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Essays, Memoirs & True Stories
House Hunting
Our sordid credit history seems to sadden more than shock her. Such nice people, she must be thinking. How do these things happen?
December 2025
On Walking
To love walking is to love the body, and this has been a barrier for me. Walking requires us to be a physical presence moving in a physical space. Your body is on display, with all its jostling parts and creaky joints. I know it’s vanity—this self-consciousness, this awareness of other people’s eyes—but it was something I shouldered when I walked, something that made me seek the comfort of a climate-controlled car.
December 2025
Considerable Luck
In the weeks before my surgery I wandered parks and refuges where black-crowned night herons clung to cattails, pied-billed grebes fished ponds, and raucous crows cawed and flew upwind to find branches where they could shelter together. They would aim for a tree, fail to settle as a flock, then fall back and regroup to try again. Like the crows, I wouldn’t quit.
November 2025
The Childless Aunt
Though a faint hope that I might yet conceive continued to smolder in the back of my mind, at some point it dawned on me that none of these joys and trials I wished for myself were exclusive to biological parents. I could love any child who needed me.
November 2025
Silent Disco
“We’re here to have fun,” she says. “Be the full expression of yourselves! You can go anywhere or stay right here—wherever the music moves you.”
October 2025
About That Time I Pushed a Car Uphill
I want to pause here and point out the obvious: According to the laws of physics, as soon as Darius put the car in neutral, it would begin to roll back. With me behind it.
October 2025
The Cat Who Woke Me Up
The hierarchy that places humans above cats has broken down. I know, in a way I once didn’t, that cats and dogs and birds and bees and every living creature are conscious in a way that’s too hard for most of us to acknowledge. We’re all a bunch of narcissists who imagine that no life-form is quite as appealing as this one we call human. We’re unable to share the stage unless the animals are the supporting players.
October 2025
Moon Boots
Our baby could not yet hold his head up. I lay on my parents’ living room floor next to my son, wondering how I was going to afford and overcome everything by myself, thinking I was too clumsy to take care of something as delicate as a child. And, in having these thoughts, I came undone.
September 2025
Between You and Me
When I was eight, I stole my sister’s Barbie. Then her turquoise nail polish. And then her candy-colored journal. I consumed its pages, the wisdom and wonder of a thirteen-year-old’s thoughts: The boys she had crushes on, the boys who had crushes on her. How afraid she was of her developing body, how every morning she woke up with something new to fixate on—a new hair, new bump, new curve. I longed to feel what she was describing. How wonderful it would be to be as beautiful as that. To be something that blossomed.
September 2025
On Wheels
Last summer I took a free one-day course in nearby Philadelphia for adults who wanted to learn to ride a bike. The incident that finally pushed me over the edge was when my eight-year-old niece was riding in circles around me, baffled by my inability to do the same. She asked why I was afraid to do something so easy. And I was afraid: Of falling. Of looking foolish. Of struggling to even get on the seat at a public park and then throwing a tantrum while some teens recorded me on their phones. Mostly I was afraid of finding out how limited I really am.
September 2025
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