May 31, 2022
Fostering
As a queer person, I’d had no role models growing up, had to stumble through every relationship, learning how to love as best I could. Dog fostering was a kind of parallel crash course.
As a queer person, I’d had no role models growing up, had to stumble through every relationship, learning how to love as best I could. Dog fostering was a kind of parallel crash course.
I’m embracing the label, with all its yearning, try-hard connotations, because desire shouldn’t be embarrassing and love does require trying hard.
My identity is tied up in my singleness, my childlessness, and I’m not sure I want to let that go.
Like many immigrant daughters, I’m of a lineage of women who didn’t put themselves first.
I’m not sure I want to be vulnerable or join a community. I’m not sure I even remember how.
The group chat is a means, not an end. Not what our friendship is, but what keeps it alive.
I wondered how I would confront what I thought was my worst: my sexuality.
It was an acrimonious divorce. I wanted justice. I settled for truth.
In any serious picture of me, I am not comfortable enough to look directly into the lens. I don’t know if I will ever be.
Promiti Islam on queerness, Bengali-American identity, and the complexities of family acceptance,
I wondered: Who was I when I first formed this friendship?
I didn’t want it to make sense—to send my children away for who knows how long—but I did need them to survive. I needed to survive.
Distance, though it may be physically distancing, need not make a couple grow distant.
For a decade I’d tricked myself into believing I was happily married, never thinking there could come a time when the trick no longer worked.
I discovered breakdancing in that VHS time capsule, and that was as close as I’d ever get to a culture that did not exist where I lived.
Nora Feely on loss during the pandemic, chosen families, and the small but devastating things 2020 took away.
I was already in love with all my friends. But in my newfound singleness, I was falling in love with them more deeply.
I've long been taught that the appearance of a good marriage, not a good marriage necessarily, is the ultimate goal.
We were all looking for the exceptions; all of us. Our conversations about white people had by now become banal.
