Issue 28 - 11/7/25

Table of Contents

1. hot aer: things from the editors by amelia swedloff, siegfried liu, zoë fairweather

2. concussion girl battles a vampire by amelia swedloff

3. real life masala chai by leela katari gupta

4. autumn (as an atheist) by zoë fairweather

5. we are meant to fall in fall by siegfried liu

6. a letter to cameron winter by zoe levenstien

hot aer: things from the editors

amelia swedloff, siegfried liu, zoë fairweather

the plan

the normalest girls in school are here to bring you their debut issue of aer’d! they are fashionably late to the printing press and showing up in style with some fantabulouso pieces of writing.

the good

chai lattes with lavender and oat milk, coffeehouse, not having a concussion, sending in your ED applications, new year new me, the wonderful wizard of oz, crossword puzzles, halloween, vampire media, autumnal foliage, GEESE, birthdays, crying too much, painting, robert pattinson, niche youtube video essayists, TSITP, loving loudly, being girly girls, “what the butt”, throwing it back on thursday, and waying it back on wednesday

the bad

pop quizzes, the ancient greek verb system, sending in your ED applications, finishing your favorite show only to start a new show and then also finish that one too, leaving the house late, flu season, disappointing leaf crunches, apathy as strength, the inability to linguistically articulate pain, forgetting your headphones and not having bus music, full class group essay, hugging awkwardly, ἐρχόμαι, εἶμι/ἐλευσόμαι, ἤλθον, ἐλήλυθα, and wet backpack in the rain

the ugly

allergies, sending in your ED applications, kelly drive, the traffic on 76, pumpkin spice chai tea, a hideous cough for a month, chatGPT addicts, clumpy mascara, jeans in bed, finding harmonies while dancing like crazy, fear and isolation, tech week, ancient greek verb principle parts, and harshing the vibe

concussion girl battles a vampire

amelia swedloff

She prowls the streets at night

Hungry for a bite to eat

Since her death, she has barely touched her food

She has been unable to leave her coffin

She is starving

Unseen and unheard, she makes her way through town

Her face is covered and

She averts her eyes away from the moonlight

Although the sun is gone, the stars shine just as bright

They give her a headache

Fighting through the pain

She stalks her prey

She creeps up from behind

Silently making her way closer

And closer

And Concussion Girl stakes the vampire in the heart

She still has a headache

real life masala chai

leela katari gupta

When I order chai at the Open Door, they ask me, masala or unsweetened? I say, masala, please, and pay my five dollars and sit down to wait. I don’t say anything about the masala question because I know I know what real life masala chai is like, brewed in stainless steel and poured back and forth between tiny cups until it’s just the right temperature, Goldilocks-style. It’s pumpkin spice chai tea season, y’all, says the girl on my feed. And I’ve got the perfect recipe for you. ‘Pumpkin spice chai tea’ is an abomination to my ears, in more ways than one, but I don’t open up the comment section—I just keep scrolling, absolutely certain she doesn’t even know what she’s talking about. Pumpkin spice chai tea. Ridiculous, or autumnal?

While it isn’t my favorite of the seasons, I’ve never hated fall. As a self-described winter bitch, fall is anticipation that builds and builds until the air is finally cold enough for my breath to steam. I love cable-knit sweaters and crunching leaves; I love Halloween, hay mazes, and hot cider; Florence + the Machine and Fleetwood Mac. I love all the fall flavors—pumpkin, apple, cinnamon, caramel, pecan. At least once a year, I surrender and order a pumpkin spice latte. It’s a seasonal drink, after all—I’d better get it while I can, before it’s time for hot chocolate and candy canes.

But to me, chai is not an autumn drink. Chai is my trip to India in the spring of 2023, hotel teatime in ninety degree weather, dry wind that feels like the breath of the people that came before me. My family only came to America in the 1960s, after all. In the scheme of things, we aren’t that removed from the farmers in the Karnataka countryside. Any of the double-braid-wearing schoolgirls I passed in the tourist rickshaw could have been me, in a slightly strayed parallel universe. 

Those schoolgirls would laugh, I think, at the chai lattes I order from Starbucks, High Point, the Open Door. It's the perfect autumnal drink, says the girl on Instagram. I imagine a conversation between her, sin language barriers, and the schoolgirl who could have been me. OMFG, I love chai tea! You do realize you’re saying tea tea, don’t you? Do you put pumpkin spice in yours, too? What are you even talking about?

