Poetry

Welcome to The Westsider!

Like many of us, I have struggled to find peace recently, plagued by the news, social media, and the uncertainties of the future. It is in these times that I turn to art and literature, both to make sense of the world and to escape from it.

The works of art and writing in the second issue of The Westsider break down the barriers we use to shield ourselves from the world, showcasing the emotions that make us human and the beauty of the world we share.

This issue’s reviews highlight the books, movies, and shows that transport us into a different world, as well as those that reflect the harsh realities of our own. “Immortal Influence” by Valentina Paredes takes us back to the world of Twilight, while Elena Wu’s “The Reality of High School” embraces the raw portrayal of our world in Europhia. In “Finding Magic in Your Own Life,” Sarah Moran encourages us not to envy the enchanting Harry Potter universe, but to recognize the magic that lies right before our eyes. 

Likewise, this issue’s photographers teach us to find stillness and beauty in the crazy world around us, from Madison Craig’s “Philadelphia Streets” to Ben Galdes’s “The Calm in the Storm.” This issue’s poets dare us to look inwards at our own minds and hearts. In Allie Murdock’s “The Space Between,” we are asked “if the mind is a universe, / Is each memory a star?” T. C. Anderson’s “How to Fall in Love” contemplates how “we step willingly on tainted ground, hoping to find order in chaos.” From poetry to photography, the works in Issue 2 have challenged and inspired me to reflect and, most importantly, have restored my hope for the future.

Welcome. I believe there is something for everyone here, so stay a while, get inspired, and above all, keep sharing your story.

Obscurèd seas of bodies wait, expecting;

How far they are from these lone hands sculpting perfectly

A hollow wall of sound to mask their deafening

Adoration—for what, but fingers flying faultlessly?

A perfunctory bow, knees buckling now, the reverie shatters

Quick, to sing again! the oceans hush, but the anchor’s gone

In the dark, adrift, stutter-starting, seeking sounds that matter

Oh to be understood: these hands reach out for a new dawn!

And in the silence suddenly blazes an engulfing embracing light

A reclaiming harmony, such jubilation, in meeting each fervent face!

Deep-red and bright-gold rings the fiery sonority; the inexorable flight

In tempting reach, with unerring purpose zealous fingers give chase

PRESTISSIMO VOLANDO! shared soaring, thundering towards rebirth, to exult and to heal

At last, eyes roving, locked: a mirrored yearning in each gaze—we know, we feel

What are the boundaries of the human mind?

I like to think that memory is rendered,

in the conviction of its infinite expansion,

Existing as a macrocosm.

Borderless.

How do we call it the whole,

Say we see the entire picture,

When not a boundary exists

To fit the frame of one’s mind.

And if the mind is a universe,

Is each memory a star?

Are recollections no more than a glowing ball of gas,

Only visible to the human eye when it lies far away?

It seems that light years of memories

are only made

to lie in a bed of nostalgia,

And to waste one’s time

towards things come and gone,

Is humanity in its purest form

as our human nature

is the 23 pages

of Terms and Conditions to our being.

Yet, Man and Machine stay on separate paths.

I guess we can thank God

for making that distinction.

Making us perfectly dysfunctional in design,

Keeping us guessing as to where our limits lie.

Oh, how we fall in love!

Blind hearts scratching at our sanity like the sails of a poor man’s ship trying to blot out the colors of the sun and guide us into oblivion…

We step willingly on tainted ground, hoping to find order in chaos, only to listen to the singing of a dead choir, sorrow-filled and long out of tune. We fall asleep alongside a memory in hopes of hearing its whispers, seek the library where pain has been turned into pages, play God with a shattered heart by putting its pieces back together, and barter with the moon and the stars so they’ll listen to a few more wishes, all in hopes of turning this hell into a heaven.

Unseen eyes blanket every surface and understand the rhythmic addiction of this girl gone ghost, dousing themselves in liquid memories and an empty palate of sounds to build a new bridge to her soul.

