, when library stamps were a small but meaningful ritual. 

What struck me most about Shizuku was how deeply she questioned her worth. She believed in her dream, but also felt she wasn’t good enough — especially compared to Seiji, who seemed to have such clear direction. That quiet sense of inadequacy, of wondering if your work will ever measure up, echoed my own experience with writing this semester. The moment that stayed with me most was when Seiji’s grandfather handed her a raw gemstone, explaining that, while the stone had value, it still needed to be shaped and polished. His words gave her permission to be unfinished — to embrace the process rather than expecting perfection. 

In “Kiki’s Delivery Service,” a young witch struggles with burnout and losing her magic. When she regains her ability to fly, it’s not through force or striving but through reconnecting with what initially made her love flying. This wasn’t some tidy lesson, but a moment that gave me vocabulary for my own experience that books, in my current state, couldn’t provide.

These films connected me to characters facing isolation, exhaustion and uncertainty, who continued forward not through superhuman strength but through small, daily choices. They showed worlds containing beauty and pain, suggesting that experiencing both was essential rather than optional. Completing each film became a small victory against inertia.

Through Studio Ghibli’s detailed animations — rain on leaves, steam rising from food, wind moving through grass — I rediscovered attention to small moments. I also appreciated the little scenes of characters putting on shoes, getting dressed, or eating meals together. These mundane actions I normally never thought about made the films feel more human. The unhurried pacing created space for reflection that frenetic media eliminates. The care in each frame reminded me that observation itself constitutes living.

It was only after many films that I realized what had happened: I discovered that what I’d always loved wasn’t specifically books, it was stories themselves. Movies provided these without the pressure I placed on reading. When reading, I felt obligated to analyze perfectly, to remember everything, to perform intelligence. With films, I could simply be present.

We should watch more movies as pathways to the stories that shape human experience. Studio Ghibli director Hayao Miyazaki once said, “I want to make films for children that make them want to live in this world.” This statement illuminated what these films were doing for me. They weren’t escapes from reality but windows revealing why reality, with all its complexity, deserves our attention. In these films, I found not an escape but a reason to remain present in my own world, even when that presence was limited to watching stories unfold from my bed.

Movies remind us that storytelling forms the backbone of humanity — how we make sense of chaos, connect with others and find meaning in difficulty. Through characters navigating different worlds, we see variations of human experience and recognize our struggles as universal.

Studio Ghibli films showed me life’s countless paths. Shizuku writing her novel, Kiki rediscovering her magic, Princess Kaguya resisting expectations. These journeys made me want to collect my own stories, to experience life as material for narrative rather than something to escape. So watch more movies. When our own story stalls, witnessing another’s journey reminds us that every narrative contains pauses before continuing.

The post My Studio Ghibli Binge appeared first on Yale Daily News.

My name is Madison Butchko, and this column is a space for reflection, for pulling apart the thoughts that resist easy answers. Here, I write to question, to challenge, to sift through complexity in search of truth. Some ideas shift when revisited, others hold steady — but all are worth a second thought.

***

Last summer, my friend brought me a small clay bowl from his trip to Egypt. Ultramarine blue and fitting perfectly in my palm, it had a thin black rim with an animal I couldn’t identify painted at the bottom. I almost cried when he handed me the blue bowl that night, standing outside my apartment. He rarely offered me anything. In our friendship, the smallest gestures from him felt monumental.

He left for home, for another continent soon after. These partings were familiar but still pained me. Months passed, and the bowl rested on my desk through summer into fall. I wrote long messages, giving everything of myself, only to receive brief responses or silence. I crafted explanations for his absence, wanting to believe it was busyness rather than apathy.

When we called after almost two months, the first thing he said to me was, “What do you want to say to me?” Even then, I convinced myself we would return to what we had been. There is a kind of hope that resembles denial. I chose not to acknowledge it.

I don’t remember when exactly in the fall something finally shattered inside me. Just that I remember sobbing uncontrollably. One night, in a surge of fury and despair, I grabbed the bowl and slammed it against my desk. The clay shattered more easily than I expected. I wanted release, but the breaking felt like nothing. I hadn’t realized how fragile it was. Feeling strangely underwhelmed, I swept the shards into my desk drawer, burying them beneath paper and pens.

He doesn’t know I smashed it. He doesn’t know that I’ve destroyed most of the few things he gave me. Maybe because I could never explain why he made me feel so destroyed inside. I could only express my feelings through my hands, breaking the pieces of him that he left me.

Months later, I still think about the bowl — how it once was, how our friendship once was, how I once was. And who I am now, long after the bowl lay in pieces, after four years of friendship collapsed in one irreparable break. Or maybe it wasn’t a single break but a slow accumulation, each crack widening until the final break became inevitable. 

Over those four years, every time we said it was the end, it never really was. Although every fracture felt like an ending, somehow, we always found our way back. Our process reminded me of kintsugi, the Japanese art of repairing broken pottery with gold — creating something more beautiful for having been broken. For years, our friendship felt like that. Splintering, then mended, the fault lines visible but somehow precious. Each time we rebuilt after arguments and hurt, I imagined gold seams holding us together, proof that we were worth saving.

But this time was different. I felt it — an emptiness carved where my friend once was, impossible to explain but undeniable. Some breaks are too deep to mend — not with gold, not with apologies, not with anything at all.

Trust fractured in moments too small to recount, leaving only their growing weight. By the time I noticed, I had already stopped confiding in him. When the heart is bruised, it builds walls. Mine became a fortress, impenetrable even to myself. I missed him while he was still in my life, mourning our friendship long before it ended. 

Now, as fall faded into spring, I felt only exhaustion — a hollowing. Not the sharp edge of fresh pain, but something duller, more insidious, a lesion that never fully heals. When people asked how I am, I said “fine” because I lacked the vocabulary to explain this strange sense of floating between absence and acceptance, between feeling too much and nothing at all.

The week before we stopped talking, I saw him in-person before he left. I told him it wasn’t the distance that bothered me, but that he was leaving me — again — for his other relationships, his other people. I was not included in his other world. I told myself I wouldn’t let my sadness interfere with my work, as it so often did, but that week, I stayed in bed. I wasn’t crying. I wasn’t even consciously sad. But my body knew what my mind refused to acknowledge. I couldn’t focus. I couldn’t engage. I couldn’t live. I moved through the days, existing in a strange emptiness: not quite grief, not quite relief.

No matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t separate him from everything that came before. I wanted separation for self-preservation, yet it was also what I feared most. Our last conversation ended with a decision to take space — followed by silence. His silence was more devastating than any explosive goodbye.

