I arrived in Antakya with my partner during Türkiye’s kurban bayramı, a week in the thick of summer that everyone takes off to celebrate Eid al-Adha. The city was sleepy and quiet, with heat rising up from the cobblestone streets. After a twelve-hour night bus from...
Photo by Sandy Wicks, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons In the weeks preceding my trip to Oslo, my father insisted I should go and see Freya. Our phone conversations kept returning to the unfortunate walrus, mirroring the ways in which she had ceaselessly returned...
Photo: red mango / Shutterstock.com I check the little blue dots on my phone that tells me I’m ovulating. The dot pulses into a line also called a pre-menstrual migraine. I imagine becoming a fairy because according to Google fairies and elves do not have periods. I...
The Alphabet Disciple greets me with open arms in the lobby at the train station. “Welcome stranger,” he says, “to the City of Angels.” He’s wearing faded jeans and an L.A. Kings T-shirt. It’s 8:00 a.m. on a Tuesday and I’ve just arrived from my hometown. I’ve got an...
Photo: red mango / Shutterstock.com There was a comfort in not knowing where she was. It felt like evidence that the menaces in her life—menaces tied tightly to a place and the people of that place—didn’t know where she was either. The beard that cushioned his chin...
Photo: lucarista / Shutterstock.com At the traffic light in front of the FAO in Rome, on a warm June night, a woman in a red FIAT 500 searches for a decent song on the radio and thinks about the grotesque date she’s just had. The man was expecting her to go to a hotel...
