Travel
In Human Parts. More on Medium.
A daughter reflects on wanderlust, travel, and her mother’s life before triplets
Text by: Brooke Mazurek
Photography and collage by: Paige Mazurek
When my mother found out she was pregnant with triplets, she quit her job and let her passport expire. She was elated and scared, nauseated and starving — and by her second trimester, under strict orders to stay in bed.
For the next four months while she lay on her…
This Is Us
An ode to the meditative power of train travel
After one horrific Megabus experience in 2012, I began taking the Amtrak everywhere instead. What’s better than staring longingly out of a train window, Sufjan in your earbuds, a vast landscape stretched before you? It never mattered where I was going, Lollapalooza 2015 or a wholesome coastal town — I…
This Is Us
How a pre-pandemic whale swim brought me eye to eye with a humpback — and my own mortality
The whales are playing hard to get. It’s a sunny day off the coast of Vava’u island group, and my father, sister, and I have set off in search of humpbacks. The Tongan archipelago is known for a migrating population of over 2,000 whales who calve and mate in its…
Past Is Prologue
Love is strange
I fell in love with a guy from New England before I knew anything about him, except his art. This is a dangerous practice, as anyone who has spent time with an artist of any sort can surely tell you.
I should know better. I do know better. …
Lived Through This
First lesson: A house is not a home
When I was a senior in college, we went to Mexico. I remember the flight being turbulent, and that was the start of my lifelong fear of planes. I wondered if we’d plunge into the ocean and what that would feel like — metal breaking the surface, a body tearing…
This Is Us
Seriously.
California is America, only more so. That’s its burden and its gift. It’s so big and tiny, crowded and empty, foggy and smoky yet bright and shining, and it shakes. If you drive the whole length of the thing, 770 miles from top to bottom, you’re going to need some…
This Is Us
I’m the only hafu in the onsen, and I get to decide what that means
Hadaka no tsukiai is a Japanese saying that roughly translates to “naked friendship.” It describes the bonding that occurs whilst bathing with another in an onsen, or Japanese hot spring. In this communal setting where members of the same sex are all vulnerably naked, the public selves that we project…
Planet Soul
The divine lives inside of us all. We just have to look for it.
Ever since I learned of the existence of a female form of God, I’ve dreamed of taking a pilgrimage to places where evidence of her had been found.
I imagined what it might feel like to stand in the presence of the 35,000-year-old Woman of Willendorf or to roam the…
Fiction
On travel, and how it changes us
Before she left again, Min said the world had changed. It was not something she could see or explain easily, and yet she was sure something was different. …
This Is Us
Notes on traveling, estrangement, and the keychains I bought for my father
In the winter of 2014, my father and I are finally in a cab traveling to the center of Dublin, my pop’s birthplace, his home. While he looks out the window and takes inventory of what has changed, the taxi driver asks where he’s from. My pop’s accent is faint…
Human Parts
A publication from Medium about humanity: yours, mine, and ours.
