I’m not sure whether it’s all in my head that Ani the cat is experiencing dementia. I question, also, whether experiencing dementia makes one demented. She’s 17 now, the first fur baby my husband and I adopted as an engaged couple. Russell proposed to me on March 19, 2008, with a song that he wrote…
Momster
Resetting the time machine
My husband and I drove to Atlanta in a time machine to see Marilyn Manson at the Tabernacle on May 20, 2025. By that, I mean I went to recreate my experience of following the band’s first headlining tour for the band’s 1994 release Portrait of an American Family, when I was a teenager and…
The MP3 queen
Jarrett places his notebook and pen on the tabletop, and a bald man in a blue, buttoned-down collared shirt and shorts approaches. “Got your laptop?” the bald man asks. “I had a lot going on this week; I didn’t get any Mp3s done,” Jarrett says as another man approaches and hears the news. “I’ll catch…
66 degrees and cloudy
Breathe in, feel the air over the water. Breathe out, hear the crash of the waves against a concrete shoreline. My go-to breathing place in my mind is on top of a rock in the winds on a cloudy day about 73 degrees and cloudy and breezy like fall weather in the northeastern United States….
blame the flower moon
It was Mother’s Day in 2002 when I called home and Mom wasn’t there. Dad said she took my little sister and left. “What do you mean?” I asked, genuinely confused. He told me her clothes were gone. He didn’t know where she went. I was living in Baltimore, Maryland, attending University of Maryland Baltimore…
how i spent my twentieth birthday
Mom held my hand as I regained consciousness in the emergency room, but her blurry body moved as the doctor rushed to extubate me. My throat felt like one of those turtles with a plastic straw embedded in its nose. Mom backed off and my empty hand fell to the side of the hospital bed….
Estoy muriendo
I ran around, arms outstretched, singing, “I’m flying” when I hosted an “end of the world” party in my backyard after graduating eighth grade. I invited boys who brought a bottle of Jack Daniels whiskey. A panic attack turned my giddy flights into drunken cries in Spanish. “Estoy muriendo,” I called out, depressed, angry, drunk….
flying through middle school
My daughter flew three times across the stage tonight, and it reminded me of my middle school “flying” incident. My daughter and I arrived at the high school 25 minutes early. We parked and waited for the eighth-grade awards ceremony to begin. Neither one of us knew what awards would be given. “It doesn’t matter,…
Cutting class
The text came in as the water on the stove began to boil. I swiped away the timer set for five minutes from the lockscreen and read my daughter’s message. It was 12:48 p.m. on a school day. “I don’t wanna be here bruh” with an emoji of praying hands. “Come get my ahh I…
return to facebook
I killed myself four months ago. That is, I deleted my Facebook account and waited in purgatory for friends to text or notice I was gone. I disconnected permanently all the data associated with the profile I had created in 2007, the year I met my husband. That deceased account held in its memory the…