Literary arts

The night a fire started between the ceiling of our apartment and the upstairs neighbor’s floor, I walked with my person to dinner. We dropped seventy dollars, but after a difficult week working in education and the arts nonprofit world, going out felt recuperative. Worth it. Dropping seventy dollars on dinner wasn’t something we did often, but it was possible, the sort of thing a person can do when you’ve lived in the same house for fifteen years while rents rise around you like water.

From the author:
This essay was in my head for a couple of years, especially after I was reunited with several childhood friends in an alumni group on Facebook. I started writing this piece off and on when, in early 2014, writer/editor Anna Clark asked if I would contribute a piece to an anthology that she was pulling together.