“It’s Monday!” Riley says, with the day still so new that the morning light looks soft and tentative and the chill outside clouds the windows. My favorite backyard tree looks bony and bare, empty-handed and reaching like me, but Riley glows like a sun-drenched bloom, pink-cheeked from sleep, bright with anticipation. I look up at […]

I sit down at the table next to Adam, and he smiles, silently tender. Love, that’s the recognition I see softening his features. It flickers, this light that shatters darkness: You love me, and I adore you, and here we are, together. You wonder maybe how Adam’s heart could be so plain to me, but […]

“I want to take care of you. Let me,” my friend says, pressing a lunch into my hands, even though it’s the last one she could eat and instead, she’ll be eating almonds and apricots from the stash she keeps in her purse. She doesn’t know she’s preaching. Here we are, the two of us […]

When the time comes to travel home, Riley throws her arms around Opa’s waist, presses her cheek against his chest and sobs.  She comes at him from the side, which turns the whole thing into a wonky lean, especially as she tries to shrink her body down to match her vulnerable feelings. “I think this […]

Mirrors lie, Amor Towles wrote in A Gentleman in Moscow.  I had to grab a pen and write the quote in my journal because it rang true, because I had heard those lies for most of my life.  I remember it now, away from home, as I walk through a glassy, windowed hallway and catch […]

Into the thin of night, during those turbulent hours when panic threatens the best of our rest; during those hours when the conversations of young friends become so exposed that with raw, sleepy voices they begin to truly know each other; during those hours when so many souls bound for home finally drift away; into […]

I laugh when I say it, but it’s the truth: driving from home to school and back in the mornings feels like playing a round of that old racing video game at our favorite childhood pizza place, the one with the actual race car seat and steering wheel, the one I had to climb down […]

When we arrive, the rustic man from whom we rented the cabin waits, rising to lumber out to the door. His eyes are blue, cool and vibrant like the snatch of sky I glimpse above the mountains. In some ways, he is those mountains, sloped and capped in silver cloud, monochrome and rumpled in the […]

“I met a new friend today,” Riley says, and it’s the first thing she wants to tell me about her first day back at school, the first thing she gushes, beaming as she walks through the door and out of the thick August afternoon heat. “Oh yea?” “Mmmhmm,” she singsongs, dropping her book bag into […]

“At least I’m doing something,” Zoe says, shadow-mumbling, making reckless half-spins in my office chair, turned to face Kevin and me, coffee mug cradled in her hands. “I mean, I’m trying.” I wait for a wave of hot coffee to crest and spill over the side of her mug, wait for it to drip from […]