If my dad were here, he’d sitting on the porch steps with me, wearing Caterpillar boots and smoking a Marlboro Red.

I’d tell him everything; all that’s he’s missed out on, the story up until this very moment in time. He’d listen as he heaved smoke in and out of those indestructible lungs, not looking at me but staring into the chirping night, nodding.

“We’re Fonsecas,” he’d say, beginning some simple lecture that my mind cannot currently finish. Yet a part of me knows that speaking to him would ease my nerves, and that alone would mean the world to me right now. 

I think I’m going to correspond with people primarily by letters this summer. I will be the most social hermit anyone’s ever known.

Previous relationships are always a little bit involved in the issues of future ones; they are ghosts in the machine of human interaction.

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Bess, I am taking you to your first gay bar when we’re in Denver.

I have this idea that tattoos are magic.

Emily’s opportunity to go to Israel for free presented itself days after she had Hebrew characters inked into her shoulder. My quill tattoo also brought about good writing opportunities within a week. 

Maybe committing your skin to something permanent is a way of committing all of yourself to that very same thing.

I am moving. My belongings are split between two apartments, and—just when I think I am settled—I frantically run back to the old apartment to drag trinkets of myself to the new one. I understand why people hoard now.

This place is nicer, a one-bedroom. There is space, and privacy. But I can hear my neighbors, summer school college kids around my age, planning the night’s keg party. And the sublease here runs up at the end of August, making this all the more impossible to settle into. That, and Statesboro and I don’t gel well together.

And now my new neighbors are playing Drake.

The professional and artistic pieces are falling into place, but my identity is being thrust into an uncomfortable place. In less than a week, I will have to learn to sleep alone again for at least a year. As much as I am trying to remain open to what is to come in our vague relationship, I need security right now, and that petulant child, sitting in a dark corner of my chest, dry-heaving, is gradually rising to the surface.

It is comforting, absurdly so, to think that g-d wants me to learn something about long-distance relationships, as I keep ending up in them.

Initially, middle-of-the-road “get that it’s my civic duty to vote Democrat” guys misinterpret me as a firey, Valarie Solanas caricature. Then, upon getting to know me, I am fetishized as the girl who does the things girls in society are not “allowed” to do. Adventuring, talking candidly about sex, obsessing over the history of war and politics.

Sometimes, the friendship dissolves immediately when I am subjected to that first whine of “Why can’t all girls be like you?” or “Why can’t straight girls be into the things you’re into?”

Because if we’re going to play Gender Binary: The Game, I wonder if this guy realizes that he’s attracted to the “man” in me.

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What transforms a piece of cloth into a tallit are the tzitzit, the fringes on its four corners. The Torah instructs to wear these fringes on the corners of garments as a way of remembering and doing all God’s commandments (Numbers 15:37-41). The mitzvah is to remember God, to further holiness in life, and to keep the commandments, assisted by the visual reminder of the tzitzit.

- Temple Emanu-El, San Jose, California

I. There was a girl on the bus who resembled Emily’s best friend when she was ten, had the girl aged into something ripe and collegiate. Emily told me the story of how she ran in a race for a cure for brain cancer and won, thinking that her best friend would get better if she crossed the finish line first, ripping the ribbon like tumors from the other girl’s tiny body. She still has the shirt from the race.

II. Emily slept in her parents’ bed for an entire week after that, and they made no effort to send her to school. Her mom eventually told Emily to pack a bag, and they drove, and drove, and drove; from Atlanta to Chattanooga to Brooklyn. She was able to adventure, visit family members, and—most importantly—try to clear her mind. As someone who does not truly know loss, I still know mortality. I wonder what it’s like to be ten and learn of mortality before you actually -get- that life has value.

Emily’s mom took her to one of the dozens of Judaica shops in Brooklyn, the one that their family has been loyal to for generations. She and told her daughter that, if she saw something that would help her reconnect with g-d, she should get it. Em picked out a blue siddur with English translations.

“I don’t know where it is now,” she said.

III. Emily’s orthodox grandmother adamantly believes that girls should not have bat mitzvahs, but as her child’s child erred on the edge of thirteen, the older woman took her into the same Judaica shop to purchase a Tallit for her upcoming bat mitzvah. Emily picked custom thread colors and embroidery patterns. A week later, a package from Jerusalem arrived on her doorstep in Atlanta, courtesy of Grandma Trudy. A 24-hour plane ride away, someone in Israel knows her just as well as her family, down to the last stitch. 

IV. A now-extinct shellfish was once used to dye the Tzitzit blue. Now, the dye is harvested from snails. Em rambles about dragging me along to Birthright this winter to hunt snails with her. “They look like rocks, so you’re grabbing rocks and turning them over until you touch a rock that…isn’t a rock. And then you crush it open. It’s fun. And kind of gross.”