Gritty Love above 90 degrees

Summer swelters the apartment until she hisses like a tea kettle past the boiling point. Our sweat dyes the top sheet I insist on sleeping with because I need something …

Rezoning

My favorite destination clothed as a stranger now.

An Alarm, A Vigil, A Resting Place

My heart howls through my chest cavity so loudly that it barrels through my throat upward until it rattles my skull. I got used to the howl like you grow …

Passing 1L like a Kidney Stone

It isn’t over, but 1L is a really hard place to be. Still, I don’t want to be anywhere else.

The third time

The two times I fell into the rose water of romantic love, it was with someone who made me feel safe enough to imagine a future where I have all …

Babs

My mom’s favorite movie is Cinema Paradiso.

In it, there’s this line:

“Whatever you end up doing, love it!”

I don’t know if she realizes that she’s applied this to her whole life,

She’s loved it even when it was hard to hold on,

and now, it loves her back all the more for it.

Edinburgh

Stand at the intersection of 55 degrees and some change north by 3 degrees and some change west.

Its a weepy sky,

Brisk air,

the kind that lingers in your socks after indoor heating finds you but your toes are trapped in the memory of outside, a temperature you left at the doormat.

I knew I loved Edinburg from the aisle-seat’s view of the train window. She’s not a city who tamed herself into tourist-friendly. To love her is a choice, a real preference. There’s water, but you’re unlikely to sunbathe. There are tourist stores, but it is a city of Scots. The Queen of England may stay in Balmoral, can historically claim Hollyrood house, but the cobblestones on the street speak in a Scottish brogue, not the queen’s english.

I never resented the rain or wished the sky into something beyond its default grey. I loved the city as she is.

What I felt for that city became a lesson in love:

Some things are not for everyone. Their climate isn’t agreeable. They don’t entice with a cosmopolitan flavor. Some people only want what is tourist friendly and touts universal appeal. That isn’t Edinburg, and it isn’t me. We are overwhelming on the senses and polarizing in existence. The people who love us dont love us for sun-soaked days and balmy weather. They bought the ticket for Edinburg. That’s what they want, not Florida.

I’m not a lot some folk’s preferred destination. But, those who are about it, about me, are sure. I get to be a decision instead of a default—to be somebody else’s Edinburg— an experience almost a decade old that I still cherish.