Reflections on Identity
Leaving kids at college, leaving marriages, losing spouses
I have a friend who drives in silence; she lives in a rural area, so she spends a lot of time in her car going from one destination to another. This astounds me: no radio, no podcasts, no audio books? I cannot fathom it. The discord in my head is so deafening that it feels essential to tune it out with someone else’s words. When I am in my car alone, when I walk around the city doing errands, when I unload the dishwasher or fold laundry, even as I wash up for bed, I listen, pausing only when the…
I just noticed it
My fingers are a dune buggy race down the endless sands of your back, and then they’re a squadron of submarines descending through the uncharted depths of your hair to your very top’s very bottom.
And after so many years mapping your body and its complex topographies, I spy a secret: a single freckle lurking on the back of your ear where I can barely see it and where you couldn’t possibly.
And I begin to imagine the freckle as a rogue star — a fugitive? a pariah? a discoverer of worlds? — launched out of the orbit of the…
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. It’s the same when you come to mind: the thoughts lead to instant agony or to nothing at all.
Remembering you is like
when my slightly damp hands emerge from the airport bathroom smelling like your perfume, and it’s been years since I’ve thought about you or your perfume. So I’m like…
HUMANS 101
Instead, focus on what’s in your control. Here’s how.
I called my good friend William and left him a voicemail. “I’ll be in Miami for five days. Hope we can get together one evening.” I never heard from him.
When I got back home, I called his mobile and work numbers. Nothing. I knew he was friendly with my ex-wife and asked her if he was okay. She said he was fine but was pissed off because I hadn’t returned his call from a month before my trip to Miami. I never got his call.
I reached out repeatedly for months to have a conversation. He wasn’t having it…
(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 elbowed in the face playing frisbee and spent the afternoon with my head in your lap as you dabbed blood off my nostrils and I thought
I’m going to marry this girl
except now I can’t remember your middle name and I’m not sure I ever knew it in the…
I met my biological mother after forty-nine years of searching for myself
“I’d never forget,” my father said when I asked him what my mother looked like. He remembered the way the sun illuminated the gold in her brown hair, the depth of her gaze, and the way she crinkled her nose when she laughed. As I stood at his doorstep with my two daughters to meet him for the first time, he gave me the kind of bear hug that dads give their daughters. Since I hadn’t ever had that sort of hug in my life, it brought me home to an inner peace I’d never known before.
My father didn’t…
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 that “all you do is type anyway.” Anyone who works on a screen for a living knows that, in fact, we do a lot more than click our keys. But I like to let him have his little fun at my expense. …
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?” I asked.
“No,” she said.
I put a hand on her shoulder.
She said, “No. This is not my world. You know, I woke up this morning very sad and I don’t know why. I had your grandfather take me to the nursery. That always makes me happy. I like…
Human Parts
A publication from Medium about humanity: yours, mine, and ours.
