Tag: Friend

We swore we’d be friends till we died. It wasn’t a hard promise to keep, because you didn’t live that long. A bright star burning in the night, you refused to dim your light. But they say the brightest stars are the ones ready to burn out. You were born with a life sentence. Nev...

I had an appointment to meet a British friend, H. This was the first time to saw him because we met at a language exchange app. Firstly we chatted in both Japanese and English, and he advised me a lot since before I left my home country. Additionally, we discovered that I was seeking a job as a s...

I’m of an age where my circle of friends are from many walks/times of my life. Some are old friends and some are new; some are nearby, some far. Some share my point of view; of course, some don’t. Some remember me from a very specific period of my life, like my Peace Corps friends, and s...

Imagine the shockwaves reverberating through the crowd as Jesus chose to associate with the very symbol of societal disdain — a tax collector. With a determined stride and sense of purpose, Jesus deliberately chose to walk away from the religious elites — purposefully heading dire...

After I received my formal diagnosis, I had to navigate the experience of telling my friends and family. It was mostly awful and just added to how traumatic a late-in-life autism diagnosis is. At the time I didn’t have the words to articulate what was going on and what I needed or wanted fr...

I was 38 years old. I had moved back to Ohio from California less than a year before my first symptom. I had just married Tracy in December. The following March I ended up with a sinus infection. Never had one in my life. I couldn’t breath, went to the doctor and he prescribed me antibiotic...

Long story short, Sieran learned quite unexpectedly that his nonbinary friend harbors some quite aggressive anti-trans ideas and couldn’t let the issue go even after Sieran requested a change of subject. As that was going down, I was dealing with a crowd of aggressive anti-trans gay people ...

Thinking back, there were a few times when my best friend(s) were white. I grew up in Minneapolis, whose population was no greater than fifteen percent Black. The block I grew up on had a dozen kids close in age, most of them white. During the summer, I burst out the back door at nine a.m. every ...

On Sunday a friend rang. Made an arrangement for lunch. She was late, I was hungry so ordered and began. Just before she arrived at the table I saw her inside my mind. We chattered. Walked along a pier. The sun came out and made the ocean blue. The waves made green lines under the pier. People strol...

This is my friend Petuuche, an Acoma Indian who lives on the Res outside Albuquerque. He and all his fellow Native Americans are suffering tremendously during the pandemic. They have a much more severe lockdown and many more restrictions than even the most severely shut-down areas of the rest of the...

There’s that moment — usually innocuous, always awkward — when someone throws a ‘compliment’ my way, thinking they’re in the clear. Something like, “Wow, your English is really good!” Or the classic, “You’re really good at math, huh?”...

Anyone who has seen Disney’s 2014 movie Maleficent will know that iron burns fairies and iron chains can hold a dragon captive. Iron frames were once popular for children’s bedsteads, because it was said that fairies could not approach to snatch or swap the infants who slept up...

The greater the number of sides, the higher the social status of the Flatlander: the nobility was composed by regular n-gons called Circles (thousands of sides), the priests. Squares and Pentagons belonged to the professional class. Equilateral triangles were part of the middle class and Isoceles we...

It was the evening of November 26, 1995, the Sunday after Thanksgiving, and I was at Lambert Field in St. Louis, waiting to board the plane that would ferry me back to Omaha after having spent the holiday weekend with my family. I was 21 years old, deep in the closet, and terribly naive. Sitting ...