“Dear Ella, “I’ve had your letter on my mind for many days now, and though I’ve meant to write you back, I haven’t been able to get past the first few lines. This week has been so eventful, however, I now have something to write about besides my usual melancholy...

These days I feel like being with people, but not like being with the people I know. This afternoon I was supposed to go with my new roommate, Meredith, and a company of strangers on a picnic, but it was cancelled in the night by… Rain, blasting out of the sky when I...

Lafayette is a small, upscale suburban community that once had a slum one short block long—a few ramshackle houses facing a one-story, five-unit-long apartment building on a street that was little more than an alley, called Bell Street. It was there that I moved when...

I’ve become depressed again, but the clarity hasn’t left me, which means it’s not simply an absence of depression—it’s a visionary state, which until now has made me happy but persists even when my spirits have plunged. I find myself with a Sunday afternoon on my...

“Today I saw a grove of fruit trees in a field of yellow flowers, and I relived, for a split second, the strange sublime scene along the road to Cuenca in Spain—where the trees were giant burls with shoots that exploded in yellow leaves like sparklers, backlit as they...