Randon Billings Noble is an essayist. Her collection Be with Me Always was published by the University of Nebraska Press in March 2019, and her lyric essay chapbook Devotional was published by Red Bird in 2017. Other work has appeared in the Modern Love column of the New York Times, Brevity, Creative Nonfiction, and elsewhere. Currently she is the founding editor of the online literary magazine After the Art. You can read more at www.randonbillingsnoble.com.
Maybe all those rebuffs—the few I gave, the many I received—were just ways of protecting ourselves, those nascent beings so unsure of who we were or what we wanted to become.