I take a walk and do the exercise my therapist taught me: something I can see, something I can hear, something I can smell, something I can feel, something I can taste. At first I can’t remember the fifth sense, and I worry it’s a sign of a problem with my brain (other than the ones I know about: the ruminations, the anxiety, the sadness that touches down like a tornado). Or it’s lack of coffee. I’m walking to a coffee shop. I like this exercise because it’s also a writing exercise, and I like the words that offer themselves: clicking crow, ladies gathered for cafecito, the sugar and oil of cooking pastries on the breeze . I try to taste my tongue and it feels slightly burnt, which is not a taste, and…is that something I should worry about? Dash is worried about my work trip next week. And angry and sad. He says he’s going to miss me so much that he wants a different mom, one who doesn’t ever have to travel for work. I try to explain how that makes no sense, but doesn’t it actually mak...
Every day contains years, like how yesterday was briefly 1985 and Jenessa's dad was right there, his glasses and strawberry blonde mustache and crew socks, groaning "Ness" about something she said. What she said as we stood in the fog watching our children climb rocks forty years later— my god—is that he was okay for a while after treatment, and then he wasn't, but he refused to talk about it. It's almost next year now. This morning at the kids' museum, I watched my toddler climb a contraption made of fiberglass and fisherman's nets, which dredged up from the seafloor another museum— The Museum of Memory is always open, always dusty— in which my older child pined to ride The Red Bikes on the mini track outside. He was the right size for the low yellow four-wheelers, but the red tricycles had the candy apple sheen of the future. (The Museum of the Future only comes in two flavors, shiny and apocalypse, and sometimes it is closed for repairs.) You probably s...
Photo by Sincerely Media on Unsplash My cousin's husband says his family was robbed by undocumented immigrants when he was a kid, only he doesn't say "undocumented." That's what the cops told his family. To me it sounds like something cops would say if they couldn't solve a crime, but I might be wrong. He baits me: Wait until they come for you. Do YOU want to spend your time with criminals? Share your bed with gang members? I tell him I have spent a lot of time with gang members, most of them citizens, and it was just fine. I say MS 13 is an American export. We should apologize to El Salvador. I say I didn't know that wanting someone not to be deported and dehumanized meant I had to marry them. My cousin's husband dares me to share a bathroom with a trans woman, only he doesn't say "trans woman." I do, that very weekend, in a pizza restaurant in a college town. I wash my hands next to her in the trough sink. I think she is kind of cut...
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