A wrap-up of all the things I've written this year that I like.

I wrote a lot this year, even though I think I didn’t. I wanted to look back at some of the things I’ve written and see what I liked best. Some of these are full bits while others are just short snippets of what I enjoyed. I’ve added commentary where appropriate to give you some sense of what I liked about it / why I included it. Enjoy!

From a short piece of something:

I was over him in theory and practice but still craved his respect.1 In therapy I talked in circles around the concept, often getting close to the reason why but never piercing through the ouroboros of my endless obsession. My therapist, for her part, pointed this out every time. Her running theory was it represented some deep connection to my past, some form of safety mechanism that made me cling to a version of myself that felt overwhelmed and understimulated by the world around me. “Some people,” she told me once. “Have a really hard time breaking old habits.”

From 3 for Friday:

Michael tells you about his plans to move out West, where the land and sky converge and the city sounds can’t reach. He tells you it’s about heartache or something more profound like longing, though for what he can’t explain.

He is going where they all go: the popup town in the West Texas national park where witchy women carve miracles from the stone.2 You have heard this tale before: how threads of miracles are worked from stone—thin slivers of salvation pulled from limestone stick with memory.

“Are you scared?””No,” He answers. “Giving up something is not so hard when you have something to gain. Mostly I am anxious, nervous about what could be.”

Nobody returns the same. Some don’t return at all. Those that do are marked by their miracles: sprouting wings or horns, heavenly marks etched on their skin, glowing eyes, or transformed muscle. They must make a pact to never speak their miracle out loud, keeping it for them alone.

“I’ll miss you,” you tell him.”I’ll be back,” He assures you, but you know it’s not the same.

From the start of a story about the dying of small things:

When I broke up with him he wrote me a long letter (by hand and with citations) explaining how all the bugs were dying.3 He wrote about the shrinking rainforests and how scientists knew that certain bugs must exist, even if they’d never been seen before. Soon, he wrote, things will die we never knew existed. Kingdoms and phylum and species more delicate than our waning interests.

The smallest things can be invaluable and yet so hard to find.After reading his letter I kept waking up in the middle of the night, terrified there was something crucial I was forgetting to remember. I cleared out my office supplies and scribbled delirious strands of thought on postage notes. In the morning I would package each into neat little stacks, sliding them into a folder of previous nights’ notes and fears and hallucinations.

From A series of moments:

The impossible image of a Terlingua nighttime, the strained sound of my grandmother’s voice, the fresh laundry smell of the first man I ever loved.4 Each sense replaced by something new: the sight of my dog stretching first thing in the morning, the bright laugh of my partner, and the fall smell of dropping leaves mixed with pumpkin guts and seeds.

I think, of course, there are layers to memories; history to senses.5 Sometime, late in life, you will recall your first taste of love: the stickiness of lips or flesh, the tender-tart way it lingered on your tongue. But let’s be honest, could you even tell me what it first felt like to press lip to lip? To feel another’s tongue wrapped around your own? Could you ever describe something so incomparable?

From 2 for Tuesday:

I cheated once. I don’t recommend it. It’s messy business, leaves you scattered and sort of crazed. It’s not the action. The action is quick. But then there are endless others. Action, reaction, and all that. There’s the accounting of things, the drama, the ending or the decision to stay. Either choice is terrible.6

From 4 for Thursday:

Jake showed up all red-in-the-face, splotched with a rashy sort of devastated look that let you know he only just stopped crying.7

from a long weekend:

Now, halfway through a short story, you confuse confession for revelation, certain that each thing you write is meaningful only because it’s true.8 You are trying hard to be something different than you are right now. You are trying to change or grow or mend—whichever one happens first. You are trying to write things that are not true. Real fiction, or at least the closest approximation of it you can muster.

from 5 stories about summer:

Laura told you once that the worst thing someone can be is irrelevant, but you always thought that the worst thing someone can be is dead. You had been thinking about death a lot lately: of trees and bugs and habitats and your small dog and his nervous whining. You’d imagine their skeletal forms splayed out and bleached bright white by the Texas sun.

from 5 stories about men:

The nature of Kameron’s love for me was always suspect. He never told me he loved me or about who he loved now. Sometimes I would catch him, right before he left, taking a sharp breath in, as if he was holding some big swell of revelation in.

