Tag: this year 2025
-
August 24th: Katie Russell
5:00am: “Meeeeelk! Meeeeelk!” Toddler screams to nurse. My body says no. 8:30am: Husband asks what I want for breakfast. I don’t know. I’m newly pregnant. I’m nauseous. 9:00am: Find a toddler bed for sale on NextDoor. “I need to get him out of my bed & off my boob,” I think. 9:30am: We sit down…
-
August 20th: Nat Urban
I’ve never had a quiet mind, a constant question in my childhood was “why can’t you just sit?” My brain is more of an overactive pitbull; leave it unoccupied, and it will destroy all your pillows and shit in the middle of the floor. It needs something meaty to gnaw on, interesting enough to keep…
-
August 8th: Madeline Bodin
Before I even open my front door, I can see that the sky is a flat orangey gray. The sun, although well above the horizon, winks with orange light from between the trees on the east side of the lawn. The weather report said that today the 2.5 micrometer small particulate matter (a fancy way…
-
July 28: Michael Dubrow
3:30 a.m. I get up to pee and then back into bed. I know from experience I’ll be awake for a while. My thoughts bounce around from people I haven’t seen in a long time to a problem I’m having with the novel I’m working on. I fall back asleep. 8:00 a.m. I wake up…
-
July 22nd: James Yamada
I wanted today to be cinematic—to trick This Year readers into thinking my life isn’t entirely mundane—so it feels serendipitous when I sleep through my alarm. I don’t have any place to be, but it does sharpen the day with an edge of unpredictability. As I wait for my girlfriend Nalini to finish in the…
-
July 17th: Jennifer Lunden
My to-do list is always impossibly long. I make each day’s list on a page in a 5.5” x 3.5” notebook. Lately, the fifteen college-ruled lines aren’t enough, and I squeeze more items between the lines and in the rare small spaces after short entries like “laundry” and “balance checkbook.” In a few months I…
-
July 9th: Josie Levin
I don’t always dream. But we’re in luck because whatever electric current leads to it visits me in the early hours of the morning. I dream I am fighting some girls in the parking lot of a strip mall, the big kind between short apartment buildings. Location is very fluid in my dreams so we…
-
June 28th: Mischa Kuczynski
4:30 a.m. I wake up from a nightmare and take the dog to pee, then get back in bed and scroll Reddit. I look over at Henry. Will this be the last cosleep? I try to memorize their face again. 6 a.m. Henry wakes up smiling. They’ve done this almost every day since they were born. …
-
June 23rd: Jessica Handler
Phone alarm 7:30 a.m., Glenn Gould storming his way through The Goldberg Variations. The music puts me in mind of my mother, who loved Bach. Go downstairs and make coffee. My father once expressed shock that my husband sometimes made our coffee. “Whoever’s up first does it,” I told him, glad then and now that…
-
June 20th: Laura Rink
It’s 5am and if I were at home the goldfinch would be tapping at one of the upstairs windows as he has been doing for weeks now. Four inches of bright yellow with a black forehead pecking at his own reflection, trying to vanquish a perceived threat. I worry about the amount of energy burning…