Once you reach this graveyard of time, where nothing grows but the wild colors of an old friend and the beats of an angry heart, you steal the silence; you scold the biting wind; you extinguish the tainted light of the poisonous sun; and you sing a song you won’t remember in the language of war.

You plant yourself in her heart, slowly and stubbornly, between “I love you” and “goodbye,” and warn the world that you’re stronger than any broken heart. When the razor-tip tongue of Eden’s serpent laps at her heels, you become the only thing it fears. When the moon stumbles drunkenly, you dip it in the sunrise.

When you get your only chance at a goodbye, you stay.

You always stay.

Finally, the clock ticks and ticks as it leaps to reach 1:30 A.M. A wave of relief washes over me because it is just us. Just my coworkers and I lost in our own time while the rest of the world is asleep. Closing time has officially begun and all the patrons have left their messes for us to clean up. Anya turns on the radio while Ciara whips out the coffee and pours a gentle splash of leftover vodka. I grab the mop and scrub the floors as I glide through the tables and chairs to the rhythm of the music. Helene runs out of the office and hops over the bar. She grabs my hands and whisks me into a twirl around the room; we laugh and dance as Mariah Carey belts out “Always Be My Baby.” My day is beginning and ending all at once. I want to stop the ticking clock to devour this moment and savor its magic. But that's the thing; I can’t press pause and I certainly can’t live in the magic of one moment forever. So I take a small sip of it and capture it in my mind, develop and decorate it in my scrapbook.

Helene snags the car keys off of the bar countertop and we all cram into her red convertible Mini Cooper to go splurge at Denny’s. Streetlights compliment the early morning moon, and the silence of an empty road is music to our ears. The convertible allows us to throw ourselves into the sky and sing to the listening moon. Just us, one car, one song, every morning. Denny’s open sign calls us in to get our usual. Nancy, our waitress, already has our orders ready! Four coffees, two milkshakes, three orders of bacon and eggs, and two side orders of sourdough toast with boysenberry jam. I’m looking around at my friends as we giggle and relive our night, and a sudden desire creeps in me to chase the sun and drive until we run out of gas. The thought comes to me often, a desire to spontaneously explore and roam all over the Earth. But I’m pulled back to reality as Ciara hits the jukebox, dancing out all the toxins and complications of life. We take over Denny’s and make it our dance floor while more customers enter and join us in our therapy.

The night and the morning are the same for me. All one story tied together. It is time for me to sleep but my restless heart won't allow me to. So I sit on my couch with my cat, looking out at the city waking up, thinking to myself: what will happen next?

We sat on the roof, unmoving, with no painful space in between us. The universe was holding its breath for us. I felt it in the way the wind stood still, more nervous than I was. It drifted between us softly, so as not to trigger an explosion. Don’t worry wind, I thought stupidly, it won’t be you who sets off the bomb. Alice’s hand slipped in mine. I turned to look at her. It was moments like these when she made me feel surreal, as though we were the main characters in a rom-com movie the angels had been waiting for. I imagined them sitting on the edge of their seats, slowly becoming aware of what was to come. Maybe they shed a few tears for us that night. Maybe they didn’t.

Maybe all they could see was what I was seeing right then. Knowing only what I thought I knew. What I wanted to think I knew. 

Alice was always beautiful. 

She wasn’t the kind of beautiful that made people on the streets wonder how long her Creator took to work on her. People didn’t stop and stare at her, transfixed, completely captivated by her eyes, brown at first. Girls didn’t look at her with kind eyes and soft smiles, oh my gosh you are so pretty! Boys didn’t look at her and see a pretty face, one he could maybe muster up the courage to ask out on a date. Mothers and older women didn’t stop to tell her what a lovely face she had. The only attention she ever got while walking down the streets were whistles and winks, glances down her body that were far too dragged out, tongues sliding quickly over lips, dying to taste her. She never expects the catcalls, she told me once. She said she doesn’t realize that the body she never found comfortable could be so enticing to those who didn’t know her. And even to those who did. That was the saddest part. Alice was tough; she didn’t care enough about other people to care about a reputation. There was no way to ignore the stares though, on the sidewalks and in the hallways. 

