For nearly a decade, my son took up the whole sky.

I don’t mean that as a complaint. I mean that he was the weather, the light, the thing around which every other thing arranged itself. His hunger, his sleep, his illnesses, his school schedule, his fears, his joy. Even when he wasn’t physically with me, some part of my mind remained turned toward him, listening, waiting, poised.

When you are caring for a small human, you are always being summoned. The small human needs a snack, a Band-Aid, a clean shirt, a story, an answer to a question you cannot possibly answer. The small human needs help finding the thing directly in front of him. The small human needs you to watch—really watch—while he does something he has already done seventeen times.

The days can feel impossibly long. Then, without asking your permission, the years become short.

My son is nine now. He can make himself something to eat. He can disappear into a game or a conversation with a friend and forget, for a while, that I exist. He still needs me, of course, but not with the same relentless physical urgency. I am no longer the entire landscape of his life. Increasingly, I am a place he returns to.

This is what I wanted. It is the whole point of raising a child: to help him become a person who can move through the world without you holding both of his hands.

But I have found that independence arrives carrying both relief and grief.

The space he leaves behind is not empty exactly. It is more like a room in the house I had forgotten was there. I open the door and find pieces of myself still inside: the writer, the artist, the woman who was sweaty on the dance floor, the person who once believed that making something was reason enough to make it.

I have continued to work throughout these hands on parenting years. I have led organizations, raised money, solved problems, managed crises, sat through meetings, answered emails, remembered appointments, filled out forms, bought groceries, packed lunches, kept people alive. I have been useful in a hundred measurable ways.

But usefulness is not the same thing as aliveness.

Now I am looking around and wondering what I want to do with the room that has opened. Not just the extra hour between drop-off and work, or the Saturday afternoon when my son would rather play with a friend than go somewhere with me. I mean the room inside my own life.

I want to write another book—not someday, when circumstances become perfect, but now, inside the life I actually have. I want to wear clothes that spark joy instead of asking whether they make my body look smaller. I want to stop treating my body like a problem I must solve before I am allowed to be seen. I want to make things that do not have outcomes or performance measures attached to them. I want to discover what ambition looks like when it belongs to me rather than to a job, a household, or someone else’s future.

For years, I thought of my life as long. There would always be another season in which to return to myself. When the baby slept. When he started school. When work settled down. When I had more money, more energy, more discipline, less body.

Then I looked up and realized I was standing somewhere near the middle.

Life still seems incredibly long. My son is only nine. There are books I haven’t written, places I haven’t been, songs I haven’t sung at Karaoke. There is time.

And yet, suddenly, it feels so short.

Maybe this is the art life after the art life: not recovering the person I was before motherhood, work, and survival consumed so much of me, but meeting the person who emerged from it all. She is older. She is softer in places. She is less interested in being approved of and more interested in being awake.

My son no longer takes up the whole sky.

I miss it. I am relieved. I can see the horizon.

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I was visible on sidewalks, in cars, on buses. I was visible riding my bicycle through rainy streets. I was visible in conversations at parties and in crowded bars. People saw me and remarked on my visibility because I was visible.

By visible, I mean seen. Simply.

I also mean something less tangible, something closer to the way late September light settles on the surface of water—golden, reflective, impossible not to notice.

The visible light spectrum is the portion of the electromagnetic spectrum the human eye can detect. This range of wavelengths is called visible light.

That was me.

For much of my life, my body arrived before I did.

I don’t mean that I was extraordinarily beautiful. I mean that I occupied the body of a young woman, and that is a role as much as a physical form. Youth carries with it an assumed narrative. People project onto it. They assign possibility to it. They expect it to be observed.

My mother understood this, though perhaps not in the way I wanted her to.

When she was still alive, she always knew where I was, whether we were speaking or not. When we were in the same room, she often did everything she could to erase me.

Do all mothers erase their daughters? I don’t know.

But my mother could subsume an entire galaxy if it meant her feelings remained larger than mine.

And yet, paradoxically, her attempts to diminish me only sharpened my edges. I became more visible in opposition. More defined. More brightly outlined.

I carried that brightness into adulthood.

Then, slowly, it began to fade.

Not overnight. So gradually that I didn’t recognize it at first.

I still felt visible.

I was offended when a young woman didn’t smile back at me while walking through the park. A child ran into the back of my legs at the library as though I weren’t standing there at all. A clerk skipped over me while I waited to buy my bunch of kale. A handsome poet looked directly through me when I approached to shake his hand after a reading we had both participated in.

I felt the atmosphere around me change.

Not dramatically. More like a dress that suddenly hangs differently from your shoulders.

I had become invisible.

By invisible, I mean unseen.

But I also mean something else.

I mean no longer existing at the center of the story.

The body of the young woman had quietly left the room.

I spent months studying my face in the mirror.

The mirror, of course, lies.

A reflection is not a face. It’s only an approximation, a reversal, a memory.

I will never actually see my own face.

I cannot look directly at my own eyes. I cannot see my own mouth from the inside. I cannot observe myself except through surfaces that distort me.

The mirror doesn’t reveal the self. It only reminds me that I can’t fully know it.

What is the self when youth is no longer the organizing principle?

What remains after the role changes?

Middle age introduces these questions with very little warning.

Inside my body, I could still feel my twelve-year-old self—the awkward, string-bean girl with scraped knees and impossible certainty. I could feel my twenty-five-year-old self, too, who believed her body was both a currency and a burden. I could feel every version of myself layered beneath my skin like rings inside a tree.

None of them had disappeared.

The body had changed, but the self remained strangely intact.

I mourned the loss anyway.

I looked at photographs and felt wistful for the woman in them.

Not because she was prettier.

Because she was easier to recognize.

I missed her in the same way I miss old houses I’ve lived in.

But grief has a way of loosening its grip when we stop wrestling with it.

In vision science, our eyes contain blind spots—places where there are no rods or cones to receive information. Our brains simply fill in the missing pieces. We edit our noses out of our field of vision. We manufacture continuity where none actually exists.

The present moment, it turns out, is constructed.

Perhaps identity is, too.

Gradually, I began to understand that invisibility wasn’t a disappearance.

It was a release.

Without the constant pressure of being observed, I started dressing for myself. I began wearing brighter colors. I told the truth more often.

I stopped crossing my legs to make myself appear smaller.

I lay in the grass with my bare feet swinging at the ankles.

I let my husband see me naked in the soft, pink light of morning and no longer worried about angles or posture or whether my stomach folded when I sat down.

I sat however I wanted.

I laughed more loudly.

I became less careful.

Middle age had taken something from me, certainly.

It had taken the body of the ingenue.

But it had also given me something I never expected: freedom from performance.

I stopped auditioning.

I stopped waiting for someone else to tell me who I was.

One afternoon, I stopped beside a bush of wild roses growing next to a busy street.

People hurried past me.

No one noticed the roses.

No one noticed me.

I stood there for a while, breathing in their fragrance.

And I realized that perhaps this was the secret all along.

Visibility was never the same thing as being known.

And invisibility was never the same thing as disappearing.

Hopefully, we are never invisible to ourselves.

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Death swung its axe close enough to shave my chin.

Not mine. Not this time. But close enough that I could feel the wind of it.

