When she opened my present – a set of linen tea towels, screen-printed with the handwritten recipes of my mother’s cookies and cakes and pies she loved most – she burst into tears and hugged me, saying that it was the most personal, thoughtful gift she’d received, and that she would use them every day.
Because race is different. Racism is different. It’s fraught, and it’s hard to discuss, and so as a result we often don’t.
In the darkest crease of the night, that she would love me until the moon lost its footing in the sky.
I cannot do great things, I can do small things in a great way. “But,” she continued, “don’t forget where you came from.
But I’m even more cautious with the white ones in the pickup trucks with Confederate flags hanging in the back windows. Because I used to be who they are, and I know what they are capable of.
It’s because when she is bruised, I’m the one that aches.
God, I pray, please, please be listening.
In most cases, the victim was still in therapy when the. rapist got done serving his sentence.
The more complex a behavior is, the more rigorous and complicated the science behind it.
My scholar, my serious, sweet boy, is now a rebel – holed up in his room listening to music so loud it makes the walls shake or texting friends I did not know he had; coming home past curfew smelling of hard liquor and weed. I have fought, I have cried, and now, I am not sure what else to do. The whole train of our lives is in the process of derailing; this is only one of the cars skidding off the tracks.
I know what love is, but only theoretically. I don’t feel it the way other people do.
I had been in the library at the bank of computers and there was a kid sitting next to me. Owen is in my Advanced Placement physics class. He is really quiet and very smart, and if you ask me, he has a little bit of Asperger’s in him. It’s like gaydar; I can tell.
And then one day, you turn around, and your baby is a man.
Sometimes, ridiculously, the more perfect he was the angrier she got, as if his generosity existed only to highlight her own selfishness.
Things don’t always look as they seem. Make of it what you will.
And I don’t understand why neurotypical guys are obsessed with girl breasts. I think it would be an enormous pain to have those sticking out in front of you all the time.
The afterlife is all about overlapping planes. We all live in the same physical space, but on different metaphysical levels, and someone who’s passed before you might have reached a consciousness you haven’t yet.
In the wild, a female elephant would not separate from her male calf until he was ten to thirteen years old.
And then come September, they fell back in step as if they’d never missed a beat. That, Peter figured, was the very definition of a best friend.
There is no such thing as a fact. There is only how you saw the fact, in a given moment. How you.