When I first started this project, the intention was to create vignettes of moments that I found surprising in how beautiful I found them.

 

I would never have thought that seeing an extra fried egg on my takeout would make me emotional or that seeing the curves of the dentate gyrus of the hippocampus stretch across a computer screen strike me as elegant. As a writer, I wanted to challenge myself to write from a place of witnessing these small moments as they are instead of writing from a place of analysis and creating a thesis the way I am used to in my coursework.

 

And yet, when I sat down to write these moments I held close to my heart, all of what came through revolved around these news experiences I gained from starting my first part-time job as a junior in college. In short, this project became a love letter to the immediate and intimate world around me that I was immersed into upon reintegrating to Ann Arbor post-quarantine and all the ways in which I and the way I viewed myself in relation to other people were fundamentally transformed, how the way I saw beauty in the world had transformed.

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I had ended up discovering the underlying thread that tied these moments together in the process of actually writing it, which was a serendipitous, fun, and surprising process. It was somewhat of a challenge trying to organize these sections in a way that was thematically cohesive, and although there were definitely more ideas I could have explored or pushed further in this piece, I am happy with the end result.