Sometimes we cried from exhaustion, the unknowns of the pandemic, and the suffocating feeling of loving a person so much you wanted to climb into their mouth.
“I’ve done some rash, impulsive shit in the name of love—built monuments to things that didn’t last. I mapped out futures for people who never asked for permanence.”
“My grandmother died three years before I was born, when my mother was pregnant with my older brother. I cannot tell you what that time was like, because no one speaks of it.”
In my writing, my father is ‘Dad,’ because I need this less intimate address as a buffer from what I have lost, left behind, or perhaps never even had.