If you’re alive long enough, memories become like a burlap bag of rocks you lug around, with some hunks of silver and gold occasionally glinting through the rubble. Over time, as the bag increases in weight, the fibers fray and give way and some rocks fall out, along with the occasional chunk of precious metal.

Case in point: My memory sucks so badly that I recently PM’ed a close friend from junior high, desperate for details about spending my 13th birthday at The Go-Go’s and A Flock Of Seagulls concert at the Boston Garden to write what could’ve been a moving essay about my budding adolescence, only for her to politely reply that she wasn’t invited.

What Belinda Carlisle or Charlotte Caffey wore onstage that night, the particulars of the setlist, or how the band sounded, are details that have long tumbled out of my burlap sack. I also don’t remember what I could’ve possibly said to my parents to convince them to buy me and a few of my friends tickets to this show. I clearly don’t recall who went with me, or what happened when we got there, but what did make an indelible impression on me is the rapturous joy I felt when watching the music I love so much performed live, because it’s a joy I pursue as often as humanly possible to this day.

When The Go-Go’s first got national attention in the very early ‘80s, they made jangly pop music that appealed to teen girls and young women without sanded edges and a lacquered sheen. Natives of the L.A. late ‘70s punk scene, their first album, Beauty and The Beat, was chock full of catchy, scratchy tunes about self-preservation, lust, longing, and a no-tolerance policy for bullshit held together with jangly guitars and, of course, the beat.

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To wit: The single “We Got The Beat” was a poppy anthem about the joy of music, but the album’s other major hit, “Our Lips Are Sealed,” was about a clandestine hook-up between guitarist Jane Wiedlin and Terry Hall, Brit singer of the Fun Boy Three and The Specials. A listen to the lyrics could lead one to speculate that one darker track, “This Town,” was about the underbelly of the Los Angeles punk scene; “Lust to Love” was about being dickmatized; and “Automatic,” the darkest, most hypnotic song on the record, is about mechanical, loveless sex. Vacation, subsequent to Beauty and The Beat, would be a markedly glossier effort, all punk predilections and day-glo aggression made smooth and palatable for mass and major label consumption. But, as poppy as it could be, Beauty and The Beat preserved elements of the darker, feminist edge of their grittier punk roots.

The Go-Go’s were something of an anomaly at the time — an all-female band — and despite the frothy femme image they were reluctantly shoved into by the media, they had preserved a rebellious edge and a firm resistance to patriarchal mores, ways, and means that resonated deeply with my misfit teenage spirit. That night, they showed me that women could (literally) band together and make art without giving a shit what guys thought. Being in that crowd that night felt more like being in a movement than just taking in a concert.

Meanwhile, their openers, A Flock Of Seagulls, were a British band that looked and sounded like the future. With his awesome blond skyward coif, singer Mike Score made rhythmic pop set to shimmering synths that inspired thoughts of what our lives might look and sound like as we moved toward an existence akin to an episode of The Jetsons. It felt passionate and deliberate, yet rife with possibility. This made clear that, though Led Zeppelin and other Boomer relics were intent on dominating radio, the path forward for me would be as femme-y and futuristic as a Thierry Mugler bustier.

To the male music critic in attendance that fateful night, The Go-Go’s were relegated to the inside of a pink, transparent, Bubble Yum bubble. “Whoever thought the ragamuffin Go-Go’s, who started on a wing and a prayer four years ago, would become such trendsetters?” wrote Steve Morse, the Boston Globe music critic, in a review of the show I attended (again, thank you, Internet). After describing the show as a meeting place for “flocks of teenaged girls” who were “fashion conscious” but “too young to go to a disco” and intent on invoking “bedlam pure and simple” (well, true), their music and performance were relegated to deeper paragraphs. He did accurately compare aspects of their sound to an ‘80s version of The Beach Boys in terms of planting fantasies in their listeners’ minds, but that’s all the kudos they would get. “It’s light and fluffy stuff,” he wrote, reductively, “but thoroughly entertaining.” If someone wrote that about Taylor Swift today, a large army of Swifties would assemble and doxx them within an inch of their life.

Maybe Morse didn’t get The Go-Go’s because they had no intention of placating the male gaze, and this was right up my alley. At 13, I already knew deep down that I wanted to live my life that way. When you’re 10, 11, or 12, turning 13 feels like an initiation, a first foray into the soft shadows of who you’d grow into. It was of the utmost importance to me to stray as far as I could from the objectified, indentured version of womanhood I saw all around me, at home and in the media. The womanhood I wanted to experience was closer to what The Go-Go’s represented. By sheer virtue of being an all-female band, The Go-Go’s (along with predecessors Chrissie Hynde from The Pretenders and Joan Jett) gave me evidence that it was possible to make the kind of art I wanted, in the company of supportive women, without having to drape myself seductively in a bikini across a GTO to sell it. After seeing that tour, countless budding teens, such as myself, were inspired to put down the hairbrushes they sang into and instead pick up a mic or an instrument. Even if just for myself, I’ve made music, written music, written about music, and been inspired by music ever since.

Decades later, as fate would have it, The Go-Go’s and their scrappy punk rock spirit would trickle down to my 8-year-old daughter. She was dedicated to learning the drums — a pursuit I was quick to endorse despite the confines of our minuscule Brooklyn apartment. In my daily travels, I stumbled across a copy of Tom Tom magazine, a now-defunct (in print) publication that celebrated the female drummer, featuring an interview with Gina Schock from The Go-Go’s. How could I not bring that home for my daughter to check out? With only a cursory glance at its contents, I handed it to her and she ran off to her room to crack it open.

“Hey Ma!” she called out — all of 8 years old back then. “Did you know that Gina Schock moved to L.A. in a pickup truck with $2000 and a bag of cocaine?” How did she know how to pronounce ‘cocaine’?!

I had to summon a tricky age-appropriate explanation, and I had to do it fast. So I did the opposite of what Morse did, and quickly addressed it head-on, without fanfare, before shifting the conversation to how special it is to be a female drummer, because there were all too few. Schock was a solid drummer, and my innocent child would go on to play for years as she grew into an inspirational, wildly creative young woman, preternaturally aware of the power of her own self-expression.

Vivian Manning-Schaffel is an experienced, voracious New York–based culture and entertainment writer and human Shazam. Her work has been featured in The New York Times, Vanity Fair, The Cut, the Los Angeles Times, Marie Claire, Cultured, and myriad other publications. Follow her at @vivtheemanningschaffel on Instagram and read her Substack, MUTHR, FCKD.

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Previously on How I Learned

I ran into my grandfather in the pool hall on Mott and Houston. I was just passing by and got the urge to play. My grandfather’s been dead over a decade now. He was by himself at one of the tables in the back.

He looked the same as I remembered and was smoking the same brand of cigars. I don’t know anything about cigars, but I recognized the smell immediately; that’s what made me look.

Funny thing: it was my other grandfather who liked pool. This one — well, I never saw him play a game of any kind, not even a card game. Aren’t grandfathers supposed to play card games? Basically all this man ever did was sit in a big black recliner and smoke cigars.

When I saw him back there, I thought that maybe I’d been mistaken about him being dead. It’s not as crazy as it seems, particularly since I don’t have much contact with that side of the family. Well, zero, I have zero contact. I guess it goes back to my dad, who calls me once a year and tells me he wants to have a relationship with me. Except he doesn’t quite say that exactly; instead he talks in this weird lingo he picked up from The Forum. Stuff like, “I want to acknowledge your willingness to put yourself out there and share your authentic truth.” I try to be nice about it, he’s a person with feelings like anyone else, but it’s hard to get around the fact that my authentic truth in this case is fuck off.

Anyway it’s my sister who keeps in touch with my dad, so it must have been through her that I learned that my grandfather had died. Oddly, though, I don’t exactly remember her telling me. Or I guess that’s not so odd, really. My memory’s not the greatest and I hardly knew this grandfather.

It was the other one I was close to. In fact he’s the one who taught me to play pool. We’d go to this place in Roosevelt Mall and play for a couple hours, but real slow and with him explaining what he was thinking on each shot. It was amazing. He’d have this whole elaborate plan in his head about where the cue ball needed to be four shots down the line.

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Given all this, it felt weird to see the other grandfather at the pool hall. Weird meaning confusing. And then on top of that, I had this awful feeling of wishing he was the other one. Because this one — well, I don’t know anything for sure, but my sister says he used to beat my father with a board or something. I don’t know how she claims to know this, but he certainly never hit me; in fact, he rarely even sat up in his recliner. Still, that’s what my sister says, and my sister usually knows what’s she talking about.

So I have to admit that this board thing entered my mind when I saw him. Not that I was worried about him attacking me with a cue stick or something. I just felt a little uneasy about starting a conversation with this person who I knew had done certain things — things I had no interest in broaching at this late date. Because what was he going to say in response? “Yeah, yeah, so I beat your father, what of it?” What would be the point? Because here he was, ten or more years past his death, playing a game of pool. Most likely he had long since forgotten all that — assuming it even happened — or even if he did remember, I couldn’t imagine him admitting it all to me and wanting to have a conversation about it.

Then I remembered this other thing my sister told me. Actually, this was the first thing. My sister says that my father used to hit me as well. I mean, as well as his father hitting him. Just not with a board or anything. Actually, I don’t remember what he hit me with, I guess with his belt. Anyway, I don’t remember it and can’t even say for certain it happened, except that my sister is pretty insistent about it.

So when I saw my grandfather again, I thought about him hitting my dad and my dad hitting me, and the whole thing just put me in a shitty mood, when just a minute before I was feeling pretty great. So I don’t know, I guess I overreacted, but after that I just decided to move on and let him play his game in peace.

On the way out, though, I had this crazy thought. My thought was that I was going to walk outside and immediately see my other grandfather coming down the street. I guess it was because I’d just seen the first one that I thought I could see this one. Well, that plus being in a pool hall, which always makes me think of him. So in my mind I constructed this cornball fantasy where I run up to him and embrace him and tell him how much I’ve missed him, although he’s always been there with me, and then he says something funny like, “Yeah, there were a few times there I kinda wished I wasn’t there with you,” and I laugh and say something funny back like, “If you only knew what I would have done if you just left me alone for a sec.”

Anyway, it was all so vivid that I started crying (I mean, in the pool hall) and then the guy at the desk said, “Hey, you alright?” so I said, “Yeah, I’m fine,” and got the hell out of there.

Needless to say, my grandfather wasn’t coming down the street when I made it outside. I didn’t have to look to know this, there are certain things you already know without having to look, but I looked anyway. He wasn’t coming.

Michael Barrish was a writer and a freelance web developer. He died in 2023 from pneumonia after being diagnosed with a rare and aggressive form of early-onset dementia.

How I Learned periodically reprints select stories that appeared on Michael’s website, Oblivio, between 1999 and 2020. The about page read, “Etymology: Oblivio is Latin. Often translated as ‘forgetfulness,’ it suggests a profound lostness, something akin to the English word oblivion, but more oblivious.”

The entire Oblivio archive is available in book form on demand. Massive thanks to Mickle Maher and David Isaacson for preserving Michael’s work.

NOTE: The stories are reprinted here the way Michael wrote them, though source links may be added and some pieces may be slightly edited for clarity.

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A quarter was the price of quelling the what-ifs. Always a quarter or two zipped into the smaller pouch of our backpacks, jingling around with an extra house key and Rain-Blo wrappers. What if our bikes got flat tires? Or we lent our key to our little sister? What if we had to walk to the Superette to use the payphone, which smelled of four decades of cigarette smoke, to call our mom at work?

In 1989, we had a mind map of all the nearby pay phones in case we had to make an emergency call: the lobbies of the library and grocery store; outside the women’s changing room at the city pool; in the vestibule at church. We also knew whose answering machine picked up on the third ring, and how to make a collect call without paying for it (MOM.PICKMEUP.LIBRARY). We sometimes invented mnemonic devices for numbers that mattered. Even if we didn’t write them down, they would stay with us.

Kids had always carried pocket change just in case, but the disappearance of Amy from this quiet hamlet along Lake Erie yanked the curtains off our bedroom windows. Our young lives, buffered by suburban comforts: nets on every basketball hoop, wood chips under every jungle gym, bikes rarely locked. But underneath the manicured lawns rumbled something more insidious.

First, the man had called Amy’s home phone. Then, he had arranged to meet her after school at an ice cream parlor. Description: White male, medium build and height, wire rimmed glasses, moppy haircut. We believed the man in the police sketch took her in broad daylight under the guise of someone who wanted to help her buy a present to celebrate her mother’s new promotion.

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After Amy, parents said, “Here’s an extra quarter for your backpack.” They said, “Don’t go anywhere with someone you don’t know—even if they say it would make us happy.” Stranger Danger was the pernicious fear, the what-ifs, the who-coulds, the where-of- all-places, the unanswerable unfathomables that every parent and every child tried not to speak aloud as the newspaper splashed new leads and theories about Amy and the man on the front page. We came of age still fearing The Stranger, rather than the strange ways a familiar relationship could turn on us, or the way a night could turn strange, or how the person in the mirror could become a stranger even to our very self.

We all looked for Amy. We memorized the details of her face, as if the horse earrings dangling from her ears in her school photo would be the same ones we would recognize out in the world. A few days after she disappeared, we set out trick-or-treating under a deep, navy sky. We walked up to the homes of strangers and willingly took the candy. But it was Amy who haunted our thoughts. Where was she? Why wasn’t she able to call her parents? If she didn’t have a quarter, didn’t she know how to make a collect call?

We looked both ways when we crossed Wolf Road on our mountain bikes. Amy walked this same pavement from her school to the shopping plaza. Nothing will ever chill our spine like the thought of her bike parked in the rack, alone under that same deep, navy sky. All the rides it would not take home, and the little girl who would not outgrow it by next summer.

The news came sudden and certain, like a call we picked up on the first ring. Our parents did not keep us home from school. We hung our backpacks on the hooks of our lockers, and settled into our desks. The news felt heavy as it settled into our laps. Amy’s body had been found, discarded in a ditch. The particulars of how Amy had been assaulted would crystallize and snap into focus only as our minds matured over many years.

Decades passed. Police chiefs retired; FBI agents came out of retirement to squint their eyes a little longer at the case. Sometimes a new lead emerged, or the hope of a DNA link streaked across the sky like a fading comet. Soon enough the case would grow cold again. Our questions abided: How did this man’s sickness prevent a child from growing up? How did he steal a childhood—while everyone was watching? We wondered: did everyone have an Amy? A girl who sent us all out retracing our steps. We looked for the last place we remembered having our innocence. We struggled to remember, as our eyes scanned the streets, and the lights grew dim.