There are seasons when life narrows to its true proportions. The ordinary machinery of living keeps turning—the school supply lists, the emails that still need answering, the dog who still needs walking, the dishes in the sink—but all of it seems to recede behind a single, impossible fact: someone who was here yesterday is gone today.

This week I found myself trying to explain death to my son because his friend’s father will never come home again.

There are no good words for a nine-year-old. There are only honest ones. That sometimes terrible things happen. That grief is love with nowhere to go. That we cannot make this right, only promise to stay close while it hurts.

I sat with my friend, suddenly a widow at forty, as though the world had split open beneath her feet. She spoke through a cloud, sentences drifting in and out, memory interrupted by disbelief. Trauma rearranges language. It makes time unreliable. You listen without trying to solve it because there is nothing to solve. You bear witness. That is the work.

From another room came the sound of her son.

Not crying. Wailing.

The kind of grief that arrives before a child has learned to edit himself. “It’s not fair,” he cried. “Nothing will ever be okay again.”

He was right about the first part.

Across the room, his mother gathered him into her arms. She did not tell him to be brave. She did not rush him toward hope or silver linings. She held him with a steadiness I don’t know where she found and let him have his pain. There was something sacred in that restraint, in refusing to argue with grief before grief had spoken.

I don’t know if anything has ever taught me more about love.

Death has a way of humiliating our illusions of control. It reminds us that our calendars are guesses, our plans are penciled in, our certainty borrowed. It pares life down to its grain. Suddenly I care much less about the beginning of the school year, about inboxes, deadlines, errands, even the thousand tiny irritations that seemed important only days before. They still exist, but they have been returned to their proper size.

This is what happens when death swings its axe close enough to shave your chin.

You remember that we belong to one another for an astonishingly brief time. That the people we kiss goodbye each morning are never guaranteed to return by dinner. That love is always, whether we admit it or not, an act of breathtaking risk.

The axe missed me.

This time.

But I felt the wind of it, and I don’t think I’ll mistake the weight of ordinary days for something ordinary again.

For C and her babies.

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Every few months someone on the internet posts the lines:

You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.

And then everyone collectively loses their minds as though Mary Oliver personally invented desire, permission, grief, and being alive.

Look, I get it. Wild Geese is a beautiful poem. It has comforted millions of people, myself included. If poetry had a greatest hits album, it belongs on there.

But sometimes I wonder if Mary Oliver has become the pumpkin spice latte of contemporary poetry. Perfectly lovely. Widely available. Somehow the only thing anyone orders.

As if she were the only poet who ever looked directly at a human life and said, “Hey. Pay attention.”

Have you ever tried:

“The world asks only that you kneel. The world asks only that you submit.” — Adrienne Rich

Or:

“Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?” gets quoted endlessly, but what about June Jordan asking us to imagine a world where we are not merely surviving but becoming?

Or Lucille Clifton reminding us:

“come celebrate with me that every day / something has tried to kill me / and has failed.”

Or Ross Gay writing an entire book of delights as an act of resistance against despair.

Or Nazim Hikmet insisting:

“To live! Like a tree alone and free / and like a forest in brotherhood.”

Or Galway Kinnell writing:

“Sometimes it is necessary / to reteach a thing its loveliness.”

Or Ada Limón asking us to carry joy and terror at the same time.

Or Marie Howe making holiness out of doing the dishes.

Or Ocean Vuong turning grief into a language.

Or Patricia Smith turning history into thunder.

Or Danez Smith making survival sound like music.

The thing I love about poetry is that no one poet gets custody of wonder.

Mary Oliver gave us geese. Thank God for the geese.

But there are also crows, vultures, sparrows, mockingbirds, and whatever strange creature has been waiting in another poem for years hoping someone would quote it on Instagram.

The world is full of lines that can split you open.

We don’t have to keep pretending there’s only one.

A few years ago, I was at lunch with a friend who will remain nameless and blameless. I was telling her about my new boyfriend, the first non-cis woman I’d dated in more than a decade. He was trans.

“So, are you straight now?” she asked.

I remember blinking at her.

“No.”

No, because I’ve never been straight and I never will be. And no, because who cares? It’s not like I have to submit paperwork declaring who I want to have sex with and what that makes me.

Over the years I’ve identified as queer, bisexual, sometimes as a dyke—mostly choosing whatever word would get the people around me closest to understanding. The word that fits me best didn’t even enter my vocabulary until relatively recently, despite my forty-six years on this planet.

I’ve been in love with all kinds of people. Cis men. Cis women. Trans men. I once had a very sweet flirtation with a trans woman. The truth is, I’ve never fallen in love with a set of genitals. I’ve fallen in love with people.

Technically, pansexual is probably the right word. It’s never been my favorite. It sounds like the kid who refused to pick a side—Peter Pan refusing to grow up, or Pan, god of “fuck around and find out.” But the definition fits. My attractions have never been limited by gender.

One thing I’ve learned is that people become uncomfortable when they can’t categorize you. Queer people and straight people alike have wanted me to pick a lane. I’ve been accused of abandoning my queers. Of wanting attention. Of being confused. Of only liking iced coffee. (If you know, you know.)

These days, I mostly feel invisible.

I’m a middle-aged mom married to a tall cis man. From the outside, people see a heterosexual marriage and make assumptions. What they don’t see is the rest of the story.

They don’t see the hot young queer making out on sticky dance floors. The fixed-gear-riding dyke cruising through city streets. They don’t see my first marriage to a beautiful trans man. They don’t see the years I spent with a long-haired butch woman after moving 2,000 miles for love, adopting far too many animals along the way.

My gender is she/her/Walt Whitman.

My sexual identity is that I contain multitudes.

My fantasies are not exclusive.

And I love my family. I love my husband, even if I sometimes bristle at the straight trappings of marriage and even the word husband itself.

I guess what I’m trying to say is this:

Happy Pride. I love you.

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July in Colorado was biblical. Pine sap tangled in my long hair. My lips cracked open from dryness until they bled when I smiled. Dust coated everything—my clothes, my cigarettes, my eyelids, the inside of my nose. The altitude made me think I was dying.

At first it was subtle, just a strange hollowness in my breathing, as if the air itself had been thinned like glass. I kept inhaling but never arrived anywhere satisfying. My heartbeat turned loud and urgent, knocking from inside my ribs. Especially inside the yurt.

Chloe lived in a round green yurt with what she called the ‘dark hippies’, her roommates who carried the smell of smoke, sweat, wet wool, and dirty feet everywhere they went. Their names were nouns, Sparkplug, Juniper, Sweet-Dick and Crow. The odor inside the yurt thickened the heat inside the canvas walls until breathing felt communal and used-up.

There was no running water except for a spigot jutting improbably from the ground outside. At night we peed into a giant coffee can to avoid running into wildlife. During the day we climbed into the trees for privacy.

After a few days, once I could finally breathe again, I slipped back into Chloe’s life the easy way I always had. We drank into oblivion every night, smoked endless cigarettes, sang songs “I got a brand new pair of roller skates, you’ve got a brand new key” and linked arms walking dirt roads under impossible skies.

Outside the yurt Mount Sopris rose into the distance so beautifully it embarrassed me. It looked fake somehow. Too cinematic to belong to ordinary people. When we ran out of beer Chloe announced she knew where a secret hot spring was.

