Nonfiction

I am ready, on this autumn-infused street in which a store clerk belts a melancholy song over the radio, to abandon everything—

To be aromantic and asexual is to find oneself wearing assumptions that don’t fit, to find oneself veering from an expected life trajectory—following an absence or negation of markers, following a quiet inner logic.

Facts are either beautiful or they leech the beauty from things.

Before my idiot dribble of adulthood, I was young once & because I was often in rooms filled with music there was dancing. Somewhere in Old City Philly…

Instead, as my shell collection on Oʻahu gathers dust, as my name grows too small to be held in the mouths of those who loved me as a child, I gather violets.

She stands at the mirror, staring at her reflection for what seems like a long time, waiting to see how quickly the puffiness will go down, learning that the answer is not fast enough. . .

Every good story starts with a dead mother. Nothing worth doing is possible until she dies.

Even a bookstall harbors the energy of a huge bookshop, books falling off its edges. You and I fell off a bench once. Gravity tricked me into thinking that it was fate, love, us, falling. . .

At the back of the hallway closet is a leather jacket. It belongs to your dad, she says. . .

I was healthy and suddenly, not—an odyssey one sentence short. . .