Some things are easier the second time around. Opening a missing persons report turned out to be one of those things for me. Not easy, but easier. Opening the first missing person’s report was so traumatic. The officer at the desk was so dismissive, like I didn’t really know my…

When I was in college, I had a roommate who found a great many things weird. She used “weird” to describe things more than any other word. In an effort to get her to help her open her mind, I would respond that it isn’t weird, just different. After a…

I opened an envelope and it all changed. Her bank statement has two deposits, her social security and her pension, and no withdrawals. No withdrawals can mean anything, but nothing good. My first, best, likely option is she is in the hospital or she was in the hospital and then…

Here I am, coming back to myself after a long time away. I hardly know where to start. The awkward pauses, shuffling on the porch. Remembering how to meet my own eyes. How to speak and be heard, how to listen with love. All the while wondering. Knowing where I have been, knowing where I had to be. To lose the most important struggle of my life. To know at last, finally, stop. How do I forgive me? Yet somehow I am always called back, invited in. I am there for me at the end. I have been there the whole time and no one knows me better.

I relocated a spider this morning before my shower saying, “You do you, just not in the bathtub.” Feeling how life has relocated me. Remembering the many times I’ve ushered flying insects out of the house, waving my hands, creating turbulence in the air. It must have been very confusing until freedom. I was comfortable where I was. I was safe, warm. Then the currents change, almost undetectable at first. Then more and more certainly. Time to move on. Into the sun, into light, into a world larger and more strange and vibrant than I could have ever imagined.

I was coming back from a circus show in North Beach. I had gotten there by train, the same train I took to visit my mother when she was in San Francisco living on the street. (She’s doing the same now in San Jose.) Going out I remembered the weight…

Turning the new year and coming on the two year anniversary of the COVID lockdown, I am thinking about my mother and her challenges over the past couple years. When we went into lockdown, she was staying at a hotel. She thought that she was having money added to her…

I could start with the first time she was hospitalized, in what was supposed to be my last year of college. In the hospital, she greeted me in her nightgown with one of my stuffed animals, a mouse, in her hand. …

I don’t want to talk with her. If I talk with, I’m reminded of how bad the situation is. I’m reminded of her delusions. I’m reminded of her struggles, her vulnerability. I’m reminded that I can’t help her because she won’t let me. I don’t want to try to find…