***

The case of Amy Renee Mihaljevic remains unsolved. The FBI is offering a reward up to $25,000 for information leading to the arrest and conviction of the individual(s) responsible for her death.

Kendra Stanton Lee is a writer and teacher in Boston. Her essays have appeared in Michigan Quarterly Review, JMWW, Pangyrus, and elsewhere. For more on her work, visit www.kendrastantonlee.com.

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From The Archive

- If you eat your crusts, you will get curly hair

- How come you’re not eating yours?

- Mine’s curly already.

As a young child I had straight hair. It was dark brown with an added red tinge when played with by the sun’s white-hot fingers. The red highlights like volcanic rock seams along cliff faces of Whakaraupō where my dad grew up.

Mum cut our hair. With seven kids, it made sense economically, but not stylistically. My fringe sat sharp-edged like a slightly sloping curtain on my forehead. My son now wears a bowl cut by choice and pays good money for it. Back then, with seven heads of hair to attend to, it was a necessity.

Mum manufactured a proud wave by licking her fingers, and moulding it into being with saliva and the warmth of her digits, like Tāne fashioning the first woman, Hineahuone, out of clay. The result was like the koru of an unfurling fern leaf on top of my head, or the sassy scroll at the top of a violin.

Dad’s hair was soft and tightly curled. It would have been a ‘fro if he’d ever let it grow long enough. But he kept it barber-cut for as long as I could remember. Even when he didn’t have much of it left near the end. My dad always wore his tidy hair with a sense of pride.

Mum had curls, too. Courtesy of multicoloured and plastic rollers of various sizes, the tiny nibs around the outside of each roller biting into damp clumps of hair, gripping them into submission. Her hair turned grey when she was quite young, so she dyed it. Copper, ash blonde, or a dark reddy-brown. Usually it fell into looser curls, but sometimes, particularly in the eighties, when the stripy boob-tube tops she wore clung to her chest, she wore it in small blonde curls like tightly wound anger.

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What is it about curls that made them so desirable? In my mum’s day, many of the celebrities of the 40s and 50s had curly hair – Marilyn Monroe, Rita Hayworth and Elizabeth Taylor, to name a few. I like the attitude and unruliness of curls, as reflected in te taiao. They are as natural as the movement of water on a lake, or the wavy motion of grasses rippling along a hillside in the wind. They are naturally unruly.

I find it sad that so many curly girls spend so much time and money straightening out their curls these days. Those waves and spirals are a gorgeous contrast to the modern world of clipped men in suits, and straightness and rigidity. I love the moment in Ani Di Franco’s song “Blood in the Boardroom” when she says, “they can make straight lines out of almost anything, except for the line of my upper lip when it curls.”

In my baby photos (there are not many, due to being the seventh child – but I’m not bitter about it) my mum manufactured a proud wave by licking her fingers, and moulding it into being with saliva and the warmth of her digits, like Tāne fashioning the first woman, Hineahuone, out of clay. The result was like the koru of an unfurling fern leaf on top of my head, or the sassy scroll at the top of a violin.

I’ve always liked curly hair, so when I was little I did try to eat my crusts, but my hair stayed straight. I had it fashioned into a spiral perm in the 80s, which was extremely tight, and my hair was the curliest it has ever been. In my early 20s I had my hair dreadlocked for about six months. I loved them, but they got heavy and took too much maintenance, so I had them cut off. The funny thing is, that after my hair grew back, it was wavy. My dad would entice me to eat my bread crusts by saying I’d get curly hair as a result. Had the power of ‘the crust’ kicked in after all those years?

New Zealand Arts Laureate Ariana Tikao (of the Kāi Tahu tribe), is one of Aotearoa/New Zealand’s most versatile and sought-after players of taonga puoro (Māori instruments). She is also a poet and author with an empowering book, Mokorua (Auckland University Press), about her experience of receiving her moko kauae, the traditional chin tattoo worn by Māori women. Her poetry and essays have appeared in Landfall, Takahē, Cordite, and various anthologies. Her debut poetry collection Pepeha Portal will be published by Otago University Press in April 2026.

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Summer trickled slowly at first, and then all at once, through the flimsy film of Spring, growing harsher with years as climate change took its toll and changed the landscape of north India — floods, landslides, tourism in the hills disrupted by the fear for life.

I was working to form an identity that year, but I was stuck experimenting between my privilege to leave — still living with my parents, not obligated to contribute to any expenses — and my disadvantage of being unable to afford to move to a different city, somewhere with a job I could be passionate about. From one job to the next, misery, the dull ache of a life being wasted, a flaring wound on my open heart. At only 21 years old.

I felt nostalgia or something worse, resentment for the year I had spent being only a human. Oh, the great suffering of one’s early 20s, I thought. I had perspective. This was normal. I was on a journey. I was just moving slower than everybody else.

***

One day, on Ferozepur Road, at the turn near the Bharat Nagar Chowk, a man slept, flies all over his head. I passed him on my way to university. Sleeping. Dead — it crossed my mind. The city running around him, as busy as ever. Students to colleges, people to offices, and a man dead, I thought. We have killed him. And we dare not look at what we have done.

***

The Grand Trunk Road ran parallel to the street we lived on, surrounded by industries. Clothes being woven, cycle saddles being stitched, nuts and bolts taking shape, the grrrrr of the generator filling the house every time we had a power outage. Red brick houses, quarters built for migrant labourers, their kids playing in the street, on the terrace. Stories of workers losing their hands to factory machinery, or their lives to heatstrokes, so that a businessman can host his son’s wedding abroad, fly all his friends out, throw a 5-day event. Dignity of one to feed the ego of another. A faded blue shirt, black with dirt, for a crisp blue shirt ironed to perfection, with a coat on top.

I was working at a factory like this. It was the third job I was trying out. I worked in the adjoining corporate office, a concrete modern building, conference rooms and glass doors right next to a bloody affair. When I joined, they gave me a tour, and all I could remember were tens of lifeless eyes, earphones plugged in, mechanical motions.

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I would leave for home at 6:00 in the evening in an auto rickshaw, amidst people scrambling home and stares of men who I would try to empathize with, my fellow passengers. Oh, how tired they were, I thought. How could I think of them as ‘bad’ merely for staring at my chest? They were feeding their families, losing themselves in the process so the country’s GDP could grow. The country had earned its status as the 4th largest economy at the cost of their blood and sweat, after all.

Big commercial vehicles, trucks carrying hosiery in and out of the city, swarms of cars and cars, and my auto-rickshaw, which would stay beneath the flyover so it could pick up more passengers. That killed me too. Sweaty men closing in on me. Two months in, and I was ready to leave.

The final stretch of GT Road, just before home, had a slum on its bank. The road was a river, in a way. Vehicles like fishes swimming upstream-downstream. I saw it everyday: a torn pink sofa left on the side of the Grand Trunk Road. But that day: a naked child — what, two years old? — sitting on the sofa, dirtied with mud. To the side, a woman at a clay stove, cooking what I imagined was their only meal of the day, carving out their suffering in concrete terms. The sofa was always there, but it stuck only this once, and then it never went away.

***

My mother changed her name after she married my father. She lived two very distinct lives. One as Sudesh, or better still, Manti. The other as someone who only exists on government IDs and forms. She is mother. Just that. Primarily that.

She was raised by a village and then became the only one raising three kids. Her busyness leaked into my life in the form of neglect, which rooted itself as a sadness in my chest – the awareness of a hole and the knowledge of what could fill it.

My mother said life was a gift because it simply could have not been, and I never would have known. It was a pleasant present. Not something I needed, but something I still got. My life, a gift I had used to kill people, take away their childhoods and their hands.

I have done nothing and still killed the man. I have been a part of the system. Suffered from it, benefitted from it. A child studying abroad. At what cost? A child naked on a roadside sofa.

The GT Road child was distinct, he would not know that he was suffering – that young boy. He did not know, not yet, what suffering was. That hands were lost to factory machines and that a woman cried on the bathroom floor and sometimes on public transport because she hated her life. And that one could kill oneself or at least find comfort in the availability of that option, that we were all murderers. Not he, of course. Never him, I hoped.

Riya Jindal is a 22 year-old graduate in Economics and Philosophy and is currently working as a Production Assistant at a local radio channel. She is curious, loves to read and plays the guitar.

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I never understood it, not fully, until I was sitting on the floor of my front hallway, freshly postpartum, clutching my car keys. They were both my salvation and my doom. The world had narrowed to a pinhole. All I could see was my own failures, how I was certain I was already damaging my children, the suffocating logic that said the only way out of this darkness were those keys, my Honda Pilot, and a cliff into the ocean.

The delivery of my third child was the most difficult of all. I had sensed something was wrong toward the end of the pregnancy when my blood sugar stopped fluctuating entirely. Even normal post-meal spikes vanished. I had mild gestational diabetes and I was monitoring closely, but nothing was changing.

Like the hypervigilant healthcare provider I am, I turned to the literature. The results were inconclusive. Stabilizing glucose could indicate placental failure — or it could mean nothing at all. I told myself not to panic, but my instincts wouldn’t let go. I went to my doctor. We scheduled a C-section for the next morning. I was full-term. There was no reason to wait.

During the surgery, the placenta came out in pieces. I hemorrhaged on the table. They stabilized me, and my daughter arrived healthy. But I was handed a newborn as if nearly dying were just a small inconvenience. I had a baby who wouldn’t sleep unless she was held, and I was caring for a 16-month-old and a 6-year-old. My body barely had time to knit itself back together. My mind had no time at all.

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Everyone calls it recovery. It didn’t feel like that. It felt like drowning — silently, methodically — in a tide no one else could see. I bled through pads that should have lasted hours. My heart hammered hard enough to rattle my ribs. My incision burned. My head swam while I fed a baby every thirty minutes, rocked her on trembling legs, kept a toddler from climbing bookshelves, and initialed homework logs for a first-grader who suddenly looked so much older than his years.

My body was wreckage. My mind, debris.

Mothers don’t get the luxury of unraveling. We learn to bleed more quietly.

People brought meals. People checked in. People told me I was doing great. I smiled, said thank you, and swallowed the truth. No one saw how the floorboards blur when I stood up too fast. No one asked why I cried in the shower every morning. No one realized the woman they thought was strong was actually standing on a fault line. I didn’t realize it either. Not yet.

***

Postpartum depression doesn’t crash in like a tidal wave. It erodes. Edges first, then center. It starts with a voice. A whisper, really. The inner critic you normally swat away without effort — the one that says you’re doing everything wrong. But when you’re recovering from trauma without time to truly recover, when you’re not sleeping, when you’re caring for three small children with almost no help, your ability to silence that voice disappears.

So it speaks louder.

When your baby wails at 2 a.m. and nothing comforts her, the voice insists you’re failing her. When your milk supply crashes and breastfeeding ends, you are a terrible mother who can’t feed her daughter the way you are supposed to. When you switch to formula and she reacts to everything, crying in pain, inconsolable for hours, you’re failing her all over again. When your toddler cries because you can’t pick her up, you’re neglecting all your kids. When your first grader asks you to read with him for the 500th time and you snap because you have nothing left to give, you’ve scarred him forever.

Every small moment becomes proof in a case you’re convinced you’re losing. And when the voice builds enough evidence against you, it offers the only solution that makes sense to an unraveling mind:

If you love them, you’ll disappear.

It begins like mold growing in corners no one checks. A thought you wipe away at first. Then, a thought you consider. A thought that sits beside you, night after night, whispering twisted mercy.

If you weren’t here, they’d be better off.
If you left, the damage would stop.
If you vanished, they would finally breathe.

It becomes a companion. Cruel, but steady. Steadiness feels like truth when you’re drowning.

***

At first, the thoughts terrified me. I told my husband I was drowning and that I wanted to die. I told him about the voice narrating my motherhood as a catastrophe. He didn’t know what to do. So he listened. Quietly. And he said very little.

He didn’t reinforce the narrative, but he didn’t challenge it either. To me, that was as dangerous as agreement.

He isn’t saying it’s not true, so it must be true.
He isn’t pushing back, so you must be too much.
He isn’t stepping in, so everyone must really be better off without you.

That’s how I ended up in the front hall with the keys in my hand, sobbing. I didn’t want to leave my family. I loved them more than anything. But I was convinced that loving them meant leaving them.

None of it was my husband’s fault. He just didn’t know how to meet me in that darkness. He didn’t know what to say.

But my son did.

He saw me crying. He heard the baby screaming. He scooped her up and carried her over to me. He placed her in my arms and said, “Mommy, we love you. Are you okay?” Then he hugged me. His sister toddled over and wrapped her arms around my leg. The baby settled on my chest.

Three small bodies pressing into mine. Three little anchors tethering me to the world. Three reasons, handed to me in the middle of the darkest moment of my life.

I didn’t drive off that cliff, though the distance between intention and action felt terrifyingly thin. I was saved by something small and ordinary: the interruption of their love.

***

The next day, I did the hardest thing I’ve ever done. I asked for help. I found a psychiatric nurse practitioner who specialized in women’s mental health. I started medication. I found a therapist. I asked for help with cleaning, cooking—things that felt like admissions of failure but were really acts of survival. Bit by bit, the darkness receded. Bit by bit, the voice quieted. Bit by bit, I began to rewrite the script. I was sick, not broken. Hurting, not harmful. Drowning, not disposable.

Once I said that aloud, the voice that wanted me gone began to lose its shape. This is how I survived. Not by being strong, but by being open. Not by loving my children, but by letting their love reach me. Not by silencing the darkness, but by refusing to disappear inside it.

Choosing to stay is the bravest thing I have ever done.

Emma Logan is a writer and poet based in Salem, Massachusetts. Her work has been recognized as a finalist for the River Styx Poetry Contest, and she has a creative nonfiction piece forthcoming in Months To Years. She writes about motherhood, silence, survival, and the fierce reclamation of voice.

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Starting February 1st, 2026

Found myself reading poetry a few days back. I don’t remember taking the book from my friend’s shelf and opening it, but there it was, in my hands, being read. How else could it have gotten there unless I myself put it there?

I almost never read poetry anymore, having once read it all the time. In fact, I used to write poetry myself once and even called myself a poet. Yes, back then, when people at parties asked what I did, I said, “I’m a poet. I write poetry.”

Which was true: I really was a poet! I really did write poetry!

