Nonfiction

Without choking, I can now swallow and smile at the same time.

I am bare. Cleared of the years before me, prepped for the ones to come.

I stare at my skin with all its melanin, and feel like a fish on a hook, body thrashing. I tongue the wound and laugh with them.

They had cool girl names like Caitlin and Caroline and wore cool girl things like tank tops and stretchy chokers. “Do you want to play ‘Stranded Helpless in the Woods’ with us?” Caitlin asked.

How fickle is fire, the element of transformation. In a single moment it transmutes joy into terror.

I was having lunch at my coworker’s house in Fort Worth, and the last thing I expected was slow-cooked, gooey okra, looking uncomfortably similar to the ones my mother used to make when I was a child.

from twenty feet away you’ll feel tethered to yourself like the pink balloon tied around your wrist when you were four

While I was flippantly making a teenage judgment about bodies and youth with a larger acknowledgement of mortality and the inability to stop time, I was also expressing a palpable loneliness.