permission - by larissa pham - intimacies

I wasn’t always a writer, or I mean, I didn’t always think I’d be one. Whether I thought of myself as someone who writes—that’s different. But I was always a good student, and for a long time, everyone wanted me to be a scientist. I liked most of it, the math and the pipettes, the deep, marveling detail of how the world worked. I liked the metaphors of chemicals and acids interacting, the way a cell’s membrane selectively repels water, though I didn’t understand how the proteins of a cell could