He was your first real boyfriend—the type you kiss on the curb of a church parking lot. The type you don’t really like all that much but you’re eleven and reading romance novels earlier than you probably should and you’re eager for the moment where fairy tale meets reality, a high you’ll continue to chase into your twenties with the same disappointing outcome you once experienced on the curb of a church parking lot.

And he looks stable, full of promise. Nice home. Nice family. Plays football. Loves to fish. Eats dinner every night. They go to church and you like church, though they arrive as a set and you an unsupervised drop-off. And maybe you do not like church in the spiritual way of complete devotion, but you love having somewhere free to go and something free to do. You were never all that picky. You survive on crumbs to the point where one day, an eating disorder will make a blessing out of poverty. You expect and crave nothing. Your standards will stay low for too long, always coming up short and measuring well below the max height of a well-maintained Ohio lawn: eight to twelve inches. That’s an innuendo, by the way. You always worry no one will get it.

He doesn’t, and he’s literally a thirteen-year-old boy. He can’t grasp his science courses, and he’s certainly not grasping you in any substantial way. But it’s not his fault, not really. Young and dumb. Besides, he’s not the protagonist.

It was actually his mother you remember best, she was the inciting incident. When he cried over the phone to you, an indication he may have felt this was more than just something to do, he revealed how he was downtrodden because his mother believed you were distracting him from football. You thought it rather silly. First that she would say something like that to someone obviously not cut out for a football career and second that he would cry about it—you’ve always been a bit callous.

You brush off his mother’s comment. You don’t think too much about it. Why the fuck would you let something so small ruin the rest of your day? The rest of your week? The rest of your something to do?

She wore blue, that mother of his, when you met her for the first time in the church basement during a Sunday school service—or what you now call “affordable childcare.” Blue sweater, blue jeans, white sneakers with blue accents. Blue, blue, blue, blue, blue. It was the kind of color that made your stomach churn, like the ocean’s depths or the inside of a day-old bruise. You expected she’d adore you the same way your own parents and teachers did, the way they beamed when you entered a room. You’re a rule follower. You like direction. You like reading. You like manners. You’re blonde. Adults have so much to love about you.

But she looked you up and down, those thin, mulberry lips forming a tight line of disappointment, her gaze on your abdomen for what felt like a little too long. You could see disgust in the crinkle of her nose. She says, “You can’t be dating her, she’s far too small to bear children. Her hips won’t be wide enough.”

You are fresh into your eleventh year of existence. You have yet to even bleed. Her words sink into your stomach, settling somewhere low and quiet, far below the surface. You feel sick with experience, blue around the gills, and you wonder if, for a girl, there’s really a difference between breathing and drowning.

You carry the event home and the women closest to you laugh at the story, telling you not to think too much about it. Your sister calls her stupid, your mother calls her a crazy bitch. When you’re alone though, you call her right. You look in the mirror, “They are too small.” And while one could argue you still had time to develop, they’d be wrong. You remain 4’11’’ and his mother remains right.

And a few years along the way, when you’ve moved on and moved away and your time is no longer spent in church basements, that boy becomes a teen dad. You’re not surprised. Dodged that bullet.

For years, you tell the story as some audacious humorous anecdote. Just another thing some stupid, crazy bitch said to you. But you never forget the disgust of not meeting her feminine expectation. An expectation you never thought much of until someone forgets to laugh when you recall the story in a university classroom. Until someone says, “That’s not really funny.” Until another voice chimes in, “I don’t know what I’d do if someone said that to my daughter.” And all you can think at the time is, Damn, me neither.

But that doesn’t stop you from laughing and telling it again because now all you can think is Why the fuck was she wearing so much blue?

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Header photography and artwork by Jordan Keller-Wilson

when you are fat in middle school, your doctors tell you to join a sport. when you get cut from softball for never having played softball—every soft lob whipping past your swinging bat and racing heart, every careless toss slipping through your borrowed glove—your teachers tell you to run cross country. when you get bullied out of cross country, your parents tell you to walk. so you walk. you tell yourself you’re cute, that deep down, the cuteness of you that no one sees is worth everything, and you tape a black satin bow to a black plastic headband and wear it to remind yourself. 

you don’t have a phone, but you’re just in your neighborhood, the same old neighborhood where the same old people live. the adults tell you to be positive, so you walk, crunching sun-baked leaves, slipping fingers through the scaly fronds of cypresses lining the yard of a girl who used to be your friend. cold shadows spear onto the crumbling asphalt like teeth, and the din of your thoughts obscures the crackling of tires. 

a boxy brown car rolls to a stop beside you. you pause, curious. you are a girl scout, trained to listen and help. the window sinks down into the door. cigarette smoke wafts out.

he’s college age, brown hair, varsity jacket, tired eyes. he doesn’t say hi or i’m looking for… or can you give me directions to... he asks, do you want a ride? 

the upholstery is red leather, cracked but clean, no crushed soda cans or crumpled fast food wrappers. just a blanket folded in the backseat. you take far too long to think, to wonder how you look to him, to scramble for a reason not to get in the car—the car of the only person who has ever, maybe, probably-not-even hit on you. yes, you want to get traumatized on red leather; yes, you want the touch of the hand that adjusts his side mirror too nonchalantly and the vein standing out on the back of that hand and the blood inside that vein; yes, you regret it immediately when you shake your head.

