Author Archives: E

This morning it rained, but at four in the afternoon, I left the locked psychiatric ward and walked into the vestiges of day. The sky was grand and mottled with clouds, the pavement luminescent from the storms, the late sunlight making something surreal out of the green stone church at the top of the hill. [...]

For the third time in my life, I sleep in a room that’s adjacent to a flat roof. (In the warmest days of autumn, I’d step out of the window, blackening the bottoms of my feet on the tar paper.) Tonight, it’s snowed under, just an inch or two, as are the roofs and porches [...]

Just north of the city jail: marble stoops chipped at the corners, the exterior walls doorless and windowless and muted with plywood. The friezes have crumbled away from the roofs and left the upper rooms open to the sky. It’s winter, but forget for a minute all this stalled decay. Already the days are lighter, [...]

In Mali this summer, I always thought of dusk and dust together, the day ending and the loose sand rising from the bare ground, grayish clouds of engine exhaust in the streets. Here, in the winter, the elision comes apart. On my way to dinner this evening, the harbor was blue and gold in the [...]

but I’m quietly thrilled by it, as this second evening of the year sinks into the season’s coldest night. We take our bikes north on the trail, return traffic on the George Washington Parkway to our left, the Potomac River to the right. My lights are nearly dead, and I’m navigating by the yellow dotted [...]

In the last week of the year, I go running on a path alongside an airfield in Colorado. Early in the morning, the fighter jets pivot and take off. I turn at the mile marker and jog back toward the mountains. On the last night of the year, I’m back in a city, again with [...]

At the top of the stairs, there is a window. Outside, in the evening, tree limbs black on a blue-black sky. I climb the stairs in the dim light from the kitchen, watching the window, watching the trees. He follows, flicks on the hall light, and the window becomes a mirror. All of October was [...]

Less than a mile from the district line, Michigan Avenue lifts into a bridge. I’m on my toes now, running in the sunlight on the narrow sidewalk that slopes upward alongside the concrete barrier. There’s an ugly little tangle of asphalt below, low brick buildings with awnings, the kinds of places where they hammer the [...]

Sunday night, I’m on the Metro, wearing a skirt and studying flashcards in my lap. Up out of the city and into the open air: the moon is low and orange and half-eroded. I get out at the suburban stop, and the train accelerates away above empty backyards. I walk alone from the station, through [...]

Most things are not dangerous, anymore. The Appalachians were once the highest mountains in the world, the jagged seam between this continent and Africa. Now they are rounded, forested: after the rain, you hike through afternoon light all watery and green. In the evening, you pitch a tent on soft ground, hunt for wood in [...]