Nana, second from the right, kickin’ it with the gals.

It’s International Day of the Girl. Which I feel very strongly about, but which I won’t stop feeling very strongly about tomorrow, once its designated day ends. And which I can’t compile the right words this morning for, so read elsewhere and understand how it would be hard for me to form any cohesive, accurate, easily structured thoughts. I am very happy about the things that happened this week: mostly what Malala’s award means for girls everywhere, what Lena Dunham’s book tour means for certain, identifiable girls in US venues listening to her, hearing my mom over facetime that her mom’s (pictured above) heart is working normally again, that no children ate these heroin packets a four-year-old accidentally misused a lesson in sharing for. The bigger picture behind all of it. The heartbreak it comes from.

One thing I can do is offer a list of sorts, that has helped me tremendously throughout the past month of transitions and thoughts and realizing how privileged and lucky I am, but how much I feel and think and hurt often. And how often I am wrong and not alone in my wrongness.

That list is a book list. They’re women writers because once they were girls, writing. Girls, reading. Another kind of being privileged. Another thing this day should bring attention to (the girls who are doing neither, because they are not allowed).  But it just so happens that the only things I’ve downloaded or reread in the past month happen to be written by women (aside from magazine articles, The Everyman Pocket Series Blues Poems, edited by Kevin Young, my first ever college creative writing professor John Warner’s new book, and Jake Adam York’s posthumous book). Do not think too deeply about that.

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