where do you live? he asks. you point beyond the cypresses at your once-friend’s house. she is thin and cute and never home. she has a boyfriend.

leaning an elbow out the car’s window, he frowns, disappointed, even pitiful. or perhaps that’s your reflection in the flake of the car’s paint, and he’s just reading your lie back to you, waiting for you to realize: this will be your only chance. a stranger in an old car at dusk. a scratchy blanket and nicotine-stained fingers and whatever violence he wants to enact on you, whatever cruelty, whatever pretend love. this is your chance, while you still hold the barest possibility that you are or ever were cute. no one actually thinks you’ll get any prettier; they make you try because they can’t stand to look at you. 

so you don’t want a ride? he confirms, and you try to convince yourself his impatience is tenderness. 

no, you say, and rush up your once-friend’s driveway, your black satin bow slipping. you stumble into a crouch in the drainage rocks behind her house, and it falls. you grab it and hold it to your heaving chest. it was supposed to make you cute; it worked in the worst way possible. 

he sits there for a moment, tapping his steering wheel. he knows you’re lying. you know you’re missing your chance. if he gets out of the car and grabs you, drags you by your frizzy hair, you both know you’ll surrender.

the car squeaks as he pulls away. tears press against your eyelids. perhaps they’ll say you’re making progress, that your miniscule reluctance to be kidnapped is indicative of self-esteem, or bravery, or whatever other basic virtue they like to pretend pumps through the chambers of your preposterous heart. in reality, the only argument you can find against running back into the road, bow in hand, is this: whatever he wanted to do to you, you didn’t even deserve that.

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Header photography and artwork by Jordan Keller-Wilson

Whenever someone asks Where do you get your fashion inspiration from? without hesitating, I say, My momma.

And, boy, you best believe it. See, my momma knows fabrics. She knows a pattern when she sees one. She travels up and down a rack, the hangers click click a-clicking. She knows when this don’t go with that. She knows a good deal when she sees one. She knows what goes.

See, it’s like this: We’re at JCPenney,  looking for my first homecoming dress. Nothing’s quite right at fourteen; my hair’s too frizzy, and stringy, and my god is that a pimple on my nose? But in between me trying on a seafoam dress and a frilly thing that itches, my momma tries on a pair of navy blue pants. Dang, she says, turning, I look good. Now, everyone says I look like my momma. And when she dances in the mirror, wiggling her butt to a pop song, a little glow lights in my chest. A tiny firefly who knows how to dance. I hold up the next dress, swaying to the music. I look good, I think.

See, you better believe my momma looks good. She’s cute-girl short with curly hair and a mouth that laughs. She’s got pretty hands and nice legs and when she looks at you, that’s what matters. She wears sailor stripes, bright shoes, a silky scarf. She’s got wide-pocket pants, heeled boots, pointy church-shoes. She likes long dresses, silver hoops, navy blue, and perfume that smells like nighttime flowers.

I’ve been away from home for years now, my own closet and shoes and way of walking through the thrift store, hangers clicking softly. When I’m back at my apartment, I catch a glimpse in the green mirror over the couch and think, I look good. I FaceTime my momma to show her what I got today. When I pan the camera to where I have the shirt laid out, she laughs and laughs. What? I ask. Hold on, let me show you, she says. She walks to her closet and pulls out the same shirt, a blue-striped button-up.

Trust us to buy the same thing three states away. It’s like her body is my body, looking good. Like I’ve always known I come from somewhere beautiful. Like we’re both fireflies, lit up, dancing to the same song.

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Header photography and artwork by Jordan Keller-Wilson

Three facts. One: when researchers leave a man alone in a room for fifteen minutes, with a button they can press in order to shock themselves, two-thirds will—bzzt—press the button. Two: while I was a music composition major, I took a psychology class where I learned about the button-pressing experiment. Three, the most important: I have never played the viola in my life. 

My brother, Luke, played the viola in school. But he never let me touch it. One December, he let me hold a fiberglass ornament his religious ed teacher had gifted him. I gave in to an overwhelming urge to—bzzt—squeeze it until it shattered. Another time, he got an action figure inspired by the hit animated TV show Gargoyles, which had a grappling hook attached to Goliath’s gun by string. I can still hear my mother, my father, and my brother all screaming, “no, Zach, no, stop it, don’t do it, Zachary John,” as my scissor-wielding hand advanced under its own will toward that string and—snip—ruined that toy. Bzzt. Bzzt bzzt bzzt.

I don’t have to tell you that I was the younger brother, or that after that birthday I always got a present on Luke’s birthday. I also do not have to tell you that I belong to the shock-button-pressing two-thirds of the male population. But I do have to tell you that I never, ever in my life, not even once for fun, have ever touched a viola—let alone played one. I respected that boundary.

I had no choice. Because Luke kept his viola locked in its case and, no, he apparently did not hide the key under the keyboard of the computer he and my dad built, on the shelf stuffed with the monumental paperbacks I couldn’t get through, or under his stack of All-State viola certificates of achievement going back to the third grade. 

