The Best American Essays 2022

I think the past and future are the same place, taking long refuge in either the same thing. A way of avoiding, not living in, the present.

Maybe if we had admitted to the precarious balance of his mental and physical state, I would’ve told him to crawl onto my bed. We could’ve lain head to toe, under my sheets, like kids at a sleepover. But he never wanted to burden anyone with the slightest of inconveniences, so we pretended that his racing thoughts were all right, however false that

Edwidge Danticat story: “Shame is heavier than a hundred bags of salt.”

We look for patterns. We look for what we know how to see.

But only fools and Americans think they can outrun the past.

Women, always the women. Thank goodness for the women.

William Maxwell says it somewhere in The Folded Leaf: that the teenager gets so brooding in his sexuality and self-sanctity that all he requires of others is their absence.

My father had not so much left us as completed, made visible, an absence that had been present among us all along.

there exists a continual fluctuation of our energies. We wish to possess, to be possessed, and to be relieved of our possessions all at once.