published work
Something New But Always Borrowed
A stranger gave me a sea glass pendent. I grabbed his hand and pulled him in for a kiss when he did. I wear it around my neck now, it sits on top a compass engraved with the words “Not all those who wander are lost,” that my mother left in a box in my apartment last year. I often wonder if she thinks I’m lost. I never saw that man again, but the sea glass he picked up from a beach in a different country, ten days before our first date sways in the wind on a chain that sinks between my breasts. He said he saw it and thought of me.
Where the Wild Women Grow
“I find myself being pulled in two different directions.
On Saturday mornings, I paint kitchen walls a deep green that reminds me of the Oregon forest. I drink coffee from the shop down the road I like, where the baristas know my name now. There’s a yoga studio on a hill in the town next door that gave me a home on my mat again.
There are trails behind the little white house my partner owns, where I walk the dogs at night, and there’s a river, where I swam all winter alone. It’s a beautiful little life I’ve stumbled into. It’s the dream, isn’t it? To fall in love, to make a home together, to fill picture frames of memories on the mantle. A mantle I’ve already pictured us hanging matching stockings on for the holiday.
There are postcards I sent my lover from a road trip across the country I took alone, soon after we met. There are many of them; they sit on his dresser and hang from the fridge in the kitchen. I close my eyes and there I am again, sitting in the desert alone, three thousand miles away, my heart so full as I write of my adventure. The fire I built on my own hours earlier still strong as the sun sets behind the mountains. It’s a feeling I’m trying desperately to recreate at home, but it feels out of reach.
Somewhere below that comfort, the nesting I’ve been doing, is something else. I catch it sometimes in the corner of my rearview mirror as I drive back to that little white house. I try to ignore it, turn up the music, and look at paint colors for the bedroom. I talk about buying a bigger mattress, one that fits us both and the dogs. But even the biggest mattress in the world, the loveliest set of color-coated dishes, the promise of security, and the sturdiest roof over my head will never be enough to quiet that voice in my head. The one that started as a whisper all those years ago and is starting to echo against my skull as my 30th birthday looms closer.
Dear Reader, I am not Sad. I Write about Magic.
“Everything you write is sad.” It’s what I hear more than anything else it seems—that I write with a sadness that seems to seep within the pages. It brings a certain melancholy to those who read it. My mother told me recently that one of her friends read my writing and was worried for me—that she is hopeful I will find happiness one day. I responded with one of my favorite writing quotes by Natalie Goldberg: “Write what disturbs you, what you fear, what you have not been willing to speak about. Be willing to split open.”
Songs of Sorrow on the New Year: Why I’m not “Starting Over.”
I woke up on the first day of the new year to the sound of something dying outside my window. When I first heard the cry, I thought I was dying in my dream. I experience those big, all-consuming dreams that leave you somewhere between reality and fiction when you first wake up.
Love Letters to Someone
It seems to happen as the leaves start to change color and the wind rustles against the grass on cool September mornings that I wake up and wish once again to write someone a love letter. Time slows just a fraction as I brew warm cups of coffee in the morning. Even after all this time, I find myself filling that red French press with too many spoonfuls. For days, coffee sits on my wooden kitchen table, turning more bitter every hour it stays.
The Walls that Grew Me
I feel the bend of the road somewhere deep inside me as I meander along the ocean. The curves of the streets, second nature to my being as they were 17 years before when I lay curled up in the backseat of the car knowing with every turn how close we were to home—hoping that if I laid still enough, someone would scoop me up, carry me inside, and tuck me into the cool blankets of my white sleigh bed.
To the Ones who become Memories
You linger in the random moments. It is when I’m thinking of almost nothing that you come to me. It’s on windy days as I wander the beach, the dog hundreds of yards ahead, and I watch surfers bobbing up and down along the waves that I see you.
A Dog’s Funeral
Crocket was going to die. His hips were giving out, and the tumor on the back of his neck had grown to the size of a melon, a thick lump beneath his shaggy black and white patchy fur. The vet said it was time to put him down, that it needed to happen today, tomorrow the latest. That’s what brought all four of us back to the house on Caleb’s Road.
Rosemary and the Red Pens
Mary was still asleep when Seamus tiptoed into their shared closet in the brown and white wool socks she’d given him that year for Christmas. He flicked the light on as he shut the door behind him, in an attempt to let her sleep. In the two-and-a-half-years since their son Jacob’s death she’d barely slept, only at odd hours of the night, when she wasn’t cleaning the house or reading on the porch. He’d roll over in the middle of the night and find her laying there, her white thinning fingers clutched together, her eyes wide and spinning with the ceiling fan in the darkness.