My first uprooting took place in 1998. It was autumn in Jamaica, and putting those words together in a sentence feels as strange as I felt when I lived there. When I was six years old, my parents pulled my younger brother and me from the suburban township of Maplewood, New Jersey and relocated us to the coastal city of Kingston, Jamaica.
(nonfiction)
Sometimes, silence is the way oppression learns to speak fluently in every language. When we were told to sit still, we didn’t just lose movement—we lost voice.
(nonfiction)
I don’t know how to hold onto the warmth of the image of Ray picking up the kids, dappled in sunlight, with the statistics of suicide that run through my mind as I think about Lizzie.
(nonfiction)
One morning I once tried to boycott mandatory COVID tests as a small gesture of resistance, but the first day I didn’t show up, I got a text message that same night warning me that there would be consequences. It didn’t say what the consequences would be.
(nonfiction)
So much of Jillian’s life nowadays feels perfectly fine with Mark. Their one disagreement is what they should’ve done about Hannah. Mark thinks they were too lenient, too oblivious along the way. He always brings up the Halloween when Hannah had just turned sixteen. There were signs back then.
(fiction)
They who love so lawlessly your laws cannot contain them. They who sacrifice so willingly you are willing to sacrifice them.
(nonfiction)
Anesthesia for the moment. Anesthesia for the pain. The anesthesiologist’s line: “Don’t worry, you won’t remember this when you wake up,” is precisely what worried me. I didn’t remember. What else had I missed?
(nonfiction)
The problem was that each believed themselves to be a good person. Ethical, if not moral. And yet here they were on a bench not talking about the thing that existed between them.
(fiction)
Nausea knocked around my empty stomach with nothing to temper it. This woman looked just like the Wikipedia image of Edith Wharton I fell asleep to. Was I seeing pixels come to life? No. I needed to get a healthier sleep schedule now that Ramadan was over, it was clearly affecting my brain.
(fiction)
“We see these policemen over here…” The intersection above them was lined with uniformed police in crowd control gear. “…surrounding our demonstration. They say they’re here to protect and serve, but who are they protecting? Who are they serving?”
(fiction)