I have played other instruments. The cello for a semester. But it was very heavy and the freshman dorm RA kept commenting on the noise, reminding me that dogs, no matter how sick they were, were not allowed in campus housing. I played the piano. The trombone. Even the guitar. But never the viola, even once I got to college.

Why does that matter? Because for one of my classes I had to compose a solo piece for the instrument of my choice. Did I choose the guitar, the piano, the cello, or the trombone? No. I chose the viola.

Bzzt.

This composition class was traditionally reserved for seniors and I was seventeen. My classmates could all buy liquor. They smoked weed in their off-campus apartments. Mike’s band had a tour lined up for that summer. Kirsten already had a gig writing music for HBO. Tyler and Carson were gonna move to LA that summer and then figure it out. They were the coolest people I had ever met and I’d never felt more like a dweeb. My professor, Doug, had shoulder-tapped me to join the class. In his cruel and off-hand way, he said he didn’t think I could do it and that was why he wanted me to take it. He enjoyed proving himself right.

I toiled on that piece, but probably not as long as I should have considering it would determine whether I could shove an A in Doug’s face, whether HBO would ever hire me, or my band could ever go on tour, whether I could ever hack it in LA.

And I really did want to impress Doug. He was teaching us about the greats of atonality that semester. You know—household names. Bartok, Schoenberg, Eisler. Those guys who composed songs that sound like math theorems. Of course, they wrote using tone rows such as in Webern’s Variations for Orchestra which I know I don’t have to tell you he derived from three tetrachords, all of which give it a unity in motif and chord. I wanted him to hear I got it.

“You can compose it in a key,” Doug reminded me. “Any key. C… G… F-sharp.”

We were listening to a computer play the latest draft of my piece. It sounded like the computer had dropped its simulation-viola on a cat.

“It’s… esoteric,” I explained to Doug. “See, I created a tone row, that—”

“No, I know,” Doug squeezed the sheet music so hard it crinkled. 

So I revised it. And the next week Doug became very preoccupied with his combover, and his glasses, and his breathing, as we listened to the computer perform what can only be described as surgery on the cat the computer had previously abused. “Can a… viola even play these notes?” he asked.

“Oh. Yes,” I said. Bzzt. That hadn’t even occurred to me.

Professionals were coming in to perform our pieces before my next one-on-one with Doug. Even if he could talk me out of writing a solo for an instrument no one really writes solos for, or at least to write for an instrument I played, it was too late to write anything good. 

The night before, I devoured my final meal in the dining hall. Scrambled eggs, cookies, cheeseburgers, fries. All as fast as I could. I was seeking sensation. I had felt this way before: in the parking lot of St Mary’s of the Lake Church, for instance.

Put Luke’s fiberglass stocking-shaped ornament into your hand. It’s cool to the touch. It’s lighter than you expected. How strong is it? You want to know. It’s not like you want to be in pain, but how strong is the shock of that little red button? You want to know. And your religious ed teacher didn’t give you an ornament, even though you–mostly–sat still in class for once. You watch the ornament in your hand become a billion little pieces. Just because you squeezed it. And you had to squeeze it harder than you expected.  And now you know. 

And then there’s another feeling. I don’t know the word for it. It’s full of shock, and horror, and permanence. Because you can’t just go back into the rectory and get your brother another ornament, and you can’t unpress the button, and you can’t go back in time and just write a damn piece for piano like you know you could do decently, even if it had no key, and you can’t stop eating the dining hall cookies.

That night at dinner I was having the epiphany I was trying not to have: My greatest defeats have all come by my own hand. And this was about to be one of them. Luke would not ever press the shock button. The button-shock researchers concluded that people will push the button to avoid being alone with their thoughts. Thoughts like these. They wrote, “Most people seem to prefer to be doing something rather than nothing, even if that something is negative.”

It would have been nothing for me to write a piece for piano, or guitar. It would have been something for me to write one that Luke heard and went, “wow.” I chose the viola because, even if he wanted to, Luke would not push the button. He wouldn’t crush the ornament, or snip the string on Goliath’s grappling gun. I chose the viola because I was sorry he was such a nice, patient brother and I was always so lousy and I had no better idea how to say that.

The next day, the violist introduced my piece last. He said, “And then there’s… this one.” He had ashy hair, an ashy goatee, and dark glasses he apparently pushed up to his brow when he was exasperated. “Who wrote this?” 

Doug pointed at me. A lot of spite in the way he twisted his hand and flicked his finger out at me. But I was ten years away, looking around my living room at the shreds of wrapping paper and Goliath’s severed string in my brother’s hands.

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Header photography and artwork by Jordan Keller-Wilson

It feels time to share the pandemic story no one asked for. 

Other single women learned to bake sourdough. Some learned French. Some learned to make perfect little ice cubes with flowers frozen inside so they could host dinner parties for no one. But not me. I was busy becoming the most feral version of myself: a woman alone in her apartment ordering massive quantities of crab. 