I, of course, am complicit. I order chai lattes on the basis of three things: 1) caffeine, 2) cheaper than coffee, 3) arguably better taste than coffee. It’s a tiny, convoluted piece of “my culture” that helps me get through Monday mornings.

As a third-generation immigrant, the idea of “my culture” is convoluted. When I get the inevitable Where are you from? question, I say Mount Airy, just to piss people off, because I know it’s not what they want to hear. Where are your parents from? Connecticut and New Jersey. It’s the truth. But when they follow up with the more calculated Where is your family originally from?, I say India. How could I not? I’m proud of my culture, certainly. When my great-uncle traced our family lineage all the way back to the 1450s, I was the only one who read his book start-to-finish. I celebrate Diwali with my family, and I sing Ganesha Saranam, even if I don’t know what the words mean. 

Still, I’m not a very good Indian-American. The only Hindi word I know is namaste, and the Indian clothes I do own squeeze my body on the curves, and hem much higher than they’re supposed to. I haven’t bought new ones since I was eight. I celebrate Christmas and Easter, and probably know more about the Bible than I do about the Mahabharata. I dance ballet, not bharatanatyam. I’d rather do pilates than yoga. No Sanskrit, just plain old butt kicks for me.

I suppose chai lattes are oddly representative of my identity. I’m a real life masala chai. Indian, but watered down by America and time. Less cardamom, more cinnamon. Based on milk instead of water, served Pinterest-ready. But I wear my grandmother’s gold earrings with my mass-produced cable-knit sweater. I smile at the Ganesha statue in the hallway on my way to eat breakfast. When I’m old enough, I’ll get a katari dagger tattooed on my arm, the same arm that will carve the Thanksgiving turkey. 

And I’ll always, always drink chai. During autumn, and all year round.

instagram: @leela_kg

autumn (as an atheist)

zoë fairweather

Tomorrow is my promise and my savior.

I am laid at his feet nightly,

cold and hungry, and lulled to sleep.

His toes are my pillows. I wake up shot

lightyears away from him and full.

He urges forward all the streams and drops the summer’s leaves.

Leaves, unlike fruit, ripen in death.

They speak to me of things like god and tomorrow.

Tomorrow is my faith.

“Oh, Perennial Father Time, grant me forever feeling” I once prayed

in a home with no god. 

I was too old to accept things like dying. 

A younger me was wise enough to see

our deaths intertwined, mine and his.

He is with me in the clocks and the early sunset.

He is with me when I search for 

dogma in fact.

Death is no comfort, nor punishment.

Each and every Brand New Day amidst 

the season change delights and burns.

In a life without worship, we hope.

we are meant to fall in fall

siegfried liu

Because one is meant to feel rejuvenated in the gentle breezes of spring, rowdy under pouring steamy summer rain, and solemn beside a solitary winter. Around the calendar, every season proposes a pure emotion for humans to experience, a complete contradiction to the internal truth of a species in constant search of meaning.

We come from pastures with no paths, and treaded until there are. Then some of us, the wise or foolish ones, which we all are sometimes, took a revolutionary step onto the grass once more, yet somehow, we are sad that we lost both the green and the brown. Fall describes that emotion. Millennia of melancholy condensed into three months of transition, hesitation, and reflection. A time of utter uncertainty about the coming cold and a faint light at the other side.

Fall becoming synonymous with withering is not a coincidence. Leaves crumble, animals die, and we cave people start to lose our minds over the concept of inevitability. Much like twilight, fall pops the facade that we try so hard to maintain. It forces us to reconcile with the incomprehensible, not to mention irreconcilable, fact that we are fishes in the ocean trying to make the best of the situation that we are placed in. Fallen leaves can be crunchy, yet soggy after rain. Autumnal gusts can be chilling, yet refreshing at the peak of day. This emotional state of being perfectly matches with the existential selves travelling between our hearts and brains, pulling logic and feeling into a jumbled mess called life.

Spring takes a brisk walk, in awe of flourishing. Summer sprints, full of passion. Winter stands still, looking back at where we came from. Fall is when we trip and fall into the ground, scrape our knees, tear up, and lie in our warm cozy beds sipping hot chocolate and watching a movie.

