Love
In Human Parts. More on Medium.
THIS IS US
How an eight-year-old kid with the exact hairstyle I wanted saved my entire day
I went roller skating yesterday for the first time since I was in like fourth grade and my partner said “You’re probably going to write a piece about this” before she skated off to chase her daughter around the rink. I was offended by the suggestion that I’m some kind…
This Cinderella has gotten off on the wrong foot
“I’m going to be just like Cinderella when I grow up.” My five-year-old niece, Keira, looked at me dreamily from across her bedroom.
On a recent visit to my sister’s home, I was assigned to my usual sleeping quarters: the girls’ room. There, I could sleep in Brynn’s bed while…
Feels like this
Remembering you is like
the time I went to the mansion of a widow who, until the day she died, kept building and building and building additions to her massive pathological hideaway, like a door that opens to a twenty-foot drop or a stairway directly into a ceiling. …
(And then what actually happened)
Whenever my friend goes on a first date he texts me
I’m going to marry this girl
just so he’ll have the receipts in case he’s ever right. And I think about all the different times, in all the different relationships, that I thought the same.
Like when I got…
THIS IS US
I needed to scream. Like a kid. It was glorious.
Wednesday, my boyfriend and I decided to have a day of play, so I re-arranged my Zoom life and cleared my schedule for a New York adventure. I put my auto-reply on, set my Slack to “out of office,” and stepped away from this very laptop. He likes to joke…
THIS IS US
Weddings, omniscient aliens, and a Tyrannosaurus rex
After losing my job, I moved home and attended my cousin’s wedding. The morning of, someone asked where Grandma was. I said I’d find her. I went outside and there she was wandering around the parking lot — small, curly white hair, wrinkle-eaten face.
“Are you excited about the wedding?”…
FICTION
Sisi and the ladder.
“I want to see them,” Sisi said to her mother. “Now.”
She was seven, a young Venezuelan long before the time of Bolivar, and, as children often are, she was unafraid to dream.
“Well, Sisi,” said her mother as she ushered the young lass outside, “The stars are right here…
LIVED THROUGH THIS
Car crashes, quarry jumps, and the friends we love despite everything
I put my feet on your dashboard, sand and beach tar between my toes; we are old friends.
You pull out a Marlboro and fumble in your pocket for your lighter, holding the steering wheel with your knees. “Don’t,” I say, reaching out for the wheel, nodding toward my child…
THIS IS US
Not all children grow up
The first playdate was the product of an infant/toddler reading hour at my local library in the fall of 2002. I’d been freshly laid off from a dot-com job that had consumed me. My daughter Ana was 18 months old.
I’d been adrift, aimless, caught in the purgatory between unemployment…
When my physical voice failed, I had to learn that I deserve to be heard
The voice box is a pink, slick mass through which air blows. It’s an alien with a toothless smile. When its folds, the vocal cords, work properly, they press together as we speak, mirroring humming lips. Air slips through the cords. They quake and can vibrate up to 1,000 times…
Human Parts
A publication from Medium about humanity: yours, mine, and ours.
