love
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lately I’ve been spending less time at the memory center. therapy has taken more of my days, and though I know I need it, I still miss being there. I miss the way presence feels in that place: the heartbeats I catch in the quiet of their eyes, the warmth that comes through a hand…
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when summer comes to an end, it can feel to me like the world is ending, too. I know the other seasons have their beauty and their possibilities. but the earlier sunsets, the days getting shorter and darker: that’s always been a trouble trigger for me. it’s when the fear of relapsing, getting sick and…
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sometimes I wonder where love will find me. in a city this vast, how do two lives ever touch? it’s endless: faces, voices, people brushing past without knowing. and still, I keep hoping for one pair of eyes to finally meet mine and stay. maybe on the Q train at dusk, or in the slow…
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I ride my bike just about everywhere. the subway in the summer feels like a test I don’t need to take, and honestly, it adds up. so I ride. from lower Manhattan back to Flatbush, it’s about an hour. twelve miles, give or take. just me and the street and the city pouring past. those…
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I’ve never been on a plane. I have never left New York City. but I’m always imagining what it’s like up there, to be on your way somewhere new. often I think the sky is trying to tell me something: about where I could go, or what might be waiting if I did. sometimes I…
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last night, my mom went to her high school reunion. she stood in front of the mirror, adjusting the straps of her dress, tilting her head the way she does when she’s deciding if she still belongs in a room she hasn’t yet entered. she does. she always has. her Spanish beauty, unchanged. the same…
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four days a week. almost every week this year. I’ve added up the minutes — over 3,000 of them so far — in the recovery support group, in the chair across from my therapist, in the waiting room at the clinic with its flickering light, the hum of an old vending machine, and an odd…
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recently, abuela says her body is shrinking. day by day, inch by inch. she claims she is now the size of a matchstick, a whisper, a breath between words. she laughs when she says it, but I see her pressing her palms together, measuring the space she still takes up in this world. one day,…
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in group one patient replaces another. it’s really hard to see someone you love backslide. and sometimes it’s really difficult to remember that there are so many more sides to someone than their illness. witnessing the cycle of people coming and going in a treatment, the weight of loving someone who struggles — if God…
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right now, my guitar is just a few steps away, but it might as well be 10,000 miles. there’s a distance between us that’s hard to explain — a space that feels impossible to cross. depression (in my case, a co-occurring mental disorder) has a way of making everything feel slow, like the world keeps…
cookie nieves 