Jacob Aiello

Sometimes Amber’s mom is late to class. Sometimes she doesn’t show up at all, and when the professor asks why she explains she’s a single mother, childcare is expensive and unreliable. She’s the only parent in our classroom including the professor and after that no one challenges her attendance. That’s where I first meet her, Amber a month later: Contemporary Critical Theory. Liminal spaces, “Notes on Camp.“ It’s our last semester before graduation, and a couple times after class we share a cigarette. She tells me she’s a widow. I tell her my mom was also a single mother and with coffee she plies me for details, what most fucked me up.