When did I start clearing my throat the exact same way Nan did? Probably around the same time I started looking over my glasses to read things close up the exact same way Dad does, but long after I stopped liking the majority of modern music, contenting myself with the songs and artists I grew up listening to just like…

Many acres it spans, my own walled estate, a gathering of places now lost to me, rebuilt in my mind for as long as I live, the only way I can visit them now. On the southern border a nursery stands, filled with building blocks and cartons of milk, the laughter of…

Most people are comets, icy tails streaking away in the distance, barely visible on the edge of our universe, they stray into our galaxy every now and then but leave no trace behind them, mere slants of disappearing dust dancing on the periphery, there and then gone again, leaving our world unaltered…

I follow him up, up, up, on a staircase made out of books, open to the sky in a castle with arches and towers all made out of books, he has sprung, flesh and blood, from the pages, it seems, of this castle made out of books, and he is my tour guide, leading me through this fine castle all…

I had to fill out, much as you didn’t want me to, did everything in your power to stop it, until the toll became too much and your schedule got too busy, until life got in the way as it always does, and you put aside the magazines and the expectations, stopped striving to obtain the unobtainable…

It was a perfect metaphor. Cutting into my chicken and mushroom pie only to find it perfectly hollow save for one tiny slither of sorry-looking chicken. No sauce, no filling, nothing. My smugness at nabbing the last chicken and mushroom immediately vanished as I poked disconsolately at my pastry shell…

He is my balance, my equilibrium, the air I so clearly needed, my vindication, my victory, the best I’ve ever been loved.

Crazy Little Thing Called Love starts playing, and my brain says the same thing it always does when I hear this song: Remember how he used to sing this to you? Snatches of melody sung during breaktimes was as intimate as we knew how to be. In the end he was…

The use of the battle analogy for serious illnesses is a tired old cliché, and one I cannot stand. I understand the sentiment behind it, but there are unintended implications to this ill-thought-out comparison that can be downright offensive to those of us who have lost loved ones to such…