Just Jessica

Under the bell jar live ten thousand goodbyes. Some are screaming. Some are crying. Some lay silent at the bottom, suffocated by the others. All of them belong to me, sad creatures of a sad life. When I count them, I lose count. Perhaps I’ll try counting backward, starting from yesterday, from kissing the soft…

There was a tree in the side yard of the house I lived in when I was five. It was small but sturdy, the branches low and nearly parallel to the ground. It was the perfect sort of tree for a five-year old to climb. I was in the tree one day when I realized…

It wasn’t love at first sight. I actually found Briggs to be rather rude at our meet cute. From the moment I walked into his house for the first time, all 70 pounds of his athletic, muscular, demandingly friendly body insisted on becoming my new best friend and lap dog. Sitting at the kitchen table…

For my thirteenth birthday, my aunt sent me a copy of Little Women. It was thick, hardcover, with a dark purple spine and her elegant cursive script on the first page wishing me a happy birthday. As much as I loved to read, I felt disappointed in this gift. It sounded like a very girly…

In the dimming twilight on the dusty plains, I always knew I was almost home. Like the lights on an airport landing strip, the multicolored fluorescent bulbs of Pakistan’s roadside chai shops guided our silver station wagon home. I watched them in the dusk as the evening turned to darkness, the bright pink and the…