Seattle is the first place I’ve lived with the intention to stick around. I always knew I’d leave my hometown, and when I moved for college and grad school, I thought of them as temporary stops. But lately, my role has shifted to the stayer, while people around me leave. One of my best friends […]
Jane
The pandemic is over. Not really, but according to Delta Airlines and Anthony Fauci and just about everyone else, it seems, it’s time to move on. So one evening, when some friends suggested we meet up for a drink at a dive bar, I went. It was against my better judgment, but like a good […]
ingredients: good friends you trust a list of things you need permission for time, space snot bandana and/or tissues (optional but recommended) instructions: gather share and explain your list of things you need permission for friends give you permission: i hereby give you permission to…. give permission to self: i give myself permission to…. cry […]
There is a lake not far from where I live now. I’m not a person who has ever invested deeply in place; I am a child of immigrants and I have always been somewhere temporarily. I don’t know the place where I was born, and as much as I love my hometown, I always knew […]
The first journal I remember writing in was a black, wide-ruled, spiral-bound notebook. I was in first grade, and had somehow associated keeping a journal with being mature, so I started to write about what happened to me every day: notable moments in school, who I played with on the weekends. By 3rd grade, I’d […]
Up here in Seattle we have reached the Dark Wet season, which always leaves me grasping for any glimmer of hope or joy. I have always liked the idea of keeping a gratitude journal, but the few times I’ve tried it, I end up fixating on the same lovely things in my life, like friends […]
When I turned 11, I wanted to have a blow-out party. My sweet, patient parents arranged for ten of my friends to show up at Mr. Gatti’s, a combination all-you-can-eat pizza buffet and arcade. (Southerners: IYKYK.) After bumper cars and skeeball, we all piled into a designated “party room” and sat at a long table […]
As I’ve moved through life, there are an unimaginable number of things I’ve seen or heard, briefly enjoyed, and then summarily forgotten about. For those of us with awful long-term memory, this is the joy in rereading books: it’s like reading it for the first time. There are things I’d like to remember better, and […]