There was no apology in her eyes, no love or caring. But she saw me, I existed, and this lifted the beams off my shoulders. It takes so little.
She looked at me for a long time and then pulled an old envelope out of the trash and drew a pear on it. This is how your body is shaped. See? Teeny tiny on top and not so tiny on the bottom. Then she...
She didn’t think she would have bothered if she hadn’t been what people call very beautiful except for. This is a special group of citizens living under special laws. Nobody knows what to do with them...
Once Carl had called me ginjo, which I thought meant sister until he told me it’s Japanese for a man, usually an elderly man, who lives in isolation while he keeps the fire burning for the whole villa...
My voice was low and formal. I sounded like a wooden father from the 1800s.
My eyes fell on the gray linoleum floor and I wondered how many other women had sat on this toilet and stared at this floor. Each of them the center of their own world, all of them yearning for someon...
Most of life is offline, and I think it always will be; eating and aching and sleeping and loving happen in the body. But it's not impossible to imagine losing my appetite for those things; they aren'...
It’s not your fault. Perhaps this was really the only thing I had ever wanted to say to anyone, and be told.
I wanted to be the kind of teacher who learned from her students.
I smiled into the air the way I smiled when customers unbuckled their belts, and I made my eyes laugh as if everything were some version of a good time.
I feel into the eyes of every person I passed on the street.
He didn't call me for a few weeks. This was customary within our friendship, confide and retreat, but I wondered. I wondered if perhaps our last conversation had been an overture. Not the conversation...
Except she wasn’t like a husband from the 1950s because she didn’t bring home the bacon.
Did you ever really love her? Not really no. But me? Yes. Even though I have no pizzazz?
You will eat, you will laugh at stupid things, you will stay up all night just to see what it feels like, you will fall painfully in love, you will have babies of your own, you will doubt and regret a...
What was the lifespan of these improbable loves? An hour. A week. A few months at best. The end was a natural thing, like the seasons, like getting older, fruit turning. That was the saddest part—ther...
We thrust our babies into the air again and again, showing them what it felt like to be a mother, to be terrifyingly in love without the option of getting off.
They were sparkling with the old love, the greatest love of my lifetime. And they were triumphant.
There were a series of closing kisses, goodbye kisses, kisses placed like lids on boxes—then the lid would pop off and need to be replaced. There, this is the final kiss—no, this is the final kiss. Th...
Then Potato ran by. He was a little brown dog, just like the woman said. He tore past me like he was about to miss a plane. He was gone by the time I even realized it had to be Potato. But he looked j...