At first, I tried to resist. Tried to cling to the kind of polish I had worn like armor in an office of men, the performance of composure that kept me from seeming too much, too strange, too hungry. I remember my boss, Greg, saying on a Zoom call at the beginning of lockdown, “I hope all you single people are using this time to pick up a new skill. Maybe a language or an instrument.” 

No, Greg, I’m not. All at once, I let go of the unspoken expectation to be the lady of the office and plunged headfirst into the delicate, delicious language of crab. Every Friday night after work, while the majority of our all-male team shut their laptops and wandered back down the hall to their families, I shut mine and entered a battlefield of my own making. I pulled the blinds closed. Removed my bra. Removed my pants. Stood alone in a tank top and underpants microwaving butter until it exploded all over the microwave like some divine, salty baptism. 

Maybe if there’d been other women at work, I would have joined the office-sanctioned arts-and-crafts Slack channel or the pandemic French club. Maybe I’d have learned to conjugate verbs instead of deconstruct crustaceans. With other women, I might have shared the strange, silent weight of being alone, trading jokes or small comforts in a group instead of inventing my own rituals in the dark. I am so glad that I didn’t. I learned to wield scissors like a surgeon. I learned to eat crab like it was survival. Like I was Tom Hanks in Castaway, celebrating his first hot meal of roasted crab in his cave, Wilson by his side. I had spent years making myself small at work—well-fed on meetings and deadlines, but starving for something that was only mine. I realized then that no one else was going to nurture that version of me back to life.

I bought special crab scissors. Having grown up in an Asian household, I already knew the power of kitchen scissors for meat, but I had leveled up. I could slice clean through a thick crab shell like I was defusing a bomb. My hands smelled permanently like ocean brine and melted butter. I didn’t care. 

I tried it all. Boxes arrived from Alaska, from Maine, from Maryland. I developed a loyalty to my crustaceans of choice. Dungeness for sweetness. King for drama. Soft shell for nights when I felt delicate and raw.

 The pandemic was long. There were many lonely nights. There was always more crab. 

This was not a hobby. This was a spiritual awakening. I was the kind of lonely you have to be to change. Each shell I splintered was another layer of polish breaking off, the shiny performance that once made me safe in a room full of men. But the safety was theirs, never mine. What I had left was hunger.

And still—so many stories from lockdown center around parenting struggles, and I believe every one. But single solitude was its own kind of strange, silent ache. No one saw it. No one talked about it. People made it sound like we were the lucky ones, spared the weight of homeschooling and partnerships and noise. But I was invisible. And that invisibility cracked something. I wasn’t eating crab in underpants because it was decadent. I was doing it because it was the closest thing I could find to celebration, to comfort, to proof that I could still treat myself like someone worth feeding. 

At the time, I was working full-time with men who clung to the office until the bitter end. In California, where lockdown was serious, university departments had already been urged to go remote, but mine refused until the governor’s official stay-at-home order left them no choice. The men scoffed at the threat, surfed off Campus Point Beach between meetings, and emailed impassioned essays about “returning to in-person collaboration.” 

I remember sitting in our silent office the day before we were finally sent home, looking around and wondering why no one else felt like we were on the edge of something. They wanted to go back to what felt like a deeply male version of domestication—out of the house, back with their buddies at work. But I was already gone. Already halfway to the sea. 

It all culminated the following summer when I went to Maine for a writing retreat. The final dinner was lobster. The supposed prize of the sea. I sat next to a kosher professor who nibbled politely on broccoli. Another woman beside me tried lobster for the first time. Wide-eyed. Hesitant. 

“It’s fine,” I told her, cracking my claws like I was some kind of grizzled, all-knowing seaperson, Quint from Jaws reborn. “But honestly? Crab is better.” 

They looked at me like I’d said something scandalous. And maybe I had. 

The next day, I ordered a lobster roll from a local favorite. And for old times’ sake, I got a crab roll too. No contest. 

Was it wrong to spend my pandemic lockdown sampling the crustaceans of the sea instead of bettering myself? I did not learn French. I did not take up embroidery. I did not write the next great American novel. Instead, I was a woman working hard. Hustling for crab. 

Once, in a weekly phone call with Greg, I licked a bit of crab off the end of a butter knife. The delighted slurping noise I made shocked us both. I thought I was caught until Greg urged me not to cry, reminded me we would be back in the office soon. “Totally,” I fake sniffled. 

And then I hung up, stripped back down to my crab-eating uniform, sharpened my scissors, and got back to the real work. 

Now, a few years post-pandemic, I walk past ice-packed snow crab in crowded grocery store seafood sections and feel something close to a heart tug. Lockdown was, for me, a return to whatever the hell I was supposed to be but had buried so deep down I’d forgotten—feral, free, eating crab while watching YouTube. No longer the girl at work in heeled booties and an array of buttoned-up jackets. Finally, I wasn’t trying to impress anyone. As alone as a person could be, I was unashamedly myself. Just feeding the creature who needed feeding.

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Header photography and artwork by Jordan Keller-Wilson

April 2023

I am still married. 

My husband is elsewhere. 

My children sleep in their beds. 

I ready the house and myself for when they wake. I am the center of a seesaw and I keep the balance. I cook, clean, plan, arrange, manage, and listen. I hope my labor is efficient enough that it will be forgotten, that my family will be unburdened by daily domestic stresses. I hold the middle. I hold still. 

