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I wake up and my first thought is not gratitude, not even complaint, but a tired arithmetic: Not another sunrise. As if the sun were a bill I forgot to pay yesterday and now it has arrived again. Morning light spills across the wall like a reminder I didn’t ask for. I lie there listening to the…

In math class, the chalk dust settles like flour on a counter. The teacher writes a new equation, and I copy it down the way I once copied instructions from the back of a box: preheat, combine, wait. There is comfort in the certainty of steps, but also a dull resentment. I am not discovering…

The garden does not ask what time of year it is. It knows. It knows by the angle of light, by the temperature held in the soil, by the way moisture lingers or vanishes. It responds without debate. Leaves fall because it is time to let go. Roots thicken because they must hold through cold.…

I remember the exact moment I decided I was difficult to love. It was quiet and undignified. No witness but the mirror. I stood there and lifted my camera like a small, trembling verdict and took a picture of myself, as if evidence were required. At the time, my body was a negotiation I was…

By noon the tree had accepted me the way a dare accepts a child, that is, without conversation and without mercy. I climbed because I always climbed. Because my body knew how to pull itself upward, knew bark and branch the way a words know how to keep going once they have started. I trusted…

I grew up in a house that faced the beach, close enough that the ocean felt like another room of the house, a loud, breathing presence. Out the door we would run, my parents and I, smiling and unprepared, as if the shore were an emergency we had to answer immediately. The air always arrived…

We sat at a table that had learned how to hold us. It was wide enough for plates and elbows and the careful spill of a morning that had no intention of rushing. Brunch arrived: coffee steaming, two breakfast burritos sliced, butter melting as if it understood time better than we did. The conversation moved…

I lie in the bathtub long after the steam has gone, after the water has learned the language of the room and gone flat and honest. The faucet has stopped speaking. The light hums. The water cools without notice, and I do not flinch. I tell myself I am resting, that this is recovery, that…

As a child, I loved the way herbs and flowers grew with no regard for the smallness of my hands. I pressed seeds into soil the way other children pressed coins into wishing wells, believing that patience itself was a form of devotion. The garden was never large, but it felt great to me—rows of…

I have made so many photographs in my life that the number loses its edges. Tens of thousands, maybe more, each one a small decision to notice, to frame, to say this mattered enough to stop time for it. If I gather the hours I spent in the darkroom—standing, waiting, breathing the chemical tang of…