Alyxandra Sarik

     Stacked atop my coffee table is a pile of mostly unread New Yorker magazines and half-read books, each one placed over the last week's edition until a winter's worth of reading was pushed into summer. I canceled my subscription and promised myself to begin anew and rededicate my time to the things that I enjoy. Now that I've graduated college I should have an unrestrained gem of time in the palm of my hand.      Amidst applying for jobs, I find myself a poor steward of time. I often get the summer blues and long bouts of boredom. I neglect activities, seclude myself, and complain to (or about) my husband. I am not a nice person in the summer. It's a season we Midwesterners wait for all year, to escape the cold and stretch out our cocooned limbs. However, the aversion to being trapped, or a complex of escapism, seems to have become a recurring aspect in my life. It's something I think most writers can relate to; however I've let it mold me into so...

“The issue, of course, is balance. A familiar problem in another costume: the desire to be solidified, in relation, bound to people and to things in time, here expressed in my house and its groaning upper regions, its poor old crowded brain stuffed with memory. I want to live with my lover and my animals in a house stratified with our collective histories. And of course I carry, permanently, the contradictory desire - to be free, open to the winds, awash in light and air, unbordered,” (Mark Doty, Still Life with Oysters and Lemon ). Many of us have seen the millennials on YouTube and Instagram who get to travel the world for a living. We watch them and we feel inspired, hopeful, and bordered with a tinge of jealous discontent. My desire for far-off places and the freedom to move between these borders is a yearning I have carried with me for as long as I can remember. This aspiration seems to promise a whispered tale of dreamlike experience, personal growth, and adventure. For...