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The Happy Vertex

(As Explained In A Letter To My Son)

You see that the cruelty of the Happy Vertex is its fleeting nature. Line A plunges downward, line B eventually plateaus, and before you know it, the distractions take over, and you’re thinking about girls, or you take a brief but intense interest in Mazda Miatas. Soon you’ll think about money, nothing but money.

A Single Suitcase

We left before they told us to evacuate. I saw the smoke over the hills, knew the ferocity of the Santa Ana winds, and figured it wouldn’t be long before the fire would reach us. I packed a small suitcase.

You

Early on I thought about wiping your memory. I might as well admit this to you now. I thought maybe if you stopped believing you were something else on the inside, then you wouldn’t be sad anymore. And you wouldn’t change. This was before your body really began to transform.

Hello, Goodbye

You want to write back, He died. You want your hurt to be the world’s hurt. This pain is what was born tonight. It’s a palpable, physical thing, an object of infinite dimension that can be looked at from many angles, held closely or at a distance, and always there is some new aspect of the sorrow.

The Ghost Of A Boy

You can belong to yourself, but it’s lonely, and you can belong to others, but there’s loss built into that, in uncountable forms.

Notes On Surrender

Over and over I have discovered that my children feel alienated in environments where, at their age, I felt an automatic sense of belonging.

Father Figure

As Lee immersed himself in these families’ daily lives, he witnessed tender interactions that ran counter to stereotypes of Black men as indifferent or absent fathers. Despite challenging financial and personal circumstances, the men Lee encountered were “loving, present, and responsible fathers,” he says, who worked hard to provide for and nurture their children.

What Really Matters

A good teacher, a shared meal, a heartfelt apology​