“It’ll heal you,” she said.

“From what?”

“Everything.”

I had been following Chloe around since we were 17, long enough to believe her.

We started walking down the logging road toward the highway that curled around the mountain. The sun felt close enough to touch. My scalp burned. My eyes felt dragged through sand. Somewhere below us the valley shimmered in waves of heat and Chloe walked ahead of me barefoot again, like the earth itself could never really hurt her. She stuck out her thumb at passing cars. Dust blew into our faces. RVs and trucks and station wagons rolled past without slowing. I watched the backs of them disappear around the switchbacks.

I’d lived in Colorado with my mother once when I was little. We lived on a mountain not much different from this one and something about the smell of pine made me think of her. I hadn’t spoken to her in years. Still, standing there in the heat, I missed her suddenly. Not the real version. The version I kept making up. A girl wanting her mama.

I looked up at the sky and felt like the whole afternoon was vibrating. We heard the car before we saw it. Its muffler was doing a terrible impression of a muffler. Chloe and I both turned as the thing came rattling around the bend too fast, shuddering like it might come apart before it reached us. We looked at each other and stuck out our thumbs with the same mental shrug.

Why not.

The car looked held together by duct tape and optimism. No hubcaps. Dragging tailpipe. The stereo was loud enough to vibrate the doors.

You let me violate you
You let me desecrate you
You let me penetrate you
You let me complicate you

The car veered onto the shoulder. We grabbed our bags and ran toward it like stranded people seeing a boat. The driver’s window rolled down and a face appeared beneath a nest of dark hair. He looked maybe twenty-five, but mountain years seemed to work differently. Everybody out there looked both twenty and fifty. His skin had that cooked, weathered look of somebody who lived outdoors too long, and when he smiled I noticed one of his front teeth had gone brown—the color of an apple slice left out too long.

“Where you girls headed?” he yelled over the music.

“Hot springs,” Chloe said immediately.

He laughed.

“That’s not a place.”

“Sure it is.”

“Nah.” He smiled. “That’s a category.”

I laughed because Chloe was laughing and because when you’re young and hitchhiking you spend a lot of time pretending the universe likes you. The inside of the car looked worse than the outside. Fast-food wrappers. Beer cans rolling around the floorboards. A sleeping bag crammed into the backseat beneath clothes and things I couldn’t identify. For a second I thought of my mother.Not my actual mother. The imaginary one good kids seemed to have—the kind who would’ve grabbed my arm and said absolutely the fuck not. Chloe had already climbed in.

“Come on.”

The guy leaned across and shoved the passenger door open.

“I’m Jesse.”

I climbed in. The car smelled like cigarettes and mildew and something sweet going rotten underneath it all. Chloe immediately put her bare feet on the dashboard like we’d known Jesse our whole lives.

“I’m Chloe.”

Jesse looked at me in the mirror.

“And you?”

I waited a second.

“Mae.”

Not my name.

He nodded slowly.

“Mae.”

Like he was trying it on.

The road curled down the mountain in long switchbacks. Trees blurred past in green smears. Every few minutes the valley opened beneath us, huge and sunlit and impossibly far away. Jesse drummed his fingers against the steering wheel.

“You girls from around here?”

“Nah,” I said.

“Nah where?”

I shrugged.

He watched me in the mirror for a second too long. Chloe had already found cigarettes somewhere on the floor.

“Can I steal one?”

“Take two.”

She lit one and passed it back.

“So what do you girls do?” Jesse asked.

“Nothing,” Chloe said.

He laughed.

“No seriously.”

“No seriously.”

“We’re professional drifters,” I said.

“Hell of a retirement plan.”

Then he looked at me again.

“You got a boyfriend, Mae?”

Something about the question landed sideways. I blew smoke out the window.

“No.”

“You do now,” Chloe said.

I kicked the back of her seat. Jesse laughed. Too hard. Outside the road narrowed. Jesse turned around to talk. Not glanced. Actually turned. The tires spat gravel. For a second nobody said anything. Then Chloe laughed.

“Dude.”

Jesse smiled.

“What? I got it.”

I looked out the window.

There wasn’t really a shoulder anymore. Just sky. A few miles later Jesse slapped the steering wheel.

“Shit.”

“What?” Chloe asked.

“I forgot something.”

He said it lightly, smiling a little. Too lightly.

“What thing?” I asked.

“My buddy’s place.” He scratched at his jaw. “I just gotta stop for a second. Dude owes me money.”

Chloe shrugged.

“Okay.”

Jesse turned onto a dirt road I hadn’t noticed before. Gravel crackled beneath the tires. Pinyon Pine trees crowded closer on both sides until they started swallowing the sky. I looked out the window. No houses. No mailboxes. No tire tracks. Nothing. Just trees.

“Your buddy lives out here?” I asked.

“Everybody lives out here.”

He smiled at me in the mirror.

“Relax.”

I hadn’t realized I’d stopped looking relaxed. Chloe leaned against the window smoking, absent-mindedly drawing smiley faces into the dust with her finger. The car dropped into a rut and my bag slid against my feet. Without thinking about it I pulled it into my lap. I told myself I was looking for cigarettes. Then I told myself I was looking for chapstick. Then I told myself I was just bored. Inside the bag I felt around blindly: notebook, lighter, socks, paperback with the cover falling off, half a granola bar hardened into something geological. Then my fingers found a metal fork I’d stolen from a diner somewhere in Arizona. I didn’t remember stealing it. I wrapped my hand around it anyway. The tines pressed into my palm. Outside the trees kept getting thicker. Jesse looked at me in the mirror again. I smiled back. A second late.

The trailer looked like every place I’d ever accidentally ended up—sun-bleached and leaning to one side, surrounded by piles of things that had once had purposes. Tires. Broken lawn chairs. Rusted bicycles disappearing into weeds. A skinny dog wandered beneath a truck and stared at us without enthusiasm.

“Told you,” Jesse said. “Two seconds.”

Before the car had fully stopped Chloe shoved the door open.

“I have to pee so bad.”

“Classy.”

She flipped me off over her shoulder and wandered toward the trees, cigarette hanging from her mouth. Jesse disappeared inside the trailer. I sat there with my bag in my lap. Still holding the fork. Outside I could hear birds and wind moving through the trees. I looked down at my hand and laughed quietly to myself. Jesus Christ. I was about to stab a guy with stolen diner silverware because I’d watched too many crime shows. I loosened my grip. Then I heard Chloe yell something. I couldn’t make out the words.

I leaned toward the window.

“What?”

Nothing. A second later the trailer door banged open. Jesse jogged back toward the car carrying absolutely nothing except his baggy pants. No money. No mystery package. Nothing. He slid into the driver’s seat. I looked around.

“Uh...Chloe?”

He turned the key.

“She’ll be a minute.”

Gravel popped beneath the tires. For one stupid second I thought maybe he was pulling forward to turn around. Then the trees started moving. Slowly. Then faster. I looked over at him.

“Jesse.”

He smiled without looking at me.

“Relax.”

The mountain dropped away outside my window.

“Jesse, what the fuck?”

He laughed softly. Not mean exactly. Almost embarrassed. Like I was overreacting to something harmless. Like we were sharing a joke and I was the only one who hadn’t heard the punchline.

