Ephemera Glossary: Youth & Adolescence
Vignettes inspired by adolescence and early adulthood.
This is a new series I’ve been toying with where I create small fictional vignettes—snapshots of thresholds, fragments of lives, stray receipts and ticket stubs left in coat pockets to stumble upon later and transport you in time. In my graduate program, we write vignettes based on our case conceptualizations, distilling a person’s history, relationships, and pain into a brief but telling portrait. It’s a strangely poetic process within a clinical world, this act of tracing the shape of someone’s life through what is left behind in memory, speech, and silence.
This, to me, is how writing characters should feel. Through these fragments (or “informational breadcrumbs,” as I affectionately call them) a reader gathers a sense of the whole. Or perhaps not the whole, but something close. Like ephemera, these vignettes are fleeting. But for a moment, they feel simultaneously universal and entirely ours.
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‘Under Your Spell’ by Desire, played loudly through bass-heavy speakers and heard muffled through a wall, is the heartbeat of this post. It’s one of my favorite songs, something that feels like longing distilled or a dream you can only half-remember. This feeling inspired the vignettes below. You can listen to the song here—I hope you do as you read through the rest of this post.
It’s dark outside when you wake, and the remnants of the day’s diffused light bleed softly through the window like an afterthought—an addendum to a day well-spent. The TV hums its ambient song quietly in the corner, casting a faint lavender glow that flickers across the room. You shift slightly, feeling the imprint of the couch’s fabric delicately etched into the soft topography of your cheek.
Through the walls, you can hear the faint murmur of voices—your family’s, familiar and comforting, their words indistinct but warm. An abrupt peal of laughter crescendoes and recedes. Your homework is done. The comforting, savory smell of dinner creeps up the stairwell, beckoning you toward the family table. You’re disoriented, unsure of how long you’ve been asleep or what you may have missed, but the disorientation is gentle, not alarming. Because you know, as surely as you know your own name, that you are safe. That the voices, the incandescent glow, the couch cradling you in its soft cocoon all conspire to remind you of this simple truth: there is nowhere else you need to be and nothing else you need to do.
On the cold tile of a stranger’s bathroom, you slump against the curve of the bathtub, its porcelain edge hard against your back. Your head spins as though you’re adrift, a ship in a storm, the room creaking and tilting around you, its fluorescent light casting everything in a dull, washed-out haze. You can’t recall the exact sequence of events that brought you here—the drinks, the laughter, the joy of being just shy of your most uninhibited self—but you know, or maybe you hope, that it was fun. That it was worth this moment of surrender to your undoing.
The knock comes softly, hesitant and small like a pebble against glass. Then, your name. Not a question, but a reassurance. A voice you know before it even registers. The door opens a crack, and she steps inside. She kneels beside you without hesitation, her knees pressing into the unforgiving tile, gathering your hair in her hands and away from your face as you bend and wretch over the toilet bowl. Her touch is methodical, careful, and kind. She doesn’t ask if you’re okay, doesn’t fill the silence with platitudes, questions, or shame. She stays, holding your hair, steady as a lighthouse. You’ll remember her hands, her silence, her presence, and how it made even a stranger’s bathroom feel, for a fleeting moment, like home.
You are out after dark for the first time, air humming with freedom and possibility as the world stretches open before you. The roads are empty, and the street lamps shine through the foliage that lines your streets, casting friendly outlines of leaves in the faint yellow circle of light. The quiet rhythm of your legs as they pedal further into the night matches the beating of your heart. Pure exhilaration—you’re still too young to feel afraid. You have no frame of reference yet for the things that prefer to seek the cover of darkness.
Your friends are up ahead, their laughter echoing, delayed, reaching you like remnants from another timeline. Behind you, your childhood home slips into darkness, its porch lamp shrinking into a pinhole like Gatsby’s green light shining across the water. For the first time in your young life, the night belongs to you, all its vastness and possibility.
You pedal faster, wind pulling at your hair, the world rushing by in an impressionistic blur of shadow and light. You feel untethered, as if leaving not just the house behind but something else—something smaller, something you’ve outgrown. A child’s sweater, a sock, a part of yourself. The quiet of the streets feels like an invitation but also, somehow, impossibly sad. You keep pedaling, pushing your adolescent body forward into the unknown.
Do you remember that feeling, when you were young, the evenings felt endless, and you’d meet a stranger at a house party thrown by someone whose name you can no longer recall? The rooms inside are loud, vibrating with muffled bass and the frenetic energy of too many voices at once. You can’t hear him over the noise, so you step outside together. The air feels like ice, startling enough to draw a sharp inhale from you while your exhales hang like smoke in the cold. You are both quiet, afraid to be the first to speak and break the seal of silence.
The stranger lights the cigarette between his lips and holds the pack out toward you—an offering. You smile, shaking your head, before looking down at your shoes to avoid confronting the exposure you feel under the warmth of his gaze. But his eyes are kind. The two of you sit down on the cold cement steps in front of the house, the warm world inside continuing without you. Friends laughing and dancing, bathed in the yellow glow of incandescent bulbs as the shapes of their bodies are projected onto the window’s closed curtains—a silent film for the passersby. You say something stupid but it makes the stranger laugh, and the joyful sound rings out into the stillness of the night air.
He holds his cigarette in one hand and, with the other, plucks a stray leaf tangled in your hair—an unrehearsed, strangely intimate gesture. And then he isn’t a stranger. He leans closer, and for a moment, you forget the cold biting at you. His lips taste faintly of ash and hops, a bitter mix you don’t expect to enjoy but do. The warmth of the kiss spreads through you, slow, electric, until you are glowing, lit from within by the wick of a secret just the two of you share.
In case you missed it:
Week 06.5’s Annotations (I published two last week because I fell behind) can be found here.
This is a fun Valentine’s Day gift guide with suggestions for February. It’s free!
I wrote an essay on Marta Becket and her life in the desert, which I think may be my favorite piece yet.
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Really beautiful, Kait!
Loved this - such a cool idea :)