I don’t remember when he left me. I only remember his continual return.9

from 5 from Chicago:

In the afternoon we board a train, moving backward towards the art museum. It’s the hottest day of the year, but still much cooler than our life back in Texas.

We stroll through the wings of impressionist art. You pose, appreciative in front of a painting of ballerinas, taking in the elegant form of their dresses, constantly in motion.

I tell you how I think people should be loud, not quiet, at the museum. “We sit in quiet appreciation or reverence when we should be screaming. Loudly explaining ‘Wow look how big this one is!’”

I stare at The Golden Age: two men posed in quiet consideration of each other10. The first, high up hands down a batch of pears to the one on the ground, who looks up in awe at this silent gift of nourishment. A quiet moment of love reflected, captured with strokes of pigmented oil and preserved here in the air-conditioned hall of the Art Institute of Chicago.

We might never come here again. Or when we do we might be living here. Or when we do it might be separately: you alone somberly gazing at frozen ballerinas, me patiently waiting for one to move.

From a year:

I say that Cookie is nothing like me, but that might not be true. Somehow, dogs always mirror their owners. My brother swears that Cookie and I have the same mustache. I think he mirrors something different: the part of me that wants to be outgoing, playful, bright, and just a little goofy.

From a storm inspired fiction:

You thought about rain and swaying trees, about the way the world looks right after a storm: gray and slightly shaken but still whole.

From more stories about dogs:

Once you had a dog. A rare thing: the first dog born of the moon. She traveled alone through the stars, circling the planets and drifting, absent-minded, through the void of space before returning home in a streak of furious fire. She burned on entry, red-hot and screaming. They held a parade in her honor. Gave her the key to the city. put her face on Time Magazine, which you placed in a white wood frame and hung on your office wall. Something to remember her by, you said. Though you were never sure if she was real.11

From inertia:

He broke things off with me after a year of living together. I didn’t do dishes and he hated doing laundry for two people. Things get rocky when you weave your lives together.12

from three parts of endings:

In the summer of growing things, you carry your body like a weeping dogwood.13 104 degrees during the day, a record heatwave sweeps the nation. You stay inside for safety, isolating yourself by working, watching movies, and lifting little weights when you get bored. 

You, late in the day, head to Barton Springs and submerge yourself. Under the water, you feel weightless. The old muscle and new fat of your body are no longer competing, gracing you with equilibrium instead. Sometimes you open your eyes under the water. You like the look of the evening light streaming through the reeds. It reminds you of some fantasy world; the type of place you read about when you were a kid.

from a pattern:

“Luis thought of something barbed and anxious, like desire—or a twisted sense of the word at least.”

from a short bit i’m puzzling through:

He had this way of reeling you into whatever he was doing. When they fought it felt less like opposing sides and more like joint counsel: each working together to piece together some grand argument. He would be logical but also empathetic. He agreed with fair criticisms of him and quickly lobbed the others away. Luis had learned early on to say as little as possible. Words had meaning and the wrong one voiced at a crucial moment could break things apart. He said very little. Responded carefully.

from a fall:

Around them, others were leaving or making out or twirling tiny black straws in empty plastic cups. The music was slowing, the bartender yawned and checked his phone. K felt pulled by a morbid sensation. Eyes stuck and glaring at each slip of L’s teeth, he felt his body twitch to stop himself from lunging forward. He craved the feeling of teeth to flesh. A chill swam up his back, pricking his skin with tiny goosebumps. He wanted to devour. Or no, to be devoured: his flesh ripped apart, the meat of his muscle pulled between each sharp and gleaming tooth. 14

from past:

It was a winter of dying things: tree trunks splayed open, branches bare and cracked from a month of unseasonable cold that left the ground coated in a thick and unpredictable layer of ice.15