Laughing Through the Pain

My brother and I are sitting on beige pleather chairs in a beige waiting room. Actually, we are not sitting but pacing. Our mother is very sick. The hospital has rooms where people can cry or rage (at God, the doctors), but where we go to giggle. It bubbled up in me first, prompted by the hospital’s Thanksgiving turkey carving contest. “I bet the surgeons are really good at that,” I say. “Is it a contest for surgeons?” he asks. We start writing down everything we find funny on a notepad. Then we come to this room to laugh. — Mina Bressler

Always a Little Ajar

My girlfriend of two years and I are moving in together, which means saying goodbye to her East Village studio. No sink in the bathroom, little natural light, but memories caked into every inch of the place like cat hair. We toured the room where our love took root, laughing, crying. On the way out, I looked at the front door and strangely felt nothing. Not a single memory. I realized: In countless visits, she’d never let me knock. The door was always half-open at the top of the stairs, Lexie’s head poking out, smiling and excited to see me. — Jill Pesce

Bittersweet American Dream

I wear my family’s immigration story like a badge of honor: The tale of a loving couple who simultaneously gain entry to graduate school, then persuade the U.S. embassy to let their daughter tag along. But some stories are gilded — prettier when you don’t dig deeper. One Thanksgiving, rolling lumpia and dishing tsismis, Mommy let the narrative slip: Daddy never wanted to leave; he wanted to open a school in the Philippines. To get him to immigrate, she concocted a lie about a colleague, inciting Daddy’s competitive side. How bittersweet that Daddy’s ambitions were thwarted by Mommy’s American Dream. — Raechelle Yballe

Distracted by Pam

We were in culinary school together. Lectures started at 7 a.m., painfully early back then. Pam was one of the very few women in our class, and I couldn’t stop looking at her with her chef whites, saddle shoes and that foxy 1980s haircut. One day, in pastry class, I was looking at her when I shouldn’t have been and boiled over the milk. Our instructor, Chef Stec, dressed me down without mercy for wasting food. Pam just stared. I turned purple. Two years later, Chef Stec very amiably made our wedding cake. — Michael Dorer

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