
I’m Not Outraged, But If I Were…
I was in the produce section of the Centreville Harris Teeter when a man in a stained white tank top came up to my boyfriend
I was in the produce section of the Centreville Harris Teeter when a man in a stained white tank top came up to my boyfriend
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Every time he left, I would feel all of my muscles shake out of a tense grip, as if I’d been holding on to the
If people always knew when intruders had broken into their homes, no one would ever die this way. I grab a chef’s knife, the knife that slices through raw chicken, bone and flesh, and return to the living room where the moth persists at the lamp. There’s only one way to be sure. I’ll have to check.
Perhaps because of the housing boom and bust of the early 21st century, American society is now more aware of the “near poor” or people who are just getting by. But when I was a teenager, normal-looking actually meant “just like everyone else.” No one knew I was hungry and poor.
Ruth had always said that when she was too enfeebled to live independently, she’d “off” herself, as she put it with characteristic candor. A Right-to-Die advocate for decades, she was now bequeathing possessions. That’s what people did when they were going to do themselves in. Ruth would have been proud of me for putting it that way, for not resorting to a more comfortable euphemism.
My body is a private and practical thing—something yielded to the production of children and the scrubbing of a bathtub, but not something I would find either pleasure or pride in offering to the public. And yet, here I am, sitting in front of a computer, offering its naked portrait to the public gaze because, as a writer, my job is to be publicly naked.
We have so many phrases and sayings in Al-Anon to help with states like this: “Easy does it,” “First things first,” “Keep it simple.” Sometimes they ring so hollow.