[Written as the war as yet to kill me.] My first brush with loss in the military was the F-16 student who g-LOC’d during training. G-force loss of consciousness occurs when a pilot endures sustained high gs, which drains blood from the brain and induces hypoxia. Without oxygen, the blackout followed. I was a new … Continue reading Dulce et Decorum
[Lost in Translation]
[Written while standing on my proverbial soapbox] An unsung talent of an effective writer is making anything accessible. Access may seem odd when applied to language since we think of it more in the context of doors or shelves—how it captures an ability or permission to attain what may be denied to another. Steep in … Continue reading [Lost in Translation]
Learning to Believe in Ghosts
[Written when I should have been doing my taxes] In Sapiens, Yuval Harari argues that the ability to conceive of imagined realities has permitted humans to thrive as a species. Supposedly, we are the only creatures that can communicate in the abstract. We have devised belief systems, supranational organizations, proverbial lines that define one nation … Continue reading Learning to Believe in Ghosts
How to Live Happily in a Dystopian Novel
[Written on my phone when I should have been sleeping] The world is crumbling, and I have never cared more or less than at this moment. Languishing? Yes, thank you, how are you? Don’t worry about me—I, like many of you, am feeling the walls caving in. (The air seems a bit thin.) We just … Continue reading How to Live Happily in a Dystopian Novel
Loves and Expectations
[Written while waiting in line for coffee] I wrote my first story in kindergarten. It was a sentence long about a horse running away from a farm but eventually returning because the stories of my childhood were supposed to have happy endings. These stories were also supposed to have pictures, so I drew the horse, … Continue reading Loves and Expectations
Song of the South | A Requiem
[Written with a white-hot urgency] I grew up in rural Virginia—the sort of rural where the roads lacked lines until recently and the bridge we required to circumvent a twenty-minute drive took nearly ten years to be replaced. In winter, our backroads were lousy with ice and ushered in snow days for the county. And … Continue reading Song of the South | A Requiem
Afghanistan | A Grammar of Regret
[Written with a heavy heart] Afghanistan was my honeymoon. My husband and I moved our wedding forward when orders dropped for me to deploy, so I arrived a day before the 2010 elections. I had deployed to Iraq the previous year and spent the eve of my twenty-fifth birthday in the prone position during an … Continue reading Afghanistan | A Grammar of Regret
My Terrible Roommate
[Written while trying to come up with the next plot twist in a manucript] It is 2020 and a Monday, the 2020iest of Mondays, and I find myself cross-eyed, sifting through pixels of data, wearing sodden socks of the most imposterish of thoughts. Like many of my fellow pandemic keyboard warriors, I was stuck in … Continue reading My Terrible Roommate
Not That You Asked 