More on: Essays

My belief: that the words are in the world, and that we are consubstantial with the world, that we are immanent along with it, the words become our world.

Grace leaves us wordless. This commonality, though, is what makes the genre of testimony so compelling.

We were at war, Christian soldiers, and on October 31, the war spilled out onto every street in the city, Satan rising, only the truest of saints fighting back.

It was during Holy Week last year when E, wearing her fake Gucci butterfly necklace, tried to light herself on fire.

I was six when my sister had her first breakdown.

We have never wanted to touch the dead.

My own faith is inextricable from the landscape in which I was taught to believe.

I woke today tasting salt, and there is still an ocean for me—to find or cross, as all is passage and mourning, the naming of things that one day will be no more.

I think of my chest like the inside of a grand piano, each key triggering an invisible response in the instrument’s body, releasing some build of pressure within an anatomy of hammers and strings. I think about writing. It’s always a gamble to live life without writing everything down in real time—the fear of what will be forgotten haunted by anxiety over what’s already been lost. A train of inkblots surfaces behind my eyes and disappears just as quickly, like music. I try to resist reaching for metaphors, attaching any images or words that would put distance between myself and the moment as it’s happening. I try not to feel like a failure.