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Nothing ever appears so beautiful as the moment you know it’s lost.
I’m an introvert, and that’s a euphemism. This whole crowded scene raises my blood pressure. Secretly, I can’t wait for everyone to leave, to shed this sundress and return to my sweatpants, to escape into a blanket and a book. The party started fifteen minutes ago and I’m already socially exhausted.
“Carrie, this is my wife, Rowena. Ro, Carrie’s another engineer at Jolvix.”
Coachella is a word that, in my native language, means “nightmare.”
Jennee looks like a catastrophe herself, hair dripping, her Proud Liberal shirt soaked.
Flip on the light. There I am, in the mirror, a wet mess. My makeup smeared down my cheeks from sprinkler rain, my dress so soaked I can see the outline of my Spanx. I am ugly. I have never felt ugly before, I’ve always known I can be pretty and charming and fuckworthy, but right now I just feel ugly. Not only that, I feel stupid—the
No matter how many years pass, it can just rush back, a despairing river.
The voice of the robot in the fire system echoes in my brain—danger, danger. It’s like I have a voice like that inside myself. Only I never learned the code to turn it off.
No one looks hurt but the sickening noise of it, the suddenness of the accident, sucks the air out of me.
I vow to not own a toaster oven again. I can’t trust myself.
Sometimes the love I have for her is so colossal, a tsunami, that I swear I might drown in it. It’s too much. I wish I could put her back inside my belly, keep her safe there forever. I read her a book about a little bunny who wants to run away from his mother and at the end I wipe tears from my eyes and beg her to never grow up.
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our house has burned down and we have all died a dozen fiery deaths in my imagination.
It’s surprised me, the further I get into adulthood, how hard it is to make new friends.
It’s embarrassing to be the subject of unsolicited prayers.
Sometimes Dane gets so aggressive on my behalf when I tell her things that I find myself pushed to defend the other side.
the most-cited reason for criticism in publications scanned appears to be that it seems to veer into self-help and can go on tangents regarding politics.
“Cascading by”? the line editor in me whispers. I would have gone for something more like “drifting by.”
Should I really have listened to the advice of a machine made by a company that throws a party like this?
Is this performance art?
Saving this to use anytime I see someone wilding out now.
All at once it doesn’t seem funny at all. Just sad. People act unhinged and are then dragged away, put away, out of sight. I’ve seen it happen plenty of times on the streets of the city, where uniformed people come and tuck some screaming person into a car with a twirling light on the top of it.
Does Jacob go to work and then spend hours on campus resting, while I’m at home with a baby on my hip, supervising the robot vacuum
It’s almost as if their nearness only makes the separation more glaring, more palpable.
Jennee
Jenneigh
Or the fact we celebrate a holiday that got its name because some Roman emperor executed two dudes with last names “Valentine” on February fourteenth in the third century AD. Romantic!
Opening my eyes, a wave of déjà vu washes over me; I cannot predict now was a neon-violet triangle that used to appear on my magic eight ball I kept under my bed.
“Unlock it. Tell me more. Amen Maxine.”
I go out to the laundry room where our washing machine whirrs and our Electrofold is folding a load of towels.
Let me in.
The comforting thing about Maxine is that she and I can coexist in silence.
“To be afraid is not necessarily a negative thing,” Maxine says. “It simply means you’re at attention. Like a deer in the woods with its ear cocked to the air for potential predators.”
Life is so obnoxiously heavy-handed.
I don’t believe in psychics. The idea of psychics means there must be a fate immovable, and the world feels far too chaotic and fluid for that. Now all sorts of questions are tangled up in my mind. Like if predictions are real, can the future be changed?
One thing about being a generally anxious person is, it’s very hard to tell sometimes if people are thinking negatively of you or if you’re imagining it.
“It is very, very weird and totally unacceptable to not tell you he was married or the real story of how she died. And blaming his dishonesty on you and your mental health? That is … almost emotionally abusive.”
Funny how close the words “believed” and “beloved” are.
But home is just another four-letter word.
Grief is like lightning. It strikes with a shock of electricity powerful enough to shatter a life into pieces, powerful enough to stop a heart in its place.
Fate can be rerouted.
When life itself feels impossible, impossibilities start to resemble possibilities.
To lie is alarming. But more alarming is when you lie so sweet it tastes like the truth.
There’s a difference between forgiveness and a willingness to keep loving someone despite the pain they’ve caused.
Love is just another kind of ache.
What’s the difference between having emotions and thinking you have emotions anyway?
As a child I feared monsters but as an adult, it’s so much worse. Now I fear I could become one.
One of the worst feelings in the world is not knowing if you can believe yourself.
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In those early days, love was easy. That’s what I miss—the effortlessness, the organic way it grew. It was something to fall into, something that just happened, oops! A lovely accident. But marriage is not that. It’s purposeful. It’s a mountain to climb, one that leaves me winded every day. There have been injuries and bad weather. And there’s nothing but darkness and mystery on the other side.
It all feels so far away from me now. Just a story I heard somewhere. Is that how the present is? Just a silly lie of self-importance that will soon fade?
I am sensing this moment will matter someday, that it will be something I cherish like an old photograph. Something I try to look at and soak up to remember how life was before.
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