Hunger might be the word for it. Maybe hunger made me pop open sticky drawers in the kitchen and poke my head into cupboards nearly glued shut by the dust of time. Hunger, maybe, is why I searched those empty places again and again as a child, though I knew full well there were only ever mouse droppings rolling on the wood, and two dried end pieces of bread, hard as tree bark, in the long drawer beneath the toaster.
Don’t do it, Justin. But I need it. I was sitting in the parking lot of Dunkin Donuts in South Burlington, Vermont. My rusted Toyota Camry was filled with fast food takeout containers, as I debated how to order two dozen donuts just for me. I was an OB—original binger. There were no self-checkout kiosks or DoorDash. I had to stare down a human being right in the eyes in order to obtain my obscene quantities. Rule one was obvious: Don’t just be my true self. Hi, I’m a 28-year-old lawyer, and I’d like to eat twenty of your delicious donuts
You spin away on the elliptical, adding klicks and minutes without going anywhere. Biting back against the extra pounds that threaten to consume you. This is how you completed your first 5K at the height of the pandemic.
I’m in bed. The house is silent, no one’s here but me. Me and my demons. Don’t think of what most scares you, I tell myself. Don’t let fear invade you. Of course, I know the pink elephant trick: my mind instantly wanders back to my most haunting ghosts. Tonight it’s an eerie scene from a murder mystery I watched.
There were four hard knocks on the door; the kind only the police made. We froze, every muscle still, breath slowing down. My eyes focused firmly on the hardwood floor, tears slow-danced down my cheeks, snot bubbles in my eight-year-old nose, little fists clenched. The loud squeaking of the front door, in desperate need of WD-40, signaled Mom had opened it.
Every night I walk the Walls, a 12,382 cell spreadsheet of the names of women incarcerated at the first state Penitentiary in Baton Rouge between 1833 to 1913. The headers scroll past: Register # Color Name(s) Died Escaped Marks Crime Term Time of Conviction Please Name of Presiding Judge. I am a fickle warden, careless. I move women around like chess pieces until their histories align in some order.
The chick crouches in the back of the nesting box, head bowed, facing the wooden panel furthest from the opening. Eyes closed, its tiny body sways amidst a cacophony of chirping. Siblings vie for top spot in the race to receive regurgitated seed, care of Mum and Dad. The budgerigar is three weeks old when I notice its parents ignoring it.
The week before you move away from home to attend graduate school, your father gets a tonsillectomy. You visit him with your mother and sisters at the hospital, and he speaks weakly with eyes dazed, his hand searching for your mother. She links their fingers together, and you avert your eyes. Public displays of affection always make you uncomfortable, and witnessing a vulnerability that you didn’t know was capable between them, especially from your father, unsettles you.
SHE purges into the porcelain bowl down the hall from the nurse’s station all the while wondering how can she still have morning sickness nine months and seven days into a pregnancy? Still eighteen hours away from giving birth, the sickness has not abated at all during this long, arduous journey. Salty foods and acrid tartness are the only two sensations she can stomach…
My father passed his hands down to me.
In an essay, I wrote “I am a second-generation Mexican, fourth-generation Polish immigrant.” When the publication debuts, I’m texted why did you say you’re second-gen? You’re first. Just like your father. I forgot that in coming to the U.S., he sacrificed himself so that I may be counted and remembered first.
A few years after my dad dropped dead, he called into an NPR gardening show to talk about some kind of tomato nymph. I should’ve been shocked, hearing his voice crackle over my car radio like that, but I’d already been seeing him around town for years. I passed him in grocery store aisles, he passed me in his car.
I learned a lot from my box of crayons growing up, about things I had never heard of before: Periwinkle, Burnt Sienna, Raw Umber, Maize. But even Red Orange couldn’t prepare me for the brilliance of a poppy. I saw my first ones in Italy, espresso-edgy, trying to take in as much as I could in a little over a week.
Goggles in hand, water smacked against the boulder on which I stood. A drumbeat reminder of why I was standing at the edge of Lake Tahoe—to swim. One mile, maybe more. I used to be the type of person who would plunge right in. Instead, I kept my arms folded across my chest wondering what had become of me.
