I have a vivid memory that I watched A Few Good Men when I was four years old. I remember being in my little body. I was practically up against the television by the courtroom scene. I was getting upset at the character that Tom Cruise was playing for demanding…

At four years old, I woke up in the middle of the night, in the back of the ’81 Oldsmobile Cutlass Supreme in mint condition, the bright and midnight blue upholstery as cushy as a recliner. Blue and red lights were flashing above me, illuminating particles in the air. I…

I heard this phrase when I was four years old in my head spacing out in the mirrors in my mother’s office before I given away to a total stranger. “Re-member me.” “The mirror stage,” a hypnotherapist said. “You just, well, were naturally doing these things.” “Probable future events can…

“Do you know why I let you run around in all these families?” Between his fencing swords and our Medieval shield, I felt the perversion driving this question. It was the same energy with which he woke me up “night after night” to fetch my mother at the police station…

When I got back from living at another family’s house for four years, I launched an undercover investigation. These were my words at eight, nine years old in my pink room with a pink carpet staring out the pink blinds on my large window. First, it was the case of…

On the brink of thirteen years old, I began to notice my friends pasting magazine cutouts onto their walls. They were plastered—glossy—and growing in numbers. From the window of my best friend’s bedroom, the pages catching the light, I could barely make out what was on them. It was 1998–1999. …

In the living room, men with metallic tanks were blowing up balloons and letting them go. Like bulbs in bobbing waves, clear balloons with gold accents were filling up the ceiling along with solid ones pink, gold, and white. At the sponged railing white and gold, Dr. …

Carmine and I were cruising up to the Capodimonte Museum in the 90s Peugeot. Shuffling, blurry, quick flashes of a sparkling blue sea came into view through the trees and palazzos pink, orange, grey. There is no “driving through Naples,” Carmine said. “It is to be avoided at all costs.” …

Strings of melted cheese were spreading, hanging, and crisscrossing across a table of fourteen people. Cutting into a calzone, mozzarella burst forth onto the plate with bits of spicy, fleshy salami. Wine from a vineyard on Vesuvius was being poured from glass bottles. We cheered for the man — “Saperle!”…