A reflective essay on Linying’s Alpine and Albert Gell’s Traps, written as a part of SC2225: Social Life of Art.

Maya lunged forward, reaching for a marker. She uncapped it, eager to dye her new paper airplane purple when she paused. Felt tip hovering over the paper, she glanced at me and timidly asked, “I’m drawing my family on the plane; would you be on it too?”

It would’ve been easier to have just taken the train. I could’ve been wrapped in sheets, safe, and listening to the rain. Instead, I was stranded in a forest, exposed and very cold. The rain was beginning to flood in, and though the next shelter was a hundred feet away, there was nowhere else to go. I made a kamikaze run for it.

Female Victor Frankenstein stared back at me with bloodshot eyes. Body parts were splayed across the dining table. I looked away from the mirror.

When a serial procrastinator is confronted by a backlog of more tasks than can fit in an A6-planner and a constricting time crunch, first, she panics. Then, she tearfully crawls onto her feet to face the impending deadlines.

The tiled wall was the greatest puzzle I had ever seen.

But my attention wasn’t on the square tiles. Instead, I was intrigued by the white adhesive between each tile. How many boxes can I form without overlapping or breaking the line? To five-year-old me, facing the wall wasn’t a punishment – it was a conundrum that could captivate me for hours.