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. 

Josh and I sat in the waiting room, an office building with a view of the Manhattan skyline. I stared at the other women, wondering what they were getting done. I wondered how many of them were here not by choice. How many of them had never contemplated getting fake breasts before they learned they had breast cancer. I couldn’t have been the only one. But I was definitely the only pregnant woman getting a boob job in the crowd.

On Sundays, I take my grandmother to the cemetery to visit her mother. With her is a straw broom, small enough to carry in a reusable bag. When I was young, I would pull from that broom, break its straw to pieces, and throw them, watching as they spun to the ground like helicopter seeds. Now, in my grandmother’s hands, the broom brushes away dirt and moss and leaves from a headstone that shares my name.

I locked myself in the bathroom. Even though I made myself untouchable, unreachable, all I wanted was to be saved. As I laid down on the tiles, facing up towards the dangling florescent light, I craved death. I don’t mean absence of living—quite the opposite actually. What I really wanted was death to what was inside of me, to the illness that spread from my brain into my entire body, the illness at the core of all the pain and torture I put upon myself. I craved death because I wanted a life, a different life.

She offered her first organ to a boy with a strip of film tattooed around his wrist.

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.

In the Beginning 

I went to a Christian elementary school that taught me A. God loves me and B. God can send me to hell. 

We had a tradition for birthdays: a call once it was midnight so that we’d be the first of everyone else to groggily whisper our well wishes for each other. It started as a promise from me that I’d do it every year for you, no matter what I was doing, who I was with, or how tired I was.

My friend Marianne died last week. We met through a writers' group that started through the local public library and continued on Zoom during the pandemic. In the beginning, the group was fluid, writers, coming and going, sometimes for weeks, sometimes longer, usually without explanation.  But  in time, the regulars emerged, with a few of the original members as the bedrock. Marianne was one of those.

The brick-arched doorway houses two twin wooden doors. It smells of early-summer piss. Under the marquee, a small blue and white sign reads, "Air Conditioned." But it's a lie: the club will be sweltering.

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 Sunday in January, my twelve year-old and I had an hour between appointments in the Denver suburbs, and found ourselves at a mall. In the age of “add to cart,” we rarely shopped together, and she had grown so much in the previous several months that none of her clothes fit. As we wandered into H&M, my daughter’s eyes lit up. She grabbed armfuls of clothes, including a pair of acid washed jeans with a chain that went from the front pocket to a back belt loop, each link a tiny heart. Maybe they won’t fit, I thought hopefully, as I trailed behind her in a daze. The Friday before, she had refused to go to school, her second school of the year, and one that had seemed promising only a couple of weeks before. I felt like I was hiking along the edge of a cliff in the fog; I had no idea what was going to happen, or how close we were to the edge.

The night before my mother’s funeral, I assured my niece I wouldn’t cry.  “I’ve shed all my tears,” I told her. “I’ve practiced what I’m going to say until I’m dry.” She nodded, clearly skeptical. 

I lost my mother on Christmas Eve. Colored lights twinkled up and down the block as I arrived but her window was dark. A pile of mail in the hall. Television on, cold coffee in her mug. The radiator banging away. The tree was half trimmed and the cats were prowling around the apartment crying, unfed. Overflowing ashtray. Cat
toys and dust balls, empty bottles of bourbon.

I remember the backyard of our house by the Intercoastal Waterway, the way the marsh smelled in the late afternoon, salty and a little sweet. My brother and I spent hours there, running around with our dog, who always sprinted in wide circles, barking at nothing in particular. I’d sit on the old swing that hung from the tall tree, feeling the wind as I kicked my legs higher and higher. From the top of the swing’s arc, I could see the water sparkling in the distance, the sun sinking lower, casting everything in a golden light. The marsh grass swayed in the breeze, and I felt a sense of calm, like the world paused for a moment.

You listened to Joni Mitchell’s Blue while you were abroad. Some say an unhealthy amount, but you beg to differ. Something about the timbre of her voice resonates with traveling, long-distance train rides and loneliness. Because that’s what the feeling was, right? Loneliness?

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. 

My mother used to tell me, “Marry a man who’s thin. It means he’s a hard worker.” As she predicted, my husband turned out to be a lot like my father. Not only were they both thin, and coincidentally hard workers, they were equally tough. My own prediction was that their thick skin was birthed from the hearty leather of bulls slaughtered by their own swords in past lives. Men like them have been around before, perhaps returned to this earth to learn a new lesson. Perhaps to walk the earth in softer-soled shoes.