27 december 1975/1984/2023 (+ 3 months)

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time is like an accordion. sometimes it stretches, sometimes it’s all squeezed up.

i wrote a version of that in a post a thousand lifetimes ago and made my students read it in spring 2020, when we’d all moved online and i didn’t know what to teach them beyond, apparently, the fact that time is weird and the moments fold back on one another and we try to navigate them as best we can.

that’s the summation of all of my work: time is weird.

when i die, they’ll write: “single lady writer dies, thought time was an accordion.”

you’re welcome.

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scattered memories of challenger

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what i remember is all of the adults in my life going into the den and shutting the door.

that’s not actually an accurate memory, as it was my mother and ann, our cleaner, and then, later, my dad. but that’s the memory. the adults in a room with the door shut and me, age 4 1/2, on the other side of it.

this was the year after The Year Everyone Died– my friend from next door, my mother’s grandfather, my father’s boss– so we were already, then, somewhat a house in mourning. or, at the very least, a house that had spent a lot of the previous year avoiding discussion of grief and death whilst living submerged within it.

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