He was at the sink washing dishes ... 

Praise be. 

Promise to not assume that this is the one and only truth about my feelings for Liz. I had this recurring dream of me devouring her.

I can show you the double-rimmed chain-netted concrete court where I taught myself it was okay to aspire.

 I walk around the trailer park that has been dropped on top of a small hill like it’s just bird shit on a windshield. The boy with ‘Mama Tried’ tattooed underneath his eyes and ‘Country Fried’ inscribed above them got shot through the heart in the smallest trailer in Hogwaller. 

From the long wooden balcony, from the house that overlooks a forest that is almost bluegreen in springtime and a witchy red during... more

What people don't tell you about grieving is that you'll spend months or years or maybe the rest of your life in this nebulous zone where half the time you love everyone in your life and the other half those same people repel you and you can't always tell which mood you'll be in at any given moment. Even the most grounded people become frenetic.

I saw her at a campus TGIF three weeks ago. Talking Gender Issues Fridays. It’s a weekly chat-session where students come to look at the week’s current events through a gender lens. The campus used to be single-sex, but now we call it gender inclusive. We were going out of business; there are only so many radical lesbian 17 year olds, and most of them already get into Smith. 

On Friday at school, we were all vibrating, so nervous for what came next. We barely listened in class because what did it matter? We wouldn’t... more

Imagine if McGregor were a woman, I’d wonder throughout the day, as I sifted through the barrage of emails from my boss, all his reminders to cc him the next time I sent this or that, the notifications that he’d be leaving early again as I stayed late. Imagine McGregor in an office. Imagine him…or her, aged a bit past her prime. How would she prep for a fight? What would it be like to be a woman like her?

The truth was I knew exactly what was happening, how the possibility of power had clouded my judgment. In bed at night, I thought about putting a stop to all of it and just playing the season out, but I couldn’t shake my contempt for Parker. It wasn’t about baseball anymore, not in the slightest. It had taken just a few days for me to turn the war of aesthetics into a full-fledged revolution.

This is later, after the White House, after he has returned to San Clemente. He has shed the name Nixon, that iron albatross around his neck, and instead now calls himself Milhous. He savors the sound of it on his tongue, rolling it around like a sculptor molding clay on a pottery wheel. He speaks it like an incantation. It does not sound like the past; it instead glimmers faintly with the potential of new life.

“YOU IDIOT!” I scream, but only in my head. For 25 years now I haven’t been able to speak my mind, especially not to a stranger. Enrolling in Glenda’s Eagle Training course is supposed to help, but for now I’m still a grounded hatchling teetering my way through week three of the seven-week program.

“And there’s got to be some guidelines for this.”
“That’s not a bad idea,” Lionel said. “So what are they? You just let me know and I’ll follow them. By God, I will.”
I didn’t have much for him. I sputtered some nonsense about my side of the refrigerator and if he saw Doritos in the pantry, especially the Cool Ranch kind in the blue bag, he should just assume that they were mine. But that was pretty much it.

When my partner finds a stone she likes, she shares its burden with me. She never seems to have a place to keep them.

You notice you’re being followed. Headlights in the rearview mirror—though they all look the same, these seem somehow familiar, like a pair of eyes you’ve seen in a dream.

They snort cocaine in the bathroom and talk about transferring to Pratt or Parsons or Columbia. They talk about how they’ll become famous designers or fashion models or authors in New York City. 

The more time spent at the sunglasses booth, the more willing you are to endure pain and suffering just to feel human again.

Peter wakes up first and texts me, hi baby, hi boo, hi honey pie.

And it was at that moment—seeing that light and realizing that other people were together in the world in that very same light while he was in an alley watching himself on TV—that he finally felt something: an overwhelming, honest and simple sense of sadness that felt like a beautiful release.

The trouble began with the intern’s new coffee pot.

“Look,” Daniel paused and took a sip of water, “I was going to introduce you to my mother. And I realized I wasn’t ready. And then I thought, when will I be ready? When would it be a good time?

What was that movie where the kids were all deaf, you asked suddenly. They put on a performance. They sang Rang-a-rang! Clang-a-clang-clang—something like that? 

The puppies are back at WBC, and I’m third in line. 

The machine sleeps in the corner. Its dreams are projected onto large white walls where we watch them and record our reactions.