Author Archives: Michelle Garcia

All day long, I keep the door shut but the window open. Then I perform the rituals of a madwoman. They go like this: listen to podcasts about black holes (Spoiler alert: they’re not actually holes! Quite the opposite actually. Look it up for your daily dose of useless wisdom) and systemic racism and theContinue reading “Aren’t All Hearts Technically Failing?”

The fat housecat twitches in her sleep. Paws kick. Soft whimper. Ears perk then fall. [And I watch longingly, jealous of her peace. The only world she knows is rise, eat, relax. Afternoon nap. 2 o’clock crazies. Smash the laptop keys, wonder why the human hates this. Spy on the neighbors from the window perchContinue reading “On Observing the Calico”

Carl Sagan once said, In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. We sent a rocket to space today with two fathers tucked away inside, onlookers watching with heartbeats lodged in throats and eyes threatening rain. Brave hope, I call it,Continue reading “PALE BLUE FIRE”

It goes like this. Wake up, fall into the abyss of timeline updates, scroll through the carnage I slept through. New day, new wrath. I grow more weary of the world every day I am forced to wake up in it. Tell me, where is the world we remember? I am weary of those whoContinue reading “If Dickinson was right and hope is, in fact, the thing with feathers”

I can’t breathe, that’s what he said with a knee against his neck. And thousands of others like him have sung that three-word chorus, all of their gasping voices still echoing, still ignored as we turn a deaf ear and stare numbly, turning the street corner to avoid taking the side of the dying man.Continue reading “I’D SAY THEIR NAMES BUT THERE ARE FAR TOO MANY NOW”

Part Five Places are people. When I drive past the landmarks of my hometown all I see are ghosts of varied significance. Exhibit A: behind the air conditioning unit of our church where I had my first three kisses after stealthily sneaking away from the youth group bonfire held in the parish parking lot, myContinue reading “THE CITY I DIDN’T CHOOSE”

Part Four When you share stars with someone on cloudless September nights you so easily fall for the illusion that, just like the lights suspended above your bodies, they too will never leave. Things feel so permanent there, two small frames immersed in late summer dew. Hair tangled in knots between heads, pinkies accidentally intertwined,Continue reading “THE CITY I DIDN’T CHOOSE”

Part Three The stars know too much about me now. If they could laugh, I know they would, both at me and with me. They’d weep too, at everything I forced them to witness. Imagine me eighteen, short hair and denim cut-offs, collapsed in wet grass, barefoot and intoxicated by summer petrichor. Call it baptism,Continue reading “THE CITY I DIDN’T CHOOSE”

Part Two The stars are real out there. In the countryside, I mean. My hometown suburb knows no such thing, though it falsely believes it knows everything. I lived eighteen full years blindly believing I knew real stars (or real anything) until the moment I first gazed upward, spine against wet soil, and was provenContinue reading “THE CITY I DIDN’T CHOOSE”

Part One I gave up New York City for pale blue mountains, pastures to roam, and a twinkling firmament. If younger Michelle knew what she’d choose, she’d weep until the cows come home. There was a time I dreamt of skyscrapers and luxury lipstick and coffee shop meet-cutes. It was a romanticized version of aContinue reading “THE CITY I DIDN’T CHOOSE”