“All of me wants all of you,” Martin told me. I let myself believe him; even blind spots can be beautiful.

His public age was off by a decade. He called himself an “artist,” yet the giant copper vessel he’d sculpted and boasted about to strangers sat solo in his backyard, a sad, patinated green. I realized only later that the biggest lies he told were to himself. That tired red house in Kerhonkson, half covered in tarp, the once-white van slumped in the driveway, the rusted axes that littered the yard, the broken sundial—he’d called this place his “paradise” over the phone.

He was Dutch and could be brutally direct. “Why do you always hang up the phone so quickly?” he asked me one day. “I think you’re just trying not to feel rejected.” I looked at the broken old chair next to us that his dad had built. He hated his father for running off when Martin was only seven, just as he hated his mother for smothering him with her sick version of love.

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That summer, we’d sit out back with his friends. All around us, touch-me-nots bloomed, bright orange seed pods so profligate, so desperate to explode between two fingers. I’d pretend not to notice the empty wine bottles that lay on the ground by the end of each evening.

Fall came, and the disappointment settled in like rot, coming on so slowly I couldn’t tell that I was covered in it. I typed on my laptop out on the deck, wasps landing on the backs of my hands, his black T-shirt in my periphery, his boots thudding along the roof.

Martin’s sweetness could surprise me at times. He would do things like polish my boots or replace my old duvet, unrequested. I was letting myself love him, letting him love me. It was messy, maybe reckless.

All winter, he chopped wood—piles and piles of it that burned in the stove while I wrote. Martin had his own fire, an old rage that had been burning for years, one that consumed every piece of tinder it could find. One comment from me, one side glance, and he’d ignite, his fury scorching the air.

That spring he built me a garden, but I didn’t wait for it to grow. I was tired of fermenting inside that house. I wrote him a letter and pictured him reading it, my words detonating in sparks, leaving him to smolder on the page.

I can still name all the big players on the New York Mets in 1986, the year they won the World Series: Keith Hernandez, Wally Backman, Howard Johnson, Rafael Santana, Lenny Dykstra, Darryl Strawberry, Mookie Wilson, Dave Magadan, Gary Carter, Dwight Gooden, Ron Darling, Sid Fernandez. It was the same year we moved back to New York, the year my grandfather was diagnosed, the year before I stopped watching baseball.

Growing up, we spent almost every Saturday afternoon in the back of my grandfather’s drug store in Sunnyside, Queens. The radio was always tuned to elevator music or a ballgame, while my sister and I kept busy with coloring books and cookies from the Italian bakery next door. My mother helped count and sort pills, placing them in orange plastic containers for customers to pick up.

Sometimes my sister and I got to help out too, stacking cigarette cartons on the shelves behind the counter—Marlboros, Salems, Newports, Lucky Strikes—sweeping the front of the store, or straightening up the candy section—Chuckles, KitKats, Chunky Bars, York Peppermint Patties—by the cash register.

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When I was bored, I’d write stories and show them to my grandfather. He would take out a pen from the pocket of his white pharmacist’s shirt to correct my spelling and show me how I could say the same thing in fewer words. My grandfather himself was a man of few words who never spoke about his own life—about the sixteen gunpoint robberies, about the framed photo of his older son Michael on top of his dresser, about his monthly visits to a place called Creedmoor where his younger son Peter had lived since he was thirteen.

I only knew my grandfather in the quiet, tender moments, separate from tragedy and uncertainty. In the evenings, I’d sit on his lap in a well-worn armchair while he watched TV and smoked his pipe and cigars, letting me take a drag or two. It was in these moments that I fell in love with many things: the scent of tobacco on a man’s shirt, the stubble from his chin on my forehead, and the crack of the bat.

Baseball, with its nine unpredictable chapters, was a story told between the lines: the secret nods and hand gestures, the angle of a curve that determined everything, the intuition to bunt or swing, to run or to stay on base. The intimate trust among the players felt safe to me, and the comfort of my grandfather’s presence made that safety real.

Watching the game, we had our own secret, Morse-code language. He would squeeze my hand silently, asking:
“Do you love me?” (four squeezes)
I would answer: “Yes I do” (three squeezes back)
“How much?” he’d ask (two squeezes)

And then, with all the strength I could muster, I would squeeze as hard as I could, trying to impress him and at the same time show him just how much I adored him.

After he died, I never talked about him to anyone, letting parts of me disappear along with his memory. But now, nearly forty years later, as spring training approaches, I feel the lure of the game. I remember the delicate rule he taught me, that less is more, and the lesson I learned on my own, that loving someone with all your heart feels like sliding into home. It’s all still right here, in the palm of my hand.

I felt myself sinking again. So I bought a kayak. I took it out on a weekday, up a highway, to a lake that just two months earlier had been frozen solid. It seemed too easy. The whole way there, I kept thinking something terrible was about to happen, that the orange tie-down holding the boat in place would unhook from the truck bed and send the driver behind me to a tragic death. Or that I’d get out on the water and somehow tip over and find myself trapped beneath the boat-turned-coffin. I was so used to disaster that its absence made me writhe.

The midges and mayflies on the water were no different. They buzzed about in fits just above the water’s surface, like airplanes shifting holding patterns at high speed. I wondered what told them to move first here, then there. Was it hunger or fear?

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I looked up to see something much bigger flitting toward me: a bat in broad daylight, bumping wildly across the sky, its wings translucent against the sun. It pitched about, threw its weight first here, then there, as if it were trying to find an opening back into the night. Then it disappeared.

As the current carried me closer to the shore, I made out a log, barely protruding from the water, hosting a cluster of small turtles undisturbed. There were ducks and geese too, and one lone falcon that swooped down onto a branch, losing itself from my sight until it decided to take off again.

