On Hiking Alone
Here is my official statement on why I do most things alone: I am a lone wolf. I am comfortable with myself. Here is another explanation: There is something about me that is fundamentally unlikeable.
Here is my official statement on why I do most things alone: I am a lone wolf. I am comfortable with myself. Here is another explanation: There is something about me that is fundamentally unlikeable.
Maybe we are the coyotes. We’ve invaded those tidy realms of whiteness, and we did not duck our heads. We acted like we owned the place.
For many, our education in first-person writing begins with the college application essay, which rewards uplifting narratives with neat-bow conclusions. This is a bad thing.
Why not form friendship around a love of good drink, openness, and a desire to treat each other with fairness?
I have never been as vulnerable with students as I was then, having to tell the fifth graders I was in pain.
There’s a religious ring to the language of appreciating public lands in America. But, as a South Asian woman and a first-generation immigrant, I am not a welcome pilgrim.
Diners are affordable, accessible, and a staple of our national imagination. They’re also disappearing—and we need them now more than ever.
But there was also the feeling of home, and these feelings shiver still in my core.
I need the ocean to quiet my thoughts, the surfers to remind me I’m a person, the Taco Bell as a place where I become solid again.
Once it happens, sleep paralysis tends to recur. It’s as if a spirit has marked your bed, like the first coming has irreversibly altered you.
I was enjoying what exists of this place today—be it Croatia or Yugoslavia—without the need for comparison.
My husband’s grandfather wrote an immigration guide called “Before You Leave for America.” We could have used one in reverse—for moving to Bulgaria.
Frarieville was the safe space on which I could plant my flag.
As her family saw it, my mother’s life in London was one of comfort. But she also struggled. Both of these things were true.
Quietly, I clung to what I knew: how to be an outsider in the South.
Though no place is home upon arrival, I make it my home by the time I leave.
Time amplifies division; I fear that we’re never going to be a big family again, that my newborn son will never consider his cousins to be siblings like I did.
At home, in Goiânia, I didn’t have to be Brazilian; I could just be me.
What might have happened if we had stayed?
The land that was previously seen as harsh and brutal by colonial forces was actually a site of survival, new life, and renewal.