I want to light your cigarette. You, the woman who shares her surname with a city romanticized by the likes of Bowie, Iggy Pop, and Lou Reed. Berlin . Wunderbar.  I want to light your cigarette even though I've always been deeply allergic to something in cigarettes. Smoking never worked out for me, which knocked off a few cool points in the punk rock circles I ran in. Kids used to pop Vicodin. I popped Zyrtec. While on the subject of punk, let's note your fascination with the

Before I leave my house, I make sure my winter jacket is packed with the essentials: wet wipes, hand sanitizer, propolis throat spray, an N95 mask, disinfectant spray, and my "transit glove" that I use to open doors, press buttons, and move through the city. It's not craziness. It's flu season. I spray the elevator with disinfectant before entering—only when nobody is there, of course, I'm polite—and I don't share elevators, at least not by choice. When someone steps in while

All morning spent flat, still on the bedroom floor. The seam between the wooden planks is wide enough for a fingernail to clear grime and splinters. Noon chirps, then out to the mailbox. The truck picks its way down the road and rattles to a stop. The mailman stiff-arms a stack of envelopes out the window. Siobhan reaches forward. Carefully, she rehearsed this part for hours, peering at the ceiling.  The words come fast. It is difficult to remove Walter’s name from some accou

By the time I had learned that I was going to have a child, my cat had grown to an enormous size. When she stood on her hind legs, which was something she did now, she was the height and width of a dinghy. Her ears would brush against my ceiling and come away grey with dust. I had never realized that I needed to dust my ceiling, and now I had a way to do so. When I learned that I was going to have a child, my cat sat me down on the living room sofa. At first, she curled up in

In response to loss we get busy making meaning, recreating what we have lost and reanimating forms of life that might otherwise disappear. This seems to me a wondrous response to love and loss, a wondrous response to caring and finitude in general - Jonathan Lear My father died under the walnut trees, in a year when there were no walnuts.  The prior year, there were many: green globes tucked under their canopies of serrated, pinnate leaves. I collected them before they fell,