The girl in the first dream is young—three or four or five. She has long, white-blonde hair and she is running circles around the flower bed in the center of the front yard of my childhood home...

Orientation was only part of the problem. This is when my reflexes stopped working. This is when instinct began to fail me. Or perhaps it is I who failed it...

We all needed help that summer—Ben’s parents, me, me and Ben. My storm had begun that spring...

In the photo it is 1986. If I am eight, then my mother and father are forty-two and forty-four, respectively....

This morning I was scrolling through my Timehop feed and came across a photo from 2008...

But it seems most women do not carry the word the way I do. It is not chained to them, or part of them.

It’s mostly true that I don’t want to have children. But it’s also mostly true that some part of me does want to have children...