Cardinal Post

  A million years ago I started a series of fictional reports about books I'd never read.  I wrote one on  Jane Austen , then one about Moby Dick, which I never posted because my dog died and I moved four times and Donald Trump was elected and I stopped writing for a while because I thought I could only write well when I was sad, or drinking, or it was late at night and I needed to talk to myself.  Over the last four years I started going to bed much earlier, became much happier, and stopped drinking entirely. In that order, which is a weird order, but it worked. Somewhere in that reset I got really superstitious and wondered if writing sad fiction influenced a sad reality. Hence the pause. I no longer think that's true.  But I've still never read Moby Dick.  ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- I've never read Moby Dick. Six hundred pages of shattered ego and whale blubber. We wan...

I collect my friends' exes. They always break up with the girls that are perfect for me: the pastry chef, the ER doctor, the bookseller with the sweet dog, the cellist with the impossible hair. A dozen more. I stay with these women, on Facebook and Instagram; I celebrate their joys and mourn their losses. Some of them have stayed with me, too, some of them know more about me now than the men we befriended through. And some I simply haunt from behind the screen. I understand that we occupy different realms, I have to accept that what I hold on to as love might bring them nothing but pain. Maybe. Or maybe they miss me too. Maybe we attract the people who bring us ones we love. My own husband was originally a friend of a friend, the cool older guy who brought beer to a party. I shrugged him off for the boyfriend I was sure about then, the way you think everything is forever when you're 18. How often we’re just that close when we aim, a millimeter off the mark. That cool older guy ...