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Essays, Memoirs & True Stories
Essays, Memoirs & True Stories
My Ghost Fleet
I have spent hours in attics, the kind reached by pulling a rope in the ceiling and ascending to a stagnant room. It was in attics that I found love letters tied with ribbons, and wedding dresses in paper boxes the size of coffins, and sepia photographs of uncles in uniform and children who’d died of scarlet fever. I sifted through images of wraparound porches and white chickens, three-legged dogs and men with cigars. I think there is a reason why the past collects in attics: heavily, above us.
December 2024
Essays, Memoirs & True Stories
The Work We Do
I can’t believe it took me so long to hold myself accountable for how much my life actually costs. Forty-two feels incredibly, abnormally late to realize that, yes, time is money. And, conversely, money is time—time that someone, somewhere worked.
December 2024
Essays, Memoirs & True Stories
Greenie
Sometimes I wonder if that moment when I came into the house after school, during a time when I was mostly friendless, dressed in matronly, dated clothes from the Cancer Society thrift shop, barred by my mother from concerts, movies, and parties, and I sat down at the table and was grabbed hard by my grandmother’s hand, which seemed to hold a charge of energy—sometimes I wonder if that moment, that physical connection, that pinch, was how I survived.
December 2024
Essays, Memoirs & True Stories
Love and Other Pandemics
The thing about the apocalypse is that nobody said it would be so beautiful. Spring is letting down her hair. The air is warm, sweet, and clear. Moss drapes over a storm drain, parting for the rush of early-morning runoff. A heavy quiet has descended since we took to our homes, save for the shrieking hawks circling the shuttered strip-mall parking lot next door to my mother’s house outside of Philadelphia.
November 2024
Essays, Memoirs & True Stories
The Telephone Mode
I find talking on the phone to be one of the purest forms of communication. You are receiving the person’s voice, their tone, their laughter, without the distraction of their clothing, their hairdo, their body. I don’t care what someone looks like. I want to hear them sigh with exhaustion or cackle with delight. I want to hear tiny details of the environment from which they speak: birdsong, barking dogs, the beep of a microwave.
November 2024
Essays, Memoirs & True Stories
Butter
I went on absorbing Beth’s hostile digs until a new patient stole her attention from me. Louise had a round face, dark curly hair, and a generous, pear-shaped body. Her weight seemed concentrated in her thighs. When she arrived at lunch for the first time, her figure filling the doorframe, Beth’s eyes brightened as if she were an African lion coming upon a gazelle. I could practically feel my tormentor’s focus lift off me.
November 2024
Essays, Memoirs & True Stories
The Next Peak
The mountain in winter enables the kind of sleep that restores, heals, allows brains to solve problems. The days have more than enough darkness to crawl inside.
October 2024
Essays, Memoirs & True Stories
Thoreau and Me
Thoreau was the same sort of hippie I am. The main difference between us is that I do not want my writing to be as absolutely sexless as his. I want to be a Thoreauvian capable of lust.
October 2024
Essays, Memoirs & True Stories
Penumbra
If Roe was created in the liminal space of the penumbra, Dobbs is the total eclipse that makes all go dark.
October 2024
Essays, Memoirs & True Stories
Transvestite Freak
Many confident, gorgeous men stare at me from the walls. They all seem to be wearing makeup. This is what a man can be too, I imagine them whispering. I’m nervous, but I want what they have.
September 2024
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