the past

Margo Orlando Littell's The Distance From Four Points

An Excerpt From The Distance From Four Points

Robin must reshape her idea of home or risk repeating her greatest mistakes. The Distance from Four Points is a story about family, womanhood, and coming to terms with a left-behind past. Read...
Artwork: Tess Emily Rodriguez

Ask Erin: My Girlfriend Doesn't Trust Me Because Of My Past

Is there something I can do to change how she feels about me? Read...
Photo by Carolyn V on Unsplash

You Wrote To Whom?!

On the one hand, he kind of broke my heart, during a cold and awkward goodbye dinner at a cheap Ethiopian restaurant in Philadelphia. On the other hand, he proved to me that the unicorn combo of good looks, sense of humor, and brains really did exist in the wild and that I wasn’t crazy to keep my standards high in looking for it.

The dude in question was a doe-eyed guy I briefly dated in college, and the reason I was thinking of him was that I was smack-dab in the middle of a project I undertook years later, to write thank-you letters to people who had helped, inspired, or shaped me up to that point in my life.

I’d knocked off the easy categories of “helping” and “inspiring” people first, writing a single one-page letter every week to family members, my closest friends, teachers, mentors, favorite authors.

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I wanted to reach inside myself and cut it away.

Erasing My Father’s Face From Mine

Little things, everything would annoy me. I couldn’t keep it down. I lost my temper, over and over. I felt the strain of it all, the sheer exhaustion of parenting two young kids. But it was more than that. This anger was reminiscent of something buried deep within me. A piece of my past that I’d buried down so far I didn’t even know it was there anymore.

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