A thing doesn’t hurt you so much if you draw it close as it does when you keep pushing it away.

Remembering someone you’ve lost can feel like drinking mist. I was thirsty for more. I did not want to see a picture in my head. I wanted to hold my living mama. To be held by her. How stupid, to want the impossible. I don’t know how to want what I can get.

would like to learn a new use for my emptiness—my spaciousness. Look at the rosewood mandolin in the corner of this bedroom. People string catgut over a hole, and send music pouring into the atmosphere. Maybe I can restring myself, and learn how to make music from my hollow place.

Fear is a ghost. It grows in proportion to what we all know and never say. It swells on what we do and do not admit to our own awareness. I will offer up my own life as proof, because I am every day afraid. Take my ghosts from me.

“What can two people do against church and state, Ania?” “We can find two more people. Two more after that…”

If a homesteader was murdered, Indians were always the first suspected of the crime. If two hundred Indian women and children and elders were ambushed on a spring morning and massacred by soldiers of the United States Army, the newspapers called it “a battle.”

The past was not so sacrosanct, I discovered. You could simply make more up.

From the grown-up talk around, I deduced that I’d escaped some terrible fate back in Sicily, where everyone was poor and hungry. We were also poor and hungry. I grew up nourished by a story, the story of my good fortune—I was an American citizen, I lived in the richest country in the world, where I would learn English, work hard, marry well, and

Love at first sight always sounded to me like somebody’s delusion. But I loved You before I saw your face. Love before sight—which sounds even crazier.