wittle1

My Daughter’s Hat
by MM Wittle

I stole my daughter’s hat while we were drinking hot chocolate at Max Brenner’s.

It was a big, floppy hat in black felt she purchased from Target two nights before. She said she needed the hat because it made her feel more glamorous and cheeky. I suspected she needed the hat to be a barrier between her and the wedding guests she wasn’t interested in making small talk with.

But then, while we were together, she wore the hat. We walked around Center City, Philadelphia and sat in Washington Square Park discussing her recent break-up and my tiptoeing back into the dating pool. We talked about books and shared memories from years ago and I realized our ages are different, but our paths are running the same course. Sadly, my history was not skipping her generation.

After our dinner, I took my moment and I stole her hat. I was hoping osmosis would deliver me some of her protection or her sass because I knew this new chapter of my life was unwritten for both of us.

All I got was a picture of me in my daughter’s hat.

AUTHOR’S PHOTO CAPTION: Me in my daughter’s hat (Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Summer 2016).

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: MM Wittle is a literary coach for writing and a writing professor. her fiction has appeared in Transient, The Four Quarters, The Fox Chase Review, and others