I should explain about my mother first, because she is the context for everything. My mother is beautiful and chaotic and genuinely, infuriatingly wise in the specific way of people who have arrived at correct conclusions through methodology that any reasonable person would reject. She reads charts. She pulls tarot. She believes in karma with…
I’m standing at the window of my apartment looking at my mother’s kitchen light. This is my life now. I am thirty years old, a registered nurse with a specialty in cardiac care and an unplanned minor in applied astrology, and I live directly across the street from my mother, which is either the most…
The first thing was small. I need you to understand that. I need you to understand it because the smallness of it is the mechanism – the way damage begins in a thing so minor, so deniable, so easily absorbed into the background noise of an ordinary life that you do not identify it as…
The months that followed had the quality of the best kind of early relationship – the kind where everything is interesting because everything is new, where the other person is a subject you have not yet exhausted, where ordinary evenings acquire a brightness from the company that ordinary evenings do not usually have. We were…
I met Matt at a party I almost didn’t go to. I want to note this not because it is significant in any cosmic sense – the near-miss arrival, the party I could have skipped – but because I find it interesting, the way the architecture of a life turns on decisions made casually, made…
I want to tell you something before you read this. I’m not telling you this story from the other side. That’s the thing I need you to understand right away, before you settle in with the idea that what follows is the account of a woman who went through something difficult and came out clarified…
He texted the next day. Not immediately – not the anxious morning-after text of someone who needs reassurance that the thing was real. It was early afternoon, casual in the way of someone who had thought of something to say and said it. “I looked up that photographer you mentioned. You were right.” I had…
I met Jamie on a Wednesday. This is a detail I find faintly amusing – Wednesday being the least glamorous day of the week, the day with no particular associations, the day that exists purely to be gotten through rather than arrived at. Nothing that matters is supposed to happen on a Wednesday. It is…
I have known Tasha since we were seventeen. That’s seven years of friendship, which sounds like a significant thing – and it was, genuinely, in the ways that early friendships are significant: formative, identity-shaping, the kind of relationship that becomes part of the architecture of who you are before you’re old enough to choose your…
I want to tell you something about the way women compete. It doesn’t look like competition. That’s the first thing. It looks like friendship – the arm around the shoulder, the shared laugh, the oh my god you have to meet my best friend said to someone who was already interested in you before your…