I had never heard someone describe Alice as beautiful. She was only ever hot and sexy and a tease and a slut and a body. I guess she, despite herself, thought one day she’d hear something else. An artist, she mentioned, I wonder if people even know I’m an artist! That I created those murals and paintings all around the school. She laughed when she said that. I guess I am everything, except beautiful. Looking at her, there on the roof beside me, I wanted to reach out and touch her how I did when she told me that. Only to them, I said. 

Alice was never called beautiful. Of course she wasn’t. Alice wasn’t beautiful in the kind of way people want girls to be beautiful. She was beautiful in the way she understood things, in the way she understood people’s pain, and in the way she could transfer all of that hurt onto a canvas. She was beautiful in the way she held her pencil, sketching without worrying about making mistakes, because she knew they would happen anyway. She was beautiful in the way she was out of breath after a painting. She was beautiful when she smiled. But not the smile that everyone got to see; that one was every adjective everyone else would use to describe Alice. No, she was beautiful when she really smiled, either because she didn’t think people could see her or because she forgot we were there all together. I always hoped she smiled that way because she knew I was there, looking.

She was beautiful in the way her face scrunched up just a little bit when the morning sun shone on her face. She was beautiful when she laughed, great shakes starting from her core, tumbling out of her mouth faster than she could breathe. She was beautiful when she couldn’t decide on things, her eyes glaring as though to challenge the choice. She was beautiful every minute she spent studying, staring at the problems, because it was beautiful to see her mind at work. She was beautiful when she ran, practically flying, and she was beautiful when she boxed. She always looked as though she was fighting something much bigger than a boxing bag—something perhaps bigger than all of us. She was beautiful when she stared at herself in the mirror, eyes moving quickly, scanning every curve and every line, settling on the bridge of her nose between her eyes. She was beautiful when she slept, chest rising and falling with every painful breath, curly hair finding its way absolutely everywhere. She was beautiful when she was awake, completely full of life, intoxicating the entire world with the sway of her hips as she danced down the street. She was beautiful in her determination. She was beautiful in the way she never let people deny her ethnicity. She was beautiful in the way she loved Mari. And in the way she tried to find the good in her dad, even though she knew she would never find it if he was looking at her. She was beautiful when she kissed her friends hello and goodbye, entrapping them in her arms. She was beautiful in the way she loved me. 

Alice once told me she felt most beautiful when she was with me. And not because she found worth for herself in me, or because I was able to make her feel physically beautiful. But because when I would tell her that she took up everything in sight with her radiance, when I would look at her like she was everything, she saw it too. She saw it so much when she saw me see her, that she saw it when I wasn’t even there. Through you, Pedro, I got to see it, she said, and now I don’t think I can ever unsee it. You make me feel like there is nothing in this world that can take away my beautiful. 

There isn’t. Not even I could. 

She looked at me, squeezing my hand and bringing me back down to earth. I tried for a smile and she tried too. 

It hurt that nothing was the same, yet nothing had changed. Really changed.

But it had to.

The wind hit my face like the strike of my father’s hand. Harsh. Cold. The sharp taste of salt lingered in the air. My feet sunk deeper into the wet sand, water engulfing my calves. A shiver traveled down my spine as water kissed the bruises adorning my legs. Salt met the wounds guarded by the sleeve of my sweatshirt. I winced, but a small smile crept onto my face. Pain. I rejoiced, sinking into this feeling that was so familiar to my mind, body, and soul. If pessimism was my home, pain was my sibling. A sense of comfort and relief washed over me. The voices in my head agreed. “Feeling pain is better than feeling nothing,” they whispered to me. I fell to my knees, the blue wash of my jeans blackening. A similar phenomenon occurred within me. My soul reached its darkest heights, flirting with the thoughts of death that ruled over me. I felt nothing. And simultaneously, I felt infinite. 