Humans love melancholy, because it upsets the apple cart. Too often we put an address in the GPS and zone out until the voice says “the destination is on your right”. This habit is not the natural state of being for life with an innate urge to wander. Melancholy is the stranger that we keep running into who shoves us off the road into the green pastures, shaking us from following that path to uninterrupted death we were on and instilling that immense sense of cluelessness and hesitation. By “cluelessness and hesitation” I don’t mean being unaware or uninformed. On the contrary, it is a state of existence caused from suddenly regaining a flooding consciousness so that one is terribly overwhelmed. To me, it feels like a misty-eyed wanderer letting that hazing layer of film slip off, finding themself in the middle of a green pasture. Not knowing how they got there or how to leave, they simply stand there, gazing at the horizon as a breeze blows over their cheek and makes their shirt flow. It is the emotion of leaving a late night conversation beside the fireplace with friends who you by some miraculous slip of the cosmic operations found, and now sitting alone for that heart-to-heart to marinate into wine. It reminds me of a painting by one of my friends, in which musical notes fall off the page onto the piano, eventually to bounce back within the five lines. Fall is the low among the highs, and high amidst the lows.

In our pursuit of recreating the sensations of fall, we produce the motifs that are now so commonly associated with the season of cold drizzling rain and warm delicious pastries, and, most importantly, melancholic hesitation. This natural creation of connotations builds the foundation for the media to capture and heighten every sense of it. In the manner that the media does best, it finds a way to intensify emotions by layering them on top of each other to paint shades of teal, burgundy, and pumpkin orange from the joy of comfort, sadness of the cold, and fear for the future.

Standing over the field saying a prayer at sunset, The Angelus by French painter Jean-François Millet depicts two peasants concluding their work in the field with a worship of God, and perhaps a reminiscence of something else. Millet finished the painting in 1859, catching onto the end of the authoritarian years of the Second French Empire. It was a time of stunning economic growth, dwindling civil rights, and enforced social order. I do not know whether the financial improvement of the empire extended to its citizens. The two peasants in the painting don't seem more concerned about the economy of their distant ruler than their prayer of gratitude and a good harvest of potatoes. Far in the distance, a vague outline of a church appears on the plain landscape under a yellow sky. Millet’s capturing of this routine moment in neutral and warm colors gives the viewer a sense of comfort and resolution, yet leaving the option to feel concerned for the farmers open. Will they get a good harvest? Will they have a relatively comfortable winter? Do they know that millions of people will try to guess the content of their prayer beside the literal text? Are they truly not concerned with these questions, or is the feeling of standing in an open field that their sweat dripped on all day overwhelming in the slight breeze and twilight? We will never know, and us looking at the painting pondering these questions makes us no different from the people in the painting. Harvesting is indistinguishable from the element of the human experience of fall, and stillness lies even deeper in us.

We love the sensations of fall so much that we seek to recreate fall in the media in every situation and every season. Catharsis screams fall, a final reconciliation with the world. Until, of course, the next story beat comes along and we go through the process with a richer foundation once again.

The classic soundtrack One Summer Day by Joe Hisaishi in the movie Spirited Away epitomizes fall in other seasons. As the title suggests, the story takes place in the backdrop of summer. Chihiro’s family stumbles into an abandoned town on the way to their new home. In a twist of fate, Chihiro’s parents are turned into pigs, blissfully ignorant of their transformation. Chihiro overcomes various challenges and makes several friends until she successfully rescues her parents, only to realize that they don’t have recollection of what happened. The fairytale Chihiro experienced remains solely in her memory, and leaks into her internal revelations. Despite her parents physically by her side, Chihiro stands alone in the forest, before a dilapidated structure and a leaf-covered car. Summer heat replaces the chill of fall, thus putting all discomfort on the mind. The warm wind plugs every pore on the skin, travels to the center of our chests, and allows warmth and bleakness to coexist. Even on a summer day, we still fall in fall.

After the long tradition of complicating the feelings associated with fall, the media circles back to affirming motifs related to this season. However, purely capturing fall now emphasizes it, as if creating a double fall in one attempt.

Tailless, he points at the creature in the distance. “Canis lupus,” then himself, “Vulpes vulpes”. The movie Fantastic Mr. Fox directed by Wes Anderson is set entirely during harvest season. From the plot to the color palette of the film to the animation style, nearly everything creates a warm and fuzzy ambiance. Under the guise of a child-like fantasy, the story explores the themes of dreams, expectations, and the consequences of greed. The family of Mr. Fox has to hide from the relentless pursuit of destruction by the three scary farmers, because of Mr. Fox’s dream of achievement and respect. He eventually realizes that his actions caused great disturbance to his family and other animals, and comes up with a plan to help them escape the dire situation. Orange, yellow, and brown are used throughout the film to create a physical environment of fall while simultaneously enhancing the emotional rollercoaster the plot is taking the audience on. As the sun sets on the land, Mr. Fox experiences an existential crisis of the impending yet possibly distant death of himself. He grasps for the last strands of warmth in his heart before the cold takes over, because he doesn’t know if he’s in for a harsh winter. Desperation and melancholic hesitation brews in Mr. Fox. Is his winter coming too? He doesn’t seem to know. Our journey alongside the family of Mr. Fox also doesn’t yield an answer. Perhaps that is the point of the story. He fell in fall, and climbed up again. To orbit around the same fate with a slight change of trajectory every cycle. That uncertainty is autumnal media in its purest form.

