Sublime

We grew up on the third floor of a little apartment building near the ocean. Just two rooms, one more cramped than the other, no wall or anything between them. Izakaya on the ground floor.

From the first minute she was a force every bit as recognizable as her mother. That feeling of life coming into the room was unlike anything I’d ever experienced before, a flood of joy. I thought of it ten years later when I climbed into my grandmother’s bed and held her while she died. The light pouring in and the light going out.

Your father wouldn’t give me my freedom, she would say, and so I had to go to court and get it that way.…

Somerville, near the Cambridge line. The neighborhood was known as Little Lisbon,

Hipsters aren’t visited by unseen tragedy (unless the mother kombucha falls off a ledge and breaks)