Praying during the first grief-soaked month following my father’s death felt rote to me. Awkward. I had taken on the obligation of saying the Mourner’s Kaddish every day for at least a month before realizing I had forgotten how to pray. A professor in college who gave me a C on a paper about James Joyce’s Ulysses said I was like a blind woman trying to describe a painting in front of her. That’s how it felt saying the Kaddish.

The last time I went to the church of my childhood, I wore my collar—my hot, plastic, clerical collar. I felt obvious and tender in it, like a burgeoning zit, like everyone would stare. And yet, I wanted them to stare, I wanted them to look at me and be amazed.

We held our hands in prayer. “Te lo pido, señor.” That week, it was my turn to visit Marco at the Elizabeth Detention Center, a contract detention facility in New Jersey used by Immigrations and Customs Enforcement to detain immigrants determined to be “suspicious” or “illegal.”

I am seven years old. It’s time for communion in my United Methodist Church in a small town in mid-Michigan. After watching communion by intinction happen for so many years from the sidelines, I am excited when my mom tells me it is okay for me to line up in the center aisle with her and slowly shuffle forward, waiting for my time to tear a piece of bread off the soft, white loaf and dip it in the grape juice.

The coconut palm in the field behind my house worships the wind. Its feather duster head sweeps low, bows to the earth like a holy roller in ecstasy, and then snaps back skyward—defiant—in an elastic, resurrecting leap that blasts the law of gravity.

I was on my hands and knees trying to hide a twelve-piece dinner set under my single bed when I heard Mum calling from the bedroom next door. She’d been in bed for two days, suffering from either a bad back or codeine withdrawals. I pushed the crockery behind a box of stainless steel cutlery and some gingham tea towels I’d bought from Woolworth’s the day before.

I lost count after the first ten, twenty, seventy-five, a thousand. I remember the first time. Driving with my sisters, one of them said, I’ve had sex with a woman. Stunned into revelation, I blurted, so have I. But she was kidding. Entrapment, and I fell for it.

Paris, City of Love, where we lay our scene of adventurous study abroad college students. Me and the girls were out in a little bar late at night. The lights were cool, a featured musician was playing acoustic, and my friends and I were ready for some dessert.

The day I came out? I’m sure it’s not uncommon to come out on multiple occasions. I expect the circumstances in which I came out are a bit unusual though. To understand that takes context: My girlfriend was once my neighbor—at a Southern Baptist Theological Seminary—where we lived with our husbands—who were studying to be pastors.

The first time that I really tell someone, the words belong to her, like me and everything else in the world around us. We are alone, and I don’t remember where the rest of our friends are or maybe we aren’t alone and all of our friends are with us but I can only ever think of her.

"You're not very gracious, are you?" he said, flashing a wry smile from his perch near the ultrasound monitor, next to the exam table on which I lay. I felt a pang; I don't like to think of myself as ungrateful. I hadn't shown much appreciation when he declared that the wound from a biopsy performed a few months earlier had healed well, that everything looked fine, and that I could now go a whole eight months, as opposed to six, or three, before my next round of precautionary imaging.

Once again, I find myself in a strange place where nobody knows me. I am naked. And drunk on Jack Daniels and fucked up on Quaaludes and coming out of another blackout. The blackouts are coming more frequently now since I am drinking on a daily basis. Because of the blackouts, I’m never sure where I’ll wake up.

My body is a windowless cage. The vessel trapping me in the memories of how I have been maimed and wounded. I look at old videos of myself laughing with friends and wonder about this stranger who laughs so freely, before she felt the weight of rape and womanhood set on her shoulders. After all, what is being a woman, if not being a plaything for others to abuse?

I was sitting upright for the first time in about a week. I’d tried a few days earlier, but very soon my head pounded, and I vomited down myself. They said the lumbar puncture could do that. Now though, I could use the bed remote control to sit myself up. Under the white sheets I could make out the shape of what was supposed to be me.

Growing up, the Black girls I saw hid in mirrors.

In the wood panel bathroom, the girl had endless marks on her face. She looked back at me with disdain as I moved through middle and high school. Her ears flew out the sides of her head under hair too short and not straight enough.

Noah and I were walking the other day when we heard a baby crying. Like really crying. Like drowning out the traffic and the birds and the kids playing in the schoolyard across the street.

“Mom, did I cry when I was a baby?”

Day 1/42 in fourth trimester.

The universe shifted
and changed,
made space and formed
a new being
within my old self
and now
I too am remade

It’s been eight years since you left me. The same amount of years we’ve been together. Has it really been that long?

I still have your letter, but today, I think it’s only fair that I write this letter back to you. To bring up the things left unsaid between us. To ask all the questions I never got to ask.

Some hot and humid afternoon in July, it was the 20th, a Wednesday, I think, I ventured off into the unknown abyss of modern lesbianism and vegan Asian cuisine. The sweat trickled down the crisp colored skin of my forearms as I made my way from the bus stop to an unfamiliar vegetarian Asian restaurant with an obnoxiously huge sunflower sculpture on top. The hostess greeted me.

I have loved my girls ever since I got them, maybe because I don’t have beautiful legs or a JLo butt. I’d like to declare my feelings of femininity come solely from my character, but I am not that evolved. When my girls arrived around the age of thirteen, they felt wonderfully womanly. I’ve loved them ever since.