My father was not a good person. Before he died, his partner contacted me to ask for medical advice, financial help, and a goodbye video call. I don’t recall another time when I felt so conflicted. Torn between respecting my boundaries and having compassion for...

I brought my high school literary magazine home to distressingly little fanfare. I placed it on the coffee table, where it sat until my Nana1 came to visit. He found it there, collecting dust, and gave it a read. “Neha! You are a poet,” he exclaimed, as he shuffled...

After the publication of my second book, almost eight years ago, I went underground. At the time, I wasn’t really speaking with my family. I think of this time as benching myself, which entailed a few concrete actions, like deleting all my social media for example–but...

Have you ever fallen into the trap of thinking you know someone just by seeing them? It can be particularly easy with beautiful people. When the scars aren’t obvious, sometimes I think it means they haven’t been hurt. But how I see them says nothing about how they see...