With him now truly gone from my life, grief found me differently than before. I didn’t sob on my floor or write agonizing, long messages that I’d send then promptly delete — things I once did, though I’m embarrassed to admit it. Yet something fundamental had shifted inside me, like furniture rearranged in a dark room. I kept stumbling into the empty space where our friendship had been.

After a week of separation and drifting through classes, on Friday night, the tears came. And with them, an unexpected companion: the urge to write. To document, to bear witness, to make my pain more than suffering — to shape it into meaning before it disappeared. My hand moved almost without permission, reaching for the journal that had remained empty for months.

The page became the confidant I no longer had. It made no demands, offered no judgment. It simply held what I placed there — the anger, the confusion, the desolation, the despair, the terrible relief of an ending I’d secretly anticipated. 

In this exchange between self and page, I questioned what I thought I knew about writing. “Writing as discovery” was just another empty, cliched phrase from workshop critiques; something professors parroted with a wave of a hand. I nodded along. Writing was architecture to me — blueprints and careful measurements, the precision of knowing exactly what I meant before committing it to paper. But that night, writing became archaeology instead — digging through memory and defense, brushing dust from buried truths. Emotional bedrock. Excavated fragments. Remnants of a self I had forgotten.

My urge to forget my friend is as strong as my urge to write about him. I want to understand him, to understand myself, but I don’t know how. All I know is that I am hurt, that I have been hurt for a long time, even if I can’t untangle its meaning or reasoning. Perhaps it’s the shame of not knowing, the inability to articulate what went wrong. After these four years, I cannot explain this pain — not to him, not to others who ask me why I’m so sad, not even to myself. And that inability hurts most of all because it makes me question if my pain was ever real at all.

I am learning to accept both my feelings and the finality of this loss. Writing makes it real — too immediate, too intense. When I write, I fully feel and I fear feeling. Fully confronting this loss might break me, and I don’t know if I can put myself back together anew. 

I don’t know if we’ll ever be close the way we once were, or if I want to move on. The bowl remains, though my friend does not. Its remnants sit untouched in my drawer. Powdered bits of blue clay and sharp edges that I can’t bring myself to discard or disregard.  

I never tried to repair the bowl. I don’t plan to. I wouldn’t know how anyway. But maybe one day, I will — if only to finally figure out which animal was painted on the bottom.

For now, I’ve found another kind of kintsugi: one made of words. In writing, I find my friend again, preserved in fragments and sentences. On the page, I piece our friendship back together — not as it is now, but as it once was. Here, I can say “Hello,” “I miss you,” “I’m still here,” “Goodbye,” holding a conversation that reality no longer permits.

The post ON SECOND THOUGHT: Excavation appeared first on Yale Daily News.

Every Friday afternoon, I go on long runs through New Haven. I run down Chapel Street, past brick facades and shop windows, past the cafe where chairs scrape against tile floors, past the bakery where the scent of caramelized crust and browned butter lingers in the air. The city moves in its own unbroken rhythm, a composition of sound that never stops.

I keep running until I reach the river. The boardwalk stretches out over the water, the wood creaking under my steps as I slow to a walk. The air smells of damp wood and sun-warmed metal. The river holds the late-afternoon light in fractured pieces, scattering it like tossed coins across the surface.

And that’s when I see him.

He stands at the edge of the boardwalk, motionless except for the occasional flick of his wrist, reeling his line in slow, steady movements. His hair is long, thick, black with strands of silver, tied back at the nape of his neck. Tattoos stretch across his forearms, curling around his knuckles — intricate inkwork of animals, patterns, stories written into his skin. His leather boots are worn, his jacket faded, and when he turns, his eyes are dark and sun-creased at the edges. He is older than me, maybe in his fifties. 

I am 18, in my first year of college. I do not fear strangers, yet. I grew up in a small Michigan town, where curiosity and courtesy outweighed caution. All I know is that the man is fishing. I haven’t fished in years — not since I was six, when I caught a turtle by accident and cried over the hook embedded in its mouth.

“What are you fishing for?” I ask.

He turns his rod. The reel clicks. “Trout.” 

“How can you tell where they are?” 

He looks at me, then at the river, then back at me again. He lifts his chin toward the surface. “You see that shimmer?”

I follow his gaze. I watch the sun strike the surface; the water bending, scattering its light. He gestures with his hand, tracing the air. “The way light moves — that’s how you know where they are. Watch the ripples, the shading.”

I squint, trying to follow the rhythm of the current, where the water folds over itself again and again until the patterns become too small to distinguish. Just beneath, I catch the faintest shift — tiny, flickering specks. Gray bodies slipping through the green-blue, barely more than quivering shadows.

“To track them,” he says. “Follow the light.”

His name is Bear. He tells me he is Native American, that he has spent years along the water, and that catching fish is something he has always known how to do. He tells me about the winding rivers he grew up near, about the first time he caught a fish — big beautiful bass — when he was four. He tells me about his daughter, Diamond, and how he wishes she was still here. 

“You two would be good friends,” he says. 

He tells me stories about his past. About the drugs, the drinking, the violent things he had seen. He pauses, threading another worm onto the hook. He asks if I know how to fight. I don’t. Not at all. He nods and tells me I should carry a gun. I had never considered buying a gun. Perhaps I was lucky I never needed one. 

Bear looks me up and down before describing the perfect gun for me. A small, cute one — one of those handguns. The ideal size to slip into a purse. But Bear says it the way someone gives advice they know won’t be taken, even if he believes it. He doesn’t insist, and the words settle between us. 

I ask him why I need a gun. He laughs, at least I thought he did. But it’s short, almost sad— abrupt, like a door snapping shut on something heavier.

“The world is not kind to girls like you.”

He reels in a fish. I watch its small body contorting midair, scales flashing silver as it writhes against the line. 

“That’s why you need a gun.” He laughs again, this time full and unguarded, his head tipping back toward the sky. “At the very least, you should know how to throw a punch.”

“I’ll work on it,” I say with my eyes still wide. 

Bear sighs, shaking his head. “If not, well — damn, just go for the balls.” We both break into laughter.

He inspects his catch, fingers running over its belly, before unhooking it and slipping it back into the river.

I let my eyes drift across the river’s expanse, tracing its path until it thins into a distant thread of navy. Bear redirects my gaze, pointing to the saffron-streaked currents straight ahead. 

“Where there is light, there is fish.” 

