Month: May 2014

Driving Me Crazy and Keeping Me Sane: My Time on VII So Far

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If you are reading this post, you should join The Phillipian. 

Why? I am honestly not sure.

I guess you should join The Phillipian because we are inseparable. We do not all necessarily love one another, not even close: but I know that we all love what we stand for. During my time as an Associate, The Phillipian led me to mentors and role models who influenced me more than I could ever have anticipated, and who I have missed more than they might ever understand. But in their absence, the basement of Morse is becoming a second home, and my fellow VII editors are becoming the family I never really had.

You should join The Phillipian because we are passionate, more passionate than you could possibly believe. Five months in the newsroom was enough to transform us into aspiring journalists, loving every new sleepless night a little bit more than the last. We have learned to care about one another as much as we care about our work; because after all, every one of us has something in common — we dedicate all of our time, some of our health, and most our sanity to the well-being of that paper. And somehow, it just inspires us to keep on trying for more.

You should join The Phillipian because it teaches you what it means to fail. I remember sitting down to complete the Upper Management application as clearly as though it were released this very evening. I remember the 60 sleepless hours, the countless coffee stains and cigarettes strewn across my bedroom floor. I remember being told I had no chance, and trying for it anyways. I remember pouring everything I was and everything I had to offer into those fourteen printed pages, and I remember what it felt like when I learned that none of it had been good enough.

You should join The Phillipian because it allows you no time to grieve. You will hold your head up, and you will congratulate your new superiors, and you will write and you will edit and you will organize and you will print—and soon enough you will find yourself laughing again. Soon enough you will find a new story, or a new article, or a new idea, and it will all seem worth it again. Soon enough you will select your own Associates, see your former dreams and determination echoed in their eyes, and you will hope to God that they succeed in all of the ways you could not.

You should join The Phillipian because it will inspire within you a love and a vitality that will transcend the trials of your disappointments, and may in fact be born of that very pain. You should join The Phillipian because despite eight months of what often felt like living hell, I can say in good conscience that not a moment has been wasted. In that newsroom, I have achieved things I had never thought myself capable of, and I have failed in ways I could never have anticipated. I have conversed with Gail Collins in the New York Times editorial office about a Commentary spread I helped orchestrate, and  I have cried in the Morse bathroom more times than I can count.

You should join The Phillipian because the people you meet may surprise you. I have worked and fought and fallen in love with the other editors on our paper, and they in turn have kept me alive during the most difficult year of my life.

You should join The Phillipian because with or without you, it will soon begin its 138th year of bringing information and opinion to the Andover community. And you may well find, as I have, that being a part of that is the most beautiful thing you ever do.

Signed,

Grace Tully ’15
Commentary Editor, The Phillipian vol. CXXXVII
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Electra

A duplicitous scene of memory and motion, seraphim and song: the sensuality of two lovers—one a mercurial visionary, the other a gentle pragmatist—juxtaposed by the violent ecstasy of a fallen angel, whose wings are freed when a mortal tears her skin away.

Rough fingers move across euphonious strings,
Working slowly through the muscles of my throat
The inexplicable is nondescript:
I can only do you justice in metaphor.

In the visceral beauty of evening
I seek solace in your warmth, your flesh,
Your presence reverberates against facets of memory
Breathes dimly through the twilight of my body.

Crescent curve of my form beneath your hands
The soft steady rhythm of your palms:
Moonlight shines pale across vertebral ridges,
Illuminates softly feathered cicatrices of skin.

I can feel, in the silence, his retrograde absence
Working backwards through my reality,
Tearing at the seams of faintest recollection,
Leaving me empty: a labyrinth of want.

My fingernails claw across leveled mortality
Echoing desire in their bite against your flesh,
Go on—tear against me
Push your fingers towards my lips, my jaws
Lace your knuckles through each cleft in my spine.

Go on—
I want this,
I need this.

Silence your doubts, as I have silenced mine.
Tell yourself that I have suffered enough,
And that you want what this is,
And what we are,
Or could be—

And for the rest of my life,
I will love you for it.

The motions are beautiful,
Plumed sockets and soft pulsations,
As your flesh laces through the fabric of my reality,
And with the unfurling of each feathered joint,
I remember what it means
To feel these muscles move again.

So when bare wrists press together
And trembling limbs intertwine:
When fingers clench the wrought iron bed frame
And bodies bend to meet the curve of the moon—

Revel then in raw openings of flesh and memory:
Release me from this nightmare of skin

Your mind is like his: pragmatic, keen—
But when you hear this music in the darkness,
Each note lingering like a trace of falling silver
Tell me please, my atheist, why only for an instant
In soft, sweet, clenching muscles,
We both believe in God.

Let me fall asleep as the sun is rising,
And watch the flecks of golden light
Tangle in the lashes of your azure eyes.
Let that be my final memory.

And if you stay—
Please stay—

Maybe I will wake beside you.

Rhapsody in Crimson

 An unfinished love song, a eulogy.

The only girl I ever loved was seventeen, with ivory skin, eyes like winter mornings, and hair to rival the autumn in which we met.

There was a certain inexplicability to the beauty and the chaos of that hair: no ordinary shade of red but a blistering conflagration of vermilion and rust, cascading past her elbows in a cacophony of curls. She had makeup like graffiti and a gaze like shattered glass, but none of it compared to her voice, which rang through the air with vivid incandescence, and lingered in the silence like a trace of falling silver.

As the phoenix ascends from an insensibility of ash, so the girl I love emerged from the dust of her broken home, seeking vitality in an apathetic age. Her dissonance held the promise of new beginnings, but its transience left the tragedy of absence in her wake; in the end, it was discordant silence that carved her memory into my skin.

I never asked what happened to her, never tried to find out. It involved a razor and her wrists, and that was all I cared to know. Sometimes I like to remember her as an angel, all flame and song and shattered possibility, teaching me to live again. But other times, without meaning to, I envision a car on a fog- shrouded highway, hurtling into oncoming traffic: her blood on the windshield, mine on the seats. We should have died together, her and I.

In the melancholy traces of half-forgotten melodies, her voice stitches silently through the fabric of my reality, my infinity echoing with the virtuoso of her grief. She never knew I loved her, and yet some nights I dream of her still: starlight trailing from her fingertips, tangling in that fiery hair. In my dreams she is alive, and she is crying: my universe contained within the confines of each cyan iris, her mouth moving softly in mine.

It has been two years since I last heard the melody of the beautiful, broken girl who bared to me her renegade heart and a soul like tinted glass. She had a voice like the landslide of a thousand falling stars, but she never found a song to match the violence in her eyes.