I know brain damage.

When I was 22, my mother was excited for the first day at my new job, but not so much that she couldn’t wait to tell me about the demon that had attacked her in the night. 

Priorities.

They held

Sometimes I stop talking to my boyfriend for no reason.

I didn’t know how long it’d been since he’d last eaten. I also knew he needed water.

The last night of the trip, you stay with one of his friends in Vallecitos, New Mexico.  

Soon sunlight would be replaced by nighttime.  I felt this, the same way my grandma could feel the rain coming on.  

I don't notice anything when the television is on.  A bomb could go off in my kitchen and I wouldn't notice the wreckage until the next commercial break.

We know who has her period and who is still waiting. If a girl takes her backpack to the bathroom or sits pool-side in swim class, she has her period. So do the girls who—when they ask Can I go to the bathroom? and the teacher says, No—say But I really need to go.

What I do know: Janet Wellington made eye contact with me in the YMCA pool. I also never had a chance to look my mother in the eye and say goodbye. 

On a cold and rainy Sunday afternoon when I didn’t want to walk outside: a box proclaiming to be synthetic urine for sale in Nirvana, next to Louie’s Tux Shop and across from C.J. Banks in the Muncie Mall, behind the counter where they sell glass pipes blown to resemble tiny carrots and octopi, next to a rack of Rasta wigs.

I turn 30 next month but I’m no longer afraid because I read somewhere that time is an illusion. I am purchasing an anti-aging moisturizer, just in case. It’s expensive, but money is no object. I’m worth four figures.

I’ve been tasked with digitizing my father’s slides, a hundred or so he inherited from his aunt.

And yet, when it came to hitting a baseball, I always liked my odds.

The solidity of contact is registered first in the hands. The knowledge radiates outward from there. 

“You can’t pee here,” Brendan tells me as I climb inside the doorway leading into the belly of the Green Monster. What he means is that you shouldn’t pee here. Manny Ramirez did once, during the

Wrigley had put out a study claiming that gum chewing increased performance on assessments and my elementary school took it as gospel, sending letters home asking for us to bring it on test days. Marshall brought Big League Chew. 

When I am young I wish I were invisible so that the white boys will stop screaming, “Go back where you came from.”

Kinsella, Annie: Cinnamon-haired romantic lead in Field of Dreams. Played with zeal by Amy Madigan. Equal parts romantic and pragmatic, she raised a farm and a daughter, vanquished small-town Nazism, and offered unconditional support to her crazy-ass ghost-loving husband.

You cannot think of baseball without thinking of your grandpa. The two forever tangled in each’s DNA.

Later that evening, Ken Caminiti died alone in a bug infested Bronx drug house.

“I’ll be right up,” I said, seeking the comfort of the remaining parental arms. But no, he told me, “wait until morning.”

The bracelet tells someone where she is, honey. But it doesn’t tell you why.

Sitting still can be tough on a body, just as the shifting earth, and plunging and thawing temperatures can be hard on a pipe.

I didn’t realize, when we were falling in love, that her father was a pathological extrovert.

There is a ceramic pot full of my mother’s cigarette butts on the front steps of my childhood home, hot-glued back together by my father after one of our cats saw a chipmunk, and went for it.