Confessions don’t make good stories. 

 It doesn't take much for a curve to become a coil, for a bridge to become a cage.

That winter my mother takes me to her country, a little place on the equator I had not yet seen.

Love Story (1970, dir. Arthur Hiller)

It’s comical that the rich kid with a building at Harvard named after his family is a hockey bruiser while the baker’s daughter not good enough to marry

We wiped down, scraped, rearranged, shook out, swept, mopped, vacuumed, stripped, waxed, sealed.

If you are flammable and have legs, you are never blocking a fire exit.

It is not the anniversary of her death that wrecks me but a day some weeks before it. It is the anniversary of the day I sat on my porch, barefoot, polyester graduation trappings in hand, and thought to call her but then did not because I was too busy. 

I was birthed alongside a digested McMuffin evacuated from a parallel pipe—my mother’s last pre-labor meal. She opted for a natural birth, taking only an aspirin, never uttering a complaint.

I lift my knees to walk in flippers, grab a glass of water in the kitchen before high-stepping my way back to the living room where Joe and I have dinner in front of the television.

It’s getting harder and harder to shave my pussy, let alone the tight star of my asshole.

You would be forgiven for thinking Vegas is not the place for you. 

The first thing you need to know about being a Disney is that you should avoid letting anyone know that you are one.

You gather one brush, one can of paint, one room, and one hand tethered to attention.

I began my life in a trailer. A black and white shaky construction plunked on a corner some farmer had carved out of an old cow pasture. One silver maple with a rotten core clung to life. I watched the world outside through drafty windows and remember the shade slapping the sash when the wind picked up. 

I used to think my father was a baseball card.

In the afternoons, I stripped off my boyish clothing and watched back to back episodes of Saved by the Bell, feeding my unhealthy obsession for Kelly KAPOWski. The perky brunette with her slim ankles and come-hither hair tosses was the ultimate teenage bombshell. 

When we first met in the early ‘90s, we had stage names. She went by Kali and I went by Olivia. 

For the third time in as many months, I received an automated email from ebay, stating, “An item you’ve been watching has been relisted.” 

What can be said about this game that hasn’t already been said about Christmas morning? Better than that. The first day of a summer break. Better than that. Evening fireworks on the 4th of July. That, too. Better than all. A graduation, an engagement, a marriage, a festival, a celebration. An outdoor fete to anything.

Vin Scully alone in a broadcast booth, talking by himself, talking to us. Assuring the world that all’s well in Dodgeralia. Calm. Composed. At home, in a park he’ll depart at season’s end. Handpicking his words, off endless branches, branches’ branches, in a deep memory he builds, maintains over many years, keeps polished like a jewel.

It is a game of beautiful pauses, pauses that take up so much of the game’s duration that calling them “pauses” seems inaccurate; the moments of action, rather, are what interrupt the long stretches of inaction.

Ten years removed from my youth baseball experience, I find myself in a car with four baseball-obsessed college buddies, headed toward the Hubert H. Humphrey Metrodome to see the Minnesota Twins play a mid-September game against the Detroit Tigers. I have no idea why I’m here.

I wanted to focus on the real victims, unthinkable crimes against them, but I kept coming back to those batting cages, to that uniform in Coach B's house.

I wanted to quit, and was too young to realize that I could just quit anything.

The trees all richly clad, yet devoid of pride, fat with birds and the season, have called back days and years for the history they are giving me.