 Birthdays aren’t the best day. The eve of my birthday is the anniversary of the day I started gushing bright red blood, after 14 weeks of amenorrhea that I honestly thought was a pregnancy. I was sick and fatigued and nauseated like a pregnancy. I even had wiggling sensations that I told myself might be kicks, but they were actually my hiatal hernia and all the noise from the severe IBS that flares up when my Poly-cystic ovary syndrome... Read more
There are days when scrolling through social media makes me feel like I should be wearing rubber gloves. Just reading the news, and the reactions to the news, is like walking through a sewer. For one thing, I keep seeing articles about the Florida high school forms where female athletes are supposed to report their entire menstrual history and no one’s quite sure if the third parties this information is being given to are HIPPA compliant. Exactly who gets to... Read more
Everything is changing now. The whole world is going gold before it goes gray. Nothing will stay the same for long. Last night I tried to take the borrowed car on a longer trip than usual, just to get out of the house. It made a horrifying noise, so I aborted the mission and took it back to my house to rest. I didn’t park it in the old hiding place on the next block, where I’d been parking the... Read more
It’s October, the best month of all. The leaves are barely beginning to turn. You can see it on the edges of trees– most of the tree still green, with a few of the bottom-most leaves going gold and purple and red. All I want in the world is to find an out-of-the-way place to go hiking and take it all in. I can’t take the borrowed car out on the freeway to find an out-of-the-way place to hike, because... Read more
During my tenure as Someone Who Expresses Opinions on the Internet, I have defended Pope Francis an awful lot. I have made fun of sedevacantists. I have called out tiresome internet traditionalists who make up conspiracy theories and show know respect for the Holy Father. I have been vehement in my defense of the Pope, whom I genuinely like most of the time, and I’m not a bit sorry. I am not going to defend Pope Francis today. I’m going... Read more
Guinea pigs sleep with their eyes open. They are prey animals, herbivores with no real natural defenses, so they never close their eyes. You know when that they’re asleep because they lie down relaxed and motionless like a library statue of a lion. You know they’re afraid if they are motionless but standing up, alert. You know they’re happy when they mill around, exploring, and chew on things. But they’ll go right back to being motionless with terror at the... Read more
 Autumn came so fast this year. September is usually a cruel month, tantalizing us with the changing seasons and leaving us sweating bullets. All the pools are closed but it’s so hot, all I want to do is go swimming. There are silk marigolds and Halloween candy for sale in the stores, but it’s too sticky to wear sweaters or turn off the constant roar of the window air conditioners. This year, right on the first day of fall,... Read more
   I saw her again the other day. Mary, the Mother of God. She was on the side of a building in downtown Steubenville, and I stopped to take a picture. It used to be the prettiest building, a pastel Victorian house like the ones my beloved grandfather used to make dollhouse copies of in his wood shop. The whole outside was aqua colored brick with white trim. I think it was a bookshop inside. There was a... Read more
 My cousins found a wall of black obsidian, way out in the middle of the woods. This was a long, long time ago, just before the PCOS set in at puberty and my life was over, when we were all still the best of friends. Every year we met up to play multiple times at my wonderful grandpa’s house, in his magic garden on a triple lot that might as well have been a whole farm. But the most... Read more
 Adrienne Rose turned eleven today. Eleven years ago, just after seven in the morning, ended the worst 24 hours of my life. The PTSD went on for years and I still jump in terror when someone brushes up against me the wrong way. But she doesn’t know this. All she knows is the story I told her: when the doctor was pulling her out of that puckered scar on my abdomen, he said “Look at that hair. Look at... Read more
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