That first time I heard it, the music was so catchy and the words were so ridiculous that I threw my head back and laughed. I opened the curtains that had been closed for a month.
To this day, I can’t tell you the names of my extended family in Taiwan—but I can tell you their astrological signs.
Sharing clothes feels like sharing a secret, the same way being someone’s child does.
It goes like this: sit with the thought, don’t move your fingers, arms, legs, let it enter you, let it stay, let it leave.
On some level, we all know: Everyone who is etched into our being will one day vanish.
To cope with pain, and prepare for parenthood, I had to learn how to breathe. To breathe, I needed more than air.
Morisot’s paintings of women up close lined the walls, a pastel perspective at vanity tables and in gardens. My breath rushed in: beautiful.
Just as America’s horrors led Baldwin to flee decades before, I waded through my own fear as a gay, black man coming of age in an America burning once again.
This was not the information I was looking for. This was not the truth I wanted.
As a young girl, running away is considered a flight of fancy. As a grown woman, people think it’s just flight.
It’s very calming, very methodical, very good if, say, someone you love has died, but you know the world cannot stop, and you can’t either.
Obtaining a perfect grasp of masculinity was not my goal when I decided to transition, but I certainly did feel the pressure to try.
I do not believe in a soul but these past six months of illness, I am guilty of dislocating, of clinging to magic. Of wanting relief. Of being sick of being sick.
Around the time I was in seventh grade, I started performing makeshift eye surgery on my grandmother.
“Hoba! Hoba!” my daughter screeches, using the short word for ‘hobotnica’—octopus in Croatian. My friend says, “She’s Croatian alright.”
I had always found a gathering of women sharing their stories and wisdom an effective way to touch the divine.
What I’d been looking for at the convent, I could find in reading and writing. If other writers could channel their desires, I could use it, too.
We’ve listed the names we get called and the names we call ourselves. Some feel true. Others give us aches.
Briefly, I was part of that mysterious organism, a biological family; no one cared about my virtues or my bad behavior.
What I forgot, for years and years, were the details of what my body experienced at the time. But my body did not forget.
