Watching Chinese immigrants shouting curt orders to Black workers in their newly learned English was often like observing a failed game of telephone, as the workers’ faces bore quiet offense.

we roll our bodies down the hillside
everything feels so green

“With O.J. there was an abyss of recklessness I was willing to dive into, a waxing appetite for danger I was unsure I could swallow.”

"Pearl had grown up knowing and not knowing her mother. It happened sometimes: a child raised by an aunt, by grandparents. The mother hovering at the borders of their lives."

“I understood that a crying man was not a gay man, and Stainless and I were not friends.”

“In hindsight, I see the event as strange, a random act of violence from which no lesson can be drawn.”

I’m interested in the way in which memory—the way that we think about the past—is a re-creation of the past, how the past keeps happening.

As we moved through the “Know Thyself” syllabus, I grappled to articulate the elements that went into knowing myself. I hammered away at myself like an interrogator.

“I tried putting myself in Mert’s shoes—I was in his underwear after all—and wondered at how easily he had offered me something so intimate. Realizing that all my efforts had been so transparent, that I had no protective cover whatsoever, was like being shoved into cold water again and again.”