The sun glints against the surface, and I think about how, a few hours ago, I wouldn’t have noticed where the ripples broke apart and the families of fish below. He casts his line again; his eyes steady and his words just the same. I lean forward against the railing, listening. 

Some people talk to be understood. Others talk to be noticed, to be liked. Bear speaks with no such need. His words drift, moving without urgency nor demand. They settle into the air, unhurried, unafraid of being lost in the hum of the world. He talks and I stand beside him, the sun bleeding into the water, watching the river catch the last light of the day.

The post How to go fishing in New Haven appeared first on Yale Daily News.

Don’t worry, I have some credentials. Yes, I’ve been in love. I’ve dated, I’ve cried over exes far too much and I’ve spent an embarrassing amount of time staring at my phone, waiting for a text that was never coming. I’ve fallen into a pit of heartbreak-induced existential dread, convinced that I would never recover, only to be fine a week later after rewatching “Pride and Prejudice” for the 17th time.

So yes, I know something about love. But do I understand it? Enough to explain it? Enough to be your Valentine’s Day guide to all things romance? Probably not. But that doesn’t mean I haven’t had questions about love. And the people who ask me the most questions about it? Hopelessly romantic elementary schoolers.

— 

Morgan: The detective of my love life

My 10-year-old niece, Morgan, is obsessed with love. She loves romance novels, princess movies and, most importantly, interrogating me about my love life — or rather, my complete lack thereof.

“When are you going to get one?” She asks, like boyfriends are something you just pick up at Target, right next to the throw pillows and seasonal candles. “Do you at least have a crush?”, she’ll push further.

“No,” I tell her.

“Are you sure?” She narrows her eyes, studying me like a detective grilling a suspect, convinced that if she presses hard enough, I’ll crack and confess to a secret, hidden romance.

“Yes, Morgan, I’m sure.” 

She then looks at me with the kind of deep, maternal concern usually reserved for people who have just received bad medical news. “But… why?”

Internally, I sigh and think to myself, “Trust me, Morgan, it’s not that I don’t want to be in love. It’s not that I don’t want to have a crush. But how? But where?”

I feel like I’m playing Where’s Waldo?, except it’s Where’s My Love Interest? and the answer is nowhere to be found. I used to think that maybe having a Yale-branded partner would help — like upgrading from Walmart to Whole Foods. Surely, I thought, a place that breeds senators and hedge fund managers would also breed stable, emotionally available partners. But somehow, I am still struggling out here, like a contestant on Survivor, except the only thing getting eliminated is my will to date.

I look back at Morgan, who is still waiting for my response, still baffled by my absolute failure at romance. Morgan thinks love is obvious, cinematic and ever-present. She hasn’t yet learned that sometimes, love is just confusing, disappointing or missing entirely.

I tell her the key is to be patient. Well, that’s also what I tell myself late at night, between me and my pillow, in a conversation that is increasingly starting to sound like gaslighting. 

But Morgan is not my only tiny inquisitor.

— 

Ellie and the Cookie Theory of love

Then there’s Ellie, one of my former students from an after-school robotics class — which, for the record, was far less sophisticated than it sounds. Picture 7-year-olds aggressively smashing Legos together and calling it “Robotics,” a label mostly used to reassure parents hoping their kids will grow up to be the next Elon Musk. 

One day, somehow, we ended up talking about love.

Ellie turned to me and said: “When I feel love, it’s like a fresh-baked cookie.”

She said it with absolute certainty, as if she had just cracked the code of the entire human experience.

“Not if it’s burnt though,” she clarified. “And not if it’s cold.”

At 7 years old, Ellie had already figured out something it took me years to learn: timing is everything.

She then turned to me, tilted her head, and smiled.

“What do you think of love, Miss Maddie?”

At that moment, I shrugged. “It’s… alright.” I pressed my lips into a smile, swallowing down the urge to launch into a tirade about all my exes like a seasoned war veteran recounting past battles.

If I had been a bit younger and more hopeful, I might have given her some flowery, optimistic answer about soulmates and fate. But enough Yalies and heartbreaks will do that to you.

Now, months later — under the pressure of having to write a Valentine’s Day article — let me try again. Between Morgan demanding answers and Ellie handing out cookie-based wisdom, I have an attempt to explain what love really is like.

But not with the usual metaphors. Not with roses, sunsets or a flame that never dies. I wanted something everyone could understand — not something that needed to be analyzed like a Shakespearean sonnet while squinting at it in confusion and pretending to have profound thoughts. Love shouldn’t require footnotes… or a SparkNotes summary to make sense.

— 

Love is like buying avocados

You try to pick the right one. You stand there, squeezing them lightly but not too aggressively, trying to pretend you understand what “ripe” feels like. You Google “how to tell if an avocado is ripe” as if the internet can somehow save you from making a terrible decision. Then, you commit. You take it home, filled with hope and optimism, convinced that this time, you got it right.

Only to discover that you have made a critical miscalculation. It is either:

1. Rock hard, completely inedible, and will not ripen until after you’ve died of old age.
2. Rotten and mushy, despite looking perfect just yesterday.

At no point is it actually ready when you need it. It is either too soon or too late, and somehow, you always miss your window entirely. And yet, you keep buying avocados.

Because you refuse to believe that something so full of potential could be this impossible to get right. You tell yourself next time will be different. Next time, you’ll wait just the right amount of days. Next time, you’ll be able to tell by the texture alone. Next time, you won’t get attached too early, and you won’t hold on for too long.

But next time comes, and there you are again — back in the produce aisle, cautiously squeezing, hoping, trying again. So yes, Ellie, you could say timing is an important part of love. Though honestly, I think it might be easier to figure out avocados.

— 

A special aside for Yalies: Love is like an unpaid internship

You tell yourself that hard work pays off. If you just show enough dedication, demonstrate your indispensability and exceed all expectations, you’ll be rewarded. Despite all this effort, there is no paycheck. No benefits. No guarantee of a permanent position.

But you hold out hope. Because surely, if you just work harder, you’ll finally get promoted to Girlfriend, Fiancée or Spouse, or at the very least, Someone Who Gets Texted Back In A Reasonable Timeframe.

So you keep investing in the relationship, convincing yourself that all this emotional labor will one day translate into security.

Then, one day, you decide to ask.

“So… where is this going?”

And they hit you with,

“We’re not really hiring right now, but we’ll keep you in mind!”

And just like that, you realize you’ve been working a full-time job in someone else’s life with absolutely no job security. And still, you stay. Because deep down, you love the work. Or at least, more like you’ve put in too many hours to quit now. And so you keep showing up, hoping that one day, they’ll decide to make you a full-time hire.

