I miss the sounds of cashiers slamming registers at the heights of a café workday, that hour between 7 a.m. and 8 and again between 3 p.m. and 4. I miss the suburban middle school music teacher, Joe, who found me in my corner seat every time he swung by the shop just to say hi, even when he was running late for this and that. I miss finding a kid lost in a bookstore, head stuck between the pages of an adult comic, and their flustered guardians trying to explain that grown-ups like picture books, too, but let’s maybe head back to the nursery corner. I miss noticing the body language of women who, in the company of only a cup of coffee and a book, seem to look most alive, most in love, most at home with the skin they’re slouched in. I miss, so deeply, the energy of crowds and strangers and how their lives somehow seeped into my writing every day. It’s quiet. Brutally quiet. And as much as I love the quiet, this silence feels more like grief, more like doom. It’s not the quiet of my choosing. The numbers of cases are climbing, the sun is sleeping earlier than I prefer, and every day I hear of a death from someone I love. Writing has not come easy.
—fiza
A big hug to supporters Cary Adamms, Sam Kruger, Arielle Lewitt and Salima Makhani.
Favorite recent reads:
The Year of Breath (Gabrielle Bellot, Catapult)
Dept. of Speculation (Jenny Offill)