Emma Netel
Emma’s bio:
When she doesn’t have her nose stuck in a book, Emma Netel can be found slouched over her keyboard writing away like a Victorian ghost trapped in an attic. Call her name and she might shift her attention away from the fantasy at her fingertips. If that doesn’t work, you may catch the spirit of her future Forensic Psychology degree forcing her to pay attention to her classes. Emma hopes that one day that hovering spirit might materialize and give way to an exciting career. If not, she will be found writing about one instead.
An except from Emma’s Flash Memoir, titled “Tears Across the Pacific”:
This was the girl Hong Kong had made.
The girl crafted out of jade and summer humidity. The girl who’d broken skin and bled, but who read in a beam of sunlight on a hypothermic ferry.
The girl who lay in the still warm sand during Lantern festival, glow sticks wrapped around her wrists and throat as she stared up at the moon. The girl who’d clambered over the gate of her brother’s playroom, baby feet on cool tile floors as she invaded, beginning the Trojan War of their childhood.
The girl who watched the dragon dancers writhe down Mainstreet to the beat of drums as she ate cha siu bao. The girl who walked across the island in the summer, breathing in the hot soup-like air, and sweated with the rest of the city.
The girl who went to the beach with her friends in the middle of a Typhoon and screamed into the sky before they ran down and swam in the furious waves in their clothes without a single care. The girl who once jumped off of the pier the day school had ended for the summer, in full uniform along with her backpack.
The girl who had heard hundreds of people sigh over New York's skyline, but knew that they’d never seen Hong Kong’s skyline from Tsim Sha Tsui after night had fallen, and the wind gifted that one cool gust that was almost enough to make you forget the heat. The girl who had made a million versions of herself crafted in the embrace of a city that stood dreaming.
I cried for that girl, and all the girls I could’ve been. Cried for all the branches I’d shed. When the tears stopped falling, I dried my cheeks with the sleeves of my hoodie and let her go.
Read Netel’s flash memoir titled, “Tears Across the Pacific” as published by John Jay’s Finest (pp. 53-55).