The road narrowed until it barely felt like a road anymore. Pine branches scraped against the sides of the car with fingernail sounds. Jesse drove one-handed, tapping his fingers against the steering wheel while humming under his breath like we were on our way to buy groceries. I kept waiting for him to laugh. Kept waiting for this to become a misunderstanding.

After a while he said, “Mae.”

He said my fake name slowly.

Like he was trying to see if it fit.

“You travel around a lot?”

“Sometimes.”

“Where’s home?”

I looked out the window. Trees. Sky between branches.

“No idea.”

He nodded like I’d given the right answer.

“I like that.”

I didn’t say anything.

“You know,” he said after a while, “I almost didn’t stop.”

I looked over at him.

“You girls looked wild.”

He smiled.I smiled back automatically. The way people smile at strangers in elevators. The way women smile at men. A reflex. I watched his hands on the steering wheel. Long fingers. Dirt under the nails. The brown tooth. I thought about opening the door. Then I thought about the speed we were going. Then I thought about mountains. Then I thought about nothing. Eventually he turned onto another road. Smaller. Dirt. No signs. No tire tracks. No anything.

“What are we doing?” I asked.

“Scenic route.”

My heartbeat started knocking again. Loud. Urgent. Like the altitude had found me all over again. After a while he pulled over. The engine kept running. Neither of us moved. I could hear it ticking underneath us. Wind moving through trees. Something screaming somewhere in the distance. Bird maybe. Cat maybe. Girl maybe. Jesse stared ahead for a long time. Then he looked at me.

The friendliness had gone out of his face so completely it felt like watching someone turn off a light. His expression emptied itself, his lips flatteened. Whatever softness had lived there a moment ago retreated behind his eyes, leaving something cool and unreadable in its place.

“Mae isn’t your name.”

I didn’t say anything.

“You think I’m stupid?”

“No.”

“No?”

“No.”

He looked at me for a long moment. Then he smiled again.Only now it looked wrong. Like he’d put it on backwards. After that things stopped arriving in order. I remember scars crossing his chest and shoulders in pale ropes, old and new layered over each other. I remember not wanting to look directly at the knife. I remember thinking about the fork in my bag. I remember a bird screaming somewhere in the trees and thinking for a moment it was me. Mostly I remember leaving. Not physically. Just disappearing somewhere else for a while.

Later—minutes or hours, I couldn’t tell—we were driving again. The sun had shifted lower. Jesse had the window down and his arm hanging outside.Nine Inch Nails hummed quietly through the speakers. Or maybe it had never stopped. The mountain rolled by outside like nothing had happened. When we pulled back into the trailer yard Chloe was sitting on a rusted lawn chair smoking.She stood up.

“Jesus Christ,” she yelled. “Where the fuck did you guys go?”

I looked at her.

Jesse smiled.

“Took the scenic route.”

Just like that. Like earlier. Like nothing had happened. Chloe rolled her eyes and climbed back into the car.

“Asshole.”

Jesse laughed.

Then he drove us into town.

The whole way down he talked about stupid things—music, snowboarding, somebody named Travis who lived in a school bus. I kept waiting to look over and see something different. Blood under his fingernails. Horns. Foam at the mouth. Anything. But he just looked like Jesse.

When we got out he gave us a jaunty little wave before driving away. We stood there watching the dust settle back onto the road.

“What happened?” Chloe asked.

I looked down at my hand. The fork was still there. I’d forgotten I was holding it.

“Nothing,” I said.

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I am both drowning and on fire. I am invisible. I am the wisest I’ve ever been. I am the woman upstairs.

Almost everything I thought was true about myself has tilted and toppled over, scattering across the floor.

I used to trust myself. I used to follow through. If I decided to drink eight glasses of water, I drank eight glasses of water. I got places early. I wrote every day in my five-year diary. I possessed that particular adult confidence that comes from believing your mind will continue obeying you indefinitely.

Then something shifted.

Perimenopause arrived quietly at first, like weather moving in. The light changed before I understood there was a storm. I began forgetting why I’d walked into rooms. Words disappeared midsentence. Names hovered just beyond reach. My nervous system felt plugged into the wrong outlet, everything humming too loudly beneath my skin.

The rage startled me most. Not ordinary anger, but volcanic irritation that arrived too fast and burned too hot. Someone chewing. An unanswered text. One more person needing something from me after a long day. Afterwards came shame and confusion, as if I’d briefly been possessed by a meaner version of myself.

Then the grief came. Not always depression exactly, though it brushed close. More like an ancient homesickness. I cried in parking lots, in traffic, over songs I’d heard a hundred times before. Old memories surfaced without warning. Old lonelinesses. Old selves. It felt as though something buried deep inside me had broken open and floated to the surface.

The anxiety felt chemical. I woke at three in the morning with my heart racing and a sense of catastrophe blooming in my chest. Mortality suddenly felt close and breathable. My parents aging. My child growing older. Time narrowing around me.

And underneath all of it was the strange humiliation of the word itself: perimenopause. Such an ugly, clinical, almost embarrassing word. It sounded beige. Medical pamphlet-ish. The kind of thing whispered by women in orthopedic shoes while laughing too loudly over white wine. I hated saying it. Hated that it belonged to me now.

But there was relief in finally naming what was happening. Perimenopause. Not madness. Not a personality failure. Not proof that I was weak or unstable or impossible to love. For months I had been moving through my life feeling slightly haunted by myself. Learning there was a biological language beneath the chaos felt like someone quietly turning on a light in a dark room.

Still, the relief carried its own panic. Because if this was perimenopause, then this wasn’t something I could fix with better sleep or a yoga class or “self-care.” My body itself had become unfamiliar terrain. The chemistry I had relied on my entire adult life was shifting without permission.

And yet, beneath the wreckage, something else was emerging too. A diminished tolerance for performance. Less willingness to placate. Less interest in shrinking myself into digestible shapes. It was as if some chemical softening had burned away, leaving behind a harder, clearer outline of who I actually was.

It did not feel like madness exactly.

It felt like becoming someone new against my will.

Every few years, I reread East of Eden, and every few years it becomes a different book.

Not because Steinbeck has changed. Because I have.

The first time, I read it for Cathy. Later, for Cal. Later still, for Lee. Each time, a different sentence opened like a door I hadn’t noticed before. This is the private magic of rereading: the text remains fixed, but the reader is unstable. You return with new grief, new tenderness, new humiliations. You return with a different tolerance for hope.

I reread Jane Eyre this way. I reread Wuthering Heights. I reread Anna Karenina. These are not passive experiences. They are acts of recognition. I am not there for the plot—I know the plot. I am there for the interior weather. For the unbearable clarity with which these women feel. For the insistence that longing itself is a form of truth.

Jane refuses to become smaller to secure love. Catherine declares, without apology, that her soul is made of the same material as Heathcliff’s. Anna, even in her unraveling, refuses to return to a life that cannot contain the magnitude of her desire. These books do not warn against longing. They document its cost, and its inevitability.

I reread Maggie Nelson’s Bluets and Anne Carson’s Autobiography of Red for the same reason. Dorothy Allison’s Bastard Out of Carolina. Carmen Maria Machado’s In the Dream House. These books do not entertain me so much as rearrange me. They articulate emotional states I have not yet found language for. They remind me that shame and devotion often coexist. That identity is not fixed, but negotiated. That the self is not discovered, but assembled in fragments over time.

