em — dash
A story about memory, loss, and the armor we choose.
I wear the coat more in winter, but sometimes I put it on when it’s barely cold. Just to feel her.
It’s a deep burgundy, wool, a little too big in the shoulders. She bought it at a thrift store on our third anniversary. Said it made me look “romantically tragic,” whatever the hell that meant. I told her I looked like a ringmaster. She laughed and said, “Exactly.”
She’s been gone two years. Cancer. Quick and cruel.
Every time I wear it, someone’s got a comment.
One woman on the bus leaned over and asked, “Excuse me, do you work at that circus on 8th?”
“No,” I said. She kept smiling like I was just being coy.
Another time, two teenagers pointed and said, “Look, it’s the popcorn guy!” I didn’t ask what that meant. I already knew it wasn’t nice.
Even my neighbor, an older guy I used to chat with, said, “That coat’s got… personality,” like it was a disease.
So I stopped wearing it for a while. Folded it up and tucked it in the back of the closet, behind boxes of paperwork and the shoes she never got around to donating. Thought maybe I was being stupid. Holding onto something no one else understood. Maybe grief had made me childish.
But last week, I opened the closet and the coat was just there, staring at me. Still smelled like the rose water she used to dab on her wrists. Still felt like her hand on my back.
I put it on. Walked to the diner down the street. Got a few looks, sure. A teenage girl snorted into her phone. A guy at the counter asked if I was part of a theater group.
I just said no and ordered my eggs.
See, I figured something out.
They think it’s a costume.
But it’s armor.
It’s memory.
It’s the last thing she gave me that still fits.
So yeah, maybe I do look like I escaped a circus. Maybe I do look strange. But that’s their version of me.
Mine is different.
Mine is honest.
And I’m not taking the coat off for anyone.
Write in your own rhythm,
even when the world misreads it —
with or without the em dash.
The Ghost in the Glue Trap
I just wanted to save my cookies. Instead, I caught a ghost in a rat. Things got philosophical fast.
The Queue Circles the Earth
If you have stood in a line that did not move, this room will feel familiar. Power calls it safety, law calls it procedure.
She was born in October
A story of love, limits, and the fragile spaces in between.
Damn
This just goes straight to the heart. There’s something so quietly heroic in the way you wear that coat — not as a relic, but as a continuation of love. The way you describe it, I can almost feel the weight of the wool, the faint trace of rose water, the ache of what remains when everything else has gone.
People see the surface — the “costume,” as you say — but you’ve captured so perfectly that tender, private layer beneath it: memory as something we inhabit, not just recall. I think that’s what grief does, in its most sacred form. It asks us to carry love differently. To wear it even when others don’t understand.
Your coat isn’t tragic or odd. It’s a kind of vow. To remember. To keep loving. To keep showing up in the world as yourself. And that, to me, is the most honest thing of all 🙏 sorry for your loss Tahir 🙏