Moonlight & Metaphors

Bright lights, a colourful people walking the street and an unforgettable ambience. In a large portion of literary history, we find New York City, the Holy Grail of all things publishing and in retrospect, the ultimate setting to a large portion of modern and classical literature.  In New York City, we find the characters of Holden Caulfield, Jay Gatsby, Esther Greenwood and Princess Mia. Author's from prior to the 1900s have been fascinated with the city and authors today are follow this trend even more so. It is home to many publishing houses, some of the biggest, and the home of the notorious New York Times Bestseller List.  New York City has an immaculate ability to draw in captors and once left, it is a place where a part of your soul remains.  But why? In Catcher in the Rye we find Salinger diving into the depths of Central Park, using it as a symbol for self-growth and the beauty of youth for young Holden Caulfield. Central Park is just this, it is beautiful. It...

I read Wuthering Heights actually over a year ago but I cannot get out of my head the searing passion between Catherine and Heathcliff. Though their love story a tragic one, isn't it beautiful? And though extreme, oh so common. We never want to admit when we love someone, we run, we hide, but in the end..."I am Heathcliff!"

I spend a lot of time immersed in written words, in the arms of hard covers and intrigued by names of people who are either long dead or just beginning their lives. I always wonder how they do it. How did John Green push through an evening that only seemed to bring one sentence? All I really have to say is that I have been re-writing various posts for quite some time and my issue is not a matter of what I have to say. I know exactly what story I want to tell.  I just have no idea how to tell it. 

I'm not going to sit here and romanticize high school for you, or your teenage years. It's all been a blur in honesty. Four years, as I now have realized, is a little freeze frame in time that we can hardly grasp. Hell, a lot of us have another four to go, some even more. So stop beating yourself up for not wearing mascara today. Eat a good lunch. Stop worrying about your hair being pin straight. That corny little poster in your English class, the one that says something like, " 30 years from now, it won't matter what jeans you wore, how popular you were, what your hair looked like, or what sneakers you wore. What will matter is what you learned, and how you used it," is completely cliché but, God help me, it's one hundred percent true. I can't tell you what colour we painted our nails on the first day of grade nine, but there are four things that I can tell you to help you get through 1. You're going to struggle with who you are. Labels, as much as ...

It all started with a nine year old Nicole, cliché as it sounds, admiring a new copy of Anne of Green Gables . Little did little me know, that I'd be opening up the pages to more than a book, but, unmistakably, a passion. I've always known I wanted to study English Literature and I could continue talking about that for hours, but hell, " Where?"  was the question that I struggled to answer since the tenth grade. I narrowed it down by the time I applied, going back and forth between Queen's and Ryerson University for actually months. I had probably done thousands of virtual campus tours of the both and still been confused. Sometimes, I wanted to be in the city, the culture clashing around me vibrantly as I wrote myself a story of self invention. During others, I wanted to sit by a lake and reminisce over old Dickinson poems that drove me to believe in love and find it in everything I could. I told myself that acceptance letters would make my decision, when I had ...

He said something, long ago, along the lines of "I don't ever see things panning out that way for us," but what he didn't realize was that I never wanted it to. I wanted someone who found calmness in the wind and had the sky in their eyes. He was a completely unbearable crashing of fists on the regular, never stopping to appreciate the morning sun. He didn't know beauty, even when he had it staring right in front of his cold, harsh face. He'd never know beauty and that scared me.

Tick, tick, tick.  The last few months have been a big eye opener to myself; the concept of time has been one that has always fascinated me, thus, I have always attempted to have a good grasp on what it means to humanity. But until now, I don't think I've really been in awe of it's true meaning So, what is time? Well, in retrospect to this year, time is something that we really can't get enough of. The clock seems to be moving fast this year— like a car rushing by on the highway. Exam round one has come, and gone, at the speed of light and I think that is absolutely exhilarating and  terrifying. I have wished on an infinite number of stars for due dates to be later, for moments to never end and for God to let me stay in the bliss of a friday night for eternity, the thing about time is we cannot change that we only have so much of it left, in high school that is.  For the rest of the time we have left, I would hope we all plan on s...