And most of the people I knew were poets, and together we would attend poetry readings, and host poetry readings, and of course give poetry readings – reading mainly to an audience of our fellow poets. And then when these readings were over, we would go to a coffee shop and gossip about people we knew, and maybe discuss poetry for a while, after which we’d head home and write more poems.

But as I’ve said, that was long ago and feels longer ago still – so much so that I almost never read poetry these days, or even think about poetry, and certainly don’t write any.

Which is why it felt odd to find that book in my lap. It was by Ron Padgett and had a French title. I’d never read it before. I liked it. It featured a long poem about the author’s high school yearbook in which he provided a few juicy remembrances of each person pictured. Fortunately he had a small graduating class, perhaps forty students. He included his phone number in the poem so that one of his former classmates, a girl whose attractiveness he had inexplicably failed to recognize at the time, could call him. I laughed.

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And then yesterday, an old, dear friend, someone I met when I was still writing poetry, sent me a poem by Pablo Neruda. I know Neruda’s work well and immediately recognized the poem as his, although I’d never read it before. It’s called Keeping Quiet, and it moved me – not to tears but to something else, a thing that only poetry can move me to. What is that thing? Tell me if you know, because I don’t know and never have.

I believe it’s related to music, to what music does, but it’s also different from music in some way. That’s all I know. I think it has something to do with it not being explainable.

My friend sent the poem for the same reason that other people are sending articles and petitions and such: as a response to the horrific events of the last week — first the attacks, then our president's declaration of war and the ensuing avalanche of brainless nationalistic zealotry — to use three consecutive words that all mean the same thing.

I confess that I’ve been deleting many of the articles and petitions. Don’t get me wrong: I think it’s great that people are circulating articles and petitions; I just can’t bring myself to read them right now. I read Neruda's poem, however, and it gave me something I needed without my knowing I needed it.

This, of course, is what poetry does when it works: it seeps into the parched places inside us and gives us what we don’t know we need.

Doubtless to talk about this cheapens it, so I’ll end here.

Here’s Neruda’s poem:

Keeping Quiet

And now we will count to twelve
and we will all keep still.

For once on the face of the earth
let’s not speak in any language,
let’s stop for one second,
and not move our arms so much.

It would be an exotic moment
without rush, without engines,
we would all be together
in a sudden strangeness.

Fishermen in the cold sea
would not harm whales
and the man gathering salt
would not look at his hurt hands.

Those who prepare green wars,
wars with gas,
wars with fire,
victory with no survivors, would put on clean clothes
and walk about with their brothers
in the shade, doing nothing.

What I want should not be confused
with total inactivity.
(Life is what it is about,
I want no truck with death.)

If we were not so single-minded
about keeping our lives moving,
and for once could do nothing, perhaps a huge silence
might interrupt this sadness
of never understanding ourselves
and of threatening ourselves with death.

Perhaps the earth can teach us
as when everything seems dead
and later proves to be alive.

Now I’ll count up to twelve,
and you keep quiet and I will go.

Michael Barrish was a writer and a freelance web developer. He died in 2023 from pneumonia after being diagnosed with a rare and aggressive form of early-onset dementia.

HOW I LEARNED periodically reprints stories that appeared on Michael’s website Oblivio between 1999 and 2020. From the about page: “Etymology: Oblivio is Latin. Often translated as ‘forgetfulness,’ it suggests a profound lostness, something akin to the English word oblivion, but more oblivious.”

Oblivio the book is now available on demand. Massive thanks to Mickle Maher for preserving Michael’s work.

Editor’s Note: Posts from Oblivio are reprinted as they were originally intended, though occasional source links may be added and some pieces may be slightly edited for clarity.

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It’s an evening in autumn. Halloween decorations, tissue ghosts pinned to tree branches, swing in the wind. I savor the look on my father’s face when I tell him I’m going out for a walk — suprise, delight. Most evenings, I’m parked in front of the T.V. “Be careful,” he says.

In the waning light, I take Sterling Street to Berkeley, and Berkeley toward Hampshire. It’s 1983 and I’m eleven. I dabble in independence. Walking alone at night is a distinct pleasure. By myself, there’s no one to calibrate my behavior to. I can be whoever I am becoming. Outdoors, in semi-darkness, possibility carries me.

Our neighborhood expands in the cool air. The big old houses, protected by shingles and double sashes in daylight, become dioramas lit from within. I see parents returning home from work, families eating together, someone on the couch watching Jeopardy. Between the beam of one streetlight and the next, I am a gray shadow, nimble and slight, barely crunching the dry leaves under my feet. After this night, I will be older than I am right now.

Kelly is coming over. We have agreed to meet in the middle, by Dawn’s house, a half-mile away. Tall, quiet, and shy — unlike me — Kelly harbors some mystery. Whenever she’s embarrassed, the lower half of her cheeks start to flush like an electric burner coming on. Hampshire bends and I reach the fork by Dawn’s house. Kelly’s not here yet so I walk a little further up the road to meet her coming down the hill. Then it occurs to me that she might approach from another direction as several roads converge here.

When I head back down the hill, I notice a person who wasn’t there before, a man. He’s old enough to seem safe; it’s kids I don’t trust, especially teenagers. I would never want to run into a group of teens alone.

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He’s standing in the driveway of a large house across the street from Dawn’s. I assume he lives there. Maybe he has come outside to smoke or walk a dog. He turns and calls to me.

“Do you know who lives here?” he says, and he points to the house.

It’s not his home after all. But where did he come from? I notice the driveway looks wider than a typical driveway, more like a parking lot. Maybe it’s not a house. It’s hard to tell.

“No, I don’t know who lives there,” I say. I walk in his direction because the question has drawn me in. Maybe he’s noticed something wrong at the house. Maybe he needs to tell something to the people who live there. I’m nosy. I like talking to people. “Why do you ask?”

As I get closer, I notice that he’s looking down, doing something with his hands, carefully taking something out of his front pocket. He has his back curved to the streetlamp and he’s in shadow. I am in the middle of the street, halfway across, heading towards him when he turns and takes a step in my direction. I freeze.

“Have you ever seen one of these?” he says and he shows me his penis.

I don’t see the penis so much as sense it, like a weapon drawn. It puts me on my heels. I have seen one before, in Playgirl magazine, where the men stroke their hairy chests and smolder-gaze at me with Magnum P.I.-style sex appeal. They hold their penises like trophies.

“You’re disgusting!” I say. I hear the anger in my voice, and my lisp. Disssgusssting, the babyish sound of me. I’m ten feet from him, maybe twelve, the fact that I’ve been tricked tripping me up. But it’s not hard to get away.

I pivot and run to Dawn’s front door. The woman who answers is not her mother.

“A man just flashed me over there,” I say, and I point across the empty, dark street. She calls my house and then the police.

My father comes. He tells me that Kelly called to say she couldn’t come over. He figured I would just make my way home after she didn’t show.

When I’m done answering the policeman’s questions, we climb into Dad’s little red Corolla, which seems even smaller tonight. He shifts the car into gear, pats my leg, squeezes my hand.

“Are you okay, kiddo?” he says.

“I’m fine.”

I look out the passenger window so I won’t see him looking at me. Something between us has changed. I scowl at my reflection.

“That must have been upsetting,” he says. “I’m glad you ran away.”

Did I really need to run? From a man who held his penis like a small animal? He could’ve grabbed me, he could’ve chased me, but he didn’t. Still, I know running was right. There are people I should not be so open and friendly with, and after this I will be more careful in our neighborhood. The scale of the incident feels embarrassingly minor, even though the change inside me is not.

Our short drive home lasts longer than usual. We cross Prince Street, then Exeter. I want to tell Dad it was nothing, to reassure him, but I’m shaken up. I can’t sort out my feelings. He doesn’t try to draw me out about it. We’ve never talked about sex. I can’t even imagine what words he’d use — he’s too direct to say something like “private parts” without cracking up. The quiet is a relief.

Our lit home glows ahead of us. We drive down to the bottom of the driveway. He pulls the emergency brake, turns the engine off. I can see my brother moving around his room, building something at his work table. My room is dark, the way I left it.

“Well, I’m glad you’re alright,” he says. Then he opens the car door. “Shall we go in?”

Erica Youngren writes fiction and essays about parenting, health, creativity, and suburban life. She holds an MFA from Sarah Lawrence.

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To remove blood from a sheet, use a fingernail and soap. Wet with water. Apply soap—bar of soap, liquid, doesn’t matter. Rub to a white lather. Scrape with a fingernail edge back and forth, top to bottom. Horizontal, then vertical. Or vertical, then horizontal. Work the blood from the fabric in lines and circles. Careful not to rub a hole through. Rinse with water. If blood remains, start over. Fingernail and soap. Scrape back and forth. Horizontal and vertical. Rinse. If this doesn’t work, try a toothbrush and Tide, same method. Trick is, treat the stain right away. The longer it sits, the harder to remove. Old blood, faded blood, blood you’ve tried to rub out turns brown. Not sandstone or mahogany. A muddy not-nice brown. Sometimes the center clears, leaving only an outer edge. It’s like the chalked outline of a dead body on cement. Everyone knows what was there.

We learn to clean blood stains from underwear, backsides of dresses and pants, in cars, on couches, mattresses, sheets, and public seats all over the world.

***

I see blood one morning, a week before I turn thirteen. I reach into the bathroom cabinet and pull out a pad–an older sister and mother in the house. I tear off the adhesive strips and attach it to my underwear. I tell my sister, and she hands me a pamphlet with a diagram of my parts. I already saw this drawing in fifth grade, boys and girls separated, both groups made to watch a short film on their development.

My best friend Peggy has already started. That night I write her a letter. She’s away at summer camp and it’s the only way to reach her. I feel a tinge of pride—me too!—and one of commiseration. How will I go to gym class now? I’ll never get into a pool of water again.

***

I try my first tampon. I put it in, leave for school. Only, something is wrong. It feels like every ounce of moisture in my vagina immediately disappears. The cotton of the tampon sticks to my insides. It’s too big, or I’m too small, or something else altogether. Every step is painful. I try to take small steps, and with each one, a stabbing pain. Somehow I manage to push past the pain and get to school, powered by misguided optimism that it will eventually get better. How hard can this be? Everybody else does it.

When I arrive, I can’t sit down. I sort of prop myself on the edge of my seat and lean back. Finally, at midday, I decide I can’t take it anymore and ask for permission to go to the restroom. Pull out the tampon, lay a thick layer of toilet paper in my underwear, hoping I can get home without an accident. I swear I’ll never wear a tampon again, and I don’t. Instead, I wear disposable pads in different sizes. Hate the wet, slick mound between my legs, the baby powder scent. Worry that it shows the bulge at my ass crack.

***

Peggy and I team up to develop an elaborate strategy of hiding. The goal is to go undetected, to not get caught having a period. Even other girls can’t know. She’s on the rag, they’ll say, despite the fact that any of them may also be bleeding.

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Number One. Do not carry a purse. A purse is a dead giveaway, even if you carry a purse all the time from now until you’re old, it means you’re bleeding or might be bleeding.

Number Two. Smuggle your supplies to school without being noticed. Pads or tampons, doesn’t matter. Stuff them in pockets, bras, and waistbands, even socks if you must.

Number Three. Pee or blow your nose or flush the toilet as you very quietly, stealthily, open packaging of said supplies and quickly (too long and you’re found out or worse, they think you’re pooping) place them in your vagina or on your underwear or both if you’re worried about bleed-through.

Number Four. Hide the evidence. Only one large trash can in the restroom and it’s open at the top and sitting at the front entry. When you exit the stall, hide used supplies balled up in your hand or in a pocket or waistband. Station a friend between the entry and the trash can, and, if clear, dump it. If not, continue walking, cool cool cool, right out of there, stuffing that used tampon or pad wherever you can.

Number Five. Always check for bleed-through. No one wants to be The Girl Who Bled In Her Pants Or On Her Seat. It’s best to have a friend to share a language of secrecy, otherwise you’re forced to drop a pen and try to look at your own crotch.

“Did the birdie fly?” and “Did the cow go moo?” Both mean: I’m going to walk ahead of you, and I want you to look at my ass and tell me if you see blood leakage.

We do this for each other every day of our periods. We follow all the steps of the strategy, even during lighter days when an accident is unlikely.

***

Peg and I are sitting in the middle school lunchroom, talking. No food between us because we don’t eat, but school rule is, whether you eat or not, you must gather in this dim, cavernous room in the basement.

We’d stopped eating lunch a year ago, after the first day of sixth grade, me out of humiliation and Peg out of solidarity. My mom had told me all I needed to do was tell the woman at the register my name and I’d get a whole lunch for free, the free-lunch list, she called it. Since we didn’t have money for me to buy lunch and no food for me to take, this was good. Exciting, even. But when I reached the lady, sliding my tray down a long line to the register and told her my name, she made me wait. The whole line had to wait and watch while she got a clipboard and checked for my name. Verified. Mortified. I never ate lunch again. Not in sixth grade, or seventh grade, or eighth grade. In four years of high school, I went to the cafeteria only once, got a chocolate milkshake, never went again.

We bide our time until after school. Peggy gets $2 for lunch, $1 for the lunch fee and $1 to spend as she likes, so every day we stop at the mini mart on the way to her house. She’ll hand me a dollar, and we’ll buy whatever we want. Score Bars and Marathon Bars, that marriage of caramel and chocolate, the usual top picks, and we’ll eat them together while watching “Santa Barbara.”

Something drops onto our lunchroom table. A white, rectangular lunch napkin laden with a red circle in the center. Ketchup. We look up to see a circle of boys. They say things about us bleeding. They say things about us being gross. And then they leave and go back to their table, laughing. I pick up the napkin, go to them, slam it down in the center of their table. Like a shotgun, I fire off every f-word configuration possible. They stare. Say nothing.

After lunch, Peggy and I are called to the principal’s office. He turns to me, asks if my grandfather knows I talk “this way” (they’re old friends), and threatens to tell him. I start crying. He does not ask us what happened. This man who is old and wearing a suit and knows my grandpa is not someone to whom I can utter the word “period.” The boys are not brought to the office. I never find out who reported us. Peg and I are sent to detention for the rest of the day, and this, and my foul mouth become the story around school.

We are stressed. We’re afraid someone will know we’re on our periods — or worse, we’ll be The Girl Who Bled In Her Pants Or On Her Seat, from which there’s no recovery. And we stress when we’re not on our periods because they’re not always regular, so we’re afraid all the time.

