Non-Fiction

I walk into my parents’ home to pick my mom up for a family gathering, and like most days over the past few weeks, palpable sorrow greets me at the door.

While growing up in Spanish Harlem – El Barrio as we knew it during the exhilarating years of the 1970s and 80s – diversity was my monarch, acceptance my culture, and faith my freedom.

Good friends are hard to find. Some friendships are centred around convenience; we build attachments to those around us simply because they are there.

I am on the second floor of the De Young Museum in San Francisco, California, sitting on a marvelous curved, but slightly uncomfortable, wooden bench…

I am borne of a landscape of freckles. My mother, her father, his mother: the Williams and Shepherds, the English and Welsh. The bounty of peach farms, peace roses and quiet spirituality.

I’m holding your drawing. It’s more of a map, really, a magic-marker rendering of your family’s redesign. Embellished stick figures rise…

They say that life has a way of giving you exactly what you need when you least expect it. That when one life ends, another is born.

There are days, sometimes weeks, when you don’t even think about it. Then, one day, in front of the bathroom mirror, you face the glaring reminders. Three scars.

“Wake up! Michael’s stopped breathing. We gotta go.” The voice seems familiar, perhaps a childhood playmate’s. I cling to sleep…