On tiptoes, I stretched to replace the binder in the metal cubby. I was shocked to feel cold, clammy hands on my back, sliding into the waist band of my skirt. I spun around.

It was him again.

“How do you, the jury, find the defendant?” asks the judge after two hours of deliberation.

The room was silent. The only sound was the jurors breathing a sigh of relief as they sat in their chairs. It was all going to be over soon. A tall man with white hair and kind eyes answered the judge.

There is a place

with waxing armpits on video in the kitchen

a room where a man plays computer games

and liked brunettes over blondes

(My mother and your mother were washing the clothes)

The girl stands plucking branches in the wide expanse of the olive grove. Gazing upwards she closes her eyes to the heavens and welcomes the unexpected breeze dancing through her hair. It cools her sweat-drenched brow and the nape of her neck. The girl knows that the wind wants to trick her.

It was early October when I updated my friend Kim about how I’d been spending my very single, mostly alone time in isolation during the coronavirus pandemic. “I’ve taken up watercolors. And also embroidery,” I said one night over FaceTime. Demure lady that she is, she covered her mouth and daintily laughed into her palm, the refined equivalent of a spit take, before regaining her composure.

Each day begins and ends with the pill tray. In the morning, it’s the antipsychotic Abilify, anti-anxiety Buspar, and antidepressant Prozac. In the evening, Buspar returns with the famed mood stabilizer, lithium. Within the first four hours of waking, I’ll know if I haven’t taken my medications by a sudden tightness in my chest or a nervous tingling across my skin. When this happens, I rush to choke down a cracker or two before taking them.

May 27, 2020

“You need to understand, if something happens, if the worst happens, we cannot let you inside,” Dr. Waters says through her mask, looking up into my face. Her eyes are beautifully made up, achieving a doe-eye effect. I wonder, momentarily, if she is in love with someone in her office. Her gloved hand reaches towards my dog. “With COVID, no one but staff is allowed inside the clinic.”

The trees are a riot of color as I drive past the grounds of the Episcopal Church in my town. The field that becomes the annual pumpkin patch worthy of inclusion in a Peanuts special is heartbreakingly bare. Every fall since I moved to this New England town over twenty years ago, the arrival of the pumpkins has been a seasonal passage.

At first I didn’t even realize you were there. You sprung up seemingly overnight, but I shouldn’t have been surprised. I was thirteen, my body already changing in all kinds of ways.

Dear Doctor S.,

I can’t believe I wake up each morning thinking about how much I love my husband, instead of engaging in the mental gymnastics of how to avoid him for yet another day.

By my eighteenth birthday, I was convinced my entire personality was a mistake. My hobbies were hipster and obnoxious, tied to the fine arts and human culture. My goals were lofty and idealistic, invoking a life of novelty and meaning. I hated that I cared for these things despite their presumed futility in our modern (read: capitalist) world. The trendy albeit psychologically debunked Myers-Briggs Type Indicator had assigned me a personality with one of the lowest average incomes, followed by fun phrases like “most likely to have trouble in school,” and to me, this was the surest confirmation of my worthlessness.

It is not true today that my children are in school learning about ratios and raising hands. It is not true that my husband is at work teaching teachers about equity in education. It is not true that my dog is sleeping with her nose on her thigh alone in a quiet home. It is true that I go to work as always, but it is not true that my day as a doctor unfolds with its predictable rhythm.

“So you’re the matriarch,” the bartender says as I join my daughter and granddaughter at the bar for a sunset drink.

I don’t know what I was thinking when I packed the frying pan. As I dashed around the apartment that December afternoon, I packed several random items along with sentimental ones: a cluster of hangers; a photo album; my bikini and wool dress coat; a framed print I liked; the blanket my grandmother had given me when I was three years old; a yellow umbrella; my favorite coffee mug; and the heavy frying pan.

W. Atlee Burpee & Company says it’s sold more seed in 2020 than any other time in its 144-year history. A month into seclusion, a Honey Gold potato in a basket on my kitchen counter began to sprout. The eyes grew thick, leafy lashes. What to do? There’s little room in my diminutive yard to cultivate any type of vegetation.

Like a dog guarding the small square of his front lawn, my father stalked and panted around the four corners of our kitchen. Rottweiler? Bulldog? Whatever he was, he’d caught my scent, and I couldn’t shake him. His breath—strong, moldering—was hot on my face.

On a cold February morning, driving solo through dense fog on a narrow potholed road from Amritsar, Panjab (the land of five rivers) in North India to a recently not-so-quiet hamlet of Dera Baba Nanak, umpteen thoughts clouded my mind.

Weak Point

“Are you sure there’s nothing else you’re worried about?”

Secrets are like poison. Until you tell someone, they will kill you from the inside out. The worst secrets are the kind you keep from yourself—held at bay for so long until the dam finally breaks. For a week, I tell my mom that I’m having stomach problems, and it isn’t entirely a lie.

In the 1980s, I kept a blank cassette inside the tape deck of my radio, so if a song I loved came on, I could run over and simultaneously hit the “record” and “play” buttons, and add that song to the mix tape developing in its boom-box womb. The beginnings of the songs are cut off, and the DJ often started speaking before the fade-out was complete. But my collection of homemade tapes was priceless to me. And I thought I would be able to listen to them forever.

There is an old saying that until you lose something, you don’t really appreciate it—even though there are things like a lousy friend, a cold, or a broken-down car that you might be glad to be rid of. Two of my favorite things were walking and hiking, things I lost the ability to do when I had a stroke nearly three years ago.