“I was never the kid to get tangled up in chatroom relationships and online communities like many of my friends in middle and high school. I repent now, for the way I invalidated, even in my own head, the authenticity of their attachments. Laughter over Zoom is still laughter.”
“Looking back, I feel the peculiar embarrassment of having been a teenage girl with teenage girl concerns, but the lives and concerns of teenage girls are often dismissed as trivial things, and if I could tell myself at 13 what I know now, I would.”
“I was interested in regrowth—what better setting for that pursuit than the lawn, where lavender and hyacinth and rubrum extend their arms beyond their allotted plots?”