When I fall in love with a man, I fall in love with the place connected to his heart by one red thread, anchored with a map pin. And being there in that city, or usually that small town (a place which no one has heard of—so, he says he’s from the nearby city that other [...]
For the most part we experience the world as consistent. Even change follows a certain kind of pattern. Difference comes, and then it repeats itself: tempering in a cycle of time. But, what happened when Darwin looked a little closer at a finch’s beak? Or when Galileo watched the tides rise, curiously out of touch [...]
After everyone left town following my mother’s funeral, one of the things left behind was a mix cd that held all of her favorite songs. It’s maybe the truest part of her that I have left, since she never wrote anything or found a way to say, “this is who I was.” It’s a different [...]
In college I took an art class and the first thing we did was tape off a square in the center of the paper. This was the space where we would draw the vase sitting on a stool in front of the classroom. We drew on a bright white sheet with a rough matte surface, [...]
I imagine Emily in the window, her white dress fading a little. She is protected by the walls of her familiar room. She is dwelling in the possible, as she put it. The floors are washed with a sunlight that doesn’t let on to the deceiving cold of spring’s first days or the searing heat [...]
I can count the number of times I’ve seen snow on two gloved hands. It happens in Portland maybe once a year. When it does—or might and, usually, doesn’t—it’s the talk of the town. Schoolteachers make announcements to their classrooms and snow becomes the only topic of polite chatter in the grocery store checkout. “Looks like [...]
My bed is in front of a window. I should move it, really. Old apartments get drafty. But I like the sound of the cars on the interstate because their wooshing wakes me up. It’s a gentle way to begin the day. Nobody honks in rural New England. When I rolled over this morning, the [...]
I left Portland thinking that I was on the verge of becoming the person I wanted to be. My big dream had become a reality: I’d been accepted to graduate school. I was about to become scholar, a creative, a put-together person who listens to their voicemail. But now, here I was, putting on mascara [...]
