Pain & Surprise

My signature move was to pack up all my opinions, feelings, likes, and dislikes, and set them aside so I could absorb the lifestyle, interests, and friends of whoever I was dating. If I remain compliant, sweet, easy, and suggestible, then you’ll really love me, right?

Each time I cross a border, I feel the push and pull in my body, a cacophony of competing desires. And always there are choices to make: what to assimilate, what to reject. Is it true that we are always, as migrants, and the children of migrants, attempting to choose what my parents call "the best of both worlds"? Or is it possible to tra

I want to untie my name, slip it off me, throw it away, forget it. But on other occasions she was more relaxed. It happened—let’s say—that I called her hoping to persuade her to talk to me about her text and, although she forcefully denied its existence, continuing to be evasive, it sounded as if my phone call had surprised her in the middle of a c

That circumstances might oblige him to withdraw from her she perfectly understood; that he actually felt himself to be less committed appalled her. It confounded all her assumptions, that something so deeply attested should prove totally unpredictable.