During my three-year-old daughter Daisy’s eight-hour transplant surgery, I imagined lying beside her on the operating table whispering, “Mommy loves you.”
I was sitting in the car when the phone rang. The caller I.D. made me pick up.
I comb through her closet, a history of her body and life before dementia and heart failure.
While surfing the web I came across a painting titled Island of Shells. It reminded me of Barbados, my birth island.
I’m staring at your hands. You’re using them to clarify medical words; to make shapes; to draw diagrams to help me understand what my brain can’t make sense of …
It’s 1969, somewhere in Alaska, my first time on sentry duty for the United States Air Force; the middle of a December night, thirty degrees below zero, a guard shack in front of a nuclear weapons dump site.
Months after my 37-year-old husband dies, I discover the borrowed Vivaldi album tucked among our other LPs.
The steel guardrail familiar against his knees. The straight, level bridge concealing its loftiness, the gorge below indistinct in the moonlight. [CW: suicidal ideation]
Desperate, I tell Alexa, “Play some music.” Truth Hurts by Lizzo comes on.
Tantrum. We've dealt with her public meltdowns for years.
“Have faith in me,” he said when he hit on the Next Big Thing. “We will be richer than you could ever imagine.”
My trusty map was supposed to lead me down a tree-lined path towards the museum, but my addled sense of direction could easily lead me to Fresno.
It’s raining again, and I’m standing in the queue with a basket of things we’d run out of: cumin, coriander powder, and star anise.
Crowded shoulder to shoulder with others jostling for prime territory on Line 13 of the Paris Metro, I felt fingers groping in the most intimate of places.
I have been afraid of water since I was six.
I was swinging ever higher on the swing mounted on a sturdy branch of the immeasurably ancient oak. And then I was on the ground …
My son and I, we’ve been to so many doctors together. We had to go to several every week when he was little to try to get him better.
In the picture, photographed in Burma, my grandmother is seated on the traditional teak chair in the veranda and my grandfather stands behind her in the shadows thrown by a padauk tree …
I’d bought them specially, sought them out, in search of the style you liked.
My LA friends think I’m crazy. CA to NY.