All This Could Be Different

by Sarah Thankam Mathews

What did it mean to be a woman? What did it mean to be a dyke? If I felt more like a crow scavenging in the dustbin than a woman, what should that mean for how the world saw me?

In my adult life I had come to understand some things about addiction, some truths about what it meant to live as a wounded person, the past a refrain of illness within you, always summoning you back to the specter of your hunger.

We create our lives saying one small yes to one small thing at a time. We create the world that way.

The world has ended a thousand times and my name called in each new book of it.