The sound of my phone broke my train of thought. The image of a woman’s face covered the screen. Her small, pink lips were upturned, but the emptiness in her eyes distracted from this happy facade. They were kind eyes, but beneath the deep brown a sadness resided. Pity mingled with my pain now. I answered the call, and my mother’s voice echoed in my right ear. Her words, fading in and out of a Filipino accent, soothed me. They swept over my tense muscles, filling every hole of darkness within me. Her words danced around me, riding the waves of salt that glided in the air. They hugged me and in one swift motion, lifted me from the sand. I drove home.

My favorite series to read when I was younger was Harry Potter. My older cousins introduced me to the books and, although I was hesitant at first because I wasn’t a fan of fantasy novels, I quickly fell deeply in love with the stories. As soon as I finished the last sentence of each book, I rushed to my mom, begging her to take me to the bookstore so we could buy the next in the series. At night, I stayed up past my bedtime waiting for my parents to go to sleep before pulling out my night light and making a tent with my covers, reading as many pages as possible before my eyes refused to stay open any longer. I loved Harry Potter so much that I even dressed as Hermione Granger for Halloween. 

When my eleventh birthday arrived, there was a small part of me that was secretly hoping an owl would fly by my window at breakfast, bringing me my letter of acceptance to Hogwarts. While I wasn’t necessarily surprised that this wish did not come true, I was very disappointed that my fantasy of learning potions in the dungeons, gazing at stars from the astronomy tower, and eating breakfast in the great hall would not come to fruition. The world of Harry Potter seemed so possible in my mind because the story is set in a world just like our own, hidden in plain sight. And although magic breaks every law of physics, I so desperately wanted to be a part of that world that I would tell myself anything to make the story a reality.

I decided that instead of wallowing in my sadness at the Harry Potter universe not being my reality, I should start to search for magic in my own life and my own world. I realized that the reason Harry Potter seemed so magical was because I compared it to our world, where you cannot bring objects from another room or two feet away from you by simply waving a wand and saying an incantation. However, what is seen as magical is all relative. If our current world was compared to one where beings did not have the ability to see the beauty that is all around them but could only hear and feel it, our world would appear to be a magical fantasy. The beings from that world would imagine themselves in the position we are all in and wish they had the ability to see all the beauty in our world, like the Eiffel Tower, the Pacific Ocean at sunset, or the Grand Canyon. The magic in our lives is normalized because we do not realize how lucky we are to have the gifts that we take for granted.

Love is another wonderful example of the magic in our lives. We as human beings have the ability to feel love and to be loved by others. It is the most powerful emotion that, like magic, can be used to harm or to help people. Some people search for love their whole lives, while others stumble upon it with ease; regardless, it is a true example of magic that is right before our eyes that we do not even see because it is so normalized. Living my life with this outlook allows me to appreciate all the beautiful gifts within my own life that I usually would take for granted. Even if the magic in our lives might not be the same as it is in Harry Potter, it truly is everywhere, if you just search for it and believe in it.

If you’ve opened TikTok in the past two months, you’re bound to have stumbled across Twi-Tok. Countless videos of everyone’s favorite cold-blooded immortals have been posted under the trending #twilightrenaissance. It’s been 8 years since the last release of a movie, though, so why the sudden surge of activity?

Twelve years ago, Twilight author Stephanie Meyer announced the upcoming release of a new novel to add to the internationally best-selling series. Midnight Sun would tell the same story of the first novel, Twilight, but from heartthrob vampire Edward Cullen’s perspective. Unfortunately, it was partially leaked online, so Meyer delayed its official release.

After over a decade of minimal noise from the Forks universe, Stephanie Meyer announced she would finally release the highly anticipated Midnight Sun. To say that fans were excited would be an understatement. Including pre-orders and online purchases, Midnight Sun sold over 1 million copies just in its first week, exceeding the initial print count of 750,000. With this new addition to the iconic saga, we revisit the impact the Twilight series had on early 2000s entertainment culture.

Since its initial release in October 2005, the Twilight saga has sold over 160 million copies in 49 different languages worldwide. All five films grossed over 407 million dollars in box office revenue. Critics were quite verbal in their negative reviews of the production and acting quality, but no one could deny the franchise’s trance-like influence over the masses. Twilight was the irresistible venom that afflicted an entire generation of thirsty teens.

