“My mother once said that, if we listen, ordinary things speak to us, reminding us of other things.” – Alexandra Godfrey in the essay “Sea Glass” (Fall 2024 Intima)

As a writer and teacher, I typically think in words. But sometimes, words fail, and the only way to explain things to myself is through images. As someone who was diagnosed with cancer at 40, when I was the healthiest I’d ever been, I’ve needed a lot of things explained to me. An image can trigger a feeling that then puts me on a path to the words I need. But it starts with a thing.

So a sticky patch in a dive bar helped me understand what it meant to have an incurable cancer. A can of tomatoes from an old Warner Brothers cartoon helped me deal with the endless cycle of doctor appointments, blood tests, and scans. In my essay, “Restoration” (Fall-Winter 2025-26 Intima), I reflect on how a broken tea wagon helped me accept that a past life can’t really come back. I never liked the phrase “This is your new normal.” I’m now pushing for people to say, “Your tea wagon has been renovated.”

In Alexandra Godfrey’s beautiful and haunting essay “Sea Glass” (Fall 2024 Intima), the blue glass of the title seems to serve a similar purpose. Memories can live inside us as feelings, without words, until an ordinary thing speaks to us, as Godfrey’s mother once told her. Ordinary things somehow give us the words that we haven’t been able to give ourselves. Godfrey, who completed a graduate degree at Wayne State University and now works in two community emergency departments in western North Carolina, has worked as an author and columnist for the Journal of the American Academy of Physician Assistants and the New England Journal of Medicine.

What I like most about Godfrey’s piece is how it reminds me that stories get told and re-told in many ways, in many layers. Like medicine in a glass bottle, sometimes our stories stay inside us, waiting to be opened, waiting for the words. And then sometimes there are stories we only tell ourselves. And then sometimes we find the courage to tell our stories to the world. But it starts with listening to ordinary things.