We hold onto companionship and rediscover solitude, and experience the joys of both. We fear for uncertainty ahead and shrink from what we will grow to be on the other side. The accumulation of thoughts and emotions hoarded away finds a way to squeeze through the cracks and explode into our minds. A firework shoots out from the chest and explodes in every shape and color we ever felt. We all fall in fall, then we all climb back again.

a letter to cameron winter

zoe levenstien

To: Cameron Winter

From: ???

Dear Cameron, (too formal)

Heyyyyyy Cameron, (not formal enough and for horses, maybe 124)

Hi Cameron, 

It’s me, Zoe. I just used the question marks to cultivate interest. Your tolerance for fangirls is probably pretty low, so I’ll make this quick.

Do you remember walking past me before your March 7th gig at the First Unitarian Church in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania? (I wanted to specify PA because I’m not sure if you’ve ever played in our fine city’s Mississippi counterpart). I was the hopelessly beautiful Ashkenazi brunette with sad eyes. I was sad because I was there alone. It’s not like I don’t have friends. I have lots of friends, just like you do I’m sure. That’s something we might have in common. Not Common the rapper and actor. (I wanted to specify not Common the rapper and actor because in my mind you’re a huge John Wick fan). 

Inside the church, I was scared to sit in the front, so I found a respectable middle of the pack pew to sit at. In my hopeless beauty, I did the New York Times mini crossword puzzle archive. The man next to me also started doing the New York Times mini crossword puzzle archive. As an artist, do you believe that he was inspired by me or just a copycat? Do you believe the early Geese material is copying Television? Not geese the animal or television the object, your band and Tom Verlaine’s band. (I wanted to specify that I’m talking about bands in case you thought I was discussing the eerie similarities between geese feathers and TV sets). 

After a wonderful opening performance by @ where they didn’t play any of the songs of theirs that I knew but it didn’t matter, your first song really moved me. “If You Turn Back Now.” Not physically. Just emotionally in a 2nd Great Awakening kind of way. You say “My heart is for those who leave me alone,” but that kind of takes me out of the whole romantic love equation. I would never leave you alone, Cameron. So now I was alone in a church with an inspired cruciverbalist copycat and a songwriter who will never love me back. By cruciverbalist, I mean someone who does crosswords, not someone who makes them. (I wanted to specify that this man was just a crossword doer, not a puzzle maker because he didn’t seem ANYTHING like a crossword maker; I think he was in a frat and not a literary frat just like a normal Brett Kavanaugh beer frat). 

Cameron, you gave me full body chills with every lyric sung. Even on your crappy electronic piano, because one of the pedals snapped off the real one, every note rang through the church, and probably struck through every audience member’s flannel or brown bomber jacket or both straight into their hearts. If God is as real as you say Cam (Can I call you Cam?), I think she (that’s right if we’re saying God is real she’s definitely a woman) was certainly in the church that fateful Friday night. She’s in your vibrato and vocal oscillations, Cam. 

I can’t imagine being an artist like you. And by you, I mean Cameron Winter. (I wanted to specify in the event that you thought I was talking about the TV show that I always accidentally google when trying to get to YouTube to watch a live recording of the show you played at the First Unitarian Church on March 7th, 2025).

Amazing grace

How sweet the sound

That saved a wretch like me

I once was lost

But now I’m found

I was blind

But noooooooooooow I see

You save me everyday, Cameron.

You sang that song for the encore, so I thought I would also end my letter with it. I hope this passenger pigeon that I Victor Frankensteined out of extension delivers my letter to you directly (I wanted to specify Victor Frankenstein and not Frankenstein’s monster commonly known as Frankenstein so that you know I am well-read). I wish I could see you again with Geese on November 13th at Union Transfer, but I will be playing the Wicked Witch in my school’s production of Wizard of Oz instead. If you’re not busy, you should come by and watch it. No promises, but there might be feet for you to obtain; I heard you need some.

Sincerely, (too formal again)

Love, (too forward, he doesn’t want you ZOE)

Warmly,

Zoe