thank you for reading & ameen🤍

i resent my biological father for shutting me out, for turning an entire branch of my family into strangers. it hurts to discover the full cost of that rejection only after she's gone. but she was so much more than my loss. she was remarkable. i'm proud she was my grandma.

she was alive all those years. while i was growing up feeling so out of place in my own family, she was out there living a life i might have felt at home in. i can't stop thinking about that. how close we came to existing in each other's lives without ever meeting.

after losing her husband, she took up a card game, traveled the world competing, and earned a rank held by fewer than 1% of players. her father invented a surgical instrument; her husband was a surgeon general. i come from a family of doctors. i had no idea.

i keep thinking about how people brought her hurt animals because they trusted her to help. i don't know what she would've thought of me, but after years of defending everything that made me different, i wonder if i could've just been myself around her.

she made science feel alive to her students. she rescued injured animals, shared her home with a lion cub, rode horses. i studied chemistry and have always felt more at ease with animals than people. i kept reading, stunned by how familiar this stranger felt.

i grew up feeling like an oddity in my own family. the way i thought, the things i loved, were too often met with ridicule. i learned to make myself smaller, to stop searching for any resemblance. and then there she was, making sense of pieces of me from a distance.

feeling gutted. last night i found out my biological grandmother died over a year ago. i discovered it while searching for a family i never got to know. i'd known her name for years, but the first time i really saw her as a person was in an obituary.

i just don't think the human lifespan is long enough to justify spending five days of every week doing something i'd rather not be doing

my favorite type of shrimp 🍤

some appetites arrive with forged credentials. only a few days old and already claiming the authority of a famine. you have never tasted it, never even thought to ask for it, and yet still your bones seem to remember a lifetime of being denied what you only just learned to want.

Yes

another week of forced participation in the labor market