the unexpected

I’m in Brooklyn for the first day of my trans-continental adventure. The apartment where I am staying is in Crown Heights, which meant nothing to me until I was walking from the subway to discover it and realized that the street names and the scenery are all familiar....

languages and heartbreak

Foreign languages have been thrust into my experience lately. And for as much as it intrigues me, the idea of learning whole new languages, there is an almost thrilling fear that all but stops me from struggling through a conversation in a language I barely know....

everything spins

Sometimes I want to live in a low rent dive—the smallest enclosure with just enough space for a bed and a chair, both rickety and worn but bug free. Or worst, a ramshackle tree house like the one my neighbor’s dad built when I was a kid and I was instantly insanely...

The Magnetism of Grief

I woke up yesterday morning with an invisible and heavy apparition straddling me. “This is just grief,” I said to my bedroom ceiling, which was giving me that piteous look. When the obese ghost finally unlocked its legs from my waist so I could get out of bed, it...

souvenir

I am back here in Chicago and it is a changed landscape. Storefronts bear different logos, carry new merchandise. Those remaining the same display their sufferance and stand nobler for it, as though they’ve been permitted to abide in my absence and therefore...

spandex is not for everyone

First of all, I’ve been presented with an experience altogether new — one that engages certain energies in me and rejects others. Or maybe that has the potential to embrace it all, everything. That’s all I’m going to call it: The experience....