Bright like Red Hots or dark like brick, blood demands to be seen. We must be smarter than blood

Heather Hawk writes from her home in the Pacific Northwest, where she also runs her own wellness practice. Her work has been published in Off Our Backs, Northwest Women’s Journal, 100 Word Story, and most recently featured in Zone 3 where her essay was chosen for an Editors Choice Award. She is currently working on a memoir about lady parts politics and uterine fibroids, selected as a 2023 finalist for the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund.

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I began calling bingo at fifteen. It was my second job ever, proceeded only by paper boy, a position I quit after just three weeks due to my inability to collect payment from a third of my customers (I actually LOST MONEY as a paper boy).

No, wait, I forgot golf caddie. At fourteen, I spent one wretched afternoon as a golf caddie, during which I inadvertently picked up the wrong ball during a game of alternate two-ball – a transgression for which I was stiffed by the enraged young Ivy Leaguer whose bags I carried.

I obtained my bingo calling job through a friend whose grandmother was president of the Ladies Club at her apartment complex. This club had 50 some-odd elderly members, all of whom, it seemed, were addicted to bingo. They played every Tuesday night, and for about a year I joined them, sitting at the front of the room behind a small metal bingo wheel, calling out numbers. For my services I received six dollars an hour plus all the fresh-baked cookies I could eat.

Now, to understand where the lie comes in, you have to understand a bit more of what a bingo caller does. Aside from spinning the wheel and calling out the number/letter combination of whatever ball comes rolling down the metal chute, the bingo caller must confirm the winner of each round; to do this, he must keep track of each number/letter called.

The keeping track part is done with the aid of a big piece of cardboard with lots of little indentations arranged in a grid. The grid has a place for each ball, and so the caller simply places each ball, once called, into its proper slot. When someone shouts “Bingo,” the caller asks the player to read off the five number/letter combinations that constitute her “bingo.” If these five have number/letter combinations have indeed been called, the player is paid. (If I remember correctly, it cost two dollars to participate in an evening of bingo, and the winner of each round received five dollars.)

At the Ladies Club, the money part was handled by my friend’s grandmother; all I had to do was confirm the bingos. Surprisingly, perhaps, players often made mistakes (I doubt that they ever tried to cheat), and thus I’d usually catch a few false bingos each night. I didn’t enjoy this part. It is no fun to publicly inform a gleeful winner that she is in fact a humiliated loser. But this was my job, and of course there were the cookies to consider.

Actually, I took my work quite seriously, being particularly careful to place the called balls in their proper slots so that I wouldn’t screw up the confirmation process.

And then one day I noticed something. Well, before I noticed this something, I noticed something else: a woman with no friends. She liked to sit in the front row with a chair between her and the next woman. During the intermission, while I was chowing down on cookies, she sat alone, eating cantaloupe out of a plastic container. It was sad. I would have gone up and talked to her myself, but I really had no idea what to say to an elderly woman aside from thanking her for her delicious cookies. But then I noticed the second something, and this second something made me realize how I could be of service to her.

The second something was this: no one but me could see the little balls. Actually, I noticed this from the beginning, but it didn’t occur to me at first what it meant; which is to say, what power it granted me.

Do you see what’s coming? I’m guessing that you have some sense of what’s coming.

Here’s what coming: one day I decided to cheat on behalf of the cantaloupe woman. It was quite simple. During the intermission I lingered past her table and memorized a row of letter/number combinations on one of her bingo cards. In a subsequent game, I called these self-same combinations during the first ten balls or so, virtually guaranteeing her of victory. And it worked: she yelled “Bingo” loud and strong, then read me her winning row. (As a precaution, I had placed the wrongly called balls on the slots belonging to the winning number/letters. Why? Because I was concerned that the cantaloupe woman might OVERLOOK her bingo, in which case the game would continue and I would need to confirm another woman’s bingo. But why, you might wonder, was this such a concern; couldn’t I have confirmed ANYTHING? No, I could not have confirmed ANYTHING, since one of the sharper players likely would have caught a false bingo if I didn’t, and that would have spelled trouble for me, the trusted keeper of the truth.)

I made it a practice of awarding at least one bingo a night to the cantaloupe woman, and several times I granted her the final game, which was worth double. I was never caught, nor did I ever have the sense that anyone even realized that such a thing was possible.

I fancied myself the Robin Hood of bingo callers, stealing from the rich Ladies Club members and giving to the poor cantaloupe woman. It was a stretch – even possibly a lie – but us self-styled outlaws must forgo such considerations. The truth we carry is our own, and it is by this that we must live.

Michael Barrish was a writer and a freelance web developer. He died in 2023 from pneumonia after being diagnosed with a rare and aggressive form of early-onset dementia.

How I Learned periodically reprints stories that appeared on Michael’s website Oblivio between 1999 and 2020. From the about page: “Etymology: Oblivio is Latin. Often translated as ‘forgetfulness,’ it suggests a profound lostness, something akin to the English word oblivion, but more oblivious.”

Oblivio, the book, is available on demand. Massive thanks to Mickle Maher for preserving Michael’s work.

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Not Unrelated

I no longer hear around corners. If someone in the next room throws me a question or begins an anecdote, a dense jumble skitters through the air, conspicuously there but crazily mixed up and impenetrable. I imagine the sound vectors hitting the walls in the other room, as in pinball, careening to the ceiling, to the floor, bouncing off the furniture, then glomming onto gunk, never making it to me right side up and intact.

“Can’t hear you from another room,” I sing out.

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It’s not much of a problem. When the message sender strolls along the corridor and unreels a rerun face to face with me, I understand. If it’s Bu, my husband, he says his whatever again without a smidge of annoyance. Sometimes when one of us asks for a repeat—“What?”—the other echoes in a droll, upturned refrain—“What? What?”—and we laugh.

“Maybe we should learn sign language now. Or lip reading,” I once added. That wasn’t completely a joke. I bookmarked a website promising 10 steps to consummate lip reading.

With Bu, a communication misfire is as likely to be linguistic as acoustical. English is his third language, after Chinese and French. Our talk retains playful vestiges of his early English challenges, such as “chicken” instead of “kitchen” and “windshield” for eyeglasses that need cleaning. Though I’ve internalized some of his habitual mispronunciations, new ones baffle me for a moment, such as “leeks” for “licks” or vice versa. And confusions go both ways. When we were driving in Hawaii, I pointed upwards at a plane tilted toward a landing. “Airplane!” I noted. “Eggplant?” Bu echoed. That became our favorite private joke.

Decades ago, I consulted an audiologist because I couldn’t hear the college students in my classroom. “Congratulations!” he told me. “Your hearing is totally normal. Your brain isn’t catching what the kids are saying because one: Young people mumble. Two: You’re teaching on the fourth floor with open windows onto busy Commonwealth Avenue. And three: Given what you described, right in front of the blackboard is probably an acoustic dead spot.” Maybe it was from him that I picked up the image of sound vectors caroming around uselessly instead of zooming to the listener.

My second hearing test, about five years ago, was more equivocal. Instead of asking me to identify words at various volumes and pitches like the other audiologist, this technician played pinpricks of noise into my earphones. Five minutes in, I squeezed my eyes shut. I was straining so hard I couldn’t tell whether I was asleep or awake, whether I was hallucinating dongs and peeps or hearing them. The testing was so phantasmic, the verdict of mild hearing loss went right into my mental wastebasket.

Objective measures of sound waves getting through my ears to my brain weren’t key, I decided. Since no one seemed to mind when I asked them to repeat something, where was the problem? I could always hear cars approaching when I walked the roads near home, as well as chipmunks and squirrels skittering through dried leaves. What mattered most was the relaxed good will Bu and I had about communicating with each other. Even when “What? What?” expanded to “What? What? What? What?” we laughed. Wayward vectors and tilts of the tongue: No big deal.

Then we took a road trip to the Rocky Mountains. In Colorado, we drove up to Independence Pass east of Aspen, nearly 12,100 feet high. Going down from that summit, my ears clogged and refused to pop. No matter how I swallowed, yawned or shifted my jaw, furry mufflers inside my head blocked almost all sound.

We registered at a motel that night. I could see the clerk’s mouth moving, but I heard none of her words. She seemed enveloped in a see-through soundproof booth. Clearly this resulted from the altitude, and it was scary as hell since I didn’t know whether the blockage was temporary or permanent.

The next day, I still couldn’t hear Bu asking me if I was okay. I just saw the grim concern in his eyes. Google’s AI indicated I was probably experiencing barotrauma, where Eustachian tubes struggle to equalize ear pressure with the surroundings.

We changed plans so we could get to lower altitude as soon as possible. In mid-Kansas at 1,200 feet, sometimes the clouds blocking my ears blew off. By the time we reached home in Massachusetts, everything Bu said in the car reached me unmuffled. Checking the audio setting on my phone’s Chinese language app, I confirmed I could now hear as well as before our trip. However, my attitude loosened.

Diminished hearing could damage my ability to maneuver in the world, I realized. As fun as “What? What?” was with Bu, I couldn’t count on a plumber, a stranger on the street or the Internet company rep on the phone patiently playing along. So were hearing flubs just a cheery kink, a winsome quirk I could shimmy around? Maybe not. Maybe not.

Based in Goshen, MA (population 960), Marcia Yudkin advocates for introverts in her weekly Substack, Introvert UpThink. Her essays have appeared in the New York Times, Ms., Next Avenue, Flash Boulevard and NPR. Decades ago she earned a Ph.D. in philosophy and is currently completing a memoir, Recovering from Wittgenstein.

How I Learned is an indie publication that runs on readership and psychotropics. To support the work, consider a free or paid subscription, or make a donation.

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Losing my hair was never a tremendous deal.

I’m not vain, but objectively speaking, I was never an Adonis. I never had a flowing, Gaston-like mane descending down glistening pecs and abs, framing a perfect jaw and a plunging chin cleft that could cure typhoid.

Also, I was prepared. My mom’s dad looked roughly 45 years old on his wedding day, but he was 20. The rate of my hair’s descent would quickly surpass my dad’s own hair loss, but I remember being at a pool with him when I was a kid the first time he needed to apply sunscreen to his scalp. He was torched so badly he had to go to urgent care. Always a lesson learned one pool too late.

My all-boys Catholic school had strict dress codes and hair policies, so naturally, after graduation, annual contests arose to see who could look the most unrecognizable. My corpulence and my shag made me look like John Belushi from Animal House the summer before college, which is the absolute best time to look like a 30-year old alcoholic freshman.

During those halcyon days of hair, my dad was quick to remind me of a Cardinal Rule of Losing Hair: the shorter it’s kept, the less noticeable it is as it goes. I nervously caved, retreating to my routine Catholic school cut during holiday break: short on the sides, just enough to comb over on top.

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This severe trim shocked my classmates. Going so starkly and abruptly bald immediately after college rendered most of my their memories of me with the same bald ‘do I have now, but on a younger face. Like a Mandela Effect, but if Nelson had a horseshoe haircut.

***

Like many terminal illnesses, the hair loss progressed gradually enough that I could have end-of-life conversations with loved ones about when to pull the plug and buzz off what little remained.

My first hunch that my hairline was nearing hospice was when I went to my barber Fantastic Sam for my standard: short on the sides, enough to comb over on top.

I was initially impressed by what he did; I didn’t look as bald as I felt. But I recoiled when I realized the uncombed truth: the left side of the hair at my part was much longer than the right, creating an absurd diagonal hairline across my brow.Short on the sides, enough TO comb over on top. Note the verb. Sam, whose fantastic-ness was waning by the minute, had given me a noun.

A comb over. The horror.

I went to my sister-in-law’s salon and gave her the same explicit instructions, this time with more verbal emphasis. She plied her trade normally, gathering swaths around the sides to sharply trim with scissors. But as she ascended, she slowed down. Grasping became more desperate until she finally had four lone hairs, which she executed one by one with ruthless precision.

I stopped her. “Buzz it.”

She paused, knowing my wife would not approve.

“I’m sure,” I told her.

A No. 3 guard, a whir of clippers, and 30 seconds later I, at 23, had the only haircut I’d ever have for the rest of my life.

***

The comb over is the sign of ultimate cowardice. It is pure, abject folly. It is a lie that cannot help but reveal damning truth. For example, I once shared an office with a man named Rick whose head was the size of a microwave turned on its side. The right side grew a brilliant white meter of hair that was painstakingly crafted up, over, and back down his gargantuan noggin.

Vintage comb overs have been all but extinguished due to advances in men’s vanity, for better or worse. Turkish transplants. Toupees gorilla glued to human heads every month. And, of course, buzzing and growing a beard.

Beards do wonders for bald men everywhere. You know those tests where they show an upside down head with the smile, nose, and eyes right-side up, and it looks okay? That’s a beard for balds; what matters is the hair is somewhere. An ironic defeat in the lives of bald men is that we cut our hair more often. Go too long, and, as any bald man will tell you, you begin to itch — and you resemble a baby bird.

These aforementioned vestiges of vain denial are further underscored by some mistakes made by the less follicularly challenged, like that alt-right Nazi cut. A buzzed side yielding to a long, over-stylized coif, like Brad Pitt in that WWII tank movie, Brad Pitt WW2 Tankman™, or something like that.

Other affronts to God include white dudes with dreadlocks and ironic mullets. Like comb overs, those haircuts make me glad to be bald. Winston Churchill once famously told a woman that while he wouldn’t be drunk tomorrow, she would still be ugly. So, I may still be bald tomorrow, but at least I can avoid whatever that is.

***

Being a bald, heavy man ages you by decades, full stop. But how the world treats you is much more subtle. Every boss I had after I went bald related to me as a lower-ranking peer.

Once, when some hit TV show had a middling finale, my boss Stacey made cubicle rounds, talking about it with my coworkers. Stacey wasn’t great at whatever her job allegedly was, but she was phenomenal at loudly having the same conversation six separate times while avoiding said job and snapping her Spanx the eye-level of anyone sitting.

I was prepared for her critiques of this finale, but when she got to me she hit me with a curveball: “They do NOT make finales like they used to. Remember M*A*S*H?!”

The M*A*S*H finale aired three years before I was born. My dad recorded on VHS every rerun that any channel aired in haphazard, non-chronological order, which is precisely as old-fashioned as saying, “I saw the M*A*S*H finale live.”

So, I was able to humor Stacey and could even detail the nuances around Alan Alda’s direction or Hot Lips Houlihan’s turn or why Jamie Farr’s spinoff didn’t work, without making Stacey feel ancient.

But Stacey sucked, so I did it anyway.

