Category: Uncategorized

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…

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…