Dad lost his job. Then he got a new job. Then he got his old job back and went back to it. They were all in the same building.
I peeled the skin off a grape in slippery little triangles, and I understood then that I would be undressing every item of food I could because my clothes would be staying on.
While she cut the mushrooms, she cried more than she had at the grave, the most so far, because she found the saddest thing of all to be the simple truth of her capacity to move on.
We are all, generally, symmetrical: ants, elephants, lions, fish, flowers, leaves. But she was a tree. No one expects a tree to be symmetrical at all.
She thought of how she had never sat and had a long conversation with her father because he, too, refused to talk about himself. Someone else should speak instead, he said. If I don’t speak, it means...
My genes, my love, are rubber bands and rope - make yourself a structure you can live inside.
I could feel the tears beginning to collect in my throat again, but I pushed them apart, away from each other. Tears are only a threat in groups.
Well, the truth is, vacations are pointless anyway, because you always have to come back, so you might as well save time, skip the middle step, and stay put in the first place.
Mom flipped through the magazines like the pages needed to be slapped.
Many kids, it seemed, would find out that their parents were flawed, messed-up people later in life, and I didn't appreciate getting to know it all so strong and early.
It can feel so lonely, to see strangers out in the day, shopping, on a day that is not a good one. On this one: the day I returned from the emergency room after having a fit about wanting to remove my...
I was with them for all of it, but more like an echo than a participant.
I pushed them apart, away from each other. Tears are only a threat in groups.
I knew if I ate anything of hers again, it would lkely tell me the same message: help me, I am not happy, help me -- like a message in a bottle sent in each meal to the eater, and I got it. I got the...
I didn’t mind the quiet stretches. It was like we were trying out the idea of being side by side.
He breathed in her hair, the sweet-smelling thickness of it. My father usually agreed with her requests, because stamped in his two-footed stance and jaw was the word Provider, and he loved her the wa...
Food is all those substances which, submitted to the action of the stomach, can be assimilated or changed into life by digestion, and can thus repair the losses which the human body suffers through th...
After the incident in the ER, Ino longer wanted to advertise my experience to anyone. You try, you seem totally nuts, you go underground. There's a kind of show a kid can do, for a parent – a show of...
With my hand in his, I looked at all the apartment buildings with rushes of love, peering in the wide streetside windows that revealed living rooms painted in dark burgandies and matte reds.
The afternoons were getting longer again, stretching. I stayed too long at a stoplight because the sunlight was so pretty, sifting through all the leaves on the sycamore trees lining Sierra Bonita, tu...