I knew on our third anniversary, though I wouldn't admit it for another two years. He'd forgotten—again—and when I mentioned it, he said, "Every day with you is special, why do we need to mark arbitrary dates?" It sounded romantic if you didn't examine it too closely, if ...Read More
At my twentieth college reunion, I couldn't stop staring at Marcus. Not because he'd gotten rich (though he had) or successful (that too), but because he looked impossibly better than he had at twenty-two. While the rest of us had softened, grayed, and accumulated the inevitable marks of ...Read More
Passion gets a bad rap. We're told it burns out, that it's unsustainable, that mature love is calm and steady. But what if real passion isn't about intensity that fades—what if it's about connection so deep it only grows stronger? The most passionate relationships aren't fueled by drama or ...Read More
She texted me fourteen times during my two-hour movie. Not emergencies—just variations of "what are you doing?" and "hello???" and "guess you're too busy for me." By the time I emerged from the theater, she'd gone from casual check-in to full emotional spiral, convinced I was ignoring her ...Read More
My father kept the rejection letter in his desk drawer for thirty-seven years. Stanford Law School, 1973. Full scholarship. His ticket out of the assembly line and into a different life entirely. I found it while helping him pack for downsizing, tucked between his union cards and a ...Read More
The elevator doors closed, trapping me with a colleague I'd worked near but never really talked to for three years. Twelve floors. Roughly forty-five seconds. The silence immediately became sentient, pressing against us like a third passenger. I could have stared at my phone, pretended to check emails. ...Read More