How easy it is to sink to that place where the smallest things we do for love don’t feel like love at all, to that shadowland where we believe wholeheartedly in withholding, where we forget that giving is the means to abundance. Adam sulks over his dinner, flicking his eyes toward me, his look pit-dark. […]

Fresh from the shower on an 80-degree day that feels thick with the promise of Summer, Adam spins–literally–into the kitchen wearing flannel pajama pants–buffalo check–and a salt-washed long-sleeved t-shirt as blue as his eyes. I wonder how he doesn’t instantly feel that sticky prickle of after-shower sweat at the base of the neck and the […]

Just home from a walk with a friend–skin flushed with sun; fallen petals from the cherry trees stowaways in my hair, on the edge of my shirt, even precariously crumpled against one sticky ankle–and Riley comes to meet me at the door. I hear her carefully set down whatever she has in her hands; I […]

Riley sits at the bar, fresh-faced and bright, if still a little rumpled with sleep. She looks like Spring, like the first day of sapphire skies; like new flowers with blushing, velvet leaves; like anticipation; like hope sitting right there on a bench in my kitchen., and it’s striking to me because it’s the opposite […]

This cluttered morning, sweaty with exercise, I bend myself into a stretch that makes me sigh with pleasure. Nothing feels better to me after a workout than the patient extension of sore and weary muscles, that resting pull that draws out pain with so much tension. Routinely, I pull my shoulders down, away from my […]

This morning, I feel the outer crumbling, how slowly I waste away–not me, but the shell of me; the me you would recognize; the me you could touch, at least while we’re here. A cellular avalanche starts the moment our bodies begin to breathe; but breathe God and the opposite happens too. The resurrected body, […]

I don’t know her name–not the sound of her voice, not even the shape of her smile. As it is these days, because of the mask she wears, her eyes—dark and determined and locked on mine–are all I know of her, those eyes and that hair, curling dark around her head in short, wild corkscrews. […]

It starts as a joke, Kevin drawing Adam back after we finish cleaning the kitchen and Adam starts the nightly pilgrimage to his sanctum sanctorum; Kevin asking Adam to give all the things Adam is withholding–a hug, a backscratch, a bit of lingering attention. Adam endures, but only with perfunctory investment–the hug, light and limp, […]

Frosty morning, and I sit by the fire still sleepy, wrapped cozy and soft, protectively sheltered like some valuable thing. I want to call this a deception, the layered swaddling of cushioning warmth–not just the clothing, the blanket, the velvety socks on my feet but the tissue, the skin, as though admitting my soul deep […]

The tags on Riley’s packages begin at the bow and wrap around the side, a thin white stripe, carefully taped. She writes sentences, not only the typical to and from, and because of this, sticker tags won’t do. To the man who likes to relax in front of the TV who is named Opa Jones, […]