It was a period of my life I think back on as dark gray, a time of sustained unhappiness. I didn’t like commuting. I didn’t like my job. I looked for a stained glass woman at a stop light. 

I am a year older than you ever reached, but the word mother remains a foreign language tangled in my throat.

It’s been four months and counting. Why is Dad holding on? Is he waiting for me to say the words I never could? Somewhere under that gruff exterior, does he believe there is unfinished business between us? 

Do you embalm your heart so that it can last forever?

Sure, I felt a tinge of guilt spending all my money gambling, but what could I do? John and I were stuck in this neon prison that we had become accustomed to. All other lights in life paled in comparison. 

I am the gun and the person holding the gun and the person being shot and the ground under them that will have to catch the body.

The best part of learning you’re incapable of conceiving when you’re 11 is that you’re 11  and not being able to birth a slightly smaller version of yourself seems like a substantial victory.

Today I sat at the counter of a diner in a new town I’ve come to so I can live somewhere you’ve never been.

It’s the supposed golden age to forge friendships that later in life you will count on your hand. But your mojo is to hang with a crowd, have forbidden crushes on a few, and keep to yourself.   

They’re getting rid of all the benches and roofed-over bus stops and everything else designed for people to enjoy without having to break their own hands for it

The notes vibrated from her heart to ours, individual and collective, breathing and humming along as one. Framed in soft light and soaring from note to note, she infused us with sounds and memories, taking us back to a coffeehouse or church basement years ago when love was young, hope eternal, the future limitless. 

They’re all polite when they ask ,“What brings you here? ”As if I haven’t been visiting my entire life.

I thought Mommy would give me love if I was the best daughter, the way my teachers gave me gold stars for being the best student. I was wrong. Love isn’t a reward. It is not something that you earn, win or achieve–it just is.

the nurses dished out paper cups of unlabeled pills the doctors handed us our diagnoses and if you questioned anything at all, they’d dish out punishments

I started swimming because it was the one thing that eased my anxiety as a kid. Existing in and moving my body through water was the only thing in life that felt effortless. The pool was my sanctuary, the place that took my anxious stomach aches away and returned me to my parents a different child.

I do not want to talk about fake news or making you great again. I want to talk about the immigrants with burning skin and an aching desire for the American dream that you drown in tears of gas.

She could soak overnight, and he’d still be there, clinging to her. She is a dirty, broken, sad, incurable sight. A dirty broken, sad, incurable thing.

There was a little girl with drugs in her pocket, / and sex in her knowledge, with addiction in her heart / living with no rest or solace.

You had dreams / of sticky hot summer days that were cool sprayed until the fire hydrants die, / while brisk winter nights were warmed by radiators stuck on walls like flies.

Each week, Mom wrote a scene about her childhood, many of the stories she had told me and some I hadn’t heard before. After the course had ended, she printed copies of her work and proudly showed them to my sister and me. Then she tucked the writing away.