Lately, I've been returning to old magazine favorites for inspiration. Notably, Granta 165: Interiors. Robbie Lawrence's photographic series "Stills" feels like it is leaving something behind. Warm tones, out of focus—the ice skater ponders the way up as shadows streak like falling clouds, raincoat melting into the horizon. It feels like everyone is trying to reinvent themselves in this skyline, warm winter, bare hands and lone silhouettes. The future blinks and retracts, condensed into dilated drops of time. 

I feel like them too: while writing poems about my mother, tracing a biological concept, losing myself on a particular dawn morning when I wake up at 5 and nearly taste the dew on the leaves outside my window. Especially on transportation—a city of strangers with their noses pasted to the window, the dull throbbing of the intercom, fluid stop-motion of civilization awash by the flames of everyone's self identified purpose. In these hazy, undefined motions we call habit, identity, and responsibility, we learn to carry ourselves. We become architects of meaning, piling seconds and experience into works that make us hold our breath, into policies and discoveries and ten-minute hugs on the street corner when the first autumn leaf falls. 

I find my reprise in these hazy rotations, re-definitions, imaginations, when I pull myself out of the fog and into the world with all its edges. I stand, gathering as the prelude plays, becoming more than the still li(f/v)es we leave behind. 

Life in northern Illinois revolves around the gravity of winter. Every brief autumn is tinged with the anticipation of complete darkness by 4:30 p.m.; every seemingly interminable day of summer, I stare at the sun and see the unyielding radiance of snow. Then suddenly, it’s deep into December, and you’re leaning against the cold metal fence in an iced-over parking lot, and everything around you is dead. Except the constant hum of the industrial heating system becoming a heaving steel diaphragm. Except the harsh yellow streetlights following your gaze around the tangled branches of bare trees. Except the unblinking black sky so empty that it isn’t. 

Reprise: recurrence, repetition, reappraisal. Every winter, the same hands feel in front of me as I walk home in the heavy darkness. Every winter, the feeling that everything mine that’s ever died haunts my periphery, the way that snowflakes glimmer briefly falling through a flashlight’s beam before subsiding back into shadow. I have a finite number of winters left. For now, though, the sun and its impassive façade is already leaving earlier and earlier—until the days start to run into each other again, until the reprises start composing a whole new piece.

My seventeen years of existence converge at a point of singularity, enveloped in a system of reprises that is yet to fail me. It is a system of loose caution, free alarm; it holds the ability to reassemble the crux of our very beings. Through its recurring intensity, I have developed a keen eye, spotting its schemes and patterns. I have come to grasp the swiftness with which it permeates the timbre notes of reiteration within me. Ultimately, I have learnt to graph and plot for the most feasible outcome, and have thus found the optimal region for my existence as well.

Similarly, we are all able to locate the most optimal region of our lives, even if the convergence point seems blurry at times. Our aches and our falls settle into the subconscious as a comforting presence in their own tedious way. In a world which propels the reckless pursuit of the unattainable, it is the everyday reprise that helps to ground ourselves in the familiar aspects of the extraordinary. 

And so, the unique normalcy of reprise offers strength. For when grief and happiness converge only to diverge again, it is these moments of mundane punctuality that connect all the equations ahead. They assimilate together to guard us against the shifting tides of life. As a نچوڑ [crux], it is only through the crestfallen melody of reprise that we are able to trudge over the lines and connect our subtle humdrums with the grandiosity of the universe itself.

I spend over 15 hours a week surrounded by marching band music. Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays brim with euphonium renditions of “Come Sail Away” by Styx, 45-minute dance sessions with Charli XCX as I repeat the same combinations that have been engraved in me for three years, and tossing wooden rifles towards the moon. And then it isn’t August band camp anymore, where we suffer in 110 degree California weather; it is November, and we are in Los Angeles for our final away trip of the year. We aren’t learning new choreography, new dance exercises, new tricks; we recall every beat of the medley, the football hash marks and yard lines we dance around, the eight-minute show we have spent the past three months sweating over, crying over, driving ourselves to the point where we have considered letting each other run out of gas. Each performance we anxiously wait on the sidelines for, we know that before this reprise, there have been more; reprisals of green bruises on knees, reprisals of ragged panting between water breaks, reprisals of the same feedback over and over. 

One day, there will be no more reprise. No more reprise of the eight hours spent in school, nor the reprise of visiting your hometown, nor feeling the first snow of the year in your hair, your hands, your tongue. But until we realize that one moment was our last, we reprise, and reprise, and reprise.

The thing is, it starts all over again. You begin to feel suffocated. A horrid taste of it all happening once more lingers on my tongue, and there is absolutely nothing I can do. It happens again. The years pass by and each time October rolls around, I can’t help but feel as if something horrible will happen. The touch of it is familiar. It feels as though all of it is a repetitive motion I am sentenced to live in forever. 

Rinse and repeat. 

The same old routine, channeling through the years. 

Reprise. 

The repetition of all the years I have lived since I saw the light of this world.  Every year, time and time again, it is a reminder of everything lost. Everything that remained untold, and everything that I was unable to save. Each year passes, and I wish the path to winter could be calmer than the one I had to walk the year before. I hope it can remind me of the good and replace the taste of sadness with something sweeter. Or maybe the feeling of sadness is an all-too-familiar blanket I refuse to get out of. 

