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The building across the street has a row of windows that catch the late afternoon light in a way that feels almost purposeful, as if someone had arranged the angle of the glass to hold the sun a moment longer than necessary, and I find myself watching it while my phone rests face-up on the…

I began the evening with a small, almost procedural act, setting a glass down on the table beside a book I had already decided not to fully read, positioning both objects with the quiet precision of someone who wants to appear occupied without committing to the occupation itself, and it seemed to me, as I…

I entered the park without quite deciding to, as though my feet had accepted an invitation that my mind had not yet opened, and the long rectangular geometry of the city, its glass planes and right angles and impatient signals, gradually loosened its grip behind me until the paths began to curve in that careful…

I sometimes think my life can be measured by the buildings in which I have tried, with varying degrees of success, to become a stable person. There was the faux- Neo-classical public library where, as a boy, I discovered that silence could feel less like an absence and more like a structure one could lean…

I have learned how to pack a life. Banker boxes, borrowed suitcases, plastic bins with lids that never quite close the same way twice. I know how to decide what matters by weight. What can I carry? What can I afford to leave? What version of myself fits into the backseat of a car pointed…

I have always believed that numbers are invisible. Not invisible in the way air is invisible, something you cannot see but still feel filling your lungs. Not invisible in the way gravity is invisible, something proven by the falling of things. No, I mean invisible in a more distant way. Invisible in the way faith…

I used to believe that monsters were obvious things. They belonged to darkness, to mythology, to stories meant to warn us about danger. Monsters, as I understood them growing up, were supernatural beings whose purpose was singular and cruel: they existed to take life from others. Vampires drained vitality. Ghosts lingered because something had gone…

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…