Mar 25, 2022
Friday
More text to follow
Around the time I was in seventh grade, I started performing makeshift eye surgery on my grandmother.
“Hoba! Hoba!” my daughter screeches, using the short word for ‘hobotnica’—octopus in Croatian. My friend says, “She’s Croatian alright.”
I had always found a gathering of women sharing their stories and wisdom an effective way to touch the divine.
What I’d been looking for at the convent, I could find in reading and writing. If other writers could channel their desires, I could use it, too.
We’ve listed the names we get called and the names we call ourselves. Some feel true. Others give us aches.
Briefly, I was part of that mysterious organism, a biological family; no one cared about my virtues or my bad behavior.
What I forgot, for years and years, were the details of what my body experienced at the time. But my body did not forget.
There are times I envy art’s effectiveness in a bilingual context, its ability to transcend language.
For my generation of fans, Naito embodies our time and our struggles. The closest thing he has to a superpower is survival.
I learned that kind of hard-won glamour; that we should have beauty, however much the world wants to keep it from us.
I spent so much time watching and trying to understand secular women that I never bothered to try to understand the others, the ones who never left.
“It was this Islam, the Islam of authenticity, community, justice, and love, that showed me how to be a truer version of myself.”
If all adoptees felt not only safe, but empowered in their families and their communities, I would feel better—but not lucky.
In order for bread to rise, the dough must be strong.
Suddenly, I wasn’t just prey, I was bait. In order to hunt him down, I had to be both cautious and on display.
I’m coming apart like the first cigarette I ever rolled. Loose, slobbering, and burning too fast.
