Category: Uncategorized
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Chat Rooms and Candles
In 2004, there was one other person. I was young and sick and more alone in it than I have ever been able to fully describe. Nobody my age understood. Nobody my age was going through it. I’ve written about how apart I felt in those years, the young cancer patient among peers who were…
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A Span of Values
My ex filed against me about once a month on average I would say. Filing was the weapon. Every time he filed, I had to respond, and responding cost money and energy, and money and energy were the point. He could reach into my life on a monthly schedule and make it more expensive and…
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Boxes to the Covid Condo
I got COVID on New Year’s Eve, right at the start of 2022, which is about the worst possible timing a person in my line of work could arrange. Because January is the year-end close. The big deadline, the last day of the month, everything due at once. I’m the one responsible for getting it…
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Bowl Cuts
My girls hate the pictures. Every so often they’ll come across old photos of themselves from when they were little, and there it is, the haircut. The bowl cut that is round, slightly-too-even, unmistakably-a-kid’s-haircut look, sitting on their heads in photo after photo. They groan. They laugh. They ask, in the way kids do, why…
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A Court Order to be at My Own House
I learned, during those years, that a court order is only as real as someone’s willingness to enforce it. On its own, it’s just paper, ink and a signature and a promise that turns out to be conditional. There were a lot of them. Orders were made, and then he simply wouldn’t follow them, and…
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Around the Corner
I was three the day Nancy came around the corner and knocked on our door. Her family was new to the neighborhood. She wanted to know if I’d come play with her daughter. So, I went. And I cried the entire afternoon, the way a shy three-year-old cries in a house that isn’t hers, wanting…
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Boys in the driveway
The hoop came from a neighbor at the house we rented.She’d seen the kids out there playing with no hoop. They had just a ball and a driveway and a lot of imagination and she had one sitting unused in the street in front of her house, parked there doing nothing. So she gave it…
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A Record
I want to write this one down simply, because I want it to exist outside of me. Not to explain it, or make sense of it, or find the meaning in it. Just to have it said, once, where it can’t be kept in the dark anymore. A record. For two years I was in…
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The Fancy One
My youngest is the fancy one. That’s the shorthand I’ve always used for her, and it fits, though it means more than it sounds like. She loves beautiful things. She loves aesthetics, the look and feel of a life well arranged. Records spinning, a good show on, something coming together under her hands. If you…
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Z for Zorro
I found out I had cancer almost by accident, and I told my mother about it almost as an afterthought, which is to say I told her after it was already over. I was twenty-five. There was a mole on my calf that had started to flake and darken, and I hadn’t thought much of…
