The Best American Essays 2022

But only fools and Americans think they can outrun the past.

My father had not so much left us as completed, made visible, an absence that had been present among us all along.

Edwidge Danticat story: “Shame is heavier than a hundred bags of salt.”

I think the past and future are the same place, taking long refuge in either the same thing. A way of avoiding, not living in, the present.

Maybe if we had admitted to the precarious balance of his mental and physical state, I would’ve told him to crawl onto my bed. We could’ve lain head to toe, under my sheets, like kids at a sleepover. But he never wanted to burden anyone with the slightest of inconveniences, so we pretended that his racing thoughts were all right, however false that

Women, always the women. Thank goodness for the women.

there exists a continual fluctuation of our energies. We wish to possess, to be possessed, and to be relieved of our possessions all at once.

All addicts exist inside a contradiction, at an unmappable crossroads between the forces of fate and individual will. Fate (genetics, circumstance, hard luck; not I) made me an addict. Will (power, determination, pure self) will allow me to overcome it. Perhaps that’s why twelve-step programs, instead of employing linear logic to lead people out of

We look for patterns. We look for what we know how to see.