The only thing worse than hearing a “no” is living in the imagination of that “no” for a long time.
Since December 2025 when I sent off my Brown application, I’ve been in this long, brutal waiting. It’s safe to say it has been one of the hardest waitings of my life. Today is the 13th of March, 2026, and I am so desperate for an answer. A simple yes or no. I do not want to be on the waiting list. The results are supposed to be out by mid-March, and I assume mid-March is the 15th, but that falls on a Sunday. So I’m sitting here thinking, will the answer come on the Friday before or will it be the Monday after? It obviously makes no difference. Awaiting is awaiting is awaiting. The funniest thing is when people tell you to just let it be, or not to wait for it, or that ‘‘if you build it, they will come”. Some mornings I wake up thinking that definitely I’m going to get in, yesyesyes 100%. But as the hours go by, that feeling twists into a certainty that I don’t even want it anymore, or the terrifying thought that I might actually shatter if I hear ‘‘We regret to inform you that…’’
I woke up at five in the morning and the sky was washed in apricot and pale violet light, and it felt like an image suspended inside a dream. I closed my eyes for a moment with a smile on my face, and I had this sharp and sudden feeling within me that no matter what happens, I will find my way and I will never give up on my writing. Whether I stay here in Austria and somehow find my way into publication, or go to Brown University to do my MFA in Fiction, those are only two different routes toward the same thing. One feels glamorous and the other feels absolutely unknown, but I think that more than wanting to go to Rhode Island itself, what I truly long for is the promise of beginning all over again.