Sep 19, 2018
What Bird Watching Gave Me After My Miscarriage
It was satisfying to see those robins, sparrows, and starlings, because they were still with us. They had stayed.
It was satisfying to see those robins, sparrows, and starlings, because they were still with us. They had stayed.
My family isn’t religious, but we have a saying that we do believe in my grandfather. And an essay he wrote about me reminds me to believe in myself.
An obsession with a Catholic saint and his relics made me think about the pieces of myself I had offered up to others.
How do you mourn someone who is still alive, who might as well be a stranger now?
Beauty and its pursuit can be art, a delight, a terrific party. But a party you must attend every day isn’t a party at all. It’s an unpaid job.
Inside her small body lives every answer to every obstacle. No maps are necessary. She is the map.
There’s a distinct kind of relationship that privileged first-generation children have with their immigrant parents.
“Not thinking about these things doesn’t make them go away. So, instead, I choose to look. It is staring into a dim room and letting my eyes adjust to the dark.”
Papa left the summer I turned eight. The emotional toll of a wife who blamed him was too much to carry along with the burden of repatriating thousands of Filipino citizens.
The language of depression can be curiously maritime. It comes in waves; it drowns us; it’s the Mariner’s albatross around our necks.
To your church and to the world, there is nothing more dangerous than a woman wanting.
Adoption is one of those forks in the road where many of us try to glimpse through the trees to the other path, the other world.
I am at the nether reaches of my fertility, curious as to what I can still grow. This remains a shock.
My English teacher helped me believe in my writing. She also drew me into an inappropriate relationship.
Patten didn’t undress for fifty days while onboard Neptune’s Car because “the threat of rape had never been far from her mind.”
It was like a disaster movie, the quiet moment before the asteroid lands. “Swim!” he yelled, but it was too late for me.
“How do I teach her letting go, when my hands are still gnarled in the shape of everything I’ve ever lost?”
What the Venus flower basket and a Norwegian bildungsroman can teach us about queer adolescence.
The violence of the moment, conveyed in shades of melancholy purple, is bleak even for a cartoon. But it’s also honest.
“The nurse sucked the last of his water world out of him. And then the cry, a goodbye to that wet planet.”