Social media played a crucial role in this powerful global impact. Fans known as “Twihards” connected with each other through Tumblr and Twitter to exchange theories, edits, and most importantly, arguments on Team Jacob vs Team Edward. Their visibility on social media gained Twihards a reputation for being “obsessive” and “crazy,” but in reality, they were no more expressive than the girls screaming at NSYNC concerts less than a decade earlier.

Twihards connecting through these global platforms ushered in a new genre of writing: fanfiction. Wattpad was still in its earliest stages at the peak of the Twilight craze, but pages of Hogwarts-Forks crossovers filled the walls of Tumblr posts. They were posted for the public to access freely, so anyone could catch up on the latest forbidden affairs starring Charlie and Carlisle or Alice and Bella. One of these pieces was written by Twi-mom E.L. James, whose erotic Twilight fanfiction evolved into the best-selling 50 Shades of Grey series.

Stephanie Meyer’s August release of Midnight Sun has revitalized nostalgia from this defining period of the early 2000s. Platforms like TikTok and Instagram have reunited old Twihards and have converted a new generation of former Twilight virgins. The surge of demand for the films led Amazon Prime to make them available for free and Hulu to bring them back in early September. All kinds of Twilight fan accounts have been reactivated and exponentially increasing in followers, while streams of the Twilight soundtrack are at an all-time high as well.

The #twilightrennaisance has not only reminded us of how attractively chaotic Robert Pattinson is, but has also proven that just because a film doesn’t meet Academy Award standards, doesn’t mean it can’t have one of the most influential multi-generational cultural impacts in entertainment history.

Flashing blue and red lights, a soundtrack that envelops you as if you were in the show, and beautiful cinematography. That is what one can expect from watching Euphoria, the HBO series that came out in the summer of 2019. Only eight episodes long, the show seizes viewers' interest from the very beginning. Euphoria is told through the eyes of Rue Bennett, played by Zendaya Coleman, a struggling teenager trying to overcome her drug addiction. Each episode focuses on a different main character’s backstory, explaining how each character came to be who they are. The first episode focuses on Rue, fresh out of rehab. Then we meet Nate Jacobs, played by Jacob Elordi (known for his previous role in The Kissing Booth), a 6’5” football jock who has severe anger and family issues. The show introduces Kat Hernandez (Barbie Ferreira), a teenage girl coping with her body image issues, Jules Vaughn (Hunter Schafer), a transgender teenage girl who is new to town, Maddy Perez (Alexa Demie) who has a hard time finding herself when stuck in an abusive relationship, Chris Mckay (Algee Smith), a college freshman football player dealing with the pressure of impressing his parents, and Cassie Howard (Sydney Sweeney), who faces the absence of her father and leaked sexual videos and photos of herself.

Not only are the characters' storylines compelling, but the show is also executed beautifully, from its breathtaking soundtrack to its powerful and moving scenes. The soundtrack features Labrinth, who sings fan favorites such as “Still Don’t Know My Name” and “All For Us." Yet even the instrumental tracks, such as “Forever” and “Nate Growing up," add depth to the show, making it a literal out-of-body experience for viewers. 

Euphoria is much more than the stunning glitter makeup looks or the iconic party scenes. There are scenes that you’ll wish you never watched, scenes that will etch a memory in your brain. There are scenes that you will wish you could watch for the first time again, and feel what you felt the first time these scenes unfolded in front of you. Each of these scenes plays its part in telling the story of Euphoria, the story being: the high-school experience. There are no flowery scenes that brush past real issues, no happily-ever-after endings. The producers work to show how dark the high school experience can be, with raw stories about rape, abortion, drug addiction, and abuse. There is no clear cut victim or enemy in this show. In a sense, everyone is, in his or her own way, a victim and an enemy. That is just how real life is. And that is the message the producers hope to convey through this tragic, dark, horrific, yet beautiful show.