Sentience Author:Ilan Avineri, Elijah Aquilina, Christopher Eskilson, Irving, Mordecai, Milo We, the collective authors of this work, are six individuals who grew up in the same coastal city of sunny southern California. We found one another in the (in the most polite terms we can use) ?experience? of high school and became united by a love of expression, a love of capturing the emotion that was around us. As we eventually all graduated... more » from our common factor of public education, we went our separate ways in the following year, taking a variety of paths with a variety of decisions that went a variety of ways between good and bad. Faced with the challenges of the ?real, adult world,? we did what we could to make sense of our lives: we wrote about them. The book contains one-hundred and twenty poems, essays, stories, and any other or unclassifiable way of written expression. Each author has twenty pieces here, an amount designed to give enough insight into their journey, as well as showcase enough of their approach to not only the topic but writing itself. Twenty is also a sort of marker for us, a boundary of sorts that we are fast approaching in age. We are all, at the time of this work, riding the border around nineteen: an awkward age of transition. All these works are five-hundred words; they are meant to be snippets of our experiences, individual thoughts connected to the larger human existence which, we are afraid, cannot fit into one volume of work. So, we present instead instances ?points? along our larger journeys, hoping you can connect the dots. This is a longitudinal study, of sorts? a psychological analysis of our sample population throughout this past year of life through the medium of written expression. Here you will find our results, our qualitative research by way of poem and story which examines the changes in our perceptions, the changes in our manners of sentience throughout this critical year in our young lives upon this Earth. We made sense of this new reality, the emotional turmoil of becoming an ?adult? whatever that term may mean, by careful study, a careful observation and participation of life, followed by recording of what was seen and heard and felt within this year of change. We bled upon the page all that is this new ?adulthood,? to expose it for what is is and feels to be. And here is what came out.« less