Thirst
What is your mother’s favorite drink? The hospice nurse asks me this over the phone. She doesn’t know that I call my mother my “birth” mother, that I was her second child birthed but not raised, given up for adoption when I was an infant. “Mother” without the extra …
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Things That Wait
The morning began the way most of them did, with small weights distributed in familiar places. A cup set down on the table left a faint ring of warmth that cooled gradually. A spoon tapped twice against its rim. Someone crossed the kitchen, and the floorboards offered their usual …
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When the Room Turned
When she was three days old, I called him. It was still dark out, that pre-dawn haze when even your own breathing sounds unfamiliar. Home from the hospital, I sat on the edge of my bed in my postpartum diaper, bleeding through a pad, the baby latched to …
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Litmus
ONE: In November, you are dancing in a club with your partner of ten months. The music is too loud, and you are sober. A grown man approaches from across the room. He says: “Sorry to interrupt, but I just had to ask. Are you Asian?” His voice is …
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A Sentence with a Seam
I learned what a good sentence sounded like at my father’s table, not through confession but through compression. His day reduced to nouns: work, weather, money, the thing that broke, the thing that got fixed. Feelings were implied, if allowed at all, but rarely named. Questions that wandered too …
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Fagends at the Whitney
Claes Oldenburg’s Giant Fagends (1967) looms like a monument to all our beautiful ruins. The urethane foam cigarettes sprawl across their stark white ashtray—each one as big as my father’s forearm when he lay in the hospital bed, tubes snaking from his collapsed lungs. I stand here thinking how …
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A Spectrum is a Ray of Light
Question 1: Is it difficult for you to understand what people are feeling just by observing facial expressions? There’s a blind spot on Reigerts Road, a dead zone at the peak of a high-sloping hill where two cars traveling in opposite directions cannot see if a stray vehicle …
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The Shed
When I was a girl, I was enthralled with butterflies. Their stately names—monarch, viceroy, painted lady—each sounded to me more like royalty than biology. I wished sometimes I could become one, unfurl kaleidoscope wings and float off into some other world, light as breath. And so I spent …
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Lift
Two scooter girls in Easter-egg helmets kneel at a suspension bridge edge. Shoulder to shoulder, they spin combination locks, racing to feel the release. Below, a shirtless boy wades into the river. His mother, on a boulder, reaches out. A swallow darts by. Concrete shifts. Cables grind rust into …
Read MoreA Traveler’s Guide to Goodbyes
Vow #1: No more getting high. I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again. I’ll say it until it sticks. Last time, it was a resolution. Everyone was making them. A month, I could do a month. One week passed. I’d had a rough day, and I …
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