Stillness can be a kind of death. 

I tell myself joy cannot exist without misery. True joy, like faith, like love, is proven by its disappearance. A heart must be carved by suffering to be filled with the full power of joy. 

I know this with my brain. It has been some time since I’ve felt such passions with my body. 

Everyone’s midlife must feel this way, warm rushing waters frozen over time. Everyone’s marriage must feel this way.

Outside, the daffodils arrive and open, trumpets of sun. An April nor’easter hits New England and the flowers are pummeled by snow.

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April 2024

My husband sleeps downstairs. We tell the children it is because he snores. 

I sleep in the closet. I am following an instinct of my body that I do not understand, an instinct for less: less light, less space, less me. 

I find a therapist who I hope will convince me to stay in my marriage. We spend our sessions discussing my husband’s manic and depressive swings. I do not tell her about the panic attacks or that I am sleeping in the closet. 

On the floor, I reach out and touch the walls on either side of me. 

My body tells me everything I have known is ending. My brain tells me it is all my fault. 

I suffer panic attacks and hide in the bathroom until they abandon me. I quiet my voice by stuffing towels inside my mouth. A violence cracks my heart and there is a thunderous splintering down my arms. A frozen pond becoming undone.

Still, that April is the warmest on record. The tulips arrive early alongside the rabbits. I build a makeshift fence with buckets and empty birdhouses, but the vermin still eat the stalks to the ground.

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April 2025

I am a separated woman—separated from my marriage.

It is Monday after midnight. March has just given way to April Fools. I ready myself for bed inside the nesting apartment I pseudo-share with my husband. He and I switch each night, one of us in the house with our children and the other in this studio apartment. He is here and not here, his life being lived in the alternating space of mine. 

I’ve spent a year thawing, discovering a new self warmed by words and friends and bodies. Desire has been made strange by its absence of love. He, too, has soothed himself with bodies. Even now, we tell each other some truths. 

I fill the apartment with seeds: marigolds, peas, cypress vine, squash. Some sprout after a few days and some take longer. Some never sprout. The sunflowers stand up first and I place them by the window with the shade open. Mornings, I am awoken by a stab of sun. 

That April night, there is a strange scent to the room. I slide into the bed and rub my legs between the sheets. The smell arrives from the pillow. Sweet. Fecund. Vaporous. It is perfume. I turn on the light. I remove the comforter. Lipstick on white sheets. It is a shade more brown than red. It shows me the map of my husband’s most intimate pleasure. Color stains the middle and I imagine rouged lips on engorged flesh. Sweat and secretions soak into fabric, the fabric I have wrapped around my own skin. I try to exhale the perfume from my lungs. I am shocked—not that my husband has a lover, but that he has left the evidence for me to inhabit, a bed made up with dirty sheets. 

The air tolls Over, Over, Over. 

I throw the sheets into the trash. I spend two days crying. Fury and sadness and jealousy quake through me as if these emotions have never before existed. But good erupts through the cracks. There is love and hope and an appreciation for the bellow in my core, a constant message rising through the violent squall. You are not who you were and Let what must come, come.

Stillness, like control, is a grand illusion. I have learned not to trust a sheet of ice. It is truer to be sacrificed to the hungry waters. 

Love and pain stand on opposite ends of a lever. They teeter totter back and forth, up and down, higher and higher until they are launched into the grand churn, that torrent of delights and sorrows and the hot in-betweens, where everything is felt and nothing is clear. 

And finally, I know what it is to be alive.

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Header photography and artwork by Jordan Keller-Wilson

The concluding sentiment at the family meeting, by which I mean a discussion my parents initiated with me, by which I mean I was told to sit down on the living room couch and listen while they did all the talking, was, Also, boys don’t like overweight girls, a sort of cherry on top of the sundae if you will, but not an actual sundae of course, because that’s the sort of indulgence that landed us here in the first place, a last ditch effort to get the point across after measured pleading and reasoning, a final appeal that would surely break the spell, thereby breaking the motion of hand to mouth, because who doesn’t want to be desired by boys? If they had just mentioned that on day one, we could have saved ourselves a lot of trouble. 

It turns out that the two people who were meant to love me unconditionally had actually been silently taking notes, waiting for the moment when it became clear that they had no choice but to intervene—this extra 15 pounds I was carrying around had officially gotten out of hand, rendering me unappealing, and this is when I learned how truly important it is to always remain cognizant of the opinions of others. 

Armed with this valuable lesson, I headed off to college where I drank whatever cold bottle was placed into my open palm and slept with boys simply because they desired me, never once asking myself if I wanted them in return, and I was careful not to get attached because that’s not what cool girls do. I went to the gym with my roommate, at first simply for something to do, and then after dropping some weight, kept at it because it felt good to be able to share clothes with friends, snapping black bodysuits at the crotch and sliding miniskirts up onto my hips, and when I arrived home for break, my newly slimmed body like a friend I was bringing to meet my parents, I was met with open arms and eager eyes, acutely aware that approval smiles differently, approval hugs longer, approval offers seconds and dessert, approval means keep it up and we’ll all be just fine.