After nodding in polite agreement when she proclaimed, “They don’t make ‘em like they used-tah!!!” I noted how much older M*A*S*H was than the portly bald man filling her cubicle with ill-fitting khakis and drawing countless doodles on company time.

Her expression withered like Matt Damon dissolving into an old man at the end of Saving Private Ryan. She demanded proof. All it took was a glance at the year I graduated college listed on Facebook.

“Well,” she replied, gnashing her teeth, “I’ve never felt older.”

It wasn’t the first time I’d heard that my visage made others feel disproportionately aged. While most people dread the passing of decades, I was eager to turn 30 and shed this discomforting co-existence with people who look their age. It seemed to put the world into its natural order if I, a rotund hairless lad, was NOT in my joyous 20s.

My 30s have yielded new developments. I’ve had what others may call aesthetic improvements — or a “glow up.” I’m willing to accept that low bar, given a mutual understanding: there was nowhere to glow but up.

I’ve gotten in better shape; working out, dieting, and not drinking like a Belushi cartoon. I’ve never had what doctors call a “metabolism,” not even when I was a kid. I weighed about 230 lbs standing at a stout 5’4” in my freshman year of high school.

Balding and weight fluctuations are nothing new for me, but they are wild new frontiers for my peers. Friends who can’t spell ‘treadmill’ are find their bodies betray them as they consume weekly gallons of alcohol. They wonder what’s going on while they scroll through TikToks detailing THE hack to the eight-pack of their dreams that’s JUST four creatine suppositories away.

My days without hair are outpacing my days with. Friends and family with Mandela-Effect imaginings of a horseshoe haircut boy? They have been around for almost two decades. My grandparents have walked by me without a whiff of recognition of the old gentleman before them. An aunt once began to introduce herself to me when I was wearing a hat.

It’s hard to be vain with this haircut. I feel required to be smart, funny, or some self-deprecating version of both. But is that vanity, too? What is it worth, to me or anyone, to measure myself by my clippers? Is the admission that I dwell on these things – even though I say I don’t – a psychological comb over that positions me the way I’d like to be seen, since I can’t control the way I’m seen?

I don’t have answers. I just know that every Thursday, I go into the bathroom and give myself a haircut, clean up, and apologize to my wife for not cleaning well enough.

But every now and then, I still move my fingers over my scalp, running them through a phantom part that hasn’t been there in 15 years.

Zack Stovall is a writer, producer, cartoonist, and comedian. He is currently a producer for the Story Collider, and has written for Vulture, and magazines, and newspapers. He is also the creator of Fancy Things, a live show/book/collection of cartoons and (fake) etiquette. He currently lives in New York with his wife, Rebekah, and he lost most of his hair sometime in 2009.

HOW I LEARNED exists because you have great taste and you make good decisions. Consider a free or paid subscription to support the work. Commitment-resistant? Same! Maybe make a one-time donation instead? Thank you for being here.

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I was 13 when I met him, and a door cracked open.

We were surprised when he walked into a meeting of our Mexican folk dance troupe. He was 28 years old then. Born and raised in Guadalajara, he traveled and performed all over the world. He was a professional. For us, Mexican folk dance was a hobby. We were beginners at best.

The founder had worked behind the scenes; she traveled from the midwest to southern California to persuade Enrique to move to Topeka. He would teach us and shape us into something that didn’t exist in Kansas.

He upped our game and we aspired to be better. We learned intricate footwork — zapateados, Enrique called them in Spanish. We created a program to perform, step by step, dance by dance. The boys wore traditional sombreros and sashes, and partnered with the girls in colorful costumes, whipping around their big flowing skirts. I wasn’t good at football, basketball or baseball. I knew kids in my neighborhood and at school, but had no close friends. I was smitten with the troupe. I learned I was a natural. I started to lose weight. My Huskies pants loosened. I wanted my clothes to hang off me.

Enrique was slim and graceful and walked with gliding steps. Light and airy. Brown skin, thick black mustache, feathered hair just below the nape of his neck. It was the mid-70s, after all. When I was around him I felt sparks inside my chest, my gut, my groin. I’d felt charged like that before, around men at church and older boys in the neighborhood, but only from afar. Enrique recognized my talent. I had his attention.

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The next summer Enrique invited me to swim at his apartment complex. I felt special, chosen. Mom ok’d it. She knew I thrived in the troupe. Dad had come around to my being good at Mexican folk dance. By that time, some of their friends had noticed that I stood out and maybe Mom and Dad were modestly proud. Maybe they were glad that I made friends and found purpose. Enrique was a mentor my parents probably trusted.

So Mom took me. We pulled into the parking lot of the El Conquistador apartments — white stucco, wrought iron fencing, a bastardized design of someone’s idea of Spanish style. I got out of the Ford Galaxy 500, that tank of a car, and headed into Enrique’s building holding my rolled towel. The hallway air seemed stuck, smelled musty. I knocked on his door.

“Buenas tardes,” or “Come in,” he probably said. The words have faded from memory.

I stepped inside and saw the shimmering blue pool through the sliding glass doors. I changed into my trunks in the bathroom, then he showed me outside. I took quick steps in the thick Topeka heat, across the sun-scorched concrete toward the shallow end. No one else around; his roommate was at work. Enrique watched from the door then turned back into his apartment. I dipped my feet in and noticed my wet footprints on the bright patio. I plopped into the pool. Boy body submerged in cool water. I bobbed my head, carved the water with my arms. I dog-paddled to the deep end maybe 30 feet away, grabbed the edge, then pushed off and paddled back toward the shallow end where I felt safest.

Before long Enrique came out. He had changed into black bikini briefs. Long lean legs and arms. His dark chest hair trailed toward his flat abdomen then veered down below the top of his briefs. I watched him slip into the pool and swim underwater to the deep end. When he came up, he turned to face me. He stretched his arms along the pool’s edge and leaned his head back. I wanted to be that lithe.

Water dripped from his mustache, slid down his skin. A pattern of undulating bits of reflected water sparkled from the sun. He might have said, “It feels good,” or “How are you doing?” in his Spanish accent. We probably talked about the dance troupe, his experiences. I wanted to live that life.

I stayed in the shallow end, though the pull to be closer to him, to feel him, was strong. He didn’t stay long. I watched as he dried off. First his face, then his head, his torso, then limb by limb. When I went inside, he asked if I wanted to take a shower. Shower? I just got out of the pool. I’m going home. It may have taken a few words of convincing, but I felt that sudden charge. I tried to cover it, but I couldn’t hide the stiffness that pushed against my swim trunks. Three feet apart at most, facing each other. My face flushed. Maybe he asked, “What are you thinking about?” The scene is wordless now.

He turned the shower on, then left. I closed the door and peeled my wet trunks down over my flaring penis. In the shower the hardness wouldn’t soften. Then Enrique opened the bathroom door and walked to the sink, the shower curtain between us. So close. I stood still. Shallow breaths. In my memory he pulled the curtain back, looked at my groin, his eyebrows raised. No words. I remember electric currents, tiny points of desire shooting through me.

He started to shave and he began telling me about his roommate.

“Tom and I, we’re close.”

My mind was jumbled. “Close?”

“We sleep in the same bed.”

“You have two bedrooms.”

“Yes, but we sleep together.”

I hesitated before I said, “You touch?”

“Yes.”

“And kiss?”

“Uh huh.”

There is some version of this that is lost to time. I can see water shooting down from above me, feel the ache of my erection, trying to picture the two of them close like that. I wondered what would happen next.

***

A week or so later I returned.

It was new but not foreign. Awkward but natural. My tongue tangled with his, I learned to kiss. A different language. The warmth of the summer sun, the afternoon light, muted by the white sheer curtain in his bedroom. The musky smell of his skin as I ambled my nose over his neck, then down to his chest. The hum of the air conditioner. His naked body pressed hard against mine. Gentle turns into new positions. What probably took minutes felt longer. My nerve endings fired until I felt I was floating. Sprawled on the bed. Held. I wasn’t alone. I wanted to be there, but where was I going?

Afterwards I called my mom. I gathered my things. In my memory the place was quiet. Enrique busied himself in the background. The angle of the summer sun had shifted, more shade over the pool, the living room was darker. I held bigger secrets now — Tom and Enrique, me naked in bed with a man. Maybe Enrique asked if I was ok. Perhaps we said nothing other than good-bye. Relief and fear intertwined inside me. I walked down the stuffy hallway toward the glass door where I waited for my mom. Twenty minutes later she pulled up in the parking lot. Her prescription sunglasses were on. She reached over with her long, sleeveless, pale arm to unlock the door. I got in and held my rolled towel close. I stared ahead, worried that something about me would reveal what had happened.

“Did you have a good swim?”

“Yes,” I said.

14-year-old Patrick Gutierrez and dance partner Adele Martinez Kestner at White Concert Hall in Kansas, dancing Alcaraván from the Chiapas region of Mexico.

Patrick Gutierrez grew up in a small Mexican American community in Topeka, Kansas, with a tall white mom, a short Mexican dad, and two brothers. He moved to New York City in 1982 and danced with modern dance companies for ten years. He’s been a physical therapist since 1999. Patrick started taking writing workshops with Blaise Allysen Kearsley in 2015. He thanks all of the other writers and storytellers he’s had the opportunity to connect with along the way.

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There are ladybugs fucking in the lupines.

The ladybugs like the lupines because the lupines are covered in aphids. I don’t like the aphids; I think they’re gross. The lupine stems and seedpods are crawling with these tiny green bugs, but the ladybugs think the aphids are some kind of all-you-can-eat buffet, so there are a lot of ladybugs now.

I like the ladybugs very much, and I like that they are fucking in my lupines.

When I first moved into this 1946 home, it was surrounded by too much manicured lawn and immaculately shaped juniper hedges. “Topiary of the Eisenhower era,” an old friend called it. I was amused by the hedges at first, and by the blue jay that would tuck peanuts in them and come back later to retrieve their secret snacks.

The front lawn was confusing to me, but I liked sprawling on a blanket on the back lawn, staring into the blue of a summer sky. Then the water bill came. It was four hundred dollars. I stopped watering out front and gradually, the lawn went to dust and dandelions.

I never expected to live in a home with a yard. I had a series of tiny apartments, the last had a common garden for which I was not responsible. For a few years, I had a small plot in a community garden a few blocks from my walk-up condo. I successfully grew tomatoes and unsuccessfully grew a few other things. Zucchini. Lettuce. Some flowers. Those community garden people were hard core and humorless. You received a sharply worded email if you didn’t empty the water from the hose when you were done. It did not make me excited about gardening.

At that condo with the common garden I had a noisy downstairs neighbor, and no room for guests, and, eventually, a husband. All that precipitated a move to this 1946 house with more space, an office where I could work, and too much lawn.

It wasn’t long before we argued, the husband and I, about what to do with the yard. He didn’t mind the mowing and was apathetic about the dust in late summer, but I hated looking at the bare dirt, the increasing weeds. I had started randomly planting bulbs in the grass. Daffodils and tulips alongside the walk out front, crocuses at random in the back lawn. Little white and purple flowers that I would forget about and then be delighted by come spring.

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One year, after returning from a work trip, the husband walked in the back gate. Upon seeing the lawn dotted with crocuses, he became quite angry.

“How am I supposed to mow?” he said.

“What if you just… didn’t until the flowers are done?”

“They’re in the way.”

I was confused by his bitterness. It didn’t make any sense. The flowers would fade; it could wait. It would only be a few weeks. Why was he reacting like this? There were daffodils along the low wall at the back of the garden; he said those were also in the way.

The yard was not the only thing we argued about, but the arguments about the garden became increasingly metaphoric over time — ridiculously so.

“I did it to inconvenience you,” I snarked. I couldn’t help myself.

“You probably did,” he said.

We’re divorced now. You already guessed that.

***

The rules are clearly stated.

When you sign up for Chip Drop, you must take the whole load, and you get notice right before they arrive. It’s a chaotic way to get free mulch. You have to be up for the adventure and ready to spring into action. I had been alone for a year by then, maybe it was two, I don’t remember. I thought I could handle it. How much mulch could it be?

I was coming back from walking the dog when the truck pulled into the alley. I stared at the container on the back. Oh no, I thought, what have I done? I asked the driver if I had to take the whole load. Could I not just have half?

“Nope. It’s all or nothing.” He tipped the container into the alley, covering most of the space between my fence and the fence opposite mine with a fragrant mountain of shredded tree clippings. The scent was intoxicating. All my neighbors came out.

“Well, that’s a lot of mulch, isn’t it? What’s your plan?”

It was Thursday. On Tuesdays, the city ran garbage trucks through the alley that was now blocked with 25, 30 yards of chip mulch. It had to be gone by Tuesday morning. Early.

The neighbors looked at me like I had an answer, like I knew what I was doing. I did not know what I was doing. I was terrified.

I had read about gardening: library books, websites, an online forum about permaculture, and I had been learning about the lasagna method. To lasagna your garden, you lay down cardboard, cover it with mulch, and wait. The cardboard smothers everything underneath, depriving it of light. The stuff above it holds the cardboard down and eventually feeds the soil as the cardboard decomposes.

Reading is a good place to start, but you don’t learn how to grow stuff in your yard until you get your hands dirty.

I had done this lasagna thing once before on a much smaller scale with only a few yards of mulch. In early winter, I had lined the front walk with cardboard and compost and waited until spring. My shovel cut the formerly hard ground like it was warm butter. I planted several varieties of lavender that now spill over onto the walk and hum with bumblebees much of the spring and summer. Easy enough, successful enough. So go big, I told myself — do the whole front yard.

There I was, confronted with this mountain of mulch; it had to be out of the way in four days — no question. I imagined the city calling to complain that I’d blocked their access; I imagined there would be fines.

I spent half a day panicking before coming to my senses. You’re the boss, I told myself. You’re alone now; you get to decide how things get done. When the lawn needs mowing. Where to plant flowers. When to hire some help. I made a call and the next day, two polite men from the day labor service showed up at my house. They made short work of the mulch, and by mid-afternoon, the entire front yard was buried a foot or so deep in fragrant shredded forest. When it rained, I could smell the pine and cedar. When the windows were open that woody aroma filled the house.

Time passed. I read. I planted. Things thrived or they didn’t.

The following summer, the California poppies arrived. They covered the front yard with neon orange flowers. The bees loved them. Standing out front I could hear them singing to themselves as they traveled from bloom to bloom, collecting great yellow blobs of pollen in their saddlebags.

