Inventory
Some things I’ve wrapped in bubble, Boxed and marked Handle With Care— Like the letter my brother mailed me The week he almost died. It still smells of cinnamon and mold. There is a unit inside me Lined with small keys— Each one unlocking a different version of grief. Rent is due the first of the month. No refunds. Sometimes, a memory slips from the shelf— The pink raincoat, the music box that played Chopin until it was silenced by a spilled glass of wine and a hand I never trusted. The air here hums with forgetting. All climate-controlled, yet every box has sweat beneath its lid. Even the wedding dress folded beside the eviction notice. A man once broke in. He took the shoebox of poetry. Left the tax returns. I am the unpaid intern of my own containment. Every corridor echoes with names I do not speak aloud. Like the vase I stole from a gas station. Like the time I locked away the softest parts of myself because love wanted a cleaner floor plan. Even the spiders keep records here. They tally each time I return To peek into bin B12— The one labeled childhood, sealed with duct tape and lavender oil. But here I am again— Clipboard in hand, checking off what I’ve managed to misplace: The voice I used in fifth grade. The scent of wet sidewalk chalk. A night light shaped like a moon. Even storage has weight. Even forgetting has fees.
The Brief Theater of Passing Cars
We drive past one another— strangers, each holding a scene just long enough to dissolve it. A man in a red uniform shirt staring into a traffic light as if waiting for an answer. Someone has written "I Love You" on her fogged-up rear window. The man in the Civic sings off-key with his whole chest— no one listening, but maybe that’s the point. There are children arguing in the back seat of a blue minivan. A mother taps the wheel in time to something playing quietly on NPR. I pass a man chewing his lip. His hands white-knuckled on the wheel. In the passenger seat, a bouquet of wilted flowers. A station wagon rolls by with windows down, and in it, a breeze of curry, two laughing teens, and an old dog riding shotgun like a prince. We never meet again. We are a gallery of glimpses, slices of almost-life. I find God here sometimes— in the gum wrappers, the dashboard rosaries, the sticker that says, Still Here.
The Journals I Never Got to Keep
One was pink with gold locks— confiscated by a cousin who laughed too loud at my poems. Another left open on the counter like a confession. Mom read the word touch and called me impure. There was one with pressed flowers that soaked through the pages like wounds. My brother handed it over. I was grounded for a month and lost something deeper. In my twenties, heartsick and couchbound, I left three at an ex’s house. He kept them like trophies. The last ones disappeared with my mother’s trash bags. She said, They were clutter. But they were the voices of every version of me. The boy who I first kissed in secret. The teen who wrote prayers. The woman who learned to scream onto paper. I grieve them like people.
After the Crash in the Hudson
What floats up is never just wreckage. It is tariff and treaty, torn passport and waterlogged hope. A helicopter falls like a policy no one read. The papers call it a tragedy. We know it as Tuesday. Somewhere a family waits for a call from ICE. Somewhere a mother nurses her child on the edge of a detention cell. The stock market dips. The President tweets. And my neighbor can’t afford her insulin. There are whole cities drowning in legislation. We build walls, but not bridges. Float promises on waves of silence. What sinks is always someone else.
Tea Like an Embrace
Boil. Pour. Steep. A steeped quiet— the kind that only follows weeping, when steam begins where words won’t go, and the cup becomes a palm to hold you— a mercy. I grew up watching my grandmother lift her storms in porcelain— each sip, a spell for survival. She’d stir silence with honey, press her lips to the rim like confession. Tea was offered when no one could apologize. After slammed doors, after the hush of bruises too fresh for names. When our bodies sat beside each other, unable to look— Tea filled the space between us like a warm, unspoken truce. I learned to brew comfort at ten, maybe younger, heating water in a chipped kettle while my mother paced with the phone to her ear, whispering grief she couldn’t explain. I’d slip a bag into her favorite mug— the one with the faded cardinal— and wait for her hands to remember mine. Even now, I measure my peace in teaspoons. Chamomile for surrender, mint for migraines and regret, ginger when rage simmers too long. I sit with it at dawn, before children stir or emails demand that I become other people. My mug is wide, a second heart. I fill it with the ache of yesterday and drink slowly, like one does when they want time to forgive them. No one taught me this, not really. But my body knew. Somewhere between the quiet kitchen tiles and the rising swirl of scent— my body remembered warmth is its own language. Sometimes, I don't want to talk. I want tea— to cradle me like I am still someone's child, like I am worth the steeping. Tea does not ask. Tea does not judge. It gathers my parts into warmth. Lets me dissolve the day in sips. Even in Styrofoam… it feels holy.