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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…

The bee does not arrive religiously with a public audience. She comes unannounced, a soft thrum stitched into the afternoon, its body already dusted with the evidence of labor. She enters the flower as if entering a small chapel, bowing its head into the bell of color, brushing against the pollen the way one brushes…

I lay in the hospital bed for weeks because I was not strong enough to carry myself, because my body had become something that required witnesses. The bed knew the shape of me better than I did. It hummed and adjusted and lifted my knees without asking. When I slept, people watched the rise and…

I dig into the dirt as if it is a language I once spoke fluently and then forgot, my hands remembering before my mind does. The soil is cool and dark, smelling like rain that hasn’t happened yet. I turn it over with my fingers instead of a shovel because I want to feel the…