(Or at the very least, give you a LinkedIn endorsement for “Being There” and “Trying Really Hard.”)

— 

Love is like assembling IKEA furniture

You see other people in functional, aesthetically pleasing relationships and think, “I can do that.” You open the box, lay out the pieces and tell yourself that as long as you follow the instructions, you’ll have a fully assembled relationship in no time.

Then, you start. And something is immediately wrong.

One of you swears the instructions are misleading. The other insists you’re just not trying hard enough. You both spend hours arguing over whether ‘Part G’ even exists, and by the time you step back, sweating and exhausted, the whole thing looks slightly crooked, and one piece is missing.

You wonder if you should just throw it all out. But you’ve already put so much effort in. And deep down, you believe that if you can just figure out this one part, everything else will magically fall into place.

(Spoiler: It will not.)

Even when you think you’ve finally figured it out, something still feels off. Maybe one of you was never sure about the assembly in the first place but kept going out of obligation. Maybe you forced a few pieces together that were never meant to fit.

Maybe, just maybe, you’ve spent so much time tightening screws and realigning parts that even when you realize it’s completely dysfunctional, you convince yourself it’s better to live with something wobbly than to start over.

Until one day, you walk into someone else’s place and see a perfectly constructed bookshelf — no missing parts, no uneven edges, no emotional damage in the shape of a misplaced Allen wrench. And you realize: maybe love isn’t supposed to be easy, but it also shouldn’t require this much duct tape.

— 

Love is like borrowing a library book with someone else’s annotations

One time, I went to dinner with a guy, and he casually mentioned that his ex used to bring him to this exact restaurant. I swear, everyone at Yale and their mother goes to Mecha — it’s not my fault this place has a monopoly on decent ramen!

“She always ordered the tonkatsu ramen,” he said, staring fondly at the menu — without looking up at me, which was probably a blessing, because if looks could kill, we’d be skipping dinner for a funeral. But the only thing that got killed was my appetite. I put my chopsticks down.

What I wanted to say: I am not in a relationship with your ex. Please stop making it feel like a threesome.

What I actually did: Nodded stiffly and stuffed my face with more ramen, as if sheer consumption could drown out the specter of his past relationship looming over the table.

But here’s the thing about dating someone with a lingering history — it’s like borrowing a library book only to find someone else’s notes scrawled in the margins. You get glimpses of what came before you — what they underlined, what stood out to them, where they hesitated. And no matter how much you want to focus on your own story, there’s always the ghost of someone else’s thoughts whispering in your ear.

Maybe it’s an old inside joke you don’t understand, a song that isn’t yours but was once “theirs,” or a restaurant that, as it turns out, comes with a side of nostalgia for someone else’s love life. You try to ignore it, to write over the annotations, but part of you wonders — am I actually creating something new, or just reading between someone else’s lines?

— 

Love, as it works out

So, to finally answer Morgan and Ellie’s burning questions — is love all bad? No, I admit. But it’s not what we were told. Love is not exactly a fresh-baked cookie. Not a dramatic airport chase. Not whatever happened in “The Notebook” — which, for the record, seems deeply toxic.

If I had to sum it up, love is like a gym membership you keep forgetting to cancel.

At first, you’re all in. You commit, show up and tell yourself this time, it’s different. Then, reality sets in. You start skipping days, then weeks. You tell yourself you’ll get back into it soon — just as soon as you’re less busy, less tired, less … yourself.

Meanwhile, the charge keeps hitting your bank statement, a monthly reminder of what could have been. And yet, you don’t cancel. You could. You should. But what if one day, you wake up motivated again? What if it was never the gym’s fault, but yours?

So you hold on. Out of hope. Out of guilt. Out of sheer stubbornness. And just when you’re ready to quit, you have one amazing workout. Maybe it’s the rush of endorphins, maybe the treadmill just hit right — but suddenly, you remember why you signed up in the first place.

And before you know it, you’re back. Which is how love works. Even after missed workouts, bad form, and regrettable decisions involving the elliptical, we convince ourselves that eventually, we’ll get it right. It’s the same reason some poor soul out there is still paying for a Planet Fitness membership they haven’t used since 2018 — because quitting feels like admitting defeat.

Most of all, love, like the gym, is a commitment. Sometimes, the hardest part is just showing up — but if you stick with it long enough, it might actually work out. And if even your date is not a good fit, at least you’ll still be fit.

The post Love: A Comedy of Errors — And Occasional Miracles appeared first on Yale Daily News.

This semester, I told myself I would become a better writer. I came in buoyant, eager, believing that simply writing more would, by some natural process, make me better. At first, it was an invitation—open-ended, full of possibility. After writing for my classes and writing articles, I’m not sure if repetition alone has improved my writing or if I’ve just produced more of it. What does ‘better’ even mean? Is it accuracy, depth, control? Or the ability to make someone pause, rethink, and feel something they hadn’t realized before?

To define what “better” meant, I experimented—testing different approaches. I imagined myself refining my voice, sharpening my sentences, cutting away the excess until every word carried weight. But a thought that feels solid in my head turns vague the moment I try to pin it down. I type, delete, rearrange; convinced that if I manipulate the words just right, they will finally say what I mean. But words resist control. They shift under pressure, refusing to hold their shape.

A professor once told me that writers are either swamp divers or diamond polishers. Swamp divers throw themselves into the tangle of words, unafraid of disorder, pouring everything onto the page without hesitation. Diamond polishers, on the other hand, refine as they go, chiseling each sentence until only the cleanest lines remain. That is me.

So, I leaned into what felt natural—polishing. Planning. If I could structure my writing before I even started, I could avoid the uncertainty. I needed to know where I was going before I began, as if words were a path that had to be mapped in advance. But writing is not a road; it is stepping into a river, cold and rushing, trying to find the current before it carries you away. I told myself that if I planned enough—if I outlined every thought in advance—I could contain the chaos. But structure alone does not create meaning. A rigid plan cannot account for the way a thought evolves as it is written.

Then I tried the opposite. I told myself I would write freely, without hesitation, without backspacing or questioning. I would let the words spill onto the page, unfiltered and raw. But I couldn’t do it. The mess was unbearable. I stood at the edge, looking down into the chaos of language and thought, and I hesitated. Then, as always, I erased it all and started over, drawn back into my old habits—trapped between the need for control and the fear of losing it.

