Upon turning 40, screenwriter-turned-novelist Sean Carlin writes about friendship, learning, and the value of slow, gradual growth.

“Despite my resentments over the secrets I had to keep and the care I was obligated to give her growing up — despite anything else at all — she is still my mother.” Jane Demuth writes about her complicated relationship with her mother.

“I was not only civil, I was gallant, / or as gallant as a girl should be / to the man of steel when he’s a molten mess / and weighing down one end of her couch, / muttering random slanders to the lamp.”
 
Whimsical verse recounts a late-night visit that reveals a superhero’s hidden side.

Jennifer K. Armstrong connects the dots on powerful women publicly dealing with cheating. “Their version flips the script on the trope of the pathetic doormat who suffers through her man’s infidelity silently.”

William Michaelian searches for the seam between art and life: “And yet what is strangeness, but the very delight of a beautiful, unaccountable world, ever the more vivid once we have learned to let it go?”

Amy Wallen fights the urge to flee: “Between the drywall and the redwood siding, their hive hummed. ‘It was warm to the touch,’ she said. I pictured her hand on the pulsating wall. . . . ‘It throbbed,’ she said.”

Brenna Holeman writes about the fleeting moments of travel: “It’s simple to fall for someone when you travel. Thrown together in strange situations, unbridled and uninhibited, perhaps we’re much more open to connecting with someone. We’re not necessarily thinking of the tomorrow.”

“My hips gyrate towards him and I lift my arms overhead, the pretty girl at the party enjoying her own flirty display. ‘Stop that,’ he says, hushing and harsh. . . . It will take two more years to realize any man who wants to quiet my hips is not for me.” A life, in eight vignettes.

“How do you tell someone that you love them but that love has been deprioritized? How do you handle learning that you’re a junk bond? A short-term investment folded for the long family game?” Felicia Sullivan writes about losing friends as one ages — and always being the single friend.

“For conservative Indians like my parents, ‘falling in love’ is an American illness, a condition to avoid as one avoids warts or gonorrhea.” An essay on Longreads by Debie Thomas, originally published by River Teeth.

Brett Fletcher Lauer on Craigslist’s missed connections: “Once I was one of those people reaching out into the internet abyss, wondering if someone was reading. It made me feel better knowing that someone else was on the receiving end of those missives…”

“I’m writing this knowing my bank account is overdrawn, because I’m still waiting on four, unexpectedly late paychecks.”

“Men want to fight for their right to leave that glass there.” A viral hit from Matt at Must Be This Tall to Ride on marriage and relationships.