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On Being Beautiful

I’m beautiful. It’s lasted quite a long time, this beauty of mine, but it won’t be lasting much longer because I’m forty now, as I’m writing this, forty now and probably by the time you read it forty-one, and so on and so forth, and we all know it ends up as worms or ashes, but for the time being I’m still beautiful.

Beds

Losing Gretchen

Had I known she was so large and that her leaving would create this cavernous emptiness, I would have fallen to my knees each morning and worshiped her. I would have strewn flowers at her feet, and I would have cherished every smile, every glance from her eyes, every word from her lips.

Home Birth

Afterward, no one present recalled my pausing. It was brief, practically instantaneous, but it was one of those moments that open vertically, perpendicular to time, and encompass worlds.

A Failed Divorce

Living beyond my means in a Manhattan apartment with two babies, no income, and a philandering husband, I suddenly found myself as vulnerable and dependent as any traditional suburban housewife.

Holy Ghost

At first I thought it was learning or wisdom. Then it came to me: my husband was a ghost; he had nothing but what he could steal from people. He could take the things they cared about most. It was his great gift.

Hunger

Spam, reading material, C rations

Living For Swans

As we pass under the Roosevelt Arch into the park, beneath the words “For the Benefit and Enjoyment of the People,” I say under my breath, “I am safe now. I am at home base. No one can find me here.” A friend has a saying that once seemed outrageous and cowardly, but is now my motto: “There is no problem so big you can’t run away from it.”

The Impossible

A prescient daughter, an exhausted and drained nurse, an unlikely marathon runner

Autonomy