Writing is not just about getting words down; it is about letting them be imperfect, letting them exist before they are fully formed. I sat down to write this article, trying to reflect something meaningful. But meaning is not something you call upon like a well-trained dog. It does not come when summoned, obedient and clear. How am I supposed to extract wisdom from my life on demand? Some moments might have meaning if I press them hard enough, but that does not mean I can force every stray thought into profundity.

But if I spend too much time forcing meaning, I risk stripping the thought of its honesty. I do not want to turn my writing into a performance. When I sit down to write, I feel the weight of expectation: say something deep. But what qualifies as deep? If I dig for something profound, all I find is a bucket of half-formed thoughts and unresolved trauma. And when nothing I write feels like enough—not sharp enough, not moving enough, not necessary enough—I begin to wonder if it is worth writing at all.

That hesitation in my writing mirrors a deeper struggle: the fear that anything less than perfection is failure. If I cannot do something well, I would rather not do it at all. It is not just doubt—it is self-preservation. Perfectionism is not about excellence; it is about control.  If I never put the words down, then I never risk them being inadequate. Instead of allowing myself to write freely, I hover over the page, measuring each sentence before it is even formed. But the fear of doing something poorly does not preserve my ability to do it well—it only ensures that I do not do it at all.

But it is not only failure I fear—it is exposure. I want people to like my writing. No—I want people to like me through my writing. I am not used to this kind of exposure. Writing is new to me. For the past three years, I have been immersed in physics, where precision rules, where problems have definitive answers, and where mistakes are just miscalculations—not reflections of the person solving them. In physics, uncertainty is something to reduce, control, measure. Numbers do not define me; they exist independently, unaffected by who I am. The universe does not care about my voice—it simply is. But writing is different. There are no equations to verify meaning, no formulas to ensure clarity. If someone does not connect with my work, it feels like more than just a rejection of words on a page—it feels like a rejection of me. My writing makes me feel seen, but that also makes me vulnerable.

I cannot get a clear sense of what makes my writing good—or even if it is good at all. I admit that putting my work into the public eye means I want approval, even praise. I used to believe that good writing was whatever received the most validation. But approval is unreliable. When I seek feedback, I am never sure if I am receiving honesty or politeness. Friends will always say they like my writing. Other writers will critique it—but not always in a way that clarifies what works and what doesn’t. Without a reliable metric, I am left uncertain.

Yet, I am not a reliable judge of my own work either. I second-guess every sentence, revising before an idea has even taken shape. The moment I begin, an uninvited critic appears. Is this good? Is this deep enough? Writing, for me, is not a private process. The audience is always there—real or imagined. I start thinking not just about what I think, but about what others will think about what I think. 

This article is a rare instance of continuing forward. Most of the time, I stopped writing altogether, believing I wasn’t good enough. The words on the page never matched the ones in my head, and the gap between intent and execution felt too vast to justify any attempt. Even when I managed to put words down, I found them lacking. I have come to realize that this is not just about writing. This is about how I have approached so much of my life. I have always gravitated toward what comes easily, convincing myself that effort should look like mastery, that struggle is a sign to stop rather than a part of the process. I’ve carried this mindset for too long, and though I am trying to unlearn it, writing is no exception. 

But through writing about why I cannot write, my words have become a mirror, revealing what I could not see before. And in my struggle, I have realized that the only thing left to measure is my own reflection. What metrics remain when I take away external validation? How much of myself do I put into my writing, and how much do I hold back?

So I have had to rethink my definition. Maybe good writing is not about approval at all. Maybe it is about accuracy—not accuracy in fact, but accuracy in expression, taking the things inside my head and placing them onto the page in a way that fully reflects what I mean.

I cannot give this reflection a clear ending because I am still in the middle of it. But I can start with: I want my desire to write to be stronger than my desire to be perfect. I want my words to carry weight, but not so much that they collapse under expectation. I want my words to reach people, to resonate, but not at the cost of losing what makes them mine. I want my voice to reflect not just how I think, but who I am. That is why I continue writing: to see myself more clearly.

The post Reflected in my words appeared first on Yale Daily News.

As I rushed to my 9 a.m.—a feat in itself for someone who is chronically late and in a committed relationship with the snooze button—I stepped outside my entryway in Jonathan Edwards College and, for once, stopped. Yale was wrapped in white. The Gothic brick buildings, the benches, the rooftops—all softened under a fresh, untouched layer of snow. Even as someone who grew up in Michigan, where snow is as common as potholes and seasonal depression, I had to admit: this was objectively nice. Had I been a little less cold and a little less sleep-deprived, I might have even called it beautiful.

And with snow, of course, comes snowmen.

As I walked to class, I saw them popping up across campus. A tiny snowman leaning against a tree outside the Law School. A snow dog with pencils for limbs by Sterling. Students rolling oversized snowballs with the kind of manic energy usually reserved for midterms and existential crises in Bass Library. It was oddly comforting that, despite the chaos of Yale—where we are shackled to Google Calendars and caffeinated by sheer necessity—people stopped to build snowmen. No agenda, no deadline—just pure, childlike joy. A rare phenomenon in a place where even mindfulness and mental breakdowns are scheduled in 15-minute color-coded blocks.

I wanted to join in, but unfortunately, I had sold my soul to academia (Yale ain’t cheap!), at least for the next two hours, and was legally—well, financially—obligated to attend class.

I traded the golden afternoon light for the sterile fluorescence of a windowless classroom. In my writing seminar, Writing on Faith, we spent the day dissecting grace—what it is, what it isn’t, and whether anyone truly understands it. Definitions ranged from “God’s favor” to “patience” to something about kindness, though by the end of class, I didn’t feel any closer to enlightenment. Grace was, apparently, one of those things like modern art or the stock market—everyone had a different definition, and none of them made sense to me.

As I left WLH, the sun spilled over Cross Campus like a well-timed movie montage, filtering through the snow like lemonade through a sieve—or maybe a very weak Brita filter. The air was crisp, the snow untouched, the kind of winter scene that makes you forget your fingers are actively freezing off. And there, in the middle of it all, stood a smiling snowman—the final product of the group I had seen earlier. 

He had little stick arms, a mostly rounded head (with a few dents here and there), and a lopsided but sincere face—the kind of face only someone who had never seen snow before could love. He was a snowman built not just of snow, but of sheer optimism and a fundamental misunderstanding of structural integrity. He stood there, slightly uneven, as if deeply unsure of his own existence but too polite to question it. My classmate Cienna appeared beside me, equally e​​nchanted. “Pics or it didn’t happen,” she said, pulling out her phone. We stood there, smiling, enjoying his company and the afternoon sunlight. 

