One dreary winter day, nearly two years into dating, he ended things rather oddly: “I don’t think you’ll be okay if we break up,” he explained, “which is why we have to break up.” Though confounding, I suppose it was not surprising—he often resented how much I seemed to need him.

A mass of white caps on a disheveled sea crisscrosses the horizon, the aftermath of a hurricane that skidded up the western face of Baja from Cabo past Punta Hughes. The storm made a westerly turn on its northern trajectory, just far enough off the coast to send a small amount of rain and mountainous surf to our small pueblo. Wave after wave, a tight fetch. a disorganized army of marching swell lines with little space between them, and out the far points, close-out walls of water.

Midlife doesn’t announce itself with milestones — it arrives in contrasts. One moment, you’re lighting candles for a graduation. The next, you’re watching your mother shrink into a hospital gown.

When I was a kid, my gender and race lived together, tightly tied in a braid on top of my head. My brothers and I share a skin tone that is pale in the winter, and cinnamon in the summer. Our father was the only black person in our rural town, and as far as we knew, we were the only mixed-race kids on Earth.

“Any requests?” my daughter asks from the backseat of the car. I’m driving up Connecticut’s Merritt Parkway to drop her off for her first year of college. She plays DJ while my husband and younger daughter count passing Teslas. Through New Jersey and over the GW Bridge, we listen to their mix of Phoebe Bridgers, Kimya Dawson, and Big Thief. We’re all a little nervous, unsure about what life will be like once we say goodbye.

"Don't you think it's kinda weird, not showing your face for like, 229 months?" Bunnie, an anthropomorphic rabbit, lightly chided me. She wasn't wrong. I hadn’t booted up Nintendo’s original Animal Crossing game in nearly twenty years. 

The sun was a golden coin that afternoon — if only it had never set. For her 10th birthday, Robin’s mom let her have a friend over for a sleepover. She chose me. Robin’s grandma came, and so did her uncle. He was very nice.

She opens the cupboard above the sink and stretches her body as far as it can go. The glasses and bowls have moved closer to the edge of the shelves since I was here last. 

This is about my mama because I’m too stubborn, too proud, too self-conscious to tell these things to her in person. I’ll backpack around with luggage until I gain enough substance to face it head-on. For now, I’m simply going to make excuses and say that I’m too green to face this— pride(?) Perhaps sheepish-ness is a more suited term. English doesn’t wield such a single term that encases this feeling to its extent.

I met you by the river the first time while the mist rose from the banks like it was trying to change elements. You were more fun to run from the cops with than anyone else I’d met, and man you made me reckless. I never had to test my legs though, the minivan did it for us while Jerry blasted through the blown speakers in the cornfield. You walked 2,000 miles up the country on trail and wrote me letters back home while I watched, sidelined. I could have walked myself from Georgia to Maine with you, but it was your own pilgrimage to undertake, your season spending nights under a green tarp.

I attended AWP for the first time this year. In my memory now, it is a fluorescent lit blur of searching for faces I recognize, of endless flyers and stacks of books and a lanyard around my neck. And the men. I can’t stop thinking about the men.

Just after the pandemic, I went to New York City with my aunt Mimi. We had planned the trip as a way for me to learn everything I could about my mother, who died thirty-five years ago from an aggressive form of breast cancer. It was the hottest day on record for the month of May and we sat in an air-conditioned restaurant in Greenwich Village.

Mimi listed things my mother loved: dancing, parties, fashion, Bailey’s Irish Cream.

My daughter doesn’t say my name.

I do not remember the name of the first child, buck-toothed, big-eyed, who called me an Oreo—a racial slur meaning someone who is black on the outside; white on the inside. I do not remember the name of the second, either. I remember sticky summers in blistering Birmingham, Alabama, legs itching from the long, prickly grass and perpetual mosquito bites. I remember waiting for night fall, the symphonious synth-sounds of crickets, the steady flicker of lightning bugs. I remember sitting on the crumbling porch of Bunk’s house, alone. Distanced from cousins whose Bama dialect compelled them a unique kind of elide, swallowing the sharp point of R’s, so when they said (speaking of me) She talks like a white girl, it came out sounding like gull. I remember biting back tears, picturing myself; head of a girl, body of a seagull, grey wings flapping, soaring above the stifling Hooper City ghetto with its collection of shotgun houses in various stages of dilapidation, far, far away to AnywhereButHere, anywhere the colour of my skin wouldn’t define me.

I was 36 and feeling perfectly fine about my post-baby body the first time a saleslady suggested I invest in Spanx.

I was driving to an appointment with my periodontist when I glanced down at the gas gauge and discovered the tank was almost empty. I panicked. As a newcomer to driving, I had zero idea how to “gas up.”  Just learning how to go down the road without killing myself or someone else was in itself a major accomplishment. 

There is a feeling I get when I travel alone. The moment I get to my destination—a hotel or Airbnb—when I walk in the room, roll my suitcase into a corner, and close the door, it hits me. I am hopeful on every trip that I won’t feel it this time, but I always do. My chest and stomach get tight. I can’t catch a full breath. There is a sense of dread and impending doom. And emptiness so loud one might think it is the thing I’ve come to visit. As if it lives right there in that room and has been waiting for me since the last time we saw each other. 

I should have heard the warning growl before pulling open the dresser drawer in the garage. It had been twenty years since my husband and I had done any cleaning out here beyond superficial tidying. We’d plunked down his scratched childhood dresser in the garage when we first bought the house. Since there wasn’t enough room for the old dresser inside our new home, it never traveled any farther. The top of the dresser became a landing station for stray gardening tools, rafts of paper towels, and a box of Hannukah decorations.

Before she died, Nancy compiled a list of appropriate women she thought could be a good partner for me, which I told her was ridiculous. I was doing everything I could to keep her alive, nor did I like the women she had chosen for me. I had loved her for twenty-seven years. She would never be replaceable. My everything wasn’t enough; all I had of Nancy were her ashes. At sixty-one, I had vaulted into old age overnight, with grey roots grown inches during Nancy’s last months of hospice. I was the solo parent of two grieving teenage daughters, one who was depressed, the other defiant. My eros was exhausted, maybe dead even. But Nancy was not five months into her grave when I hooked up with Tami.

My last child has just turned three. I want another child—a fourth child. The number of children that gets you stares at the supermarket, that makes your mom and sister say, “You’re fucking crazy.” I want this child so badly I can feel it close by, as if it is hiding within me, not to be eventually expelled from my body, but a shadow—a ghost child.