Essays
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Backslider
My mother always warned me about the danger of backsliding. Some Christians believe in eternal security, believe “once saved, always saved.” Not us. Salvation was slippery, could fly out of your hands like a bar of soap. I prayed constantly…
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castration: a love song
I think of a world in which I knew, as an adolescent, that I could have stopped the train that ran roughshod over my boy soprano range, and I swallow the kind of wailing that I would have once seen…
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To the Man Who Stopped
You had to trust him, though. This is the unspoken agreement. Help a stranger, but don’t push too hard. Don’t look too closely. But I wonder what you saw when you watched Robert, the way his eyes did not quite…
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The Small, Sad Freud Museum in Vienna
After listing various museums, walks, and cafes, my friend added, almost as an afterthought, “Of course you could also visit the small, sad, Freud Museum.” For some reason, I didn’t ask, “Why sad?” at the time. Instead, with excitement, I…
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Fall In Love Mid-Sentence
I have never fallen in love at first sight. I fall in love mid-sentence, in the hush that follows a difficult question, in the small electric pause before someone changes their mind aloud. Some people remember faces. I remember arguments,…
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Play the Cards as They Lay
My point of view on my desires was certainly formed by my religion, and it is probable, highly likely even, that a young man despised by the very same religion finds his faith faltering. It is therefore an awful thing…
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What We Are Allowed to Give
This is what it means to be a child who receives love and damage from the same pair of hands. You do not only inherit the damage. You inherit the confusion about what love is supposed to feel like, whether…
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How Do You Write a Palestinian Novel
As a young person, I absorbed this Janus as a particularly Palestinian predicament, one very much at the heart of my Palestinian novel. And yet, such a Janus lives in many of us—escape your past, you cannot escape your past;…
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Dinner Party at the End of the World
At the dinner party table, I looked toward my friend. She had also turned to her phone, where an endless compilation of rare Labubu unboxings played on the screen. I resisted the urge to tell her I hold a conspiracy…
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Synthetic Heaven
And when the high would hit, I would think to myself—This. This for as long as I can. More than summer and bicycles and flowers littered on the pavement like confetti, more than the way Sydney looks in the spring,…
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Books that Made Me Gay: “The Group” by Mary McCarthy
Provided that your girlfriend can drive on the freeway, you might spend Saturdays at the beach. Mine can and we do. After ritually sacrificing a tube of sunscreen, we unwrap soft deli sandwiches and I am bowled over by my…
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you won’t hear this
When mom would tell me the story of my birth, I always imagined the hospital room was dark, like the only light was coming in from the hallway or maybe a small nightlight plugged into a far corner of the…