She never realized how much she wouldn’t miss the slow ooze down her throat. Never thought she’d wish she could recall the last time she’d filled the hole in herself with the cold spirit of bubbly, smoldering sweet until it wasn’t.

Sometimes I actually try to use some of the coping skills I talk about all day and sometimes they work. Often, when I think about doing something I advised earlier in the day, I am struck by how completely worthless and stupid and totally inaccessible these tools are when you actually feel like you might be drowning. Or suffocating. I guess those two sensations are pretty close.

Modern scales are fragile, too weak to bear the weight of words and those of recent vintage are tepid and irrelevant;

I like to think I contributed meaningful help to Daniel, but there was just so much more going against him than there was going for him. It is easy to point to the perceived failings of parents, but the truth is, we usually don’t know the circumstances surrounding families in need.

before we tumble off the crust and fall, i’ll tell her i drank sauvignon blanc on the airplane and it didn’t taste as bad as i remember when i was seven and dipping my pinky into the pool of her wine glass.

We tell these stories and we watch the countryside fade, we watch Volterra disappear behind the fog, and we see other towns, we watch cypress trees thread their way through the land in folded stitches, we look out and we can almost see the mountains past this haze. One day this will be my story.

As I shivered, I wondered what I was missing. How many years did I sleep too early for stars?

I imagine this Christmas Eve, the snow falling lightly, the Nativity displayed, a polka spinning on the turntable, the radio missing, taken by the communists that took over the farm. I envision they must have been using that radio to play their drunken tunes, singing with their harsh voices in a crowded bar. The family must have felt torn apart like the leftover corn husks shucked the week prior, limply sprawled across the kitchen table.

I’m tired of hearing that we don’t have diaspora or that my culture doesn’t value education and I’m tired of hearing that I am a pity admittance i am a product of my struggles and the fire that has burned ever since I was a kid