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Header photograph and artwork by Jordan Keller-Wilson

I cradled the tree in its pot for a coworker over Zoom. It’s just like you, she said.

I showed her the swan-necked watering can that held no more than a pint. Don’t overwater it, the lady at the garden store said. 

My coworker didn’t know that the lush, green slope reminded me of the backyard of the house I grew up in, when my legs were so small it took all my breath to run its length past the apple trees to the woods at the other end. How I’d climb up with my siblings to eat apples that swirled green and red. You’ll get sick to your stomach, my dad said. 

The bonsai tree was bright and prickly. Juniperus communis: juniper. Its branches arced over the pot and brushed the moss and stones below in a graceful bow. Green and brown on gray and orange: the colors of 70’s office buildings, like where my dentist was as a child, or where I had started seeing a therapist. They really gave you a raw deal, he used to say.

The moss is what I loved. Stems crisscrossing and hugging as if laying out a pine needle floor. It sprawled over the pot and reached up to embrace the tree trunk. Pleurozium schreberi: sheet moss. It covers forests from Greenland to New Mexico. A website claimed that it helps preserve nutrients and protect tree roots in case of overwatering. Don’t overwater it, the lady at the garden store said.

My first bonsai didn’t have moss. I bought it with the lunch money my parents had given me for a field trip to Quincy Market when I was in seventh grade. Its rocks were jagged, imposing. The tree grew over tranquil desolation. I pictured myself in miniature, walking the dirt along the pot’s edge with a Zen Koan settling in my mind. I can hardly recall it now: the one where a teacher tells a prospective student he can’t learn anything until he’s emptied his cup of tea. 

The browning started at the outer edges. Then it crept inwards. I figured I wasn’t watering it enough. Was that possible? Don’t overwater it, the lady at the garden store said. 

I bought a spritz bottle and misted every three days. Once a week, I used the swan-necked watering can. The moss turned beige and then bleach yellow. I checked a book on bonsai care. Tap water can cause browning. I bought a gallon jug of filtered water and poured it into the pint-size can. The moss shrank from the side of the pot, curling into itself as if clutching a wound. Can I water it with you? my six-year-old asked.

Some stems died alone, others in clumps. Some mornings I’d discover that entire patches had broken off in an act of doomed secession. Each loss a failure: silence from a hiring committee, rejection from a conference, criticism from my thesis advisor. I started spacing out while reading your chapter, he said. They really gave you a raw deal, the therapist would say.

Was there enough sunlight? Too much? I placed it on the side table next to the microwave. Another clump shriveled away. I pushed toys off a shelf in the sunroom and sat it there. The soil around the edges cracked and dried. I moved it to the center of the dining room table. I’d see it whenever my eyes strayed from my laptop during work. The yellows and browns were a blight, an error, a failed sentence, my blood pressure when I went in for a COVID test. Have you been diagnosed with hypertension? the nurse asked. I hadn’t. I’d been avoiding doctors for years. I already knew what they would say. I’d bought bigger clothes once, and then again. I didn’t need to quantify breathless trips up staircases and furtive glances in mirrors. I didn’t control my schedule; I was on company time. After lunch, I’d have to get through hours of meetings, finish budgets, complete at least 10 items on my to-do list or fall behind. I needed a full meal to get through the afternoon, then a snack, and then another. You’ll get sick to your stomach, my dad said.

The moss is supposed to be the easy part! a friend said, laughing. I had asked him for help during one of my six-year-old’s playdates. I called my mom. She brought moss from her backyard the next time she visited. Leucobryum glaucum: pincushion moss. It grows in forests, it pushes up through cracks in sidewalks and roadsides, it can thrive in wet or dry conditions, I couldn’t kill it so long as it would graft onto the soil in the pot. I looked up how to encourage moss growth. Use toothpicks as tent stakes and cover the area in plastic wrap, leaving a hole for air to come in. Spray liberally. Can I water it with you? my six-year-old asked.

The leaves on the juniper tree began to wither. They bleached and turned yellow, like the moss, then fell off. Can I just throw it away? my wife asked. 

I snipped off dead leaves and branches and kept spritzing. Sometimes I’d miss and water droplets would form a cough pattern on the table. It’s winter, I thought. It’s not going to do well when it’s so cold and dry. Maybe I could delay its death for a few months, until April when the rain-filled air could heal it. Maybe it needed only a new season to begin thriving. If only there were time, if it weren’t so broken, if it hadn’t missed its chance at life but could burst out of its pot and scatter kaleidoscopic growth across the table.

OK, I said. Then I made a cup of tea.

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Header photograph and artwork by Jordan Keller-Wilson

My junior prom corsage was big and wet as an open mouth. A decadent purple. My high school boyfriend liked to give me decadent things. When he asked me out for the first time, for example, he gave me four squares of cake with frosting shiny as lip gloss. 

There’s a long-standing association between the flower and the vagina. I don’t understand the resemblance, though in fairness I don’t spend much time staring at vaginas. I prefer to dive in tongue-first and get to work. Still, I do wonder if my boyfriend was thinking about pussy when he looked at the flower he gave me. Based on my interactions with him I’m pretty sure he was thinking about pussy ninety percent of the time. 

