Is it even possible to explain why you like something? And I don’t mean explaining why it’s cool, but why, over everything else people love in this world, you love what you do.
I can safely sit here, two days after turning 20, and tell you that you will be okay. You aren’t sure that you’re even going to make it to see yourself graduate high school--let alone make it through the pandemic that’s coming--but please believe me when I say that you will.
Tom Casey’s letters from Vietnam are not merely a historical artifact, but a bildungsroman, the story of a man discovering the limits of his duty and the faults of his country.
I soon joined the club of licit pink-pill slipping girls myself, along with the 82 percent of teen birth-control users who rely on the drug for purposes, at least in part, other than pregnancy prevention.
There’s stillness: the whispers of trees and soft winds that make them heard. They’re talking to us; we’ve come to listen. Plantations are vast, empty, filled with invisible souls and their all-too-audible cries; these acres are not that.
Maybe it needed to be a song. On the other hand, they had already done that. A poem crossed their mind, and they had to laugh (they often had to laugh). It could have been a lot of things. But then, it could only have been one way.
Summer in the Bronx lasts forever, and it is like this: naked bodies that are at once child-skinny and child-swollen sprinting through spray-capped fire hydrants, stained popsicle sticks in neat piles on the sidewalk, asphalt that remembers the warm smell of rain long after it storms.
I hadn’t known the story of how Anna’s life had played out; how she had ended up working in the arts and how she had ended up becoming the Anna that I knew. I always saw her as having things figured out.