And yet, alongside these books, I reread others I am not supposed to love as much as I do.

Books where the heroine is secretly powerful. Books where someone dangerous recognizes her power before she does. Books where the emotional climax is not transcendence but recognition. Books with sex scenes.

These books are often dismissed as indulgent. As unserious. As “smut,” a word meant to collapse the complexity of both the text and the reader into something small and vaguely embarrassing.

But I have come to believe that what these books offer is not escape, but restoration.

There is a quiet pressure, especially among readers who consider themselves literary, to treat reading as a form of self-improvement. To read upward. To read rigorously. To read toward difficulty, ambiguity, prestige. To prove, through our reading, that we are intelligent, disciplined, worthy of respect.

But this framework misunderstands what reading is for.

Reading is not a performance. It is a relationship.

Some books sharpen the mind. They fracture experience into something strange and precise. Anne Carson does this. Maggie Nelson does this. They teach you to tolerate ambiguity. To remain inside questions that cannot be resolved.

Other books speak directly to the nervous system. They offer a fantasy not of domination, but of recognition. They imagine a world in which the heroine’s strangeness is not a liability, but the very thing that makes her essential. They offer the possibility that someone might see you fully and remain.

This is not a lesser pleasure. It is the same pleasure Charlotte Brontë offered. The same pleasure Tolstoy offered. The same pleasure Emily Brontë offered. The aesthetics differ. The emotional architecture does not.

To read widely—to move between Carson and Armentrout, Nelson and romance, memoir and myth—is not to betray literature. It is to honor the full range of human hunger. Some books help us understand the world. Others help us survive it. Others remind us that survival alone is not enough. That it is still possible, even now, to be chosen. To be known. To be loved without first making yourself smaller.

I no longer believe in the hierarchy of reading. I believe in rereading as a form of self-portraiture. I believe in reading that meets the reader where she is, not where she believes she ought to be. And I believe in defending the books that allow us to experience longing without apology.

Because longing, after all, is not unserious.

It is evidence of being alive.

green flags:

✔ A heroine who senses there is more to her, even if she can’t name it yet
✔ Someone who sees her clearly, sometimes before she sees herself
✔ Longing treated as meaningful, not something to outgrow
✔ A character who is changed by what she loves and what she survives
✔ Desire that reveals the truth instead of obscuring it
✔ Strength that emerges slowly, often through pain or endurance
✔ Love that makes the heroine more fully herself, not less
✔ A heroine allowed to remain complicated and whole
✔ Serious attention to the character’s inner life
✔ A point of no return—she cannot go back to who she was before
✔ Devotion that feels earned, not convenient
✔ Emotional stakes that feel as important as physical ones

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Or at least, nothing that would sound important if you tried to summarize it out loud.

A woman wanders New York, half-formed and hopeful (Frances Ha). Two strangers share a quiet loneliness in a hotel bar (Lost in Translation). A bus driver writes poems in a notebook and goes to work each day (Paterson). A group of teenagers spend one long day trying to save their record store (Empire Records). A boy grows up (Boyhood). A girl watches the world with equal parts contempt and longing (Ghost World). A woman reinvents herself by noticing small acts of kindness (Amélie). A feral love story blooms between two people who don’t belong anywhere else (Dinner in America). A man vibrates with invisible emotion (Punch-Drunk Love). A woman becomes herself through experience, curiosity, and refusal (Poor Things). A young woman burns down her own life and tries to understand why (Anora). Max Fischer stages elaborate plays in an attempt to make his life feel larger (Rushmore). Dawn Wiener survives adolescence through sheer, observant endurance (Welcome to the Dollhouse). Harold falls in love with someone who teaches him how to live (Harold and Maude).

This is not a ranked list. It’s more like a map of emotional territory I’ve lived inside.

For a long time, I didn’t realize these films had something in common. I only knew that when I watched them, I felt less alone. I felt seen in a way that had nothing to do with biography and everything to do with attention.

I have spent most of my life as an observer.

As a child, I watched the adults around me carefully, trying to understand what was spoken and what was withheld. I grew up in a house shaped by forces I didn’t have language for yet—trauma, service, silence, love expressed sideways. My father carried things home from war that never fully left him. My mother carried the natural world inside her like a second nervous system. I learned early that people contained entire universes beneath their visible surfaces.

Movies like these seemed to understand that.

They didn’t rush to explain people. They didn’t reduce them to their actions. They lingered. They allowed characters to exist in uncertainty, contradiction, becoming.

Later, when I started to write, I realized I was trying to do the same thing. Writing, especially poetry, is, at its core, a form of noticing. It pays attention to what others overlook. It resists resolution. It makes meaning out of fragments.

The first time I watched Paterson, I felt something unlock inside me. Here was a film that treated the interior life not as incidental, but as central. Here was a man whose creative life unfolded quietly, without audience or applause, and whose existence was no less meaningful for its smallness. It affirmed something I had always suspected but rarely seen reflected: that attention itself was a form of devotion.

When I watched Frances Ha, I recognized the strange, suspended years of my own early adulthood—the years of working jobs that paid the rent but not the soul, of building an identity through trial and misstep, of believing in a future that had not yet revealed its shape. There is a particular vulnerability in being someone who believes in art, in meaning, in purpose, without yet having external confirmation that those beliefs will sustain you.

I see that vulnerability now in the young people I work with. In my work in nonprofit spaces, especially with children and teenagers, I am often aware that I am witnessing people in the earliest stages of becoming themselves. I recognize the uncertainty, the watchfulness, the fragile hope. I recognize the way belonging can change the trajectory of a life.

Empire Records understood that belonging doesn’t have to be perfect to be transformative. Dinner in America understood that sometimes the person who saves you is someone the world has already discarded. Anora understood that reinvention is often born from rupture. Poor Things understood that becoming yourself sometimes requires rejecting the scripts handed to you.

These films do not offer fantasy. They offer recognition.

What I return to, again and again, is their willingness to honor interiority. They trust that the quiet moments are not empty. They trust that emotional lives unfold invisibly, accumulating weight and meaning long before they become legible to others.

This mirrors what I have learned in my own life. Working in mission-driven spaces, writing poetry, raising a child, building a life shaped as much by intention as by circumstance—I have come to understand that meaning rarely arrives fully formed. It emerges slowly, through attention. Through presence. Through the willingness to remain open.

There is a scene at the end of Lost in Translation where nothing definitive is said, and yet everything is understood. That is how these films operate. They do not resolve life. They accompany it.

I think I love these films because they affirm something essential: that there is dignity in becoming. That there is beauty in uncertainty. That the people who watch closely, who feel deeply, who exist slightly outside the dominant rhythm of the world, are not lost. They are simply paying attention.

And attention, I have learned, is where meaning begins.

What about you? What are your favorite movies? What should I watch? Thank you for reading.

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I get up at 5 a.m. now. My internal clock is locked in; no matter what time I go to bed, my eyes open at the same hour. It means I turn into a pumpkin by 8 p.m., but I’m okay with that because it buys me almost two hours of solitude every single day. I need it. When I don’t get it, the bitter resentment is real.

