Activity

On the night my father died, I walked back to the Pad alone under the same blood moon, but this time I didn’t watch it in the sky. I didn’t think about my father on the walk to what was now, in some sense, my home. I wanted, more than I had ever wanted anything in my life, to turn back the clock an…

Sentimentality

Synonyms: death of literature / emotional manipulation practiced by hacks and universally feared by “literary” writers / a thing glutted out by us ecstatically in emails and texts. Topics for further research: Why is it so difficult to convey love and joy yet so easy to find l…

Here is a thing you don’t know unless you, too, have left someone it nearly killed you to leave, and that is when you cleave from someone who doesn’t want to break up, you have to find a cold steel core inside yourself to stand firm; you have to become a more unfeeling version of yourself, that sam…

[...] Was it not having to look at him directly; was it the unusually lively nature of our dinner conversation; was it the crushing guilt of our expensive renovation; was it rainwater having filled the cistern of my body for so many years that I was a vessel running over; was it simply the goddamn …

It was the season when, after years of Sphinx-like secrecy, I left increasingly blatant breadcrumbs—had been scattering them without much intention or control ever since, six months prior, my husband had privately told me at Emily’s wedding (after first shouting at me in the hotel courtyard in fron…