“For years, Jill Christman has been waiting for her long-lost lover to communicate with her from beyond the grave. Finally, he walks into her early-morning exercise class, setting her world awhirl.”

Spinning: Against the Rules of Angels was Creative Nonfiction Magazine’s True Story. Issue #12, 2017.

“I would need a thousand pages to clearly explain all that has gone down in the world’s spinning from the night Colin stepped off this earth and into the never-never and I stayed behind to build a life worthy of the way he had loved me. Before Colin, I’d been a girl on the edge of survival—smart but broken, ambitious but wounded, dancing along the dark edge of despair, hoping someone would notice—and then, like a miracle, someone did. I was only nineteen when we met, and Colin was just two years older. He loved me as no one before him ever had, with the kind of love that made me love myself.”

Want to read the whole thing? Sadly, the little pink Spinning chapbook is forever out of stock, but you can either read it on CNF or find your way to a copy of If This Were Fiction: A Love Story in Essays  for the print essay in its entirety.

When you do get your hands on Spinning, please be sure to pull up this companion Spotify playlist to rock every song mentioned in the essay.