Most mornings, I move my body a little, then sit with my logbook, my five-year diary, and a page or two of journaling. I drink one very large cup of coffee and do my New York Times puzzles—Connections, Wordle, Tiles. It’s a small, steady ritual. A way of orienting myself to the day.

But this week, those mornings have been swallowed by images. Protest after protest in Minneapolis, my old neighborhood. Video after video of ICE murdering an innocent woman—say her name, Renee Good—of families torn apart. I can’t look away. I can’t stop crying. I feel helpless and enraged and afraid. I am so afraid.

And then my sleepy eight-year-old finds me and crawls into my lap. His face wide open, searching mine, as he asks me to explain the world. This week he asked, “Can you get into trouble on your birthday?” A perfect, tender question from my beautiful boy. I hate that I have to answer it. The world doesn’t care if it’s your birthday, or if you just dropped your six-year-old off at school, or if you’re trying to bear witness for your neighbors while your dog waits in the back seat. You can still be shot in the face.

So what do we do? How do we keep going?

I’m trying to read history—to look for the stories of everyday bravery, the kind that has always been required and is required of us now. I’m trying to gain perspective. I’m trying to stop weeping into my phone and actually be present, to live inside my body and my life and my love. It’s hard.

But maybe this is the work: to keep showing up awake. To tell the truth. To hold our children without lying to them, and without handing them despair. To remember that courage has never been loud all the time—sometimes it looks like getting up at 5 a.m., drinking your coffee, putting one foot in front of the other, and refusing to let your heart close. To stay human. To stay tender. To keep going anyway.

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After a year when I took 123 flights for work, I didn’t go many places this time—and it turns out that was exactly right. I learned that proximity can be a kind of medicine. That a life doesn’t have to be big to be full.

Some of my favorite moments were small, repeatable ones.

I volunteered as a way to get out of myself. I took long walks, often without a destination, just moving my body through the same streets and noticing how they changed with the seasons. The dog park became my new Cheers—the place where everyone knows my name and is glad I came. I read more and scrolled less, which felt less like discipline and more like relief.

I made 300 pieces of art. Some were serious, some were experiments, some were just me showing up and putting something on the page or the table. I put together 52 jigsaw puzzles—one for each week of the year—which feels like a metaphor I don’t need to explain. I got a giant cargo bike that makes my chest expand with joy every time I ride it, like my body saying yes before my brain can catch up.

Somewhere in all of that, I published a book. Tuscaloosa Grief Factory went out into the world—quietly, the way this year did. It’s a book for mothers, and for anyone who has a mother, and writing it felt like placing something heavy and tender down where others might find it and say, yes, that too.

I watched a lot of little league. I reveled in watching Max find a spark—watching him light up, watching him try, watching him belong. Grant cooked about 6,000 meals for us (no official count, but it feels accurate), and so much of the year was shaped by the quiet devotion of being fed and feeding each other.

I read over 100 books, entirely by mood. I wandered across genres—fiction, nonfiction, whatever called to me in the moment. Reading felt less like productivity and more like companionship, a way of keeping myself company without needing to be impressive about it.

This wasn’t a year of big announcements or far-flung destinations. It was a year of repetition, attention, and staying. Of letting life be local. Of choosing presence over momentum.

As I look toward next year, my hope is simple: to be more consistent here. To keep showing up, even imperfectly, and to keep sharing the things that feel true and worth holding.

If you subscribed this year—thank you. Truly. And if you’ve been here reading quietly for a while, thank you too. Your presence, your attention, your willingness to read alongside me has meant more than I can easily say.

I’m grateful for all of it—for the ordinary days, the steady love, and the way this year asked less of me and gave me more than I expected.

If you’re a mother—or have a mother—Tuscaloosa Grief Factory is here: [link]

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I’m so excited to be co-teaching Experiments in Poetry again with my husband and longtime collaborator, Grant Gerald Miller—just like we used to do for years back in Portland.

Hosted by Olympia, WA’s Poet Laureate Ocean, Experiments in Poetry is a two-hour, hands-on lab for language. Together, we will cut, collage, and re-wire words—trying constraint games, erasures, found text, and quick prompts that spark surprise.

No experience needed. Just bring a pen, your curiosity, and a willingness to break the poem open with us.

As you may know, I’m A.M. O’Malley, a poet, educator, and community arts organizer. I’m the author of Tuscaloosa Grief Factory and Expecting Something Else, and my work explores memory, class, and resilience. I’ve spent many years as a teaching artist, leading writing workshops in prisons, schools, and community spaces across the country.

Grant Gerald Miller is a poet, editor, and photographer whose work blurs image and text to examine place, intimacy, and inheritance. His writing and photography have appeared in journals and exhibitions throughout the U.S., and he co-leads creative writing workshops focused on experimentation and collaboration.

Register online!
FREE FREE FREE.

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Lately, I feel a steady, low hum of rage. It’s not the kind that flares and burns out, but the kind that stays—like background radiation—at the state of the world. The cruelty baked into our systems. The endless noise of greed and indifference. The way everything feels like it’s falling apart, and somehow we’re all supposed to keep showing up to meetings, to smile, to post something cheerful.

My rage comes with grief, too—the grief of remembering that it didn’t have to be this way. We could have chosen care over profit. We could have tended to each other, to the land. But here we are, numbed by headlines, scrolling, trying to make sense of it all.

What keeps me sane—if that’s the right word—is making little collages. Cutting and gluing scraps of color and paper, rearranging fragments into something that makes sense only to me. There’s something holy in the smallness of it: scissors, glue, texture, torn edges. A world I can control. A world where things fit again. I tear apart what’s broken and make something new. It doesn’t fix the world, but it quiets the storm in me long enough to keep going.

On Martin Luther King Jr. Day, 1989, my grandfather went to bed early after watching a PBS special about sea mammals. He ate a can of sardines and an entire sleeve of saltines. My grandmother was away with one of my aunts, who was about to give birth to her first child. He didn’t lock the door.

Five hours later he woke up covered in blood. The rose-patterned blankets had been folded back with eerie neatness. Someone had beaten him with a pipe. His forearms—raised to protect his head—were shattered. His skull fractured in two places, his jaw in three, his front teeth on the beige carpet. He had lost a liter of blood.

I was nine years old, living two hours away with my newly sober mother. When she told me, something dark and hot rushed up my face. “I’m coming with you,” I said with a force beyond the scale of my small body. An hour later she buckled me into the car and drove to the hospital where my grandfather lay in a medically induced coma.

I had spent much of my first seven years in my their care. My father didn’t want me and my mother was too drunk to keep me, so my grandparents became my world. In the 1980s they semi-retired to Sun City, Arizona, a sleepy retirement community where the biggest thrill was a root-beer float at the pool. My grandfather was a mammoth of a man. He’d dive into the deep end and swim the entire length under water like a great blue whale. He was my whale, and I loved him.

Even after the attack, he was still my whale—wounded, surfacing, but alive.

The police never caught his attacker. Behind my grandparents’ bungalow they found a duffel bag stuffed with chains, duct tape, a still camera, a camcorder, rolls of film, and several “snuff” magazines. Investigators believed he’d been randomly targeted—possibly watched for days—and that the attackers had expected my grandmother to be home too. Something had scared them off before they could finish what they’d planned.

