It wasn’t until my mother’s nasally, soon to be estranged cousin, who would shortly thereafter go on to achieve such worldly things as losing her mind and hair at the same time and finding love in a halfway house, pointed it out in her pinched-nose voice that I knew the real truth: the house that our family lived in was perhaps a chimera. Before then, I’d suspected nothing.

Sure, I’d known that it was lacking in many ways. The decor alone was a hostile takeover, its carpets the color of expired mustard starting to mold (undoubtedly the factory dregs), flimsy…

For the second time in three months, my mom is in the hospital. For the umpteenth time in 16 years, my mom is in the hospital. This time it’s different though. Courtesy of coronavirus, I’m not allowed to see her. No one is. And I know I’m not the only one experiencing this right now, but it’s devastating. And it’s exacerbated by the fact that I also cannot call her, cannot FaceTime her. You see, something has rattled her brain. She still knows who I am, but the rest of her thoughts are delirious and paranoid. She is only half…

Never having to pee again will be the best gift of dying. Up until now I’ve never thought of death as having any gifts to offer, but having spent an amount of time roughly equivalent to 38.52% of my life peeing or worrying about whether there will be anywhere to appropriately empty my bladder, I’ve decided that a lack of urine, that yellow fluid threatening to trickle down my leg after due warning should it so desire, would be the best present you could ask for. As it stands, the question of peeing leaves you having to debate whether it’s…

After watching the first episode of HBO’s new docuseries The Case Against Adnan Syed, all I could think was: I’m exhausted by this case. And if I feel that way, then I can only imagine how Hae Min Lee’s family might feel having their daughter’s murder, that they thought was long resolved, dredged up as a means of national entertainment and speculation for the past half decade. One podcast segueing into another segueing into a multiple episode TV show on the most prestigious cable network in the country. …

I’m still waiting for the #metoo version of bullying. While I’ve written about the horrors that have been exacted on me by men, I’ve left out the larger story. I’ve remained silent for years, sharing with very few the truth of my formative years: I was bullied for years that felt like eons, primarily by women (though then they were merely girls). The hurt that I feel now as I walk as one of the wounded in this world is largely the effect of words that women have wielded against me like weapons. I never had a shield; each verb…

Though we have retained our human- female, upwards of thirty- for some years now, it seems that we have only just now at this very peculiar moment in time developed an allergy to her that, sadly, we can no longer tolerate. After much thought and careful deliberation, we have decided that is in our best interests to let our human find a new home where she can live out her remaining years.

As two felines approaching our elderly years, we are finding it more and more impossible to take care of her. Frankly, as a more mature human she is…

For the longest time I thought I hadn’t been affected, thought about how “lucky” (oh, what a grim choice of words) I was to never have been raped, to never have been sexually assaulted. Not really anyways, I told myself.

But then I remembered. Not in the vein of some recovered memories, but more along the lines of shadowy whispers recounting the minutiae of the multifarious horrors that I had enacted on me by men solely because I am a woman.

It starts with seemingly innocuous comments on our appearance that begin when we are mere babes in arms, and…