Activity

What you know now: There are ways to cheat without cheating. There are signs you are not living the right life for you, even if your life looks almost unfathomably pretty and privileged compared to where you come from or in other people’s eyes. There are ways the body screams truths when the voice …

When you pretend to be Karen, and write about her, she appears to be your polar opposite, based on someone else entirely. But the longer you write about her, the more you act as her no matter where you are, the more things begin to click into a certain kind of place: you feel yourself becoming some…

[...] The real magic surrounding Angie is the way she is respected rather than teased by the boys—the way even adult men speak of her admiringly as “tough” and a “tomboy.” She can hit a ball over the fence and do more chin-ups than most of the boys on the block, and when she takes to wearing a jean…

My mother and I have suggested throwing a party for his ninetieth, where all the many people who love him could gather, but he won’t hear of it. “Oh, Jesus Christ,” he says. The trappings of socializing—having to maneuver around with his walker, possibly falling down as he often does or not making …

Since Kathy’s diagnosis, though—or maybe it dates back before then and I merely found a catalyst on which to pin the label of previously unnamable feelings—I feel myself unspooling, a hypomanic restless energy mounting. I change radio stations mid-song; I’m eating and sleeping less, something under…