I never had sex with him. He asked me, shortly after we started dating, if I wanted to “you know.” I told him that if he was not going to say the word “sex” then we were certainly not going to have sex. He didn’t think I was funny. 

We spent our dates in my basement, curled up on a pale green beanbag with his hands skimming my surface like water striders. He would always ask, “Do you like this? Is it good?” which at first I thought was nice, but he got so upset with me when the answer was “no” that lying was just easier. So, I let him touch me, because I didn’t want to be a bitch. But I was still just enough of a bitch to keep my pants on. Mostly I made encouraging noises while trying to subtly crane my neck so I could see the TV over his left shoulder. In retrospect, this was maybe the meanest thing I ever did as a teenager.

Since I couldn’t offer him sex, I offered him secrets—even my biggest secret of all, that I too was thinking about pussy ninety percent of the time. Though, while I can’t speak for him, I was also interested in the person attached. Back then, I was sort of Catholic, in that my parents told me to attend Catholic school and I preferred to avoid conflict when possible. I knew some of my teachers wouldn’t like me anymore if I came out as bisexual, so I resolved to stay in the closet for the time being. 

My boyfriend liked this secret very much. Especially when I gave him permission to fantasize about me with other women. Pussy times two. Three, if he was feeling devilish. All I needed to do was occasionally contribute more secrets to flesh out his dirty talk. Which girls in my class I liked. What I wanted to do with them. There was an odd irony to it, finally giving voice to my most fervent teenage longings only to watch them transform into material for someone else’s wet dreams before my eyes. But they say a good compromise leaves nobody happy.

On prom night, my friend hosted an afterparty in her basement, featuring games, plastic bowls of chips, and absolutely no alcohol. My boyfriend and I came early, and the four of us waited on the tattered brown couch for everyone else to arrive. He pulled me close to his body and gripped me tight, ran his hands up my thigh. My friend and her date sat in silence, unimpressed by our shameless PDA. Sorry, I thought. If it helps, I don’t like this any more than you do.

“You should kiss her,” my boyfriend said to me, indicating my friend with his head. He did not whisper, or even mumble. I looked at my friend and thought, would she know? Would the knowledge pass from my body to hers? I looked at her date, who was practically a stranger. I wondered who his friends were, and what kind of stories he might tell them. I looked at my boyfriend, and there was nothing in his eyes but hunger. A rotted hunger, brown and wilted and wet, and it stank. Like a corsage left lying in the trash after a prom night when no one had any fun and no one got any pussy.

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Header photograph and artwork by Jordan Keller-Wilson

We must rewind to see how I got here.

We must rewind to the glaring, too-bright, yellow-green lights of the PATCO train.

To the walk down a darkening Arch Street in the chill of a March evening. To my shoulders, draped in a white lab coat on weekdays, draped now with the heavy suede of his jacket, the sleeves hanging far below my hands and flapping against my knees as we walk, the streetlights blurring before my eyes, the lights of the bar where we’d met several hours earlier growing dimmer in the distance. 

Let’s rewind further to the shots of Jäger he insisted I do despite my protestations that I was not a much of a shot girl. To him, handing me the glass and goading me to try it, his buddies behind him, urging me on, because, in his words, it “tastes like purple.” To me, it tastes like Dimetapp. They all circle around me, and I am holding court, the unlikely object of their attention.

Rewind a little further to my emerging from a stall in the ladies room and finding him there, grinning in a more menacing way than he had out at the bar, pushing me against the cold, tiled wall and kissing me forcefully. Here is where you will say, why didn’t you know then? Where were your instincts? And here is where I won’t have an answer that will satisfy you. I was drunk? I didn’t want to make a scene? He was a friend of a friend? Would any of these answers satisfy you? Probably not, because they don’t satisfy me.

 Do you have more questions? Do you want to know if I kissed him back? So do I.

Rewind all the way to the beginning of the day, to me, walking into the sparsely populated Irish bar, all dark mahogany and dim lighting, even at ten thirty in the morning. Zoom in on me, a walking juxtaposition, a bespeckled, bookish blonde with a Barbie doll body, clad in jeans, a navy zip up sweatshirt, and blue Payless sneakers, eating a bowl of Irish oatmeal—the first and only food I would consume on this day—and sipping a glass of Dogfish Head 90 Minute IPA. I am looking for no one’s attention, but somehow, I have attracted his. Watch as he materializes next to me, his jeans brushing mine. Do you think I’m intrigued? Attracted to him? You’re not wrong.

He is the tall, tan, human embodiment of a redwood tree. His nose is crooked—perhaps from a rugby ball to the face, perhaps an elbow—but his smile is straight and Colgate commercial white, framed by the parenthetical laugh lines of someone who smiles easily and often and with confidence. Someone the opposite of me. He tries to explain what’s happening in the rugby game on TV—the one I’ve been invited here to watch by friends I’ve now lost track of—and he says he is rooting for England because he’s English, but with a name like Colleen, I must be Irish. I walk right into it. I say, “I have a little English in me.” He says, the grin spreading slowly across his face, “I’m going to make a really bad joke now.” He says, “Would you like a little more?”

