It is 10:34 p.m. I am journaling about the difference between what I eat and how I taste it.

In other words, it’s not about the chocolate cake. It’s about the pool of saliva swirling through each bite. It’s about the tongue pressing crumb into ganache, the esophagus readying itself to carry each sweet offering down. It is about my body knowing it is safe. Safe to sit, to enjoy, to receive.

A few summers ago, I sat next to my dog on a pile of ice-coated rocks in the Brooks Range of Alaska, afraid that my soon-to-be-husband had fallen off a cliff. 

I read an article in our local newspaper about a high school coach who had just been fired for abusing his male students. I was in my early forties, and remember taking in the article (yes, back in the day when people still read an actual newspaper) and contemplating the unpleasant information that a football coach in a city just north of where I lived had inappropriately touched his male students. My next thought was, Oh, that happened to me.

One of the reasons I love children's books is that there's always an invitation to loosen and lighten up, be poured into, be lulled into a place of deeper reflection—to see yourself in mid-grapple. For that reason, happy to be nappy is much more than a children's story. 

I grew up listening to my mom criticize her stomach. Having children had done this, she would say as she ran her hand over her loose stomach. Being pregnant and giving birth had changed her body forever, leaving behind stretch marks and large breasts and a stomach that jiggled and bulged. She didn’t like how her stomach looked, but she didn’t starve herself or excessively exercise. In every fitting room we shared, she commented. If only I could get rid of this, she’d say as she patted her stomach. Look at this, she said, as she shook her head and looked at her side profile in the dressing room mirror. If I didn’t have all this, these would fit better, she would say, while pulling down the pair of pants that didn’t fit. She saw, and continues to see, her stomach as a negative, a defect.

A couple of months ago you were going to several Overeaters Anonymous meetings a week, sometimes every day. But when Elaine told you she couldn’t sponsor you anymore after your suicide attempt, and when she and a friend whom she also sponsored asked you not to attend a couple of their regular meetings, and after your therapist came to the facility you were hospitalized in to tell you she couldn’t work with you anymore, you stopped going to meetings altogether.

Sometimes I wonder why lovers hold hands when they walk around. I wonder how long they have been dating. Are they in that new stage, where it feels like they have to hold on tight, constantly let the other person know that they are there, that they aren’t going anywhere, that they want to touch them, that they want to be touched. Or is it the older couples, the ones who have been together for longer that hold hands. A gesture they don’t even realize they’re doing, their fingers just mindlessly reaching for each other, keeping their connection as they pace around the city.

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.

If not for the pup and the ritual of our morning walk, I might not have banked so much joy, watching her endearing hobby-horse bounce as she runs across the field. I would never have seen that barred owl swish overhead in a silent, majestic flight. I'd have missed the quiet presence of the setting moon and an infinity of stars disappearing into the pale blue.

I married my ex-husband in the early ’90s, and despite being a feminist and a working professional, I took his name. It wasn’t a difficult decision. In fact, I don’t really remember it being a decision at all. We had decided to become a family and I wanted a single, family name to unite us and the children I expected we’d have.

I’ve often wondered: Why don’t you see birds drop dead from the sky? Surely it happens. There couldn’t possibly be a mechanism that keeps it from occurring. Could there be? Something about the nature of the flight that keeps beings in a state of suspended life, no matter the outcome?

“Shorter,” I said. “Take it all.”

January seemed a fitting moment for fresh starts. It wasn't born from some halfhearted resolution or unfounded faith in the promise of a new year. It wasn't shoved in with a promise to swear off chocolate or set the alarm an hour early every Monday through Friday.

I fumble through the kitchen searching for the button that turns on the light under the microwave. The one that doesn’t shock the darkness out of me. The house is still and quiet.

Start the coffee. Open the laptop. Light the candle that smells of evergreens.

I sat in Taylor’s chair in the high-ceilinged hair salon on Madison Avenue, watching all the wealthy Upper East Siders, as they rested their five-figure handbags on velvet stools like beloved pets. My newfound sense of mortality had no place in this land of excess. This was the room T.S. Eliot must have been referring to when he spoke about the “women [who] come and go/ Talking of Michelangelo.”

The two of them were naked, the man and his wife, yet they felt no shame.

—Genesis 2:25

It’s the word “yet” that breaks my heart. Why would the Bible’s authors add that qualifier, unless body shame was already, in their time, a cultural given, a feeling so immediate and gutting that the lack of mortification at one’s own flesh—its size and shape, its smells and hungers—was worth noting in chapter two of the story of How It All Began.

Whether I’m writing fiction or nonfiction, every piece begins the same: with a haunting. It grows as any respectable haunting should, first with creaking footsteps in the other room, the sense something is watching, until there’s a full-blown apparition standing beside the bed whispering, “You need to write this down.”

I see you,

with your dimpled smile,

your tubby legs,

your first stumbling steps,

a complete trust in the universe

that nothing will harm you,

even as your harried mother

calculates all potential risks.

For years, I used my hair as a diversion.

It began with my ponytail phase. Every picture in my mom’s photo albums show me with my hair pulled back into a ponytail. The photos didn’t capture the back of my head and the way I carefully color-coordinated my ponytail holder with the day’s outfit.

A sweetheart story is what I crave. The sweep-off-the-feet type that rides my heart into the

sunset with the faint letters rolling in the background. As innocent as prince charming, in

desperate search of their damsel in distress.

Before getting a smartphone in the seventh grade, I relied on memories captured by others. My mother, an amateur photographer, stored thousands of snapshots on her phone. Whenever I felt bored, I would navigate through them, retrieving, reliving, and retaining each preserved story.