I was driving across country with my kids, hoping to see our friend before she went into surgery for cancer.
I stride to class, passing towering lockers.
My finger taps anxiously at the edge of my greasy screen as I anticipate his reply.
“I can’t do this,” I said, plopping down on the closest boulder.
My sister and I sit on the floor, a small wooden table covered with our mom’s and grandmother’s jewelry between us.
On my New Year’s Day walk I noticed an old man looking jaunty in a red tartan scarf.
Midway through my walk, I realize the thing I dread is about to happen.
Some mornings in the hospital they gave us boiled eggs, unpeeled puzzles we had to solve in our blue pyjamas.
Up in Tahoe, Ken had a night.
When the Amtrak train arrived from Chicago, I stood on the platform anxiously watching as passengers began to exit.
When I say "car," it doesn’t sound like a crow crying out. I don’t “warsh up” or “dash off to the loo.”
Probably two or three-hundred pounds of bare naked man is bobbling towards me along the sidewalk outside of the Soldier’s Grove Public Library on Main Street.
My computer is whirring, the screen hot to touch.
My girlfriend’s nephew, barely five, alternated between squeezing my hand and excitedly scooting ahead to the onsen, then skipping back to us.
Dad was dead, but that was beside the point.
Whenever my mom came over, she would, within minutes of her arrival, move all of my knickknacks around.
I hold my breath as I ask the secretary over the phone what my neurosurgeon said.
As I stand to check on my dad again, my mum stands, smiles, and tells me to focus on finishing the lecture note.
After four daughters and a new wife, my father says to me one afternoon, “I wish you were born a boy.”
I wear her clothes daily, sometimes just one article, sometimes an entire ensemble.