And then—the murder.

A group of guys came barreling across the quad, laughing, yelling, exuding the general energy of people who have never been told “no.” Before I could even process what was happening, one of them torpedoed himself into the snowman with the reckless abandon of a man who thinks parkour is a personality. The head shot off like a champagne cork, bouncing once before landing facedown in the snow—as if even in death, it was too ashamed to watch what happened next.

The others descended like starved seagulls on a dropped french fry. Kicking, stomping, howling with joy, they executed their attack with the kind of military precision that suggested this was not their first time killing an innocent. What was once a respectable, well-formed member of the winter community was now a corpse. Stick arms ripped from their sockets, amputated. It no longer looked like a snowman—more like a failed avant-garde art installation or a deflated beanbag chair someone had kicked to the curb. 

Cienna and I stood there, frozen—both emotionally and, given the temperature, quite literally—stunned to silence. I couldn’t decide what was colder—the New Haven air or the soulless depths of the men who had just committed snowman homicide.

I should have yelled. Cursed them out. Demanded justice. But instead, my brain, in its infinite wisdom, decided to fixate on grace. Grace, which I had spent the last two hours discussing in class, pretending to understand. Grace, which I was supposed to extend to others, even when they did not deserve it. Grace, which was now being tested at the sight of a snowman’s severed head, face-planted into the ground like a Yale student after a particularly brutal physics exam.

And then I remembered—this wasn’t the first time.

Years ago, on an elementary school playground, I had built a snowman. He was small, a little lumpy, but mine. I had spent my entire recess stacking him just right, carefully packing snow with mittened hands. And then, just as I stepped back to admire my work, a fourth-grade sociopath—a child who had most certainly grown up to major in finance—charged at it full speed and kicked it to pieces.

I said nothing. I just stood there, blinking hard, willing my face to remain neutral as I swallowed down the lump in my throat. I had walked away then, fists clenched, stuffing my hurt into the deep, impenetrable Pandora’s box of childhood injustices.

But this time, I didn’t walk away. I bent down. And I picked up a handful of snow.

Sadly, not to hurl at the men, though they were long gone—fleeing the scene of their frosty felony like cowards, no doubt, off to kick another innocent snow creature in some other unfortunate courtyard. Instead, I crouched down with grace (both the divine concept and the kind you force upon yourself when you’re trying not to lose your dignity).

“I’m putting him back together,” I declared, chin lifted toward the sky in righteous indignation, hoisting my dress slightly as I knelt—with the dramatic urgency of a Disney princess. I was somewhere between Cinderella scrubbing floors in existential despair and Elsa belting her way through an identity crisis—a tragic yet determined figure, except instead of a kingdom at stake, it was an amputated snowman. 

Cienna, laughing, tagged along, her breath curling in the cold like visible proof that at least some of us had a soul. I yanked a pair of gloves from my backpack with the flourish of a magician revealing a final trick, while Cienna, gloveless and therefore exempt from manual labor, took on the role of emotional support crew.

The resurrection was not easy. The snow had hardened into something closer to concrete mixed with spite. My fingers, even gloved, ached as I clawed at it, shaping and packing, trying to will it into submission. Every handful felt like I was wrestling an uncooperative yeti.

My sneakers, designed for the relatively mild demands of walking, proved themselves wholly unqualified for the role of snow construction gear. Every movement sent me sliding across the icy ground like a discount figure skater who had somehow made it to the Olympics by accident. At one point, my balance failed entirely, and I found myself descending into a full accidental split. Cienna seemed far more impressed by my near-athletic feat than my snow engineering skills. The snowman was coming along, but my unintentional display of flexibility had stolen the show. 

Still, I persisted. I reconstructed Pete’s torso, reassembling his fallen remains with the dedication of a scientist in a questionable Frankenstein experiment. Every handful of packed snow was an act of defiance, a rejection of the forces of destruction that had reduced him to rubble. His new arms, selected with great care from nearby branches, were pressed into place. Then came the finishing touches. I scavenged for leaves, meticulously inspecting each one before deeming it worthy of becoming his new set of eyes. They weren’t perfectly even, but that only made him look wiser—like a man who had seen things and come out stronger, even if slightly asymmetrical. It built character. 

At last, Cienna and I stepped back. He was reborn—not as he once was, but tougher, wiser, and significantly more weathered. Ready to face the cruelty of the world—and harder, since much of the snow had fused into an unintentional ice sculpture.

“He needs a name,” Cienna announced. She tilted her head, squinting like an art critic searching for hidden meaning in a blank canvas. “I don’t know what it is… but he just radiates Peter energy.”

I nodded solemnly. “Perhaps… Pete.” 

And so Pete he was. We stood there, admiring our work—his slightly bumpy form, his carefully chosen stick arms, his mismatched stick eyes that somehow made him look both enlightened and slightly alarmed. He had suffered, but he had returned. Pete was proof that destruction is not the end.

And for Pete, I would act. I had just spent an entire class discussing grace—how to extend it, how to receive it, how to wield it like an intellectual weapon rather than a blunt instrument of rage. I was proud of myself for not swearing at the men who had destroyed him, for not hurling snowballs at their heads in righteous fury. No, I am a Yale student. I would reclaim my power in the most insufferably academic way possible: through poetry.

And not just for Pete. For my childhood self, who once built a snowman with care, only to watch it be reduced to a pile of unrecognizable slush—who bit her lip, shoved her hands deep into her coat pockets, and walked away, pretending it didn’t matter. This time, I would not walk away. This time, I refused to stay silent. I threw up my fists with the righteous indignation of Draco Malfoy declaring, “My father will hear about this,” except in my case, it was “The Yale Daily News will hear about this.”

So, instead of swearing at the men who destroyed him, I shall reclaim my voice in the form of a sonnet.

Oh Pete, reborn from snow so white,

Thy fate was cruel, thy end not right.

Struck down by men whose hearts were small,

Yet risen again, defying all.

With twigs for arms and leaves for sight,

You braved the cold, embraced the fight.

Though kicked, though slain, though torn apart,

Still warmth resides within thy heart.

And though your life was short and fleet,

You did not fall—you found repeat.

So let the snow, the frost, the sleet,

Remember thee, our dear sweet Pete.

I left Cross Campus smiling, feeling victorious, knowing Pete had been resurrected. I had rebuilt, resisted, restored order to a world that, for a brief moment, had been devoid of justice. Pete was back, I thought.

