Pretty Kitty →

Or how her mother hounded her to look more like the prep school girls she was shelling out money for Lizette to be around. More fresh faced, less makeup, more collared shirts, less halter tops, more Gap, less Wet Seal.  Like the ingrate she was, Lizette rejected her mother’s wishes. Lizette longed to look like the girls her mother scorned…girls that reminded her mother of block letter tattoos, the sour scent of beer cans, dark roots sprouting from blonde hair, thick acrylic nails that were so long they became their own appendage. Despite their differences, both she and her mother knew Lizette had no business looking like either type of girl. 

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Como La Flor →

Her psychic was the first one to predict the blockage, followed by her fertility specialist, the one she found by researching the doctor to the celebrities in town who were all giving birth in their mid-40s. According to her doctor, her blockage was more than spiritual, but also physical, small muscular spheres he referred to as fibroids that littered her uterus leaving no room for a baby. Mari blamed it on the universe. Paul blamed it on Mari which meant if it was Mari’s fault it was actually the universe’s fault by process of deduction. But Mari kept all this out of her conversation with her mother. She didn’t need to know her female troubles which translated directly into her marital troubles. She worried she would find Mari at fault too, blame it on her being barefoot all the time, the cold floor chilling her ovaries over the years.

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Reckoning with Brown →

The moment I walked into this school I had entered the Garden of Eden. A serpent slithered around me as it whispered in my ear a litany of the ways in which I wasn’t good enough. My classmates around me insisted on pointing out to me I was something other than white so I became consumed by what I lacked, whiteness. The forbidden fruit offered to me held the promise of acceptance and I ate from it. In an instant, I grew ashamed. First, of not being white, then of wanting to be white, and later of being too white. A trilogy of shame would follow me from here forth.

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5 Life Lessons I Learned at Coachella →

Often we forget that artists, even popular ones, can get better. The moment we decide we like them enough to buy or stream their music, they are ours and we are theirs, no questions. Now we may like who they used to be better or just as much as the first day we first laid ears on them but rarely does an artist impress us more than the original moment we fell in love with them. But that’s what great artists do, they make us love them more than we thought we could.

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