The hospital walls were stark white and we weren’t allowed to have pens: they were on the list of things we could potentially hurt ourselves with, alongside other items like shoelaces and earrings. I was thirteen and doodling with Crayola markers on construction paper. Even with the “non-toxic” declaration written on its label in the […]
In the middle of an IKEA showroom, I agonized over the transition between two sentences. I was wrestling with a second-grade assignment on Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. While I knew any seven-year-old could cobble together two statements about Dr. King, bridging together two thoughts about his achievements with one seamless transition proved to be […]
“Your mother’s your slave,” a girl in the playground taunted. “Is not!” I insisted, but even at six years old, I recognized the truth in her words. My mom pulled socks on my feet while I lay in bed to save me from the shock of cold tile, read to me in the bathroom when […]
Josef didn’t realize how little I thought about religion—how complete my lack of belief. “Are you religious?” I asked on one of our New York subway trips. I wonder now why I asked. I didn’t have the slightest premonition. I was making a joke, teasing, the way I might have said, “So, are you secretly […]
It was a cloudy September morning in San Francisco and my body had decided that everything inside of it was poison. It was 8:34 a.m. on a Thursday and I was hungover at work, sitting behind my desk praying that my breath smelled like coffee and not vomit. It wasn’t very often that I was […]
The February I am twenty-six, on the day before I’m supposed to fly to Portland to rent a house, I come down with the most brutal and short-lived flu I’ve ever had. My body aches so badly, I can’t move. When I say this, I don’t just mean that it hurts to move—I worry, when […]
The cover of my phonics workbook is plaid like my uniform but in reds and pinks and whites. Inside, each page is covered with little pictures. Crowns, shoes, fruits, stars, each in its own little box. Then there are the letters. I know them all and know the sounds they make, but in English they […]
Mack has been hit by a Mack Truck more than once. I know this because he tells me the story often. It is fuzzy though, because I ignore him every time he shares it. When I tell my family about the things that Mack has narrated to me, they look at me funny, like maybe […]
I remember Camp David. Not actually being there, of course. But I remember hearing about it on the news. And I remember Jerusalem, awaking to a new millennium, the feeling that the whole city was rubbed raw, like a skinned knee. Tension was building everywhere, and with it, the blood pressure of the entire population […]
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