Are you exasperated when I laugh even though his remark makes me slightly uncomfortable? Are you flabbergasted that I could have missed such obvious foreshadowing? So am I. 

We arrive now at the moment in question. This is the moment where my eyes open and struggle to focus on the cracks in my shitty, eggshell white apartment ceiling.  This is the moment, on the living room sofa handed down to me by my parents, that I become conscious of him moving inside me, the moment where the slow, cold panic of realization spreads across my body and I somehow summon my voice from the pinned down pit of my stomach to rise through my trachea, somehow summon my lips to move beneath the stubble of his jaw and force out the words, slurred and hazy and more whisper than protestation, “Hey, wait a minute.” He does stop. With a grin that now calls to mind the Cheshire Cat of Alice’s Wonderland, he says, “Oh, I guess we forgot something.” He thinks I mean he should put on a condom. My mouth is dry, and my mind is a gelatinous fog, and I don’t know what I mean. 

All this rewinding has gotten us no answers.

Let’s fast forward through the part where I wriggle out of the jeans and underwear that are around my ankles, where I stand up, bottomless, and lead him to my bedroom where I have condoms in my nightstand—safety first, for I am nothing if not a sexually responsible adult—and where I consent to him completing the act I had not consented to in the first place. Let’s fast forward through that because my motivation is confusing to me even now. Because I don’t know what I was thinking, except isn’t this what I expected when I invited a stranger back to my apartment? Did I invite him? Onto the train? Into my car? Into my home? I don’t remember, but at some point, I must have. I must have expected this. Except I had probably also expected to be conscious. 

But let’s also fast forward through the act itself, because I don’t remember it. It’s possible I enjoyed it, or parts of it. The next morning, he interprets the raw, red trails my fingernails left on his back as proof that I had. He emerges from my bathroom to show them to me with pride before he pulls on his white undershirt.

Let’s skip the part where we have breakfast at a diner and I drop him off at the train station, grateful he doesn’t ask for my number, because I am confused about what even happened between us and whether I want to lay eyes on him again. 

Let’s skip ahead a few months later to me at a different bar with the same mutual friends I had been meeting to watch the rugby tournament. Here I am, still bespeckled, moving my way through the crowd to the bar to order my friend and myself a couple of beers, when I feel someone’s body pressing against me, trying to occupy the space I am in, and I realize it is him. I am dwarfed by his presence. His back is to me, and before I can decide if I should say hello or hide, he gestures with his hand to the friend he is talking with, and hits me in the mouth with the neck of his beer bottle. He doesn’t notice. No one notices. I swallow the pain silently. We don’t speak that night, and I never see him again.

Fast forward now to the next morning when I wake up alone in my bed with an ache in my mouth and go to the bathroom mirror to locate the small, almost imperceptible chip in my tooth.

We could end here. We could fade to black on all this ambiguity, but let’s press on. Let’s fast forward four years, to me in a car with my husband and our infant son, running mundane errands on a mundane afternoon. We are stopped at a light and half listening to the Kavanaugh hearings on NPR. My stomach drops and my skin goes clammy as Christine Blasey Ford describes in detail what Brett Kavanaugh (allegedly?) did to her on the night in question. Something in her words, in this thin, small voice emerging from this educated, accomplished woman, stirs the long buried discomfort of the encounter that I had filed away as a one night stand borne of my poor judgment. The memory had been buried in the recesses of my brain, a VHS tape collecting dust in a basement. Blasey Ford’s voice pressed play on the tape. The cracks in my ceiling, the weight of his body are suddenly a humiliation so visceral that my forehead breaks out in sweat and I have to force back the bile in my throat.  I stare at the dashboard. I say to my husband, “I just remembered something I haven’t thought about in years.” I say, “I think I’m going to be sick.”

When I tell him the story, his knuckles go white on the steering wheel.

Switch scenes to later that night, and zoom in on me alone on my living room sofa, my husband asleep, the baby asleep for now. Always a night owl and now plagued by postpartum, anxiety-induced insomnia, I sit in the darkness and scroll on my phone. I open Facebook. I find him. He is easy to find, his last name so unusual that I still remember it, though he never told me. I found it on his driver’s license when I woke before him the next morning, found his jeans on my sofa and went through the pockets looking for clues about the stranger snoring in my bed. Here I am, years later, still sleuthing for clues.

Facebook informs me that he now lives in Colorado. In his profile picture, he stands shirtless in front of the ocean with his arm around a pretty, tan brunette. He is still tan. His nose still crooked, his smile still disarming. Somehow, seeing his face again, I feel unsafe in my own home.

The comments beneath the picture congratulate him on his engagement.

It’s about time, his friends write. Congrats, dude.

I don’t wonder if he ever thinks about that night in my old apartment; I’m fairly certain I already know the answer..

I wonder about her. I feel strangely worried for this smiling stranger.

Did their first meeting go like ours had? Or is she a woman he handled more delicately?

How would she react if she knew about the night I woke up with her fiance inside me? Would she forgive him? Would she think there was anything to forgive? 

Do I?

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Header photograph and artwork by Jordan Keller-Wilson