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For the first time in years, I was writing fiction—scenes with an artist father and his estranged teenage daughter. She was staying at his run-down house in the Texas desert. When she opened the fridge, I pictured the empty fridge in my father’s apartment. A prior version of me might have been enti…

Still, I fantasized about the tumbleweed playing songs for our kids on his guitar, telling them the story of the night we first met. Even my daydreams hit a wall pretty soon, though. I cringed to think of him hating the tedium of meeting a child’s needs, over and over again; cringed to think of him…

Sometimes the world is heavy-handed like this: the straight hit of sex and the suitcases, the hobo tattoo on the ring finger, the stranger literally yelling, “Get out of the way!” The blaring marquee telling us which movie will play.

Except that’s the easy narrative. The truth was something more…

She wasn’t wrong. After she went to bed, I pulled out my computer. Often I read my students’ essays. Sometimes I got so tired I could feel the blood pulsing against the inside of my skull, but their minds were good company—their intelligence and humor, the details of their lives, their voices strug…

Sometimes I counted the men of my past like rosary beads. He loved me. He wanted to sleep with me. Even just, he looked at me. Even just, I came into being, for a moment, because I was visible to him. It was as if I’d won by making these men want me. But what game? For what prize?

After leaving …