My grandfather survived, but he was never quite the same. After his release from the hospital, he and my grandmother moved into our trailer in northern Arizona. I helped her dress him, his heavy arm draped over my sparrow-thin shoulder as he stepped shakily into his pants. I spooned melting ice cream between his wired jaws, walked him around the block at dusk, saw him wink and waggle his eyebrows to hide his shame. At night he’d rattle the trailer walls with screams, my grandmother soothing him: “John, you’re alright. You’re okay.”

By sixteen, my mother was clean but had married a dry-drunk husband who cornered me, groped me, told me my feet were big enough to ski on. I hid under XXXL T-shirts from Goodwill. Stayed at school until the janitor kicked me out. Wrote a letter to Grandpa saying I didn’t want to live anymore.

A week later a letter arrived in his block printing. He didn’t mention my wish to die. He wrote about going back to Ireland in his seventies, visiting his brother’s grave, seeing his first child born, his first airplane ride. He told me he admired my grasp of language, that I could be a writer.

That was his way of telling me to hold on.

When I was seventeen, I left home again and stepped off a Greyhound bus at 11 p.m. He was on the platform, hat tilted at its signature angle. Something heavy fell off my shoulders. We fell into an easy rhythm: chili dogs and root-beer floats on weekends, old movies, library runs, stick-shift lessons.

He was a polyglot and an autodidact—French, Irish, Latin, Spanish, Russian, German, English. He’d joined the Navy, served in WWII. A Roman Catholic who quit Mass when it stopped being in Latin. He and my grandmother had ten children; three sons died young. He traveled as a salesman, read three books a week, sang at every opportunity.

But the trauma inside his skull kept rippling outward. One afternoon at work I turned a corner at Barnes & Noble and found him in an armchair reading The Greatest Generation, wearing only his ratty velour robe and underwear. His slippers sat under another chair. My grandmother’s voice broke when I called her. “He went to check the mail three hours ago. I’ve been sick with worry.” Weeks later he came home with $200 worth of sardines. Weeks after that, a new car. That was when his children intervened.

Research now links severe head trauma to a greater risk of dementia years later. My grandfather spent the last years of his life as a confused child with occasional fits of grown man rage.

The last time I saw him he lay fully clothed on his bed, tapping his feet against the wooden footboard in rapid staccato. “AnnMaarie!” His face lit up. “Did you know that when light travels from air into water it slows down, bending toward the normal line? That’s called refraction.”

I sat with him, held his hand, and listened to the tap-tap-tapping of his foot. He was still teaching me things—physics this time instead of languages—still bending light, still my whale beneath the surface.

When I think of my grandfather now, I see him under water, enormous and graceful, holding his breath and gliding from one end of the pool to the other. I see him after the attack, leaning on my shoulder, his smile jagged but determined. I see his block-printed letter telling me I could be a writer.

His life bent, but it did not break. Mine bent too. And yet, even through violence, shame, and the years of tap-tap-tapping decline, he kept handing me back a fragment of light.

That’s what refraction is: a change of direction when you enter a denser medium.

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In the months before I left home for good, I tested my wings in smaller ways. My mom helped me rent one apartment, then another, during my senior year of high school. I got into surprisingly little trouble, though I was mostly alone. I still remember standing in that first apartment when the news of Princess Diana’s death came through the radio. Mother Teresa died the same week, but no one seemed to notice.

Those apartments were strange sanctuaries. I felt excommunicated, shunned for being an object of desire. But at least I was safe. I learned the small lessons of independence—don’t leave onions in the trash too long, the whole place will reek. I learned the freedom of solitude. And I learned how it feels to be needed, as friends began slipping through my door when they needed a place to hide.

My friend Steph and I hitched rides to the Sturgis motorcycle rally that year. Two teenage girls could always find a biker willing to take us the twenty minutes from Spearfish. The Hells Angels had an entire motel to themselves; the police usually sent runaways home, but that night we looked like we belonged. We both pierced our tongues, clunky barbells clanking against our teeth. When her parents found out, she came in tears to stay with me. She painted a bare tree on my kitchen cabinet and we slept head-to-foot on my twin bed. I don’t think my mother ever noticed my pierced tongue. No one noticed much about me in those hollow last months.

School began to feel optional. I would slip all but my art class and English and then show up for yearbook committee. Eventually, I failed all my classes. My mom brought me home again. But you can’t come home again. I stomped the halls with force daring my stepfather to try anything, which he did. I wasn’t as tough as I thought.

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First and most joy-inducing for me. You can now buy my books directly from the writer! If you do, I’ll throw in some art and won’t charge shipping. Just Venmo me at @AnnMarie-Miller or Paypal @annmarieomalley@gmail.com. Books from me are a flat $20. Please include your mailing address and name if it isn’t clear from your payment method. Thank you so much for supporting you "local” poet.

There are days when joy doesn’t announce itself. It doesn’t arrive in grand gestures or tidy packages. Instead, it slips into the edges of ordinary life, asking only to be noticed.

On a park bench, two teenagers share a keyboard, their fingers fumbling at first and then, astonishingly, finding harmony. Across the lawn, a mismatched group—some in sweatpants, some in work slacks—move through tai chi poses, their arms rising and falling with uneven grace, like waves learning to sync with the tide.

A dog lopes past, tongue dangling in a crooked grin, the kind of smile no human can quite replicate. On the hill nearby, toddlers roll down in a chorus of giggles, grass stains spreading like badges of joy across their clothes.

Wildflowers open unapologetically at the park’s edge, unruly splashes of yellow and violet. And in the corners of fences and window frames, new spider webs shimmer—tiny cathedrals spun overnight, catching the morning light.

Joy spotting is nothing more than paying attention. The world is forever offering these gifts, quiet reminders that delight is still possible, still abundant, still ours for the noticing.

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That was the year I met Alex—the only openly gay man in Vermillion. He wore Hawaiian shirts and offered me a kindness I couldn’t yet believe I deserved. He said I sang like an angel. Those days I burned through everyone else like acid, like lava, like a flame thrower.

I fell in love with a boy who wanted my friend instead. At a party, I nearly fainted beside him as he sang along to Wilco: she’s a jar with a heavy lid. Unrequited lust was a religion I practiced nightly.

And then—the first funeral. The first wax face. Alex’s sweet boyfriend, Derik. He drove a red Miata and wore a stiff little toupee. A blood clot stopped his heart on a bright spring hike.

I saw Alex collapse across the coffin. Something inside me shifted—relief, almost, at the sight of someone else carrying grief as heavy as mine.

Now twenty years have passed. I try to find them, but there are only shadows and ash.

Alex has vanished.

Others, I cannot even name.

If I could speak across time, what would I say? I think I owe you money for the phone bill I skipped out on. Yes, I stole that bracelet, and yes, you taught me to make soup when no one else would.

I was twenty, and I didn’t yet know that what happened to me was rape. All I knew was the fissure inside me, a crack the size of a grown man who told my mother it was my fault—for wearing nightgowns in the living room.

My first funeral taught me that grief could level a person, that love could be ripped away for no reason, and that some pain looks like wax when it hardens.

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I was seventeen when I rode out of my not-quite-hometown on a Greyhound bus. Hometown wasn’t the right word—it was just the place where childhood ended. What do you call being from nowhere?

