This summer, I will be graduating from a small university in Paris with an undergraduate degree in Art History. It was fun. I wrote essays on Frida Kahlo, dicks, Leonardo da Vinci’s lazy ass, Impressionism, and my love of performance art. I live in Paris, so before the pandemic, I had classes in the Louvre, in the Musée d’Orsay, some of the biggest museums in the world, studying artworks as close as you could physically get. Paris is a museum in itself, some would say. I even had the opportunity to participate in a student program in which, for a…

I’ve heard a lot of people say this. “I wish I could just move to a new country, get a new life, a new job, become a new person.”

Well, what’s stopping you?

For many, the answer is family, or financial setbacks. I was lucky enough to go study in a foreign country when I was 18, and I haven’t stopped moving since. It is so exhilarating to create a brand new life, somewhere you’ve never been before. It reminds me of a quote from the (excellent) film, Kill your Darlings:

“I love first times. I want my whole life…

I have always been attracted to “darker” subjects. Even as a child, I grew up watching violent 1980s Japanese animes in which demons competed in deadly fighting tournaments (Yu Yu Hakusho) or in which a man walks around a post-apocalyptic nuclear Earth, blowing up people’s heads (Hokuto no Ken). I even remember having my very first orgasm at 9 years old, watching a scene in which a character from Saint Seiya is chained to a rock and almost drowns as the tide rises.

I don’t know much about psychoanalysis, although my therapist likes to link my fascination with horror films…

The vast majority of filmmakers who are given recognition and awards are men. That’s a fact. Men also love, love, love making films about women, preferably women having sex. That is also a fact, and the list ranges from good to bad, very bad, and so disgusting I’m calling a lawyer.

It’s no surprise. Lesbian porn is one of the most-searched-for categories. It makes sense they would want to direct films about it too.

Now, I’m not saying all films about women in love directed by men are inherently terrible. Some actually come from well-intentioned people who want to tell…

There’s this idea that women don’t feel self-conscious about their bodies around other women.

That it is only when confronted with the male gaze that a woman starts to question the way she looks, if her skin is too oily, if her breasts are too small. However, I argue that in today’s society dictated by impossible body standard and Instagram filters, women are self-conscious all the time, even with each other, even when we’re alone.

I’ll always be haunted by this Margaret Atwood quote: “You are a woman with a man inside watching a woman. You are your own voyeur.”

It’s true. Even when sitting in bed by myself, I’ll start nitpicking every single…

I’m 22. I’m single. I have a cat, whom I treat more like a son. Since the pandemic started, I’ve been socializing a lot less, meeting less new people. I have two friends. Sometimes I have one night stands, but nothing serious. I’ve actually never been in a relationship. And this self-imposed isolation, going strong for a year now, has me wondering: why?

Why do I refuse to let my guard my down and just date someone?

Am I going to end up alone, surrounded by cats who will feast on my remains upon my untimely death from slipping on…

I think if I was a city, I’d be Beirut. Not because that’s where I was born, although that does play a part, but because it’s rooted in stubborn, miserable perseverance. It’s been conquered so many times, outlived the last of the pharaohs, the death of Alexander, the fall of the Roman Empire, the cruelty and eventual disintegration of the Ottoman Empire, the rule of the French, and 15 years of ruthless, catastrophic civil war.

It’s surrounded by the Mediterranean, a graveyard of rotting bodies, and two ravaged countries — the Palestinian injustice and the Syrian massacre, yet it’s still…

A cat stretches, lazily batting at a spider on the dusty floor. He occupies the central space of the tiny cell, as the two other figures are each backed up into a separate corner. The room is filthy, littered with bugs and feces, and the floor is warped. In the cell, on the left, a woman is writing on the yellow wall.

She has long black hair and black eyes. Her fingers are covered in chalk, but she does not stop to dust her hands off. Her clothes are covered in a dark red stain, but she does not look…