When my toddler son says the word “mum,” it is not me he looks at. While his voice enunciates the first letter with a clipped edge, he points instead at a trumpet-shaped hibiscus we always pluck from the flower tree tipping across the fence delineating his older brother’s school. It feels magnificent that he says this word, but it is also shocking that he cannot fit me into it.
You might think words live in your mouth. But you would be wrong. Your lips, your tongue, your cheeks, your teeth are just a vessel language moves through. The headwaters of language rest deep inside your brain where image, sound, and memory curl into meaning, flow into words, and cascade into sentences. It can dry up or slow to a trickle.
1. Do you agree that the Second Amendment guarantees your individual right to own a firearm?
Yes, but—
2. Do you support the confirmation of pro-Second Amendment judges to the U.S. Supreme Court and lower federal courts?
No, the second amendment didn’t account for three round bursts.
My friend sends a video of her newborn opening and closing her mouth, testing the length of her tongue in air and then resting it back inside its wet, warm spot. Her spit and lips make soft sounds, the closest she could get to language. I want to come closer to how she must feel. It’s snowing.
It was mid-December in Mumbai, a city with just one season, hot and humid. Yet the worn cotton curtains of the consulting room I sat in billowed with an afternoon breeze that sent icy fingers down my neck and up my spine, and a hollow cough rattled my chest. The Out-Patient Department (OPD) was crowded, and patients pressed in on me from all sides even as I feverishly attended to them.
He’s poised with a notepad and pen on top of legs crossed tight like braids. He repeats the question, “When did you find out your father was the main suspect?”
The therapist sits in front of his motivational posters, the ones that frustrate me with their cornball optimism.
I am drawn to a series of black and white photos in a recent New Yorker magazine. The article reviews a book of 1200 images through which the author, Nancy Floyd, chronicles herself aging over a forty year period. Flabbergasted, I stare at the ease with which she leans against doorways or fence posts, without any of the vanity or careful posing that has been typical of most of my lifelong behavior when being photographed. . .
Look at this, a hand towel, hot from the dryer. A souvenir from a friend’s trip to Italy not so long ago. I bury my face in its warmth, unable to let go until the linen is cold. It clearly speaks for itself, but when I point that out, no one listens so I must make the case myself. . .
About a year after Mom died, when I was a freshman in high school, I had a weekend job as a cashier at a car wash. Customers pulled their Range Rovers and Subarus up to my window and ordered the type of wash they wanted from a menu, kind of like McDonald’s, except this historical town’s zoning laws prohibited most chain restaurants and franchises. . .
You asked me how it felt, my belly swollen with cramps and emptiness. Those were the cold-spark days when winter kept us huddled in bed. You were worried about how much pain I was in, but I had no answer to give that didn’t end in blood, so I turned my head due west and pondered the slice of sky framed in the window [. . .]
When I checked the clock again it was 5:16 a.m. I would get up in less than an hour. And I would have to stay alive until O, our five-year-old, was eighteen. When you don’t want to live another day, thirteen years is an impossible amount of time to fathom. In the half-light, simple math and insomniac logic can lead to infinity. [. . .]
You are with your parents when you first meet him. You are on vacation, a spring break trip to a big city you are going to live near next year. You are seventeen, and certainly, you look it, if not younger [. . .]
Almost every night now, I cauterize my jaws shut. Our melancholy, this weight—as Ginsberg once put it, this love—grinding and pressurizing my teeth into dust.[…]
Each time a new friend was in treatment, I held my breath waiting for results of follow-up scans, my entire body exhaling when results were positive. As in negative. As in clear.[…]
You get to re-live childhood again if you have children, a kind of a do-over, the opportunity to
create the kind of childhood you had and loved, or, even more seductive, the chance to create
the childhood you never had and missed your whole life.[…]
Well, it looks as though you have three choices. You can go to him as he orders; you can refuse,
be whipped, and then have him take you by force; or you can run away again.[…]
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