My toddler is standing next to my bed. Again. I swing my legs out of bed. “Lie down,” I whisper. He rushes back to his makeshift mattress on the floor, lies down, and waits for me to tuck the blankets around him. Again. At least he’s not screaming at me about this routine anymore. We’ve done this back-and-forth battle two nights in a row now. If I don’t give in, the worst should be behind us. I just hope my husband doesn’t sabotage all my efforts by allowing him to crawl into his side of the bed. Since I’m awake I might as well write about it.

There are people who have this rare gift. They may be charming and intelligent, but that's not what will make you fall for them. They will look at you with adoring puppy eyes across the table, oblivious to the rest of the dinner guests. They will deliver prideful this-hot-girl-is-my-lover looks when you're out together. They will make you think every crazy-in-love song ever written is about the two of you, you just used to think it was some soapy wordplay because you'd never felt like this before.

Who would have thought we’d be back here again? Me, blinded by your headlamp, white-knuckling a tooth-shaped stress toy with your name and number printed on it. You, on your swivel stool, tapping your running shoes to the eighties soft rock that seeps through the walls like the smell of the salmon your assistant reheated for lunch.

It was supposed to be a fun weekend. Just a quick overnight from Oakland to Los Angeles. A visit with Joe’s family that would double as a celebration of my forty-first birthday. My boys, Max and Leo, then seven and four, would be with their dad for the weekend. Things were still a little iffy on their dad’s end, with only six months sobriety under his belt, but they’d all be at his parents’ home. The boys would be safe under their grandparents’ watch.

Something bad happens when you’re eight years old, maybe nine, and you don’t understand it, you don’t have the words, but you do know—with throbbing certainty—what it means. Your dolls will be your only kids, because now you will never have one. Your insides have gone all wrong.

I nominated my mother to share the news of my pregnancy with the rest of our family. I was confident my father and brother wouldn’t kill the messenger, but I knew for certain they would want to kill the message.

I only feared two things as a kid: death and my mother’s Dabur Amla Coconut Hair Oil. Each morning, I watched as the soulful hues of gray and blue intertwine in the sky, inviting a promise of a fresh start along with a tender slap of morning nausea. I hear my mother’s screams, “जल्दी उठो बस निकलने वाली nहै!!!” or “wake up now the bus is about to leave!!!” as my platinum chrome alarm clock sparks a great epiphany — my perception shifting from fantasy to reality in a heartbeat.

“There are two parts of the mind. The outer mind that records facts and the inner mind that says ‘Yes’ and ‘no.” –Agnes Martin

1.

Once, years back, a woman, an acquaintance, asked me why I decided to become a speech-language pathologist, a person who works on helping children who can’t say their rs, who sits in quiet classrooms with the thud of the other, happier children outside, or who leans in, in the dead of winter, in a trailer because that’s the only extra space, a metallic trailer with stucco on the sides, and who rehearses the way sounds go.

On Monday, August 20th, 2012 at 11:54 p.m., a piece of rail snapped beneath an eighty-car train carrying 9,837 tons of coal as it passed over a bridge above Main Street in Ellicott City, Maryland.

Just a moment before the accident, Elizabeth Nass and Rose Mayr, two nineteen-year-old friends spending one last night of summer together before heading back to college, sat on that same bridge, dangling their legs over the edge.

Just a moment after, the train cars tipped over on their bodies, crushing them beneath piles of coal.

It was a perfect August day, and the Wolf River was clear and cool. The leaf canopy of spruce and cottonwood sparkled overhead, like shards of brilliant green glass backlit by intermittent bursts of sunlight.

Dave and I were trying out the twin red kayaks that his kids had given us the previous Christmas. Everyone agreed we had been working too hard, and the weight of a business we could no longer save was taking its toll.

I stand at the church parking lot entrance and stop each car. 

The surface lot is small and we’re saving it for those who NEED to park closer. Please park in the parking garage, yes, the one RIGHT there, and get your ticket validated inside for free parking. 

I smile, nod, and point.

I have a problem with many words in the English language, the most recent and personally applicable being “menopause.” Apparently, the term is a Greek mashup of “month” and “cease.” I’d have less of a problem if the English term were “menocease,” since “menopause” suggests that something about the female body—my body in this case—is “pausing” and will, ASAP, resume its regularly scheduled programming. But, that’s not the case. My body is going off the air.

It’s our last night on Kauai together, yet not together. For the past seven days, we’ve been staying at different places due to the separation, Ian and I in a condo, and you at a hotel. We have a late morning flight back to the Bay Area tomorrow, and when we reach San Mateo, you’ll drop me off at my apartment, a tiny one bedroom I’m renting several blocks away from the house we raised Ian in–the house where you and Ian now live.

She was doing Pilates when she saw the first sign. She should have noticed. It was like last summer when the cop stopped her, leaned into the window, and asked if she’d seen the “STOP” sign. Of course she hadn’t, she told him; if she had seen it she’d have stopped. But that, too, was no kind of explanation.

There’s a ten year old girl, long unbrushed brown hair in a private school uniform running late for lunch from gym class. She’s alone. There are eight buttons on her white oxford shirt. This is her third month in a real school after being homeschooled for her entire life, her seventh move to her fifth state, Ohio this time. Her sister, Liz, just two grades below her in third was recently teased for not knowing the word fart.

And to feel that the light is a rabbit-light,

In which everything is meant for you

And nothing need be explained;

At the Y pool, 7:00 AM on a Wednesday morning, my lane stretches before me.

I’m in the chilly water, kept at what I’m told is “competition temperature,” a shock to me my first time here. Nothing to do but swim, swim, swim to try to stay as warm as possible. I’m the only swimmer who has pulled a long sleeved swim shirt over her suit, in addition to wearing  swim pants reaching to my calves. After weeks of swimming, I am still not accustomed to the cold water.

Some Girls

In 1966, a teenage girl walked into a fancy salon in London, England wanting a simple shampoo and set. Instead, persuaded by the owner, she had her long locks cut into a short crop. After the cut, a picture was taken, revealing an almost waif-ish yet intriguing schoolgirl: pretty, wide-eyed, and made up beyond her years. Barry Lategan, the photographer, said of the girl, “She was gawky, but she had a sort of elegance…I think it was the eyes…she had such a presence.”

My brother props his long legs on the dashboard of Dad’s pristine Honda. He presses his feet in their sweaty black socks into the windshield hard enough to leave `a smudge, a crime our eighty-five year-old father swoops on like a hawk.

Once upon a time, there was a magical world where the mud from my mother’s freshly watered roses was coffee and the sticks that fell from the branches of our backyard trees were witches’ wands. This was the fairytale that my little sister and I wrote together. We were princesses, pop singers, actresses, fairies, or anything we wanted to be from the stories we read and the movies we watched. Every morning of summer break, our parents would leave for work and a magic door would swing open inviting us into this secret world of adventure and mystery.