"Once in third grade, I got a 96 on my spelling test, highest mark in the class. I was so proud. I brought it home to show my dad. 'What happened to the other four points?' He says. Fuck you. Fuck you."

//

"Me and my dad would always go down to the beach every summer. He was a big Ramones fan, and he'd call it Rockaway Beach, even though it was just some unknown scrappy place that happened to meet the ocean. It was kind of endearing in a way, you know, like how when you're a kid and you really become attached to some... place, idea, thing, person... and you make those little nonsensical references and connections just for yourself. You smile at them, regardless of whether anybody else understands or cares about them. Whenever anyone mentions an unnamed beach now, I immediately think about Rockaway Beach."

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"Some of the wonder was sucked out of my life when we did this program on the computer in elementary school. It was a simulation of cutting paper snowflakes. I did it a few times and I was immediately aware that it was a basic algorithm that just picked one of a small sized set of snowflake images based on how many cuts you made. I thought the things people said about every snowflake being unique was complete bullshit for years after that."

//

"I remember the first time I ever saw snow."

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"My mom used to take me to Target sometimes on weekends. She'd let me loose in the aisles and for me it was like a sensory overload without the downsides. Every row was three times as tall as me and filled with things that amazed my burgeoning brain, I'd look at the jeans and khaki pants in the clothing department and just think 'Oh my God this is so cool!'"

//

"I used to carve my initials into the bark of trees... you know, like you see sappy couples do in shitty teen movies. Most of the time it just ended up a mangled mess, though. I was never good with my hands."

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"I like to envision myself, my friends and my acquaintances in individual bubbles, the kind you see in the cartoons when someone gets really sick and they put them inside of it as a quarantine precaution. The distance between us is an estimate of how close we are, on a relationship level or uh... just a level on which we 'get' each other. It's quite depressing, even though we're practically touching, there's always this thin layer between us that prevents us from completely connecting. I've never managed to exit my bubble and enter another."

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"I spend a lot of time in water, swimming and such. It frees the mind. I think it's the thickness, no, the density. Floating is something else entirely."