In Human Parts. More on Medium.
What would happen if I’m single for the rest of my life? Is it possible that somehow, I might not meet someone who feels compatible? Is it possible that I might not like someone as much as they like me, or vice versa? That there’s just not someone who would be a good fit?
What would it be like if I lived alone for the rest of my life? Would it become harder for me to be flexible and accommodating of other’s needs? Would I ever get over those moments of panic when I feel a major illness coming on…
The silence of my thoughts echoes through the walls at night when I’m trying to drift off to sleep. I think about all the things I should have done but did not do or simply forgot about. As the silence grows louder, I often find myself looking through other mothers’ lives on social media. I find their play dates, their Pinterest ideas, and their cute professional photos — but most of all I find their normalcy.
Oh, how I would kill for the normalcy of being an ordinary mother. I never asked to be a special needs mother; in fact…
Last December, I embarked on a month-long solo trip to Eastern Europe. I’d been feeling a bit stalled personally and professionally, and I thought a big adventure would help me get unstuck. I booked a flight to Estonia, reserved a few nights in an Airbnb, and planned to figure out the rest when I got there — after all, everything was up to me.
It was a thrilling thought: I was exploring a foreign country entirely on my own, with no one else’s schedule, wants, or needs to consider. I wandered the charming cobbled streets of Tallinn, the capital city…
absence finds me in
the likeliest of places –
in the shower this
morning, when i
flip the soap over
so that the
lettering is on
top, there will
be no one to
flip it back
This poem originally appeared on Yi-Ching Lin’s blog.
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Have you ever tried to teach someone to slow dance? I never have. I’m not sure I’ve ever slow danced with anyone. Maybe in middle school, I think, to a slow-jam R&B song, and we probably had two feet of space between us, and we probably didn’t make eye contact, not once. That, I’m guessing, I did. I have a vague recollection of one. I recall feeling very warm inside, because at some point, I was telling the boy how nice it was of him to dance with me, that he didn’t have to do that, and he…
It’s the early hours of morning and I’m watching small wisps of clouds race by in the sky, somewhere in some hemisphere. A Google search reveals these are scattered cumulus clouds, and I’m oddly captivated by their velocity. I spend my life in the ocean and yet I’m stunned that corridors of current can exist so invisibly thousands of meters above when the terrestrial morning is so calm.
Romantics cling to the idea that they and their star-crossed lover are gazing, probably romantically, out onto the same sky. But that’s bullshit. My sky on the other side of…