But when I returned that night, Pete was nowhere to be found. I scanned the field of snow, searching for any trace of him—a stray twig, a lump of packed ice, anything. But there was nothing. 

Then, in the far left corner of Cross Campus, movement. In Pete’s place stood something bigger. A monstrous, towering snowman, at least seven feet tall, looming over what could only be described as a live-action battlefield.

On one side, a coalition of determined builders—engineers, probably, or at least people who knew how to use a protractor correctly. They were reinforcing their creation with the focus of men who had abandoned their p-sets for this. On the other, a rowdy gang armed with shovels and a dangerous amount of free time, pacing like wolves, waiting for the perfect moment to strike. This could only mean war.

As I approached, a sudden hush fell over the crowd. One of the guys—presumably the leader of the shovel-wielding anarchists—threw up a hand, like a commander halting his troops.

“Whoa, guys, stop. A woman is coming through.” 

And just like that, the battlefield paused. Like some bizarre act of chivalry, they stepped aside, creating a solemn path for me to pass, as if I were some war-weary diplomat caught between rival factions. I nodded, shuffled awkwardly between them, and stepped over what I am fairly certain was once Pete’s torso.

From a safe distance—a grand six feet, a skill I perfected during COVID—I turned back to watch. The battle resumed—one side creating, one side destroying, both deeply convinced of their own moral righteousness. This was no longer about Pete. This was the eternal struggle between order and entropy. The fragile balance between creation and destruction. The inevitable cycle of human nature, playing out in the form of an increasingly unstable pile of snow.

I watched for a moment longer, then turned and walked home to Jonathan Edwards College, leaving the fate of the battlefield to the imagination—or at least to the next wave of students passing through.

By morning, it was all gone. The snow had melted. The battlefield erased. The war forgotten.

But Pete? Pete lived on. Not in snow, but in legend. Specifically, immortalized in the Yale Daily News. He had been documented, archived, and therefore, by the modern laws of technology, granted immortality. 

The world had been reset overnight once more. But Pete had entered the cloud—both the digital one and the kind that snow eventually returns to.

The post Cold Case: The Frosty Felony appeared first on Yale Daily News.

I knew this wasn’t a good idea. But what I knew was not what I wanted.

How did I let this happen?

I let my feet guide me here. I tried to outrun my thoughts and my pain. There was nothing left behind for me. I ran both away and forward. Away from the turbulence. Forward into the forest. Yet, my thoughts still roared louder than the wind, in a desperate search for an escape, for solitude — for anything to calm the tempest.

 I let my muscle memory propel me forward down the path I had run a million times before. My soul sensed something new nearby. A remedy. Perhaps. The tall grasses stood at attention like soldiers guarding something important. Diverging from the dirt path, I pushed down the stalks, forcing my entry, until the blades revealed a cutting view, sharpening before me.

The pond greeted me. 

I let myself drink in the view as if it were Nature’s finest cocktail. A sparkling, priceless champagne. Intoxicated, I’ve seen this pond before, but today Monet could only dream of painting a scene as beautiful as this. Was the pond always this strikingly ethereal? Or had my perception shifted? Did the pond change? Or did I? The pond resembled a sheet of glass, a horizontal mirror reflecting the darkness. The water appeared far darker. Not blue at all. Not a single ripple. Not a single flaw. The pond oscillated between two realms: peculiarly perfect and perfectly peculiar. The untouched surface captured every carefully drawn pine needle. Spruce trees, white pines, and delicate blades of grass stood as if meticulously painted—each leaf, each branch, a stroke in the crafting of a masterpiece. 

I let the pond ensnare me. The pond was not just “pretty.” No, the pond was beautiful. Pretty pleases the eyes, but beauty stirs the soul. Such exquisitely captured beauty enveloped me in a deep sense of comfort, a comfort that had the potential to manifest hope. And, with that, an inexplicable warmth surged within, buzzing and bubbling, permeating body and mind. And, with that, the cold darkness of the world melted away in the heat of flawless precision — if only for a fleeting moment. The pond brought peace within my grasp, making it feel tangible and real, almost convincing me life too could be beautiful again. 

I let my thoughts surrender to the allure of the pond. Glazed in layers of obsidian, the pond’s surface gleamed with such smoothness that I imagined skipping across without a single ripple. The serenity refreshed the crisp air, imbued with the scent of fresh pine and mystique. But everything was too… quiet, too seductive — What was the word? The trees stopped whispering, the wind stopped whistling, and the birds stopped warbling. Everything stopped. Silent and still. Something too perfect about the water entranced me.

Was this a pond or an abyss? Or was it merely my imagination, driven by desperation to transmute reality into refuge? Was it a pursuit of limitless solace or an attempt to escape my limited life? I couldn’t stop thinking. I couldn’t stop feeling. I couldn’t stop. Rather, I didn’t want to. The pond held no depths.

 I gazed into the abyss for what felt like centuries, lost in reflection — a longing echoing throughout my limbs. Every pristine detail bewitched every one of my bones with a binding force of desire and fascination. I swore I heard a faint whisper, a temptation luring me in: There is something beyond the darkness. There is something beneath the surface. I needed to find out. How could such perfection exist in a world like this? I don’t believe in true perfection. Not anymore. Not like this.

I held onto my breath and onto the potential of perfection. I whispered back: prove me wrong. Please. I peered down at the abyss; at least I could capture and revel in its latent promise. And, with that, I let go. I leaped. All it took was one single movement. With only one moment, the pristine reflection wasn’t the only thing that shattered into a million ripples. And, with that, I had my answer. 

Cold.

Cold.

Cold. Dark. Bottomless. Easy to jump. Not easy to swim. Easy to envision. Not easy to endure. What shocked my body was the penetrating cold, but what shocked my mind was the piercing imperfection. I didn’t know it was possible to scream without opening your mouth, until now. The pond crafted an illusion, but her waters imploded. An implosion of cold, dark water. And even colder truths. Her beauty resided solely on the surface. Ponds — no matter how beautiful — are still made of water. The pond lured me in, but her water pulled me down. My arms flailed. My legs failed. My body frail.

Stop. No.

Darkness greeted me. The black blanket of water wrapped around me. Constricting, not comforting. Smothering, not soothing. Every part of me wanted to blame the pond. But no. She did as I requested. Prove me wrong. A curse, not a command.

 But what I saw was not what I wanted. At least so I thought. But shouldn’t I have known? Nothing is how it seems beneath the surface. I knew. But I let it all slip through my fingers like water.

 How did I let this happen? Rather, why did I let this happen?

I don’t know how to swim.