Reprise, like a ballad, a musical note repeated so often that it makes you wonder if you even like the song anymore. The passage of my life feels as if it has been put on rewind, cursed to live the same year over and over. A chorus of woe persists, even after witnessing my pleas for it to end.

Desperately praying, that once in my life, the reprise will finally come to an end and that once in my life, I will not be sitting in the solace of my room mourning October’s return. I hope the reprise ends next year, or the year after that. I think it would be nice to welcome October without the reminders of why it is the most loathed of all the time I have spent. Until then, however, I'll be forcing myself to live through this. It will repeat over and over again, and I will be forced to let the silence of it follow me around like a shadow. I will let it continue, breathing in October's dust and all its storms until I'm finally able to say that the endless cycle has ended.

Until I'm free from the reprise and so is it, of me.

It can often feel tiring following the same routine day in and day out. Wake up, get dressed, go to school or to work, stay there the whole day, come home, eat, sleep. A seemingly endless cycle of repetition. But within the drudgery of waking up early each morning, there is a new sunrise to greet you. In the boredom of having to cook, enjoying the simplicity of some rice with dal after a long day. In the tediousness of driving to school or to work, singing along to the catchy parts of a song on the radio. These miniature reprises, they are repetition that never gets old. 

Sometimes this is because the act itself is special and brings us joy, other times the joy comes from being able to imbue the old with the new. I think of excitedly grabbing my friend’s arm when I remember a fond memory. (“Wait wait wait, remember that time when we…”). Even though we have told ourselves the same story a thousand times, one of us has something new to add. That is the beauty of reprise, to be able to do something again, without it losing its meaning or uniqueness. In rediscovering a hobby you used to enjoy, maybe you realise you have more time, or energy, or simply more love for it again. Maybe what used to scare you in the past is easier now, or maybe you are courageous enough now to do it anyways (even better!). Reprises are testaments to humans being unable to let go of what they love. And they are scattered about in the mundanity of our lives.

It is innately human to yearn for more of what itches your desires and less of what crushes your enthusiasm – more of hazy summer vacations and less of stressful school work; more of natural wakeups and less of squealing alarm clocks; more of laughter with friends and less of tense relationships; more of perfect exam scores, and less of struggling grades; more of breezy falls with wind whistling at your ears and less of scorching, humid summers. 

From the start, we’ve all had our firsts. To experience terrible failures serves as a contrast to help us savor incremental successes. We’ve had to experience the crippling heat pouncing on our bare skin for once to appreciate even the slightest of autumn breezes. Paradoxically, to appreciate yolky golden hours by the beach, we must have felt the piercing wind that penetrates your coat anyway. A desperate longing for what is to come such as – oftentimes – the change of seasons and the aesthetics we associate with it, is what comforts our overwhelming present. 

The cycle of hope is what instills sanity.

While the reprisal, repeat, and cyclic patterns of seasons remain seemingly similar, there has yet to be two exact summers, two same individuals, or two same tests. The beauty of repetition demands of us an even meticulous attention to what has changed rather than what persists.

Each of us are living memories of our past ancestors. There is object permanence in grief, proprioception that tugs at phantom limbs and the knee jerk reaction that protects us from excess stretching of the quadriceps. My fidgety habit of wrinkling pages while reading, refolding my upper lip over an overbite, my awareness of these tiniest moments all result from aeons of evolution and conflict.

There are a myriad of respinning constellations, sequences but our perception is built from a linoleum of past thoughts, cultures and myths. We pursue precision, leaving behind the flaws that carry countless lives, parts of us have left behind to leave room for ours. In this reverberation of cause and effect, our present is the rebirth of the past and a blueprint for the future. By breathing our discoveries to life, we serve as another reprise rather than a coda.

My mother curls my hair, but she does not see me. Instead, she is looking at hours of tugging and pinching and “sit-still”s she had to tell a wriggling seven-year-old with hair and attitude too thick to be tamed by heat. As a high school senior, this year marks the first of many lasts—when the next fall comes around, I will have to learn to curl my own hair, or simply live with straight hair instead. It’s a decision I haven’t quite made yet. 

There are countless unspoken reprises in the mundane—seemingly minor yet principal points of our lives circling back again and again to become the moments we grow from. My mother curling my hair for elementary school church choir concerts and now school dances. The sharpness of the air on weekly night walks. My handwriting on the diary I’ve been writing in for the past seven years. Art brings us back to moments we do not remember with clarity, but it can also bring moments we cannot remember back to us through a new lens. 

Our history is rife with symbolism on the misery of repetition. In Ancient Greece, Sisyphus pushes his boulder in perpetuity, doomed to fall just short of the mountain’s peak. In Georgian lore, the demigurge Amirani has his organs devoured each night, only for them to regenerate the next morning, the horrific disembowelment repeating anew. In the 21st century, we have “Just make it to Friday” memes and legions of movies exploring the harrowing consequences of time loops. 

Even so, I find my life unfolding within steady, comforting patterns of back-and-forth, redoing and redoubling. I am a teenager hunching over the blue pool of light spilling from her phone’s document app each night, a fluorescent beacon in the stuffy darkness of a bedroom; I am the lines upon lines of struck-through words on my old composition notebook that is now more ink than paper; I am listening to my mom’s reassurance that “writing is rewriting” when the initial version of my essay is awful; I am the first, second, third-and-a-half, “I think I blacked out here,” discarded, preserved, and penultimate draft of that poem I still haven’t perfected. I am led forward by a path paved with identical stones, each step both an evolution and a repetition—or, maybe, a reprisal.