Yesterday, I had to unearth the four 1 x 2 foot stepping stones that for your entire childhood, made a path through the grass from our home to our car. It felt like a desecration.

 It was a task borne of necessity—not an undertaking I chose. A worker had arrived unexpectedly to remove three tree stumps (ash, cedar, and elm) from our property, and the cedar stump could only be accessed by displacing the stones.

he last time I saw my girlfriend, she was a few seconds behind. 

 Her face froze mid-sentence, her mouth poised around the w-sound. Her locs were longer than they were three months ago–they covered her eyes now, which she loved but knew I hated. The tattoos I’d seen sketched on her iPad were now all over her body–a spider crawling up her abdomen, vines coiled around her collarbone, anime characters battling on her forearm. Then the connection caught up on our Instagram video call and my phone screen was alive again, her stupid gap-toothed grin taking up its entire area.

The highway signs warned, do not pick up hitchhikers.  A few miles further down the road was a large sign, Iowa Correctional Institution for Women.  I was fascinated by those road signs as a child, they promised an ominous darkness we would only avoid if we did as we were told, allowing no strangers into our car.