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. 

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.

I had teenage dreams of spending spring break in Seaside, Florida. I grew up in Tallahassee, and it seemed as though the Who’s Who of the Panhandle vacationed there. 

It had been just under a month since my boyfriend left me, and the plants he gave me for my new apartment were dying. I had a hard time admitting it to myself then, but they’d been dying since he walked through the door with them: his last offerings before what was left of our love sputtered and took its final exhale - death blooms. I looked at the Bromeliad turning from its gorgeous fuchsia hue to a yellow brown crisp, the Peace Lily dropping its virtuous white flowers, its leaves turning black, and my near-constant thoughts were affirmed: I am bad. I can’t keep things alive. 

I. I drove to my mom’s house to print the divorce paperwork. Now there’s a blinding white stack of lines to fill in, boxes to check: communal property, dissolution. One of the questions is, is either party pregnant? I lean over the kitchen counter and rest my face on the cold granite. I start to cry.

It’s cliché to say, but time really does have a way of flying by. Slipping by, sneaking by. Tiptoeing at a hurried pace— one month turns into the next, seasons blend, and it’s time to start thinking about summer plans: where should we go this year? Then it’s back-to-school time of year, favorite-season Fall. Football, orange-yellow trees, then the holidays. A dark, cold January-February and it’s time to start thinking about summer again.

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. 

The key, newly cut, fit awkwardly in the lock. I jiggled it, turning it upside down and right side up again, but the door wouldn’t budge. The superstitious part of me wondered: Is this a sign? Am I making a mistake?

In the summer of 1982, I come home to Edinburgh from university wearing Doc Martens a size too small, thick black eyeliner and my boyfriend’s coat. I spend the week’s wages from my holiday job in a second-hand bookshop getting a bright red streak put in my hair. I strut home from the hairdresser feeling like Chrissie Hynde’s sister. When I open the front door, Dad is waiting for me in the hall. 

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.