HerStry publishes one Personal Essay every Wednesday. Weekly Personal Essays are a way for writers to tell the stories they want to tell. There are no rules. No themes. Nothing is off limits. For essay submissions check out our guidelines.
March 14, 2020
The days are getting longer, but winter still holds New England in its chilly grip. Looking out at the empty harbor, no boats bob merrily on moorings, and the still dark water reflects the last rays of the setting sun and scattered streetlights. John and I sit in a half-empty theater, with vacant seats clustering around small groups of two or three people.
Read MoreMy pelvic floor is broken. The PT slides her fingers inside me and presses on a spot at the back of my vagina. A jolt of pain shoots through the inside of my ass. Not exactly my ass, it’s too far forward, but like the outside of the inside of my ass. It’s a hot spark deep inside where the tissue is tender and aching beneath the rock-hard surface of nebulous vaginal-anal space.
Read MoreBesides my husband, I have lived with no other being longer than Mullen. When we lived in Austin, after I suffered a miscarriage, my husband saw a pitiful ginger tabby kitten at an adoption fair. If we had any reservations, they were nullified when the adoption volunteer gave us Mullen’s history; his was the saddest tale in the shelter. A few weeks old, he had been found in a plastic bag, riddled with fleas and mange, cast away on the side of Mo-Pac.
Read MoreThe salt-wetted air tangs your tongue and sprays your skin, but still the tide feels strangely distant. Under normal circumstances you would gaze at the steady horizon, trying to absorb the enormity of the ever-shifting ocean. Its depth, its strength, its unknowable currents and flavors.
Read MoreI once saw a monkey jerking it. It was at the zoo, of course, where several blue-faced baboons swung over plaster tree trunks and romped across a funny little walkway modeled after a hanging bridge. As much as schools want zoo visits to be positive, educational experiences that transform the lives of young people forever, what has stuck with me in a lifetime's worth of field trips is deflated polar bears, hobbled cheetahs, and a monkey ignoring all the other monkeys to beat his meat.
Read MoreThe first playlist I made for someone came in the form of a mix CD that I’d burned on an old Dell desktop computer. It was a summer mix, meant to be played in my best friend’s pink Sony portable CD player as we skateboarded and biked down the backroads of our small Florida town.
Read MoreI 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.
Read More“A plane just crashed into the Twin Towers,” Sister Mary Frances said. Her eyes were wide, and she was breathing hard. She had just returned from dropping Sister Mary Michael at the Newark airport. “It’s terrorism,” she added.
Read MoreI grabbed orange-colored poster board from the art section at Walgreens, then joined my wife in the check-out line. I made sure to stay six feet apart from the person in front of us, even though I'm double-masked. I felt the customer behind standing too close and turned around to see she was not wearing a mask.
Read MoreI had never been to a funeral. I never went to a wake, never stood by an open grave as a priest read scripture. All I knew of the ritual of mourning was what I had seen in movies. Sometimes I idly entertained the notion of someone I knew dying, just to imagine what the funeral would be like. How would I act?
Read MoreMy mother passed away when I was eight years old, and for some time after that, I journaled to cope with difficult feelings. She wrote in beautiful notebooks while she was sick. I suppose I was trying to find a connection. I shared thoughts and feelings about a variety of topics: what pony I was going to ride that week in my horseback riding lessons, stories about my dolls’ lives, and random emotions.
Read MoreFor 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.
Read MoreThe first thing I remember about that day was my coffee. I sipped it nervously on the way to our eight o'clock appointment, the Anatomy Scan. I'd just recovered from my first miscarriage and was miraculously pregnant again. I was painfully nervous. My co-workers talked about the anatomy scan like it was the pinnacle of pregnancy appointments. In addition to finding out the gender of the baby, I was on pins and needles about whether all would be right anatomically.
Read MoreWhen we were young, my cousin and I seized any opportunity we had to toss a ball around. It was the nineties, before our obsession with internet games or online chat rooms. He was full of energy, never able to sit still.
Read MoreA 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.
Read MoreThe preheated oven warms the living room. The eighteen-year-old tape deck plays the Mughal-e-Azam soundtrack in the background. Caramel bubbles over the stovetop as I scramble through the pantry to find pecans for the pecan buns. This is a typical Saturday morning in my household.
Read MoreWhen I was a child, each summer, my mother took my sisters and me on a journey westward from our home in New Jersey to Minnesota, where my grandparents, cousins, aunts, and uncles lived. Although my sisters and I delighted in the prospects of seeing our relatives once again, what pleased us most was the train ride that lay ahead.
Read MoreBefore 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.
Read MoreThe death of Dianne, my ex-husband’s mother, opened a wound. The service was in California. I wasn’t invited. I didn’t ask if I could be there. Instead, I agonized over whether my daughter should go. She was in the middle of her college semester and travelling to India in a week. My ex-husband and I argued, he bought tickets without consulting me, and I worried it was too stressful for her to make both trips.
Read MoreI wanted to slide into that Restoration Hardware bedding in your four-poster bed and never leave. My head would’ve sunk into that big pillow as I closed my eyes, waiting for you to crawl in beside me. I possessed a strong desire to have you hold me for twenty-four hours or forever. I’m that young girl again, longing for an emptiness to be filled.
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