In our latest @longreads feature, Emily Zebel goes on a weeklong solo motorcycle trip to find a way to cope after a breakup with the first man she loved following her divorce.
"I don’t tell him that I can’t go home until I learn something. What, I don’t know. Nevermind how."
"Silence has been framed as society’s enemy. It broods, holds hostage, cannot be trusted. Worst of all, it spells boredom. We are accustomed to entertaining ourselves by filling all the empty space with noisemakers and firecrackers. Yet nothing is more boring than a lot of noise." —Jeanette Cooperman for The Common Reader
"There is something about learning, about admitting 'I don’t know,' that brings you back into that space of childhood, with its mix of excitement and possibility and fear and shame. There is something about being a beginner again."
Today at @longreads, Devin Kelly overcomes the inertia of learning a new skill as an adult to experience joy, not just because of success, but because of perseverance.
"If you’re neurodivergent, masking becomes more than a passing courtesy. Masking is a perpetual motion machine of presenting yourself to appear not weird and not too sensitive and well adjusted. So you adjust, constantly."
"What I know is that she has seen things I can only imagine, tanks stationed at palaces, churches converted to morgues, lines of mothers begging at shops for the last bottle of milk. She deserves all the ice cream she desires." —Terry Kirts for Ruby Literary Magazine
"My life with Paul and Philip asks practically nothing of me. I’m content to wait for them outside the dim rooms at the backs of bars that don’t have signs, and to avert my eyes—this is easy for me—from the doings of men among men in the absence of women." —Amy Margolis for the Iowa Review
"It was, at the time, probably the most forgettable 10 minutes of our friendship. His hug was quick before he went into the night." Kevin Sampsell lost his friend Arthur to suicide. For @longreads he remembers his enigmatic friend and explores his own suicidal ideation and feelings of depression.
"This is my memory picture. It contains sun, a terrace, and three women set apart by 20 years of life, respectively. It also contains all the planned and unplanned grief. It contains war, invisible, but on our lips." —Maggie Levantovskaya for @longreads
"It starts underground. Twofold, really, the growing of the onion and the making of good steel. Both come from the earth and both are elemental transformations. The act of smelting and the act of cooking are humanly transformation, divinely inspired. It was cooking that led us to alchemy." —Matthew Medendorp for Joyland
"How did Momo make me feel? She had taught me that moments live in the flickering gold light of a beech tree and a bowl of warm soup. That loss waits for all of us, so we’d better wring happiness from every second." —Linda Button
"Even the recent past eludes me. I can remember crying last week, for example, but not what the crying was about. I can remember around a memory, but rarely the memory itself. Nothing is medically wrong with me, at least not as far as I can tell. It has always been this way." For @longreads, Maddy Frank writes about memory, absence, and the karst of Missouri.
"By bringing my drinking inside our kitchen, I had broken her spirit, her keenness to build a home for us. And I had done it because I thought a home wasn’t what I wanted, that all I wanted was to be forgotten, to be entirely ignored." —Sharanya Deepak