Ode to city

I think I will always love you like this; from afar, you are only an idea. I fill the space of you in my mind—I pave your streets with asphalt; I build skyscrapers and hang lights upon your windows so that you gleam; I fill you with people, of all skins, of all walks of life, and of all types of love. I am still too far to feel your heartbeat, but I imagine it beneath my fingertips, pounding and trembling, as ferocious as a horse galloping, as tender as a baby’s chest pressed against a mother’s palm. Over the water, you duplicate, your edges blurred and hazed, as if you are Atlantis, lost but found again in my imagination. I will always remember you like this; from afar, I am not yet a stranger from a foreign land for whom you are responsible, only a daughter arriving home, laden with expectations, which is to say I still love you completely. – Jessica Jiang

There is a saying in my mother tongue: “Only the good leave, the evil ones stay.” I’ve spent years trying to parse these words so often spoken in the days after my sister was killed in front of me, scooting along carelessly, like the child that she was. In the precarious moments after my mother wailed beneath the wheel well of the truck, her words carried on the wind. “Only the good leave, the evil ones stay.” Am I evil? For Sama means sky and I was cursed with the name Omar, long-lived. I did not choose to be the evil, it was foretold, and I still don’t know where to go from here.  – Kelly Moffitt

A Suitcase of Lost Things

She collects lost items left on the streets of the city—a slap’s sting at the footstep of the World Trade Center, the soundbite of a mother’s harsh scolding strapped to the Thunderbolt, a first kiss laid gently on a bench in Central Park, and more. She pauses when she finds them, lips pursed, a little furrow between her eyebrows, because for a second they are so familiar that she had mistaken them for hers. But no, her first kiss had been under the dark of a movie theater, her mother scolded her constantly but always in the confines of home, and she had only been slapped once, drunk, in Natalia’s basement. It takes her breath away—this familiarity—as if she had not known she had been lost until the city offered someone else’s memories as beacons, their memory becoming her own. In a suitcase of lost things, the asphalt is skin, the skyscrapers limbs, the rivers blood, the parks a pulsing heart—she is found in the reflection of the city.  – Jessica Jiang

Process

When they first came up with this idea in October 2020, Kelly and Jessica were simply looking for a way to bring the fun back into writing after a summer spent on college essays and difficult application processes. Remembering that Jessica had an interest in photography, Kelly suggested a multimedia exchange of disposable cameras. For three months, they took photos with the idea of exchanging worlds. Jessica then learned how to operate the post office in sending Kelly her camera to develop at the Bushwick Community Darkroom. When the photos were developed, they chose four photographs from the other’s collection to write stories about, with a limit of five sentences per story (a challenge for both Kelly and Jessica to write succinctly!). What resulted was more than either expected out of this quirky project: a glimpse into the small things in the other’s life and connection even though they haven’t seen each other in person in a year.