Some of my best writing has originated from prompts. Writer Daniel Levin Becker, a member of OULIPO, has provided at least two of them. The most recent piece was for the column he’s doing at The Believer Magazine called Distancing: A Homebound Registry of Other Places and Times and the Albums That Take Us There. Here I wrote about being twenty and feeling lonely as an international student on the campus of Rochester Institute of Technology.

Sheltering in place is making me sentimental, I fear. This conversion project has been on my to-do list for a decade, and suddenly I’ve made the time for it, so now I’m listening to Goodbye Yellow Brick Road and it’s 1999 and I’m on the campus of Rochester Institute of Technology, a former farm that still sounds like a farm at night. I can hear all kinds of insects whose names I don’t know in English or in Russian, because—well, this is a different continent from the one I grew up on, and surely these are different insects. I have no idea. I’m studying business. It’s July, two in the morning, and I’m circling the athletic field with headphones in my ears.

https://believermag.com/logger/distancing-7-goodbye-yellow-brick-road/

Read the rest of my essay and don’t miss the other pieces in this column, taken together they make for an amazing musical mix.