My mother drove me to the gas station where the bus loaded and unloaded dog-eared people. She followed along the ridge in her car so I could see her one more time, my baby brothers’ feet sticking up from their car seats in the back.

I pressed my face against the glass, watching the prairie pass, convinced the script of my life had already ended. Another word for lost? I was a girl with a leaking tank of toxic rage under her skin, riding into the great elsewhere on a Greyhound bus.

I landed in my grandparents’ basement. Nights became parties, drinks became bruises—on my arms, my knees, my chin. I found boys, then men: one who threw me on the bed, one who threw my purse out the car window.

Eighteen, then nineteen. I drove to the ocean and bled on the beach. My grandmother sent me a birthday card with nineteen dollars inside. I stepped over chalk outlines of bodies to get to my bookstore job, floating like a wraith among the stacks.

I crisscrossed the country—Phoenix, Los Angeles, Seattle, Wisconsin, La Crosse, South Dakota, Portland, Sturgeon Lake. My skin became a map of what I refused, what I allowed, what I wanted too much.

One desperate fall, I wrote to my father—more stranger than parent—claiming I’d been accepted to college so he’d send me a thousand dollars. I tried to drive to Vermillion to start over but broke down halfway. Virgil and Shirley, an elderly couple from Spencer, South Dakota, picked up the purple-haired girl with the lip ring and carried me all the way to a new front step. They are long gone now, but in my memory they live as kindness.

That last year of being underage, I discovered The Pixies and sang Surfer Rosa in the bathtub. I learned the fire of Thai chilies on my face lasts all night when there’s no Google and no one to help. I watched Run Lola Run and dyed my hair blood-red with Manic Panic.

Pain was colossal, nearly as large as grief. I carried my Pentax K1000 everywhere but had no way to print the film. I drank Southern Comfort until I vomited into snowbanks, blacked out, wept for “no reason.” I rolled in alleyways in a 1950s prom dress, bare beneath the satin.

I stole a bracelet and was fired by the best boss I ever had. Sick with myself, I threw the bracelet into a wet alley. Weeks later, a man named Harry, older than my father, called me “kinetic beauty” and asked me to pose naked. I stood frozen for twenty minutes before saying no.

I cheated on a boyfriend in jail with a drummer eleven years older. When the boyfriend found out, he set our apartment on fire, singeing his eyebrows while trying to save the kitten we’d just adopted.

That was my early twenties: a lit fuse, a restless body, a girl still in flight from Nowhere. I lived as though there was a timer strapped to my chest, daring the world to watch me explode. I mistook annihilation for freedom. I mistook hunger for love. I mistook surviving for living.

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Clare Leslie Hall’s Broken Country is the kind of novel that gets into your bloodstream. It opens with a gunshot and never lets go—not because it is loud or frantic, but because it moves with the relentless pull of a tide you can’t swim against. I loved it. It broke me. And still, I couldn’t stop turning the pages.

Set between 1955 and 1968, the book shifts effortlessly between a murder trial and the tangled history that led to it. Beth, our narrator, is a woman divided—between the memory of her first love, Gabriel, and the steady devotion of her husband, Frank. Loss hangs over them all, most sharply in the death of Beth and Frank’s young son, Bobby, a grief that stains every conversation, every silence. When Gabriel returns after a decade away—bringing with him a son whose age mirrors Bobby’s—the past crashes into the present with devastating force.

Hall’s prose is spare but saturated with feeling. The English countryside is rendered in strokes so vivid you can almost smell the damp grass, yet it’s the emotional landscapes that take your breath away. Love here is not simple. It’s layered with class divides, broken promises, and the unrelenting weight of guilt.

What made it propulsive for me was not just the twin mysteries—the truth behind Bobby’s death and the murder trial—but the way every revelation reshaped my understanding of these characters. Hall writes with a precision that turns each page into both a blow and a balm.

By the end, Broken Country left me raw, hollowed out, but also grateful. It’s rare to find a book that is this unflinching about how love and loss can exist side by side, how we can be both broken and moving forward at the same time. This one will stay with me for a long, long while.

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Happiness isn’t a trophy you put on a shelf, or a state you finally reach and never leave. It isn’t the flat line of contentment we’re told to chase. Happiness, for me, is movement. It’s a state of well-being that hums and shifts, fragile and resilient all at once.

This has been hard won.

I grew up in chaos. My childhood was marked by empty cupboards and nights when the heat didn’t work. Housing was temporary, and my sense of safety—like the roof over my head—was always in question. When I think back, I remember the sound of arguments through thin walls, broken glass in my mother’s hair, the ache of wanting things I couldn’t have, the way hunger sharpens your edges.

But I also remember how, even then, wonder would find me.

I was the kid who could spend an hour watching ants carrying crumbs three times their size across a cracked sidewalk. I was the kid who picked up the smoothest stone or the most crooked stick and felt like I had found treasure. That instinct—to marvel—saved me.

I grew up, and I made a life for myself. Piece by piece, like building a nest from scraps.

I took myself on a backpacking trip to Asia, carrying only what I could fit on my back, learning to order food by pointing and smiling, sleeping in guesthouses where the air smelled like incense and frying garlic. I celebrated New Year’s on a beach in Chile, the sky exploding with fireworks, strangers passing around bottles of champagne, the ocean licking at our ankles.

I made piles of art—stacks of drawings and paintings, scraps of fabric stitched into something resembling beauty. I published two books. I found love. I had a bright, happy child, who laughs like the sound of water hitting rocks.

And I did all of this without anyone paying my bills, without a safety net to catch me. Every plane ticket, every tube of paint, every bag of groceries—I found a way to cover it. That self-reliance has shaped me, but it’s not where my happiness lives.

What I was blessed with was an ability to experience joy in the smallest of places.

This week, at a cabin, a hummingbird hovered three inches from my face, its wings a blur, its eyes sharp and curious. That’s happiness: that brief, unasked-for visitation.

Happiness is the urge to look up at the sky when it blooms pink at dusk, to follow the contrail of an airplane and wonder who is up there and where they’re going. It’s buying the bright orange bowl or the ridiculous patterned socks because they make me smile to myself.

I collect stones and pinecones and line them on my windowsill—a private museum of tiny wonders. Happiness is sitting at the base of a giant sequoia, pressing my back against its bark, feeling its age hum through me. It’s the warmth of my child’s hand in mine. The smell of coffee on a cold morning.

Ross Gay writes in The Book of Delights:

“Joy is the mostly invisible, the underground union between us, you and me… We might call it sorrow, but we might call it a union, one that, once we notice it, once we bring it into the light, might become flower and food. Might be joy.”

I think about that a lot—that joy and sorrow are tangled together underground, their roots entwined. That happiness might sprout from grief, or that what I call happiness is really the noticing of the connection between it all.

Some people say happiness doesn’t exist, or that the pursuit of it is foolish. But I think the pursuit is the point. Every one of us, regardless of age, race, religion, or bank account, aches for it. We craft little strategies, bargain with ourselves, take detours and shortcuts and long, winding roads—all for the hope of reaching happiness.

For me, happiness isn’t an arrival. It’s a thousand small arrivals: a bird’s wings beating inches from my face, a child’s laugh splitting the air, the quiet knowledge that I built a life—messy and imperfect, but mine—that can hold all of it.