Do any of you ever think you mistyped a period or comma and then you realize it’s just a fleck of dirt on your screen? Or is that just me with a gross laptop? I keep meaning to clean it but somehow it never happens, though I did clean the fan recently. This involved my sister popping the bottom of my laptop off and us staring at its guts. It was cool but also scary because usually it is not a good thing if you can see your laptop’s guts.
Anyway. I’ll consider this a sign that I need to clean my computer screen and move on. Extra mental energy and time have been low recently, but I just finished the semester (and finished-finished my bachelor’s degree 😁). No more homework! Time to rejoice!
With the end of the semester comes a new publication of The Bell Tower , Purdue University’s undergraduate literary journal. This year I had two pieces published! Both pieces can be found here. The first is “Becoming Spring,” a prose poem about how spring feels. It’s based off of the spring I remember growing up in Northern NY, wild and wonderful. The funny thing about this piece is that I wrote the first draft as a flash fiction piece for a class. I realized after that I loved what the piece captured but that it lacked a real plot, which is kind of necessary for it to be a story. So it became a prose poem.
Quote from the poem:
The second piece is “Chocolate Chips and Peanut Butter,” which is a short personal essay about dysfunctional relationships with food. I think a lot of people can relate over the conflicting messages that surround food and eating. That said, if disordered eating is a trigger for you, I’d skip this one.
And that’s it for today! I haven’t read all the other pieces in the issue yet, but there is some good stuff. If you want to check out older issues of The Bell Tower they can be found here.
Con amor,
Melanie Raine
Almost Canadian 
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