Prose: "Twenty-First Century Blues"

Twenty-First Century Blues

Lainey Terfruchte, Class of 2025

It was September when I decided to see how little I could live on.

It was mostly because the consumption made me sick and guilty. I had tried to explain it to my friends before—that seeing junk piled up on crisp white shelves and hundreds of plastic clothes on plastic hangers made me literally ill—but no one really got it. When my friends bought cheap shit, they joked that they couldn’t show me because I would scold them, something I had never done. They didn’t understand that I was fighting the same materialistic instinct.

I threw most of my belongings in a big box to donate: candles that smelled like vanilla and lavender, clothes that made me feel good, tchotchkes from vacations long past. I stopped going to my cashier job and was consequently let go, but it didn’t matter because after that I got all my food from fancy grocery store dumpsters. The dumpsters often had things I never could have afforded new: fancy German chocolate, cuts of wild salmon, twenty-dollar wine. I left these behind and subsisted largely on granola bars and stale bread. It was a spiritual exercise—what did I really need?

I went to the store to feel the ache of desire just so I could quench it. A mug in the shape of a fox, my favorite animal; holiday cookies made of grainy sugar that melted in my mouth; a soft sweater the color of thriving moss. Wants piled up. I saw a girl with big silver rings cluttering her fingers and I loved her for them. I gave all of my jewelry to Goodwill, except my great-grandmother’s emerald ring, which I wore on a chain hidden beneath my shirt.

Some of my clothes from middle school still fit, faded neon t-shirts announcing the track season and stretchy athletic shorts. I didn’t need to dress nicely anymore—I hardly spoke to anyone. I spent my time in the library, reading books on Buddhism and wishing I had coffee. I tried to meditate, but more often than not just fell asleep. I didn’t understand how people lived on so little, but I hoped the answer would dawn on me, not just that answer but the answer to everything else. 

I hated passing people my age on the street. Everyone wore their personality on their sleeve: rings bearing their favorite gemstones, purses in their favorite color, pins on their jackets that proclaimed their political positions. A tote bag meant something different than a handbag. Collections of crystals, records, clothes—these were not just things, they were extensions of a person. On the street, a girl wearing oversized black sunglasses looked like my favorite retro journalist and I envied her. When people looked at me, what did they see? I looked as unhappy as I was: old clothes, bare face, dirty sneakers. I didn’t look like anybody that mattered or meant anything.

I broke my rules and bought a philodendron because it was as close as I could get to adopting an animal. When I brought it to my apartment, it looked much sadder than in the store. It was small, and the leaves were browning from lack of water. Perhaps it was the kind of project that could fix me—as the philodendron grew, so would I. Then I realized I was just attaching myself to another object. The plant became a symbol of my failure, but I kept watering it out of guilt. 

I obsessively followed an influencer who always posted about her purchases. She collected all kinds of things: purses, figurines, jewelry. Every few days she had something shiny and new to share with her captive audience. She collected charms from everywhere she traveled, and I understood this impulse. Memories were so unreliable—who could survive on them alone? 

I got lost scrolling through photos of people’s carefully curated apartments and became preoccupied with finding one of those stained-glass table lamps. I went to the thrift store, feeling that it might be a safe environment to consume, but it just made me sad. An album of baby photos, a hand-painted shirt that said “World’s Best Grandpa”, a collection of Precious Moments figurines. I tried to pretend my ugly, gray apartment with its old appliances and cracked mirror was some kind of peaceful sanctuary, but really, it just looked like the before photos on a house renovation show. 

I hiked on trails desolate from the winter, the soles of my feet bruised by the hard ground. I tried to be happy, but mostly I was cold and aching. When I sat to look at the Mississippi—a gray, miserable thing—I was distracted by the cold stinging of my ears beneath my hat and my ever-sniffling nose. The natural world was draining my life like a vampire. Maybe that was nice: dead things fed the earth. But I didn’t know what happened to a dead body left out in the winter.

I put my philodendron out on the curb, hoping somebody would pick it up before it shrivelled in the cold. I mailed my great-grandmother’s ring to my sister. I smashed my plates on the tiled floor of my kitchen so I would have only one. I painstakingly swept the shards into my hands to throw them away. I was afraid to walk into my kitchen without socks.

My mother called one day, upset I had quit my job.

“I don’t understand what you’re doing,” she said. “Is this because Devon broke up with you?”

Judge's Notes:

“I was immediately captured by the voice in this story. Items are removed one by one from the protagonist’s life as they chisel down to the bare necessities of food, clothing, and meaningful objects. Humans collect and consume. It’s in our nature. But the protagonist fights this human

desire with a deep understanding that all the things we obsessively spend money on only adds to our existential unhappiness. Friends and their mother don’t understand why the protagonist is shedding everything in their life down to the simplest equation, and the protagonist falls deeper

and deeper into solitude because it’s easier to do what they overwhelmingly feel are necessary actions to save themself. This story resonates because I think many of us readily relate to our culture’s love of consumerism and our conflicting feelings about how we each play a part in perpetuating it. Every specific image builds on the next, creating a cohesiveness that

deeply impressed me.”