I read up on native plants and ordered way too many from the conservation district plant sale. Every time I turned over the soil to plant the mock oranges, red dogwoods, daffodils, and tulips, I found earthworms. I randomly scattered Northwest wildflower mix, thinking it would take. The calendula did. And the lupines, where the aphids thrive and the ladybugs fuck.

Sometimes I watered. Mostly I didn’t. Friends gave me plants they’d divided from their own yards; seeds they’d collected from their crops. I put them in the ground and remembered them when I waded through the knee-deep poppies, my nails dirty from pulling stray grass.

I found myself puttering in the garden, meticulously weeding one clump of lilies, clearing around that coastal strawberry runner for ten minutes here, fifteen minutes there, and then calling it a day. My dying lawn of dandelions and dust had transformed into a riot of color—orange and purple and neon green—and butterflies and ladybugs. Hummingbirds. Crows feasting on the earthworms that surfaced after the rain.

One day I was stopped by my neighbor, a quiet, keep-to-himself guy in an orderly house with regular garden service. “I just wanted you to know how much I love your wildflowers,” he said.

Another neighbor said, “Oh, I can see you’re a gardener.”

Spring came and I let the back lawn grow tall and the flowers bloom. I left the lawn mower in the garage until the last crocus wilted. No one was inconvenienced by my flowers. I wandered around in the increasingly abundant mess out front; letting things grow where they wanted to grow and not worrying much when they didn’t. It’s a certified wildlife habitat now, registered with the National Wildlife Federation.

And there are ladybugs fucking in the lupines.

Sometimes I hose off the lupines; that works to get rid of the aphids in the short term, but it doesn’t make them go away. I planted fennel and sage because they are supposed to deter the aphids long term, but the stalks are covered with those sticky green bugs all the same. There’s a much neater garden around the corner from me, their yard is also full of lupines, but they don’t have the aphid problem that I have. They also don’t have all those ladybugs, so I guess it’s a tradeoff. I’ve looked. You can’t miss them, the ladybugs, with their bright red-orange shells, their polka dots. The ladybugs are at my house, the house with the untidy garden.

I have counted four or five kinds of bees. Honeybees and fat fuzzy bumbles and a shiny greenish bee. I have hummingbirds zooming in and out of the currants in the early spring. They will be back to feed on the crocosmia and the lilies when those bloom in summer. The wild brown bunnies nap in the shadows, the earthworms turn the soil below ground. The lawn isn’t completely vanquished. It sends up tall spires and goes to seed, but no one would call that unruly meadow in front of my house a lawn. It’s a mess, a tangle of color and life, and there is no containing it.

Pam Mandel is a memoirist, screenwriter, and podcaster. Her current passion project is the podcast CANNED, Conversations about Getting Fired. She lives in Seattle with a rescue dog named Harley. Her yard is a beautiful disaster.

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The drawing assignment: Render a person’s likeness without depicting their face. Create a portrait in objects.

My grandmother Choo Choo loved her pocketbooks.

My mother holds onto them.

From the top of her closet, my mother lowers Choo Choo’s everyday bag. It's made of black leather that’s “soft like butter,” in my grandmother’s words. We explore the compartments. My muscles spasm. The wallet bulges with department store credit cards. The oversized sunglasses, an homage to Jackie O. Plastic-wrapped peppermints crinkle in every supple fold.

And then there are the clutch bags: the beaded rectangular, the alligator envelope, the black satin clamshell that shuts with a clap. The inside of my throat thickens.

My mother pulls scarves from a metal drawer overhead. My sinuses swell. We recall how Choo Choo knotted the paisley fabrics beneath her chin, like a 1950s movie star.

Inside the compact jewelry box, a confetti of stud earrings. A gold brooch spells out “Mother” with a heart dangling from the word.

My mother unfolds the tissue-thin handkerchief with the Poinsettia pattern. We laugh because we know that this object absolutely must be included in the drawing. Christmas was my grandmother’s favorite day of the year. In the early morning darkness, she’d pull her sleeping daughter out of bed and over to the tree. After I was born, each Christmas Eve I witnessed a tense negotiation that began with my grandmother bidding for a 6 a.m. start to gift-opening and my night-owl mother countering with noon.

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I leave my mother’s apartment with a grocery bag full of my grandmother’s possessions. Each swing of my arm shakes up the smell that stokes my body’s rebellion.

I keep walking.

My grandmother is not toxic.

Sure, in her bathroom there were those little soaps with a faint rose scent. On special occasions, it’s true, she dabbed Nina Ricci perfume.

But Choo Choo spoke the words “Ebonya and I” like we were the sole members of the most exclusive club. I felt so proud and safe and loved to hear her boast, “Ebonya and I like that program”, “Ebonya and I want to go to Filenes”, “Ebonya and I are going to pop some sweet potatoes into the microwave for a snack. Does anyone else want anything?”

Sweet potatoes are one of ten foods that I can still eat without provoking symptoms.

My grandmother would never hurt me.

In my living room, I arrange the objects into a still life for drawing.

I might’ve preferred to learn painting. But my illness forbids it. Even the smell of watercolors makes my body react. As does food, clothing, furniture. And most people.

I itch and fuss, shuffling purses and scarves and jewelry, scrambling scents.

It’s like I’ve sheltered in a Sephora during an earthquake.

My grandmother died ten years before the onset of this unexplained illness that has me smelling smells that no one else smells. Inert smells that power over me.

To fulfill my drawing assignment, I should quickly settle on a composition, snap a photo, and pack these items in the fridge until I can return them to my mother. It’s not like I want to wear the tangerine paisley scarf or carry the handbag sculpted out of black butter.

Yet I’m possessed by a need to fix this. I soak the scarves in a tub of vinegar overnight, although I’ve learned that these tried and true cleansing solutions don’t work for me.

When I lift the scarves from the bath, they smell the same as they did when they went in. I’m not surprised.

I am shattered.

I turn to OxiClean next. Then I pack the fabric in moist baking soda.

And when all that fails, I fall to my knees. I round myself over the tub as the water rushes over the scarves, and suds, and all of those “miracle” cleaners. I plunge the fabric beneath the brine. The water splashes my chest as it leaps up to choke me. I wrestle that fabric down, whip those scarves beneath the tide. Runny-eyed, mucusy, struggling for breath, I pitch my body forward so I can thrust more forcefully. The slats of the wooden bathmat pinch at the center of my knee where the skin is most tender.

I drown the fabrics again, again, again.

Ebonya Lia’s debut novel I Can Feel It All Over on illness, identity, and isolation is forthcoming from Amistad in spring 2027. She lives in Brooklyn with her plant Chris, who is also thankful to finally be under the care of a compassionate doctor. Follow her on IG: @ebonya.lia.

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As does obsessing over things beyond your control or ability to influence.

Try re-reading the newspaper, looking for articles you skipped the first time around.

Nap.

Write emails you don't need to write and edit them to eloquence.

Search online for your various exes until you discover that one, a biggie, has returned to her hometown where she works in the Budget & Finance department of the local university, serving as a "team member" on the Dean's Office Feedback project.

If possible, locate her email address but do not find any recent photographs, however comprehensive your search.

Consider writing to her, and in fact begin several such emails, but then dig up your last letter to her, written four years previous and never sent, in which you relate the pathetic story of how your roommate at the time reported that she, your ex, had called saying that she was in town for just one day and was sad to have missed you, and how this moved you to tell her how much it meant to you to hear from her after five years of silence and how it made you realize what a jerk you had been to harbor bad feelings for so long, and how you had gone to bed that night filled with such happiness and relief, only to discover the following morning that the message had been left by another woman with the same name.

Space out.

Make lists.

Remember the first time you and aforementioned ex had sex and how her then recent ex-boyfriend, who was also your boss, appeared at her door in the middle of everything, and how she went into the hall to talk to him while you stood naked on her bed, not knowing what else to do, and how you listened as they argued about the fact that he wanted to come into her room, only she wouldn't let him—not for any reason, she said, but because he had no right— and how he kept saying that he knew someone was in there, because he wasn't—as he kept saying—an idiot, and how you wondered if you should put on some clothes in case he decided to storm into the room, because you had a better chance in a fight with him with clothes on.

Contemplate new shelving strategies.

Put on the kind of music that befits the melancholic mood brought on by thinking about a woman who never loved you and who you never loved, as you would each periodically remind each other, and then discover, on further research, that she had placed 29th out of 37 entrants in the 34-39 age division of the 2001 Run for Independence 5K.

Calculate that as 10:36 a mile.

Repeat as necessary.

Michael Barrish was a writer and a freelance web developer. He died in 2023 from pneumonia after being diagnosed with a rare and aggressive form of early-onset dementia.

How I Learned periodically reprints stories that appeared on Michael’s website Oblivio between 1999 and 2020. From the about page: “Etymology: Oblivio is Latin. Often translated as ‘forgetfulness,’ it suggests a profound lostness, something akin to the English word oblivion, but more oblivious.”

Oblivio, the book, is available on demand. Massive thanks to Mickle Maher for preserving Michael’s work.

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“There’s something wrong with your baby’s heart,” the perinatologist almost whispered after pausing a sticky wand on my swollen abdomen during a Level II ultrasound. I had known to look for the familiar window shape broken into four symmetrical panes, its edges writhing and wriggling with life.

I could not find it.

Before talk of termination and hypoplastic left heart syndrome filled the airless space, I had one thought: I have a plan, and this is not part of it.

In 1960, when Milton Bradley debuted its modern-day version of The Game of Life, my mother was repeating her freshman year at boarding school and my father was graduating from Harvard. To mark the company’s 100th anniversary, the updated design featured a three-dimensional game board with a built-in spinner. The premise was simple: players “drove” tiny plastic convertibles along a narrow track, earning and spending money along the way while encountering milestones — from landing a career to having children (tiny pink and blue pegs tucked into the backseat). The first to reach Millionaire Acres with the most cash won.

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My parents left nothing to chance. After meeting (at the Episcopal church she attended, where he was organist and choir director), they began checking the boxes. Early in the game, each acquired a college degree and a career before getting married. They had children (two pink, one blue) and purchased a home. I grew up believing this series of conventional moves would lead to my future happiness. With few opportunities to forge my own path, I played along — checking the boxes and steering clear of obstacles.

When my youngest daughter was born, it felt like my tiny plastic car had skidded on black ice and gone into a tailspin. No amount of research prepared me for the reality of parenting a medically compromised child. The doctors’ plan, a trio of open-heart surgeries aimed at compensating for my newborn’s half a heart, was out of my control. I was terrified.

My husband assured me everything would be fine. I was not sure. After three decades of attempting to follow the rules and control life’s chaos, I had entered uncharted territory. Fewer than 48 hours after my daughter’s birth, I held my breath while her sternum was cracked open for her first surgery. Cora’s condition was fatal without intervention, so I let go.

It was the only option.

For nearly six years, surgeons attempted to repair Cora’s two-chambered heart in a process reminiscent of kintsugi — the Japanese art of reinforcing cherished vessels by making them beautiful at the broken places. In the absence of space to explore my fears I pursued a new path. With every open-heart surgery (there were six) and cath lab intervention (I lost count), I leaned into being present.

Cora faced myriad complications, from mechanical valve replacement and anticoagulant therapy to acid reflux and g-tube surgery. With each zig and zag away from the conventional path, my own transformation took root.

Living parallel lives at opposite ends of Massachusetts became our family’s new normal. Patrick stayed in the Berkshires teaching history and ushering our two other girls through their daily routines while I kept Cora company in Boston. We’d occasionally switch roles for holidays or parent-teacher conferences, our matching minivans passing one another on the Mass Pike without notice. Most nights, the girls connected via FaceTime to catch up and giggle. To find us all under a single roof was rare.

The diagnosis of end-stage heart failure came on Cora’s fourth birthday, which she and I spent at Boston Children’s Hospital. She pedaled her tricycle in a loop around 8 East, pausing to share an Elmo cake covered in thick frosting fur with her favorite nurses. After drifting off to sleep, Cora was added to the transplant list. It was the only move left to make.

We waited 18 months for a new heart. Each morning, as Cora slipped her slight arms into the straps of a backpack bearing an infusion pump that fueled her failing heart, no one dared mention what we were really waiting for — the death of another child roughly the same age and size as my daughter. This knowledge, like the equipment keeping her alive, felt burdensome to carry.

When a donor heart did arrive, it was not the miracle fix our family had anticipated. After several weeks of groggy consciousness, Cora crashed. The sheer volume of other folks’ blood products swirling about her system ganged up to attack her healthy heart.

Cora’s cardiologist gave a matter-of-fact explanation. “Each of us has two hands. In one, we are holding hope that Cora will make a full recovery. In the other, we are holding space for the fact that she might not.”

Kathryn and Alice doted on their little sister, unbothered by the rhythmic clicking and whirring of an ECMO machine performing the work of another failing heart. They took turns painting Cora’s fingernails with pots of purple polish from the hospital gift shop, reading aloud from picture books about Murphy the dog and Pinkalicious, and styling her hair in pigtails and bows she’d have never tolerated if alert.

I wondered if they knew Cora wasn’t coming home. Or starting kindergarten in the fall. Or splashing with them in the lake like they had promised.

The truth would crush all of us, so I didn’t ask.

***

Cora died on a September afternoon, 49 days after receiving her donor heart. The details have blurred around the edges with distance. I no longer remember the familiar smell of adhesive tape criss-crossing Cora’s face or the weight of her body draped across mine as life support was withdrawn.

I do remember this: After exiting the hospital one final time and stuffing our daughter’s belongings into the backseat beside an empty car seat, Cora’s father and I did not speak.

We drove from Boston to the Berkshires in silence. The 125-mile journey was reminiscent of another return trip from a different hospital. Six years prior we had been equally incapable of communicating about what bringing a medically compromised child into the world entailed and the chaos it would create.

Back then, the unknown had been too painful to speak aloud, so we avoided the subject. Instead, we set to work dividing and conquering, tending to our three daughters and their diverse needs while our relationship slipped through the gaping cracks in between tasks.

“You are the ship,” my therapist told me as September waned. “If you go down, everyone on board will drown.”

I contemplated this notion after dropping my kids off at the bus stop and going through the motions of going to the gym, meeting friends for coffee, folding laundry, cooking dinner, and tending to my kids’ questions.

“But where did Cora go? Where is she?” my eight-year-old wanted to know. She was crumpling at the concept of cremation. “I want to see her dead, don't you?” she asked her older sister.

“I don’t care,” my 11-year-old responded. “When you’re dead, what does it matter?”

I did my best to make space for their needs. In a house where quiet filled every corner, punctuated only by bursts of screaming at the dinner table, this was a challenge.