So much life along the edges of the lake, here with no clock to count the minutes before I had to pick up a child from school, or the days before a deadline, or the weeks before a lease was up and I had to decide again where to stack my books or on which wall to hang a mirror.

I thought, Is anything real? The ducks seemed to know.

Once when I was eight years old, my hair caught on fire. My older sister saved my life by shoving me out the front door and burying my head in the snow. We were never close, thanks to an imaginary line my mother had drawn between the obedient, dependable daughter (me) and the obstinate, wild one (my sister). But that day, we sat shoulder-to-shoulder on my sister’s bed, counting the minutes in dreaded silence before our mother returned home to discover what had happened. My sister and I had directly disobeyed her instructions not to use matches, and the complicity of our crime, along with the shared trauma that followed, were enough to make for a rare tender moment between us.

Thirty years later, just west of where the hair-on-fire incident took place, another sister would come to my rescue. Born two decades after me to a different mother, and a continent away, she was practically a stranger when she came to live with us in our newly-rented house. At 18, she was also not much more than a child; yet there was an air about her of someone well beyond her years. We were refugees, she and I, searching for safety and rest in those purple mountains we’d hoped to call home. My sister, who had just finished her high school exams while caring for our dying father, arrived from Germany still laden with the burdens from home. I, with three young children, a crumbling marriage, and demons just beginning to rear their heads, was teetering on the edge of collapse.

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That year, my younger sister and I kept watch over each other, waiting for the death of so many things: a father, a marriage, youth. During the day we’d take long walks and sneak cigarettes while I got to know my father through her stories; at night, we laughed as we jumped on the trampoline in the backyard. I’d say goodnight to my sister as she headed up to her attic bedroom, only to find her in the morning curled up asleep beside one of my children. Neither of us wanted to grow up–neither of us wanted to be left alone.

Strangely, for one reason or another, all five of us sisters have never been in the same room together. Still, a bond exists between us that is as undeniable as it is unseen; a bond even stronger than a father’s love. Whether or not we’ve shared the same blood, I have had many “sisters” in my life who have sat with me, waiting for a storm to end, searched alongside me for a place to plant our roots. We are all here—living, searching, waiting—like strangers in a strange land, like seeds in snow.

When I cut my head off a nude painting, it felt like an act of violence. Really, it was an act of authorship that would become the final scene of a personal essay I wrote five years ago, during a period when I felt profoundly lost. The piece sprawled across 16,000 words, three cities, and four overlapping relationships. Writing it was my attempt to make sense of that unruly time. It was excessive, yes; but even more than that, it was accurate.

Because if I’ve learned anything over the years, it’s this: you can write, but you can’t hide. Our psychologies always end up on the page, not necessarily in the language we use, but in the structure. The way we organize our thoughts directly reflects the original inner receptacle holding them.

Now, five years later, the original structure of that essay seems frenetic to me. One man would appear suddenly from the past, only to disappear again a few pages later. Another man’s words would trigger a memory from my marriage, pulling the narrative backward and sideways at once.

What was most telling, though, was this: the men were the actual structure of the essay. Their actions and words moved my timeline and even my character arc. The amount of space they occupied in each section shaped the narrative itself. The essay even opened with a photograph of a man:

“His profile photo, a middle-aged man with a bland smile, was less than memorable. But something about his deep, scalene eyes and the horizontal crease across his chin hinted at a geometry more complex than met the eye.”

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In real life, my relationship with this man had consumed me; on the page, it was still consuming the word count. I spent paragraphs pondering things he’d told me or pontificating about whether we would be together forever. I did the same with the other men, too, to varying degrees, sometimes getting creatively playful with troubleshooting guides and unsent letters.

If I’m honest, when I sat down to revise the essay the other day, I felt embarrassed by how much mental space I’d seceded to these relationships—and how little of me had made it into the stories. It was finally time to claim my role as the protagonist.

The first step I took was to home in on one defining moment. That was easy. It wasn’t a breakup. It wasn’t a sexual encounter. It wasn’t a move across an ocean. It was a single moment alone in front of a mirror inside a hotel room that lasted all of ten seconds:

Turning back toward the room, I caught a glimpse of myself in the wardrobe mirror. There it was, my bare silhouette, limned by the light from the TV., as if I were seeing it for the first time…Was it the lucky refraction of light on my torso, limbs, and face? Or was it the afterglow of ecstasy? My impulse, like a child grasping at the tide, was to capture it…

Looking back now, having explored my fatherless childhood, my struggles with body dysmorphia, and my years of conditioning as a cult member, I have the answers to these questions. Back when I wrote the scene, I still didn’t.

The selfie I took that evening was meant for me. But a second impulse almost immediately followed: to send it to Richard. The essay traces what happens next, from Richard’s infatuation with that image to my attempt to immortalize it through another man’s art. The result is a strange triangulation of desire, surrender, and captivity. Hence its original title: Captivated.

After I’d cut the word count of the essay in half, saving some scenes for a different piece, I added one last scene that resulted in a new title, Postcard. It recounts what I did to the painting when I returned home from Spain:

The oil on the canvas was still wet when I unrolled it onto my bedroom floor back in New York. There she was, that woman caught breathless by her own beauty, before she’d succumbed to someone else’s gaze. The painting no longer belonged to that moment; it never had.

I took a pair of scissors and cut incisively around my face, a small rectangle, no larger than a postcard, and held it in my hand...”

Cutting the painting and keeping only what mattered to me marked a new level of self-recognition. I had lost my head all those years ago, inside a thousand small moments of surrender to others’ desires and influence that I mistook for belonging. We rarely notice the moment we stop authoring our own lives, and how long we remain there without calling it captivity.

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