If you really want to know about my sister, we have to go so far back. It’s why I have this resistance around mentioning her. Ever. Quiet observation tells me that there was never a more complicated story: the Pandora’s box, the inescapable Labyrinth of my sister’s very life. Trying to make sense of it—to […]
Last night I notice that my 14-year-old son has posted a new profile picture on Facebook, where he claims to be a 20-year-old simply to gain access to what he terms an outmoded world. The photo is from the last day of summer, on which we summited a 14,000 foot peak, climbing up the backside and endangering our […]
This summer, I take Lovey and Django on a three-day car trip across four states. A sixteen-year-old boy, now an equal part of our eclectic family, also joins. Somehow, it’s in this spinning of wheels and endless road that I have historically seen my kids the most. They unwind for me. Show me who you are, I silently invite. My heart […]
We were vacationing on the coast the night that Dad died. And when we came back, our things had all been packed up. Arrangements were made for us to live for a while in the mountains, in a pair of rooms bestowed on us by Mr. Craig, Dad’s former boss. Just for a year or two, while Mum got […]
Somehow, my son finds a picture of my mum this week. It’s all such a long story, and it never really stops. Despite the fact that I shed people regularly, the way a snake sheds its skin. “You look just like her!” Django tells me, that laughter in his voice when he knows he’s found […]
While it’s true that Dad dying changed her life changed irrevocably, there was, long before that, the irrevocable changing of life anyway. It’s only now, in reaching an age he never attained, that she recognizes how simultaneously insubstantial and grandiose his existence. Insubstantial because of its disjointed structure. Brevity. Lacking the development of even one simple character […]
The first day of 8th grade, Debbie and I make bets on who will lose her virginity. By choice, I mean, as opposed to the way we’ve had it. That weekend, I pass out at a party and when I come to I’m in the bathroom being fun-dipped by this older guy while my boyfriend pounds on […]
Django and Lovey are thirteen now and smarter and just overall better than I was at their age. This week we go to a haunted hotel and spend a night together there. We luck out and there’s even a terrifying thunderstorm. It grows dark and ominous, and the rain pounds hard against the window […]
There is something that I have to tell you now. Something I’ve been trying to avoid. But that isn’t going away. My sister is dying of cancer. I was told this by a mother with whom I am not otherwise in contact. Which used to be her choice. And now is mine. There are those who […]
why are you already a home to me and why was walking in on you, asleep on the couch to the left like walking through a dream i’d had as a child of the woman I would one day become the taste and smell of your breath […]
