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The need to keep busy is both a symptom of high-functioning anxiety and the key to my success.
She was born Margarita Carmen Cansino, with dark hair. They turned her into a redhead. They did electrolysis to raise a hairline they considered too ethnic. They posed her in her underwear. She gave good face.
Research has always been my happy place. It might be related to my sometime collecting of facts about my peers, an attempt to feel safer by mapping the world.
I quite like most Mormons as people, even if I settled into solid agnosticism at Granby, even as I take great issue with the church’s history of bigotry. I at least owe them my fondness.
Alder struck me as a hugely creative kid who’d gotten the unfortunate message early on that there was always a right answer.
I liked how things looked in the half dark, the late sun shining through high horizontal windows in soft, heavy beams. I’d forgotten about the light at Granby. It was different there, older, passing through centuries before it reached you. Outside in winter, it came down in needles; inside, it fell like soup.
Displaced anger had always seemed an odd motive, though, even at the time—and by 2018 I knew more about the way prosecutors weave narratives from scraps. I certainly knew more about how rage gets ascribed to Black men.
“When my husband passed,” Sheila said, “it was like losing the bookend to a row of books. We all tipped over sideways. But losing Omar, the shelf itself went. He was pulled out from under us.”
The dosage of my antidepressant is such that I haven’t cried actual tears in a decade, but there are times when I want so badly to cry that I make all the noises of crying, press my fists into my eyes so I feel something similar.
So: Here I was, giving him the easy out. Reduced to the girl I’d always refused to be, happy with crumbs.
English, and was mildly surprised now to find him insightful. He’d be picking at a hole in his khakis like he wasn’t listening, then pop in with “Beethoven was the Miles Davis of his
A girl from southern Indiana got to see three operas at the Met. It was exhausting, but it rewired my brain.
There were kids who made Frisbee look like ballet. I didn’t know how to throw one (who would have taught me?) and was initially mortified.
It was the one where the witness wasn’t considered credible because six years earlier, she’d accused another man of the same thing, and it was easier to believe she was lying than that lightning loves a scarred tree.
I could sense my proximity panicking him.
And now here I was, shaking him from his moorings. But I found myself uncharacteristically helpless to leave him alone.
I understand: It’s human instinct to put yourself at the heart of a disaster. Not even for attention, but because it feels true. Someone who was supposed to fly the day after 9/11 was, in the retelling, supposed to fly that very day. He was on his way to the airport, in fact. He was in the airport. He’s not claiming he was booked on one of those flights, nothing like that, he just moves himself a few steps closer to the departure gate.
The two dozen or so Black students tended to sit together in the dining hall, at those long tables by the cereal station. I saw it only as cliquish; I failed to consider to what extent it might have been an act of self-preservation.
It was entirely possible (it slowly occurred to me) that my empathy and tenacity were not what had gotten me through Granby, but were things Granby had given me. Things it had meted out to anyone willing. How many times did I have to learn the same lesson? You’re not special. And that’s okay.
The kids’ energy, their improbably fresh faces glowing in the low-watt bulbs, reminded me again that they were kids. Yahav was right. We get so used to twenty-four-year-old actors playing high school students, and we seem so mature in our own memories, that we forget actual teenagers have limited vocabularies, have bad posture and questionable hygiene, laugh too loud, don’t know how to dress for their body types, want chicken nuggets and macaroni for lunch. It’s easier to see the twelve-year-olds they just were than the twenty-year-olds they’ll soon be.
It seemed we were waiting for midnight. These kids were young enough that the stroke of twelve still connoted mischief, parties, ghosts, rather than work deadlines and colicky babies and red-eye flights.
She said, “Life isn’t that messy if you stay away from mess.”
I hate the phone. It’s one thing talking to family or the pharmacist, but a scheduled call with someone I sort of know makes me want to pull hairs from the nape of my neck. I do best when I’m moving, so after a hot shower in the guesthouse, I put in my AirPods and started my walk
“It’s only a student project,” I said, feebly. “So was Facebook.”
Yahav’s voice was ice in a whiskey glass, and I could feel it through the table, through the floor, up my legs.
I hate LA driving so much that I’d forgotten I actually love regular driving.
Loretta Young didn’t understand that Clark Gable had raped her. She considered their daughter a “walking mortal sin” until, in her eighties, she learned about date rape by watching Larry King Live and realized her inability to fend him off hadn’t been her fault.
things besides blood could make luminol glow. Certain paints, for example. The flesh of turnips, unlikely as that might be.
We hugged like old friends, because we were. You don’t have to have been friends with someone to be old friends with them later.
he closed his eyes against the news. He said, “I was always in love with her.”
juggling some of the thick acrylic paint tubes. We ignored him as we’d ignore a mountain lion we met in the woods, hoping our silence would cloud our scent.
“I figured you’d be lurking,” I said, not unaware of my word choice.
I said, “I don’t want you to get your hopes up.” Alder stood, brushed off his jeans. He said, “I’m a Black man in America. My hopes aren’t up.”
But I’d learned long ago not to counter people’s trauma with my own. I said, “I am so sorry you went through that. I had no idea, and I’m really fucking sorry.”
In the aftermath of my latest Yahav relapse, I’d had the unflattering realization that I had never once, in my life, gone after a man who was fully available. In my early twenties, I honed my skills on married men, men whose rejections and eventual departures it would be impossible to take personally.
painted trillium, bunchberry, hemlock, sheep laurel, white
Dr. Ciprian Gheorghe helped with emergency medicine. Any errors on those issues are mine alone. Jordyn Kimelheim named Starlet Fever. My kids named the Dragons and chose their colors. Lacy Crawford’s brilliant memoir Notes on a Silencing (please read it!) shed light for me on institutional collusion.
