Dipping My Toes In
By Camryn Ward ‘25
I’ve always imagined time as the sea. Calming yet restless, gentle yet powerful, something that you can never get ahold of. Always pushing forward, always moving, but most of all, inescapable. I felt the weight of time press on to me this past summer, frequently finding myself counting down the days until I could finally return to school and get back to planning my future. Those days time would blur and pass by me, but never fast enough. By the time summer was over, I came across this poem:
“The Orange”
Read MoreA Declawed Cat
By Anonymous
Content warnings: references to self-harm
Anger is a problem. And I treat anger as a terrible person would a cat—if claws scratch things, remove the claws; if anger breaks things, remove the anger.
Read MoreNumb is Trapped in Numbers
By Li Yin ‘26
After a good cry from a scolding for being 2% away from 100%, for being one away from a five, I hold that gutting pain in my chest. It is at first blunt and piercing, but it slowly fades, and I let out a laugh. Every pore of my body, clogged by generational trauma, tightens. But laughter, and the boldness and unavoidance of its accompanying breaths, time and time again becomes another breath, becomes another step into clarity.
Read MoreWe Know No Balance
By Li Yin ‘26
The buzzing engine, the faint cabin light, the sharp cry of vexed infants, the muffled noise of food carts rolling. I wake up shivering with Hong Kong thousands of miles away. Or maybe more. Everything weaves together by chance, and the intricate, complicated, and unpredictable world carries us like the ocean carries a wooden vessel. The vessel floats, thinking it owns itself, its capabilities, its existence. But the next second the ocean may decide to swallow it whole.
I close my eyes again.
Read MoreA List of the Most Bitter, Sweet, and Bittersweet Things About My Time at Wellesley as Summarized by Headlines of Counterpoint Articles I Didn’t End Up Writing
(in chronological order)
By Parker Piscitello-Fay ‘22
No Really, Where Am I? (a case for more signage on Wellesley College’s campus and admitting you don’t have everything figured out)
An Ode to the Compassion and Honesty with which Esteemed Poetry Professor Dan Chiasson Approaches Discussions of Odes
It’s Tuesday, November, 2018 at 3:29 pm and the Idea of Shadow Grading is the Only Thing Holding Me Together (why we need to talk about first years when we talk about Wellesley’s stress culture)
Read MoreWhat I Wish I Could Tell My Younger Self
By Zaria George ‘22
As I’m writing this, you are two days short of turning 22.
You will develop a love for art that you never knew had been there.
You will lose a lot of people who you loved. Don’t let that harden you.
Read More33 Dover Road
By Stella Ho ‘22
I was walking back to the French House with my friend Gaya last week when a sentence slipped out of my mouth: “Look, we’re almost home.”
I paused for a second. Before that moment, in my last month of classes, in my senior year at Wellesley, I had never called a dorm here “home” before.
Read MoreWhat's In A Name?
By Zaria George ‘22
Although I’ve become more comfortable with being called Zaria, there is still the internal dilemma that I have about its origins. In a community where I’m surrounded by friends and family with culturally significant names that reflect their heritage, I grapple with being “Zaria.”
Read Moreplaylist: wellesley moods april 2022
By Counterpoint Staff
A playlist of 20 songs reflecting Wellesley’s current mental state. Featuring “Ain’t It Fun,” “I Drink Wine,” and “Presumably Dead Arm”.
Read MoreBereft
By Lizette Mier ‘22
This past spring break, I sat in the recording room of Washington D.C.’s newest language museum, Planet Word. I glossed over the themes of what to talk about. Planet Word had a recording studio where anyone could share a story for their archives, and I knew I had been waiting so long to come to this museum that I couldn’t leave without leaving a mark behind. Breadcrumbs of my existence.
Read MoreWhen Pretense Falls Short
By Van An Trinh ‘24
I’ve always felt like I was a first draft of a person. Every environment I’ve been in has highlighted an unbridgeable difference between myself and the richness of others—like I should have contained a self, somewhere, that was lost in the gap between my actions and their bearing on who I was.
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