The post Beneath the surface appeared first on Yale Daily News.

The National Suicide Prevention Lifeline is a hotline for individuals in crisis or for those looking to help someone else. To speak with a certified listener, call 1-800-273-8255. 

Crisis Text Line is a texting service for emotional crisis support. To speak with a trained listener, text HELLO to 741741. 

On-call counselors from Yale Mental Health and Counseling are available at any time: call (203) 432-0290. Additional resources are available in a guide compiled by the Yale College Council here.

The art gallery is the first place I go when I hear the news. I close my eyes and whisper a prayer — “please save us from the pain.”

It was cold that day. I felt the chill down my spine as I read the news and the chill of the wind down my back. I remember swinging my leg over my bike, pedaling down York Street, feeling the weight of the news settle inside me. I have heard news like this before, but, this time, I didn’t just hear it — I felt it. It wasn’t like being told the weather or any other piece of information to absorb and move past. This time, it pressed into my chest, made its way up my throat and sat there. The weight of the news spilled out in slow, quiet tears. I tried breathing — but now, breathing was not only a measure of calming but a measure of life.

I push through the heavy glass doors of the art gallery. I live next to it in Jonathan Edwards College, so it feels like an extension of home. The routine is familiar — I walk to the lockers, hang up my coat, slip my bag inside. 

I come to the art gallery in search of beauty. I believe art is beautiful — or at least, I want to believe that. But what we call art today feels boundless, its definition stretched thin. Some art is beautiful to me. But not all. 

I have wandered these halls often — sometimes alone, amongst the chorus of my own thoughts, sometimes with friends I’ve persuaded to join me, debating what is beautiful. But now, I am not just asking what is beautiful — I am asking what beauty is. A word heavy with thought and wonder, one that many before me have tried to define. “Beauty will save the world,” Dostoevsky proclaimed. But what does beauty save us from? And how?

Perhaps I want beauty to save us from pain. But what makes someone stop seeing beauty, stop living? Maybe beauty keeps us here. We create beautiful things to hold onto life. But pain is not always beautiful, and beauty does not always come from pain. Sometimes pain is just pain. Sometimes it is so vast that beauty disappears, and with it, the will to go on. I have felt that. Maybe Lucas did too.

As I think about how Lucas must have felt, I remember Leo Tolstoy’s words: “If you feel pain, you are alive. If you feel other people’s pain, you are a human being.” But what happens when pain becomes too much? When feeling it no longer proves life but instead takes it away?

I wonder about the balance between life and death, the threshold where pain shifts from something endured to something unbearable. I feel the movements of pain within me. I think of the pain that lived inside Lucas, growing until it took on a life of its own — by taking his. In Tolstoy’s terms, Lucas’s pain was proof of life. But to me, it was also proof of the loss of life. 

Pain resists definition, a bit like beauty. Pain can create — art, music, poetry — but it can just as easily destroy. I once wanted to believe in the beauty of pain. I was drawn to the myth of the tortured artist, the idea that suffering gives birth to something greater. Picasso’s work is revered, his paintings framed in museums, studied and admired. Yet he never saw their impact. His pain created, but it also consumed.

I wonder when Lucas stopped seeing beauty. If he stopped seeing beauty. I think about the times I have lost sight of it myself.

I walk through the main hall past marble columns, evening light filtering through the tall-paned glass. Usually, I move quickly, making quiet judgments — “I like that one.” “That one is just okay.” “How is that even art?” But today, I linger at each sculpture. 

I pray silently, “God, save us. Save humanity. Save the world.” The words loop in my mind, until they are no longer words but a quiet hum. I keep thinking of Dostoevsky: “Beauty will save the world.” I don’t know if I believe that. But I want to. 

I search for beauty, as if it might save the world. As if it might save me. I think of Lucas, who could not be saved. I seek out beautiful things when I am sad because I need to believe beauty still exists in a world of pain. Perhaps beauty makes life bearable. That is why I came to the art gallery.

When I received unbearable news, I needed to feel like I could still exist in this world. So I came here, to stand among paintings of sunsets and clouds, of people frozen in time — women in ball gowns, children whispering secrets, ballerinas mid-spin. I came to be surrounded by beauty.

The question is not whether beauty exists — it does. The question is whether we can still recognize it.

So I step closer. I walk up to the paintings, inspecting the globs of paint, the texture, the raised points where the brush left its mark. I think about the construction, how each stroke was placed, how it all came together. I like the Impressionist section because I can walk up close, see the chaos of color and then step back and watch it resolve into something whole. I can see the steps of creation. For me, beauty is creation. Creation is what we leave behind.

Creation is also a way of holding on, a way of making sense of what feels unbearable. As Tolstoy wrote, feeling another’s pain is what makes us human. I think of Lucas and the weight of his pain. When I heard the news, I closed my eyes and whispered my prayer again, “please save us all from the pain.” I wanted to forget the words I read, to replace them with oil paintings, glass vases, silver platters. I wanted to lose myself in beauty, to erase what had already happened.

But forgetting does not change what still exists — or what no longer does. Forgetting Lucas would be a second death. Forgetting is the erasure of a life, while remembering is its preservation. He no longer exists in flesh but in memory and meaning. 

I think of all the people I have lost to suicide. Every year since my sixth grade, another name, another email, another life cut short. At first, it felt distant. Tragic but abstract. I knew it was sad, but I didn’t know how to feel it. I read the words, processed them and moved on. I sympathized, but I did not understand. Not until now. Not until now did I know what it was like to carry pain so heavy that life itself felt impossible. Not until now did I empathize.

I felt for Lucas because I knew that feeling of being in so much pain that I did not want to live. That I did not know how to live. That was my truth for a long time. I pray that no one else feels what I have felt, what Lucas may have felt, what each person I have lost over the years has felt. I pray there is a way to live beyond pain. And I believe there is. 

That search begins here in the art gallery.

I declare to myself, “I am searching for beauty,” laughing a little at the boldness of it, at the way it sounds silly out loud. Still, I move from one painting to the next, studying them. I think about how old they are — how they were made centuries ago, how they have outlived their makers. How, even after all this time, they remain. I wish the same for those I have lost. That their memories might last as these paintings have.

Not all the art here is beautiful to me. But all of it has survived. It has withstood criticism, weathering, time. It has endured.

Endurance is its own kind of beauty. Even if beauty does not save the world, may it help us bear all that is not beautiful. If beautiful things can still exist — can still endure — so can I. 

The post What beauty leaves behind appeared first on Yale Daily News.