Amidst my grief, I came to a conclusion: Trying to adhere to the conventional path had not elicited happiness; it had made me miserable. I had gone from being my dad’s daughter to someone’s wife without ever becoming myself — something I needed to remedy if my daughters and I were to survive.

***

Three months after we buried Cora’s ashes under a half boulder at the cemetery in our rural town, I filed for divorce.

This new chapter was bittersweet. I saw my kids half as often, but we talked twice as much. When we were together, I was present. And the more I listened, the more they talked. Being in the presence of my undivided attention was a novelty to both of them so they shared big feelings about their sister’s short life, and feelings that included regret and relief.

When The Game of Life appeared under our Christmas tree that year, the changes were evident. The 1960s-era convertibles had been replaced by minivans, the once binary pegs were now rainbow colored, and the option to expand one’s family included adopting pets. I had not laid eyes on the board game since third or fourth grade when my best friend Beth and I engaged in heated matches after school and ate bread-and-butter from the microwave. For Alice, the game was comforting. Round after round, she hoped for the same outcome: to become a veterinarian and retire to a cottage in the country. Kathryn, favoring strategy, learned to play backgammon and often walked next door to play with her grandfather.

Each of us found our way through the mess in different ways. My oldest daughter’s path included attending extra sessions at sleep-away camp, applying to boarding school, and choosing a college more than 1,700 miles from home. My middle daughter (who, with no little sister to care for, quickly rejected that descriptor) chose to seek solace in nature by working on a local farm, and transferring to a tiny Waldorf high school that nurtured her curiosity. I quit my teaching job, one of many conventions that no longer served me, and took up freelance writing. We traveled to the beach in Maine and Long Island, to London and Montreal — freedom my daughters had never felt before.

***

It’s been ten years, and my (mostly) grown daughters and I have come to agree: Life is easier without Cora. And we miss her terribly. These are the truths we confront around the dinner table while devouring Indian takeout straight from the containers. Between bites of chicken tikka masala and dal makhani, we debate ideal study abroad destinations, discuss best practices for raising backyard hens, and acknowledge how we might still be going through the motions of simply being alive had it not been for Cora’s death.

Each day, our hands remind us that beauty and pain can coexist. Cora has been gone almost twice as long as she was alive. Still, she remains the fuel in our tanks, the experience of having loved her urging us on toward the brilliant unknown.

In keeping with the rules, her donor remains anonymous. Their family's gift of a whole, healthy, four-chambered heart might not have saved Cora’s life for as long as we’d have liked.

But it sure did save ours.

Hannah Van Sickle is a former educator turned freelance writer whose journey raising daughters has been chronicled at Parents, She Knows, Modern Loss, and Refinery29. This September marks ten years since her five-year-old died following a failed heart transplant—breathing unexpected life into her mom and big sisters. Hannah lives and works in the Berkshires of western Massachusetts. She is at work on a memoir.

Mo’Bradie only exists at family reunions. Not on Google. Not on paper. Not a birthday or death day or an anniversary recorded or remembered. Never captured on film, pressed on the glue-covered page of a broken-spine photo album.

Mo’Bradie is a word-of-mouth kind of woman. A “did you hear” or “I heard that she” kind of woman. Someone my family remembers in passing, but only when asked. Someone they knew as children, if they had a chance to know her at all.

***

There go Mo’Bradie, smiling in the rain. Hair loose and flying. Arms out wide, spinning like some kind of propeller, just ready to take off. Not caring what the folks say about how she’s different. Hears things no one else can. Sees what the children and the grown can’t. How that poor Mo’Bradie, can’t no one understand her. Can’t grasp the why of her. Why she out there in the rain. Ruining that good hair. Spinning and grinning like some kind of fool.

***

I’m a child when my mother first mentions her to me. Mo’Bradie, the aunt with spiders in her hair. Not her father’s sister or the daughter, whose voice carried the thoughts and desires for their father ‘cause granddaddy Pigeon had “nim nam” words for little girls back then.

“She’d get real close and part her hair.”

With every telling, my mother tilts her head down until she’s curling into herself.

We’ve shared the story of Mo’Bradie so many times that I’ve started to mimic her movements, even parting my hair down the middle.

“Mo’Bradie’d say, ‘Little girl, I feel something itching me. I got them spiders in my hair.’ You know she’d ask us to look!”

My mother and I bump heads, our scalp and hair nuzzling to scratch what we can’t see.

And we sing the chorus of Mo’Bradie, our heads back, our voices raised. “Quit that! Quit that! Qwoo! Qwoo! Qwoo!”

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Mo’Bradie on the porch with a secret — all spiders have a routine. Folk only see them when they go off course. The spiders colliding with the people like the slap of death served with an open palm. Mo’Bradie knows the call of spiders. Knows she’s caught in their routine. Tries to pass the gift to her niece, my mother, if only she would see.

“They in my hair,” she says every time. Every time, my mother looks and doesn't see. The spiders tell her to quit. To move on to someone with a better mind. Mo’Bradie knows in the root of her skull that a better mind does not exist.

“One day, when I got good and grown,” my mother says, “I just stopped looking.” She rubs her lips together, shakes her head. “Wasn’t nothing ever there.”

***

A quick internet search suggests that the possibility of any bug, including spiders, living in someone’s hair is incredibly low. But for Mo’Bradie, those spiders were real. They were real for my mother, too. Not real in the touch-and-feel kind of way. But real in the way a child trusts an adult until they get too grown to believe what they can’t carry in their hand.

***

We’re in the back room of Uncle Leholt’s house.

Uncle Leholt, in and out of sleep in a guest chair by the phone. My mother stealing residence in his usual chair which has the best view of the television. Me, still small enough to treat the burgundy velvet rocking chair like a hammock, my legs swinging over one arm, neck craned over the other.

Aunt Raenelle (Reenie for short) throwing glances with Uncle Satchmo, trying to make sense of what their youngest sister is saying.

“But what were we looking for?”

I like the way Uncle Satchmo says “we.” Like everyone in this room had a chance to know Mo’Bradie. To look through her good hair as she parted ways to her scalp. A chance for all of us to see what wasn’t there. “We,” like the memory is still there, just underdeveloped.

“The spiders!” My mother half screams, half laughs.

To which Aunt Reenie and Uncle Satchmo yell “no” loud enough to startle Uncle Leholt but not enough to keep him awake.

“You two know Mo always said she had bugs in her hair,” my mother says.

“And how you know she had spiders?” Aunt Reenie straightens in her seat.

“‘Cause that’s what she said she had!”

My mother mimics Aunt Reenie’s movement, a common position between the two of them. Ready to debate until the other backs down.

Aunt Reenie asks, “But did you ever see ‘em, Sabby?”

My mother leans closer to my aunt, like closing the gap between them will trigger the one clear memory she has of Mo’Bradie. Like, somehow, talking and searching for the spiders will snap this version of Mo’Bradie back into their lives as easily as the memory of them snapping peas over silver wash basins.

“It’s not like I wanted to, Reenie.”

“Then how you know they were spiders?”

“‘Cause that’s what Mo’Bradie said to look for!”

Uncle Leholt has this way of snoring that makes anyone nearby think he’s asleep, until he can spit your entire conversation back on you when you least expect it.

“I thought you was sleep,” Aunt Reenie says, sucking the gold crown of her front tooth.

Uncle Leholt doesn’t bother to open his eyes until he’s sure Aunt Reenie’s back on my mother. I stare long enough to catch him when he winks.

Then, somehow, he gets right back to snoring.

“I’m telling you, she’d always sit in the same corner and pat her hair,” my mother says.

“‘Cause of the bugs,” Aunt Reenie says, rewinds a strip of her hair that’s come loose from around one of her blue rollers and tucks it back under her bonnet.

“Spiders,” My mother says, then sighs, then looks to Uncle Satchmo. “You remember.”

“Well, Sabby, can’t say that I—”

“Mo’Bradie in the corner just beating her hair saying, ‘quit that! Quit that!’”

And like my mother and I have done so many times before, we lift our heads and sing, “Qwoo, qwoo, qwoo!”

We are loud enough to make Uncle Leholt sit up wide-eyed and laugh. Uncle Satchmo slams his fist against the floor, giddy, clapping and laughing, the room shaking. Aunt Reenie left gasping and asking, “what she say,” then joining in when we teach her the words to Mo’Bradie’s song.

***

Mo’Bradie in the corner pulling at her braids, watching the children play. Daddy Pigeon telling her to sit still. Be still. Asking why she think don’t nobody fool with her? And Mo’Bradie knows she’s no fool. The spiders know so too. They tell her on the mornings she washes her hair. How she’s pretty and loved and wanted by them. But their voices come all at once, always loud and sudden like gunfire in the backwoods during coon hunts. Better to wash them away. Watch some of them be eaten by the drain. Tighten her braids. Make it hard for the spiders to return. Hard for their voices to find her again.

***

I leave the thought of Mo’Bradie alone until I’m 35 years old and ready to talk to my family without asking for my mother’s permission. Or with my mother present to hold my hand as I struggle to find the balance between respectful and my true personality — a dry sense of humor that can be misinterpreted as too casual over a phone I’d rather use to text.

I call Uncle Leholt who keeps records of the family and might know more facts than stories about Mo’Bradie. And I know he will sense my desire to quit speaking over the phone and will ask to speak to my mother.

Except instead of Uncle Leholt, Aunt Reenie answers.

She says she had made macaroni, and now my uncle is driving the two of them to her daughter’s house to eat, and my stomach caves. Aunt Reenie’s macaroni and cheese is the gooey kind that slides down your throat. The pull-a-pile kind that you wait in line for. Macaroni and cheese that all the cousins want, and that she fusses at us for wanting, but refuses to teach anyone how to make it. The kind she bursts through the door with, demanding access to the oven. I get so lost in my jealous wanting that I almost forget why I called until I look at my sheet of paper.

I’m upstairs with the phone on speaker so my mother can hear. “What do you remember about Aunt Mo’Bradie?”

“We didn’t fool too much with Aunt Mo.”

But Aunt Reenie was a grown enough child to know her. Know about Mo’Bradie on the porch with Granddaddy Pigeon. Grown enough to be given a dime to buy Pigeon snuff from the corner store, a dime she used to buy candy instead.

“Do you know when she died?” I ask.

“Should be in the book.” The book being any number of family reunion books I’d have to find around the house.

Or maybe the book Uncle Leholt has, which is actually a binder that tracks everyone buried at the family church.

After I hang up, I ask Mom if she knows if Mo’Bradie’s out there amongst the family. With the church members, privileged with tombstones facing the church’s doors or with the nonmembers, buried closer to the main road with tombstones that mimic gray color samples as seen at Home Depot.

“Probably.”

I’m thinking, there’s a headstone for the family rumored to have "got burnt up" in a fire but not for Mo'Bradie. No proof of her or hint of her body anywhere out there where the rest of her family lay. Just a woman assumed to be buried somewhere amongst them all.

My mother can always tell when I’ve caught something based on what she’s said. I must make a face or pick or bite my lip whenever a thought grabs me.

"She was a bitty thing. 'Bout this big," she says, raising her pointer finger the width of a Slim Jim, "with that good grade of hair."

***

Mo’Bradie who doesn’t exist online. An unknown woman tongue-tied in the stories her nieces and nephews try to unravel on the rare occasion someone asks. Mo’Bradie with spiders in her good grade of hair she kept in braids resting on the top of her head. Knotted like a carnival pretzel. Mo’Bradie who might have smiled if someone had a chance to capture her in a photo. Might have cried at the sight of what developed, seen and not seen, as if she wore no expression at all.

Avitus B. Carle (she/her) lives and writes outside of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Her stories have been published in a variety of places including Ghost Parachute, X-R-A-Y Litmag, SoFloPoJo, Necessary Fiction, The Commuter (Electric Lit.), and elsewhere. Her work was selected for the 2025, 2024, and 2022 Best Small Fictions anthology, the Wigleaf Top 50 in 2023 and 2024, the 2022 and 2020 Best of the Net anthology, and has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, PEN/O. Henry Prize, and the Best Microfictions anthology. She is the author of the flash fiction collection, These Worn Bodies, which won the 2023 Moon City Press Short Fiction award. Find her at avitusbcarle.com or online everywhere @avitusbcarle.

We are several weeks into my weekly private swim lessons.

I am not a toddler, a 6-year-old, or a teen. I am almost 30; this is the farthest I have gotten in any swim class. Sitting deck-side is my peppy, warm, and empathetic teacher, Deb. She is a small, muscular athlete with short black hair, dark eyes, beautiful arms, and a kind smile. She is the athletic director at the Y where my girlfriend swims three times a week. She hires Deb to teach me to swim before we vacation in Mexico.

We are in the shallow end working on the crawl and I start to cry. I feel deep shame about not being able to do something everyone else does effortlessly, especially my girlfriend. Deb and I face each other. Let’s tread water, she says. My salty tears run down my face and into the pool. She tells me how brave I am. She admires me for doing something so risky. She is completely patient and non-judging. When I tell others about it, I say she did therapy with me in the pool.

Three years later I run into Deb. She is dating a good friend of my new sweetheart. We start hanging out. We talk about our childhoods, our butch girlfriends, our exes. We have regular lunches and people in public ask if we’re sisters. We laugh and say yes. Other than being the same height, and both of us having long dark hair and bangs, we don’t look anything alike. Deb’s mother is Choctaw. She has her Mom’s wide face and cheeks and golden skin. I’m a pale Eastern European Jew with green eyes and occasional acne. We shop, get pedicures, go to demonstrations, and talk on the phone. We celebrate together when the anti-gay ballot measure is defeated in 1992.

My sweetheart’s brother Kevin has AIDS and he moves from Santa Barbara to live with us when he needs more care. Deb visits, brings homemade fudge, listens, and entertains him with her funny stories. She holds me up. I miss being at Kevin’s bedside at the moment of death because I am on the phone with her. She is by my side at Kevin’s memorial service. I applaud her for applying and getting into social work school. She moves in with her girlfriend Karen and meets her future sperm donor in grad school. I spend the night on Deb and Karen’s couch when I am devastated after finding out my sweetheart wants someone else. Deb helps me pack when I can’t bear to be alone in the house I am moving out of. I go to her baby shower after Gabe is born early. She calls me at work crying when the relationship between her and Gabe’s dads turns ugly. For years we go to Pride together.

She can always laugh at herself. She cooks delicious roast chicken and fruit crisps when I go over for dinner. I do baking projects with Gabe. She gardens and sews matching PJs for Gabe and Karen. She loves sappy romantic comedies. For years she tries, unsuccessfully, to get pregnant again. She desperately wants another baby. When I tell her I met someone at a silent retreat she asks, How does that work? We both laugh.

I don’t lose my fear of deep water. She gives me birthday cards for more swimming lessons that say good for as many lessons as you need. She is successful in her therapy practice and becomes more involved with energy medicine. She tries to get me to use EFT tapping to help with my grief. I don’t understand or believe in much of the new-age aspects of her work, but I cheer her on.

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I am alone in my apartment when I get her call. I have breast cancer, she tells me. We cry. She has a lumpectomy and no radiation. She is utterly convinced that after the surgery she will no longer have cancer and she will keep it from recurring with alternative treatment. I try to talk to her about it. She is resolute that she will be OK. And she is for a couple of years. Then she has a pain in her chest. It’s a rib out, she says. Her naturopath tells her she’s not embracing her power.

My partner Laura and I are at a work-related, fancy gala for a non-profit. I get a call on my flip phone. Deb is in the hospital. There is cancer in her spine and she is having surgery tomorrow. We leave the event early and drive to Good Samaritan Hospital. We feel stupidly overdressed walking in. Deb’s spirits are good. I hold her hand and tell her I love her. The doctors are optimistic, but her recovery is brutal. The meds make her paranoid and anxious. I sit with her so Karen can go home to shower. I feel helpless and surprised that for the first time, I am not able to comfort Deb. She leaves the hospital with metal rods in her spine and a back brace that looks like Frida Kahlo’s. Soon she is up and around with a walker. I help her take one step at a time down from her house to the sidewalk and around the block. The metaphor is not lost on us. The athlete is there, strong and determined.

She accepts that she has metastatic cancer and joins a support group and gains confidence from these connections. We talk about dying and she has some good months. We walk in Race for the Cure. She asks me to go with her to Gabe’s last high school basketball game. I take a big-smile photo of her and Gabe with their arms around each other on the court. She doesn’t look sick from the outside. Gabe hands her a balloon someone gave to him and we walk to the car. She is giddy with joy that she got to see him play again. The string from the balloon is somehow shut in the car door and there we are on Hwy 26 with a balloon flapping outside the car. We can’t stop laughing. We go to Por Que No?, our favorite taco place, and share one small margarita, perfect chips, and guacamole, and for a few moments, it feels like the old days.

She is one of the first friends I call after my breast cancer diagnosis in 2012. Even though she isn’t doing that great and my choices about treatment are so different from hers, she gives me support. Until she can’t.

Her cancer does what cancer does. Now, the last-ditch big guns of Western medicine come out. Daily radiation is followed by oozing, bloody open sores. She’s on Compazine and Oxy, plus weed. She withdraws into a haze of meds for pain and anxiety and she doesn’t want to talk. She tells me, Char, sometimes I don’t want to see people.

But I’m not people, Deb, I’m your best friend.

It’s 2015. The hospital bed is in the living room. Her parents are here. They are cheery, homophobic Christians from rural Northern California, but they love their little girl. They call her Debbie. June, her mom, cooks Deb’s favorite enchiladas even though she is barely eating. No one acknowledges that she is dying. When June isn’t cooking she sits reading her 2-inch-thick, heavily annotated bible. Burl, Deb’s dad, is reading some alarmist right-wing shit. I remember to breathe. Everything But the Girl, her favorite band, is on repeat. Karen looks ready to throw the CD player out the window.

We go out and sit on the porch. We both know that Deb is close. Karen tells me that Deb wouldn’t talk about dying with her. She tells me how hard it has been to support her in the decisions she made about treatment. All these years I thought Karen was a gung-ho believer in the ozone therapy, the eating for your blood type, the Rick Simpson oil that was going to cure her. But no. Karen did what I did, what we all did. We kept our mouths shut and support her choices.

She’s mostly sleeping on the day I say goodbye. I squeeze her hand again and tell her I love her, again. Gabe and Karen are with her when she dies, the parents are upstairs asleep. Gabe puts flowers around her body and on her closed eyes. They are grateful it is just the three of them there. Gabe is 17.

I go with Karen to the cremation place. It is utilitarian, but OK. She plans a beautiful memorial party. No family of origin, no religion. Just good stories, music, and food, and found family. I drink too much champagne and give a tear-filled speech. Karen has glass marbles made with Deb’s ashes inside. Mine sits in a small ceramic dish on my bedside table. Some nights I roll it around in my hand before I go to sleep. She’s been gone almost 10 years. I’m going through another breakup now. My 22-year relationship is ending. Laura, the one I met at the silent retreat. Deb should be here, by my side again. But she’s not. I talk to her anyway. I also wonder about taking more swimming lessons. But how could there ever be a teacher like Deb?

Char Breshgold has been a working and exhibiting visual artist for 40 years. She paints, often from photos, using her art to tell stories. During the 1980s she was a member of The Girl Artists. A five woman, feminist collaborative group whose archives have recently been acquired by The Smithsonian Archive of American Art. She began creating hybrid flash memoir pieces with words & images 5 years ago and had her first published pieces in Prism, International in 2024. She is at work on a graphic memoir about the AIDS crisis years.

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I’m a grown woman and I haven’t had sex since the Obama administration.

My last romp was towards the end of the era of hope and change, the only consolation prize after that awful day in New York when people had to pack up their Hillary Clinton/I’m With Her posters in collective shock and grief. I had sex with two guys in as many weeks. I felt powerful and interesting. And then that was it.

I believed I was the only freakazoid out there with a pussy so deserted my legs would audibly creak if someone tried to open them. I imagine if Miss Frizzle and The Magic School Bus took a trip to my vagina, they'd see it's all boarded up with jagged NO TRESPASSING signs.

On a summer day in Houston, over the sound of sizzling, attention-seeking fajitas, I found out a good friend also hasn’t had sex in years. “Sex… what’s that?” she laughed as the fajita steam further moistened her face. A few months later, in New York, with zero fajitas involved, another good friend confessed to going years without sex. Both are attractive, smart, and vibrant women. The Bible says something like, “When two or more are gathered.” I think that’s about faith and sex trends.

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If the “Sex Diaries” feature in The Cut is a barometer, then every person with operable sex parts is having sex with at least three different people, sometimes simultaneously. Most of my millennial and Gen Z girlfriends are sex positive and talk openly in a way that was unimaginable when I was a twentysomething in the 2000s. But perception and reality are not aligned. Not only are women not having much sex, but we’re also not having pleasurable sex.

In The Pleasure Gap Katherine Rowland writes, “Between low desire, absent pleasure, genital pain, guilt, shame, quiet self-loathing, and viewing sex in terms of labor rather than lust, it would seem that we have increased sexual quantity without improving sexual quality.” My sexual quantity has dwindled down to zero because I’ve grown tired of looking for sexual quality.

My doubts about sex were lodged in my conscience as a young girl. Fastness—the term bestowed upon sexually active and/or sexualized black girls—seemed fun, scandalous, and overblown all at once. Reluctantly putting my raging hormones aside, I decided to wait for marriage. “Thou shalt not commit adultery” was double underlined in every Bible I owned. I continued checking scriptures the same way you check the refrigerator when you’re hungry and expect new food to show up if you just keep opening the door enough times.

Eventually, I latched on to a decidedly better legal interpretation: sex before marriage may be biblically illegal but lustfulness, masturbation (of which I was already a veteran), and rounding the bases didn’t count if you stopped after third base, before hitting home, right? Right?! Right.

The summer before senior year, I gave one guy a handjob in a girls’ defunct restroom at our classical music conservatory but it was so transactional in nature that I struggle to count it as my first sexual experience. We made the arrangements over AIM like we were preparing for a parent-teacher conference.

My West Texas college was known for both its commitment to conservatism and its high concentration of STDs. I relished every hot moment I had to say, “No! I can’t!” to country boys who wanted to go all the way. Still, something told me I didn’t want to learn what sex felt like outside the confines of college.

One night I was hanging out at a house party with Brian, my impossibly cool coworker from the Gap. He motioned for me to keep him company while he smoked on the patio. When we weren’t at work, burdened by customers, we talked about the bands we loved and the shows we hoped to see. We loved driving around the vast South Plains listening to The Killers and screaming Sam’s Town tracks into the endless darkness that is the West Texas sky at night. I respected Brian and knew he respected me. We stood on the patio in the half light listening to the sound of distant dual mufflers ripping all over our flat town.

Watching his smoke vanish in the wind, I said, “Do you wanna have sex?”

He took one more drag, stomped out the rest of the cigarette, and said, “Let’s go.”

Lying on my back while Brian was having sex with me like a human jackhammer, I thought about the magazines I was going to read at Barnes & Noble later on. THIS is what was so forbidden?! I wanted my religious-sacrifice-money back. Years of warnings about the premarital sex boogeyman, only to find out firsthand that it was just… this?

A few months shy of college graduation, I met the ultimate country boy who’d become my husband. We loved each other deeply, but he struggled to make me orgasm. I expanded my catalogue of fake moans. Whenever he’d go down on me (with the frequency of a total solar eclipse), he winced and sighed like it was the greatest sacrifice.

And I just went along with it; no one talked about pleasure when we were growing up — not to me and not to him. Like most American boys born after 1980, he learned everything he knew from watching internet porn. Sex felt like a marriage tax.

My feminist awakening didn’t come from Audre Lorde, bell hooks, or Nikki Giovanni. They’d all come later. It was when fellow Houstonian church girl Beyoncé released her self-titled album that I realized capital F feminism wasn’t a white invention. I questioned my passively patriarchal assumptions about sex, love, and marriage as my own marriage eroded.

Less than a month after my estranged husband moved out, I hooked up with two people. The first one was fine but nagging, repeatedly asking, “Can we do butt stuff?” even though I told him no. Also, he seemed annoyed that I, a person who works in tech, didn’t care that he worked at Google.

The second boy was a chef. We made out as we walked across the Williamsburg Bridge, then had sex three times. More accurately, he had sex three times. I laid there and moaned. He went down on me, but he wasn’t good at it. I closed my legs on his head and said, “That’s enough,” then sexily suggested we call it night.

I journaled about it when I got home: “Do I feel guilty? Not at all. If anything, I’m more excited about my quest to come. Haha.”

That was in 2016. And here I am today, perimenopausal in 2025. I’ve survived the first Tr*mp presidency, a global pandemic, an earthquake in New York, and a host of other noteworthy events without having sex. I’m less weirded out by the fact that I haven’t had sex all this time and more weirded out by my undeniable contentment.

Adult homo sapiens physically, spiritually, and emotionally require sex. I’m a 40 year-old woman who should need sex, but I don’t. I am childless and I don’t like pets. I am a content, single lady. To 50 percent of the American electorate, I am a mutant. Steve Harvey would find my entire lifestyle appalling.

I have some suspicions as to what keeps me unbothered about being unpartnered. The world of sex has become dangerous to me. Risking revenge porn, being secretly filmed, or old fashioned murdered just for the prospect of mid-at-best intercourse? No thanks.

I also find the role of technology in intimacy to be disturbing. Last time I had an active sex life dick pics weren’t a thing. I haven’t typed nasty things into an electronic device since 1999 when I pretended to be 19/F/San Diego in pre-social media chat rooms.

Despite my misgivings about technology and sex, I have downloaded Bumble, Hinge, and Tinder dozens of times. Four days is my current record for keeping dating apps on my phone before deleting them and getting my life back. But last year I took matters into my own hands. I made an honest Hinge bio:

“Hi! I’m just here for safe, normal, and good sex. Please don’t be weird!”

Within minutes, my phone actually grew hot. There were hundreds of men saying, “Hey.” One guy’s message said, “I’ll send a car to pick you up.”

The volume of response was overwhelming and, frankly, dubious. Either the sex was going to be safe, normal, or good. I found it hard to believe all these men could supply all three.

My therapist suggested I reconsider keeping the bio so that I wouldn’t end up the main character of a Law & Order episode. I wish the odds of having consensual and mutually satisfying sex were higher, and limited to highly recommended people.

Do you or someone you know wanna have sex with me?

Here’s what my next sex partner must understand:

1. I’M NOT FAKING IT ANYMORE. Be prepared. I’ve been listening to Megan Thee Stallion all these forcibly chaste years, so trust and believe I now know I’m not obligated to fake it. Not even any introductory mood-setting moans! If I’m not feeling it, I’ll just collapse like Woody and Buzz Lightyear whenever humans enter the room.

2. DON’T TALK TOO MUCH. I’m an avid runner but this is why I don’t like running groups. Talking in… word couplets… is… annoying as hell.

3. NO WEIRD POSITIONS. I haven’t printed a Yoga With Adriene calendar since January 2020. Make it do what it do at 90 degrees.

4. YOUR PLACE, NOT MINE. I will be leaving afterwards. I have hobbies, a full life, and a full-size couch. I’m busy the next day. But do ask me if I want to hang out, as I like feeling needed.

This list has thrust me back to square one.

The pursuit of good sex requires effort — and any effort is too much. Sex is good, but have you ever taken a perfect Saturday afternoon nap while it’s raining outside? Have you ever driven across West Texas while listening to Norman Fucking Rockwell!? Sex is good, but have you ever read a good book, uninterrupted?

Have you known the peace of going to your annual Well Woman’s exam with zero concerns about being pregnant or having STDs from a dude with no bed frame? There’s nothing like it.

One night, for some twisted reason, I had drinks with a coworker who was full of Breitbart and conservative Caribbean machismo.

"All this feminist body positivity," he told me with the tone fathers use to warn kids about the monster under their beds. “Keep going on about all that and you’ll end up alone! You don’t want that, do you?”

I thought, well, yeah...that's better than this.

Well-meaning family and friends say, “You don’t want to die alone, do you?”

I think, do people know how dying works? You don’t get to take your partners with you.

If a man who can make me orgasm exists, he has to find me. Though I can’t be too sure since I oscillate between waiting to be found and saying to hell with it.

If we’re going to be wiped off the face of the earth by climate change, PFAS, nuclear bombs shot from space, or the National Guard, then maybe I should just do it. Maybe I should be more “you and me baby ain’t nothin but mammals but let’s do it like they do on the discovery channel” about things. Then again, I’ve waited all this time.

Jennifer Stewart has written for Texas Monthly, Electric Literature, Texas Highways, DAME, Runner’s World, and other outlets. She is a Texas Tech University and Columbia University graduate who currently lives in Houston.

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