I asked “When you told your friends you don’t love me anymore, how did they feel?” and you said “Not surprised.”

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Three days later you posted a photo and your friends were like “You’ve never looked happier!!!” and they were right.

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My friends don’t ask me where you are anymore because they know I don’t know.

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I guess we were ships crashing in the night.

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So now my memory of you is like money in a glass case in the sea: beautiful, untouchable, distorted, seductive, sinking. …

This Is Us

You’re walking on an empty street in your hometown. Someone approaches and a meeting of some kind is inevitable. To ignore them would be an act in itself, since it almost seems, for a moment, like you’re the only two people in existence. Perhaps there is mistrust or fear or who knows, but there is an antidote, it turns out: the humble nod. That simple movement, if returned, can be a powerful act.

A nod is often something beyond language, whether you’re bopping along to music or offering affirmation when someone is telling a story. The slightest movement of the…

This Is Us

I told a lie to get the job. It was 1981 and I said I was 18, old enough to legally serve alcohol. I was 17. I needed cash and something to fill the time that wasn’t school or the bad boyfriend. My place of employment — my first real job — was a mid-range French restaurant on the fringes of Washington, D.C. For a few years, while in college, I worked six days a week, serving lunch, dinner, and private parties. …

This Is Us

My earliest memory, and thus the beginning of my selfhood, has absence at its heart. I don’t remember much about knocking out my front tooth. By that I mean I have an incomplete, fragmentary recollection of what happened Before and what happened After. I remember sliding around the kitchen floor in my socks. Getting a bit of momentum, sliding toward the stairs at the back landing, then turning around and doing the same in the opposite direction. My mother was in the kitchen, too, moving between the sink and the stove. My sister was sliding with me, sometimes in front…

This Is Us

My friend Lisa and I have a very specific, limited relationship: We make mix CDs (and more recently, playlists) of soundtrack music for each other. Yet it’s also oddly intimate: a shared love of music bares something in you — especially love of an uncool, schmaltzy genre like movie scores. I just finished a new mix for her, of ’80s film music — my own idiosyncratic ’80s cinema, as defined by the arty independent movies I saw at Shriver Hall on weekends in college: films like Blue Velvet, Repo Man, Brazil. Listening to this music has made me a little…

As a child I feared you, fear as cold and hard as a stone from the river. I imagined your frailty as something monstrous, something otherworldly. All rotten gums and cavernous wrinkles, you were ruin and disaster, the vandal from the gloomy future come to slowly leech my essence, the horrible witch already haunting the bright red alleys of my young body.

I saw you on your deathbed. The bed was always white as mountain snow and I was always somehow looking down on you — myself — from above. …

First, begin by remembering the house in its heyday. Skip-Bo games prompting shouts of victory or loss, the front door clapping with entries and exits, onions and green peppers sizzling in cast-iron frying pans, and the comforting smells of buttermilk pie drifting from the still-warm oven.

I have a confession to make. I’m a pack rat, notorious for my obsession with memorabilia. I possess shoebox after shoebox of ticket stubs, art exhibit pamphlets, birthday cards, graduation programs, theater playbills, music festival wristbands, goofy photo booth pics — one shoebox might span several years’ worth of travel and adventures.

I’ve kept notes passed between me and my best friend during middle school science class, along with every single journal I’ve ever written in, including the ones I gave up on after a single entry. …