It’s easier to cut people out than to learn to differentiate between the chronically demanding and the occasionally needy. It’s war, we tell ourselves.
I have no desire to live forever. But what I would give to return to adolescence and do it over, even once! To kiss who I wanted to kiss, not settling for her brother.
In her illness, Korean food was all my Polish-American mom from Jersey wanted to eat. It was all that she could bear.
If citrine is supposed to bring you abundance, what might it bring if you didn’t need so much wealth in our capitalist hellscape?
There will be as many different iterations of this storm, and the ones to come, as there are Houstonians. And we have to hear them—they’re what will determine our map for the next one.
“Accommodations are things that we need, and deserve, in order to lead our lives. But they’re treated—we are treated—like we’re trying to pull one over on the rest of society.”
For me, distinctions between light and dark have dissolved as my blindness has worsened. I do not experience blindness as darkness or blackness.
Remain forever hungry, or enjoy the tried-and-true? Sometimes, I learned, it’s okay to double down on the life you have.
What, exactly, are the building blocks that make a fairy tale a fairy tale? And who—or what—might be making them in the future?
When we dress up, when we experiment, sometimes it’s because we are trying to discover who we are. But sometimes it’s because we already know and have nothing to hide.
My parental separation was vastly less traumatic than what is happening to children at the border. But this narrative lives inside me.
Hafu carries insinuations of otherness; of not belonging, but being fetishized. How do I carry this name and this history at once?
I’ve been wondering what my edges really are, and finding they don’t exist. I feel myself shimmer with every conflicting thought.
Not knowing happens to all mothers, and to all of us—if we are breathing, we are without escape from things we can’t know.
In fairy tales, the only good mother is a dead one.
As my mother loses the ability to remember, I find myself playing with my own memory.
In Houston, as with everywhere else, the arts serve as tiny lifeboats—and sometimes, if we’re lucky, we all find ourselves floating together.
Nukumori can refer to a kind of existence not dependent on physical proximity, allowing a person’s presence to linger with you even if they cannot.
If traditions like the rodeo can accommodate Houston’s diversity, whole new traditions will be formed—leaving us with something even better.
What if my son, the boy who has puzzled everyone, has helped to save my life?
