He pulled away, but his eyes held my eyes like hands.
He loved me. He was a complex person with layers of percolating emotions, some of them spiritual, some tortured in a more secular way, and he burned for me. This complicated flame of being was mine.
He breathed out the bitter air that makes women doubt everything, and I breathed it in, as I had always done. I expelled my dust, the powder of everything I had destroyed with doubt, and he pulled it...
Every night my plan was to make it to dawn and then feel out the options. But that was just it -- there were no options. There had been options, before the baby, but none of them had been pursued. I h...
By now everyone must have realized that this person is not coming back to the picnic. Everyone was wrong; this person is not who they thought this person was. This person plunges underwater and moves...
But, like ivy, we grow where there is room for us. She seemed to have room for me; she never turned away in the pauses that allow for turning away.
But as the sun rose I crested the mountain of my self-pity and remembered I was always going to die at the end of this life anyway.
But I couldn't put a face to the feeling; it was a dissolving thought, like a dream that hurries away when you approach it.
After a minute a willowy woman with a baby boy came out. The baby was swinging a crystal from a string. I checked to see if he and I had a special connection that was greater than his bond with his mo...
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’t always easy, and they take so much time.
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...
Would she understand that time had stopped while she was gone.
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.
We really wanted to know all the unknowable things about each other and how we were the same and how we were different, if we even were, maybe nobody is.
We had loved people we really shouldn't have loved and then married other people in order to forget our impossible loves, or we had called out hello into the cauldron of the world and then run away be...
We had fallen in love; that was still true. But given the right psychological conditions, a person could fall in love with anyone or anything. A wooden desk -- always on all fours, always prone, alway...
We don't have intercourse anymore. I'm not complaining, it's my own fault. I lie there beside him and try to send signals to my vagina, but it's like trying to get cable channels on a Tv that doesn't...
We could smell each other's shampoo and the laundry detergents we had chosen and I smelled that she didn't smoke but someone she loved did[...]
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...