I wonder if this is how he felt when my mother died: flattened by the impossibility and yet inevitability of tomorrow. I am suddenly so tired, no match for the heaviness of gravity. I look at the floor and it calls to me, as strong as a magnet.

Grief is like a deep, dark hole. It calls like a siren: Come to me, lose yourself here. And you fight it and you fight it and you fight it, but when you finally do succumb and jump down into it, you can’t quite believe how deep it is. It feels as if this is how you will live for the rest of your life, falling. Terrified and devastated, until you

He always gives me the wrong type of straw, but I don’t know how to tell him without screaming at him and I don’t want to scream at him.

“Just forget it,” he says. And then he turns his back to me and fluffs his pillow angrily. And I smile to myself because you don’t fluff a pillow you’re not planning to sleep on.

I’m not sure there is a greater strength.” “Playing second to a woman?” I ask. My father winks at me. “Feeling secure, even knowing you are not the best.”

Every night, I grab his hand and pull him inside and bring him to my bedroom. And every night, he presses himself against me and kisses my neck and makes me wonder if anyone has ever survived jumping off the edge of a cliff.

The second half of the summer is a train heading full speed toward Flushing Meadows.

watch the moon as it hangs over the river. I stare at the gentle sway of the curtains.

We live in a world where exceptional women have to sit around waiting for mediocre men.