Category: Uncategorized

We entered the museum as if it were a weather system we had agreed to walk through together, a soft front of color and steel and suspended light. MassMOCA held its breath for us, or perhaps I imagined that it did, because I wanted the world to feel arranged. I wanted the afternoon to feel…

I am afraid of succeeding at the one thing I have worked for long enough to call it a life. This fear has a shape, and its shape is an arrival. To arrive would mean that the years of preparation, the hours of quiet labor, the small and stubborn fidelities to language and thought, have…

I can explain the objects of my interest carefully and exactly. I can tell you what a story does when it tightens its fist. I can tell you why a certain book or manuscript survives its transmission or copy and another dies. I can name the theorists, theologians, the histories, the stakes. I can also…

I go to the movies the way some people go to church—not for answers, but for scale. I like the act of arriving early, the small ritual of choosing a seat, the way the room exhales when the lights dim. There is relief in surrendering to the size of it all. Movie stars loom larger…

When I was young, I used to wonder how paper was made, not in a scientific way, but in the quiet, distracted way a child wonders about ordinary miracles. I would hold a sheet up to the light and think about how something so thin could unapologetically be, how it could be folded and unfolded,…

I mourn something I cannot name because to name it would be to admit it had a shape once, that it lived somewhere in my body and not just in the negative space around my days. It is easier to say I am tired, or busy, or doing well. I wake and rehearse myself into…

Clouds are born from what cannot be seen. Water vapor, so ordinary it slips through fingers, rises, cools, and condenses into something strangely visible, something that can be pointed at and named. They are made of countless small things agreeing to become something larger than themselves. They are always in motion even when they appear…

When I was young, my body sat in a chair but my life did not.My life was busy somewhere else. Running, saving, building, loving. In my head I carried volumes. I had names for the backstories and moral dilemmas that kept me awake in the soft way joy keeps you awake. I lived so many…

I want to wear a gorgeous tie on special occasions, but they are in my closet without a warrant. I keep returning to the same doorway, the same small moment where your leaving first happened, as if the mind believes repetition might soften the blow. When you chose to leave, abandonment was not a concept…

I watched a movie and the song stayed the same. I go to Central Park the way I return to an essay already finished, certain there is nothing left to say, and yet compelled to read it again. Once, this place was a place mark in happiness: a pause where laughter caught its breath, an…