changing
All artwork in this newsletter is by Rashi Shah
Author's Note:
Phone calls with friends lately always include a quip about the bars, malls, and restaurants we went to before the quarantine. We recount the way things were and the way we were. The past feels nestled in these phone calls, and memory spills over to the present. As the last 100 days have seen more and more cases pile up in a 500-mile radius around me, a threshold begins to build, not only for fear and disorientation but also the possibility of something transformative on the horizon.
A host of millennial aesthetics from fashion to film is grounded in 90s nostalgia. I think this generation manifests emotion in small acts of dissipation- the present fading to the rigid presence of the past, memory flaunted in retro filters. The millennial internet aesthetic is nostalgia for a past devoid of the internet, and today, it serves as a perfect metaphor for my friends and I siloed in our separate apartments, so far away but still waiting together for the emergence of a different world.
Until then, I'll be telling myself stories to keep the life that transpires between my bedroom and kitchen something worth showing up for.
xx,
Srish
It’s hopeless, the stars, the books about stars, they can’t help themselves and how could you not love them for it here in the new week with animals burying food and everything outlined in cold and even friends, it’s hopeless, this mess, this season, all that is lost and tickets and strangers, what can I say, only sitting here on this dark bench waiting for what I don’t know, I want this world to remain with me, this holy tumult, which does not know it loves me and you, friends, spectacular driveways, an orange, the vanishing year.
Advent by Heather Christle
I know this transformation is painful, but
you're not falling apart; you're just falling
into something different, with a new capacity
to be beautiful.
William C. Hannan
The next day
arrives. You worry. You recall the archive.
Your body again goes restless.
The safety of having just experienced
trauma fades and you are again
imbued with the fear of the possibility of
experiencing trauma.
You’ve cut the word sick, and its synonyms, from your vocabulary.
Wave Archive, Emmalea Russo
I am so busy. I am practicing
my new hobby of watching me
become someone else. There is
so much violence in reconstruction.
Each minute is grisly, but I have
to participate. I am building
what I cannot break.
The Sun is Still a Part of Me,
Jennifer Willoughby
Recommended Reading:
https://lithub.com/rebecca-solnit-before-the-uprising-comes-the-work/
https://gay.medium.com/self-portrait-of-a-panic-attack-f5a698ebe43a
https://thecritic.co.uk/issues/may-2020/art-for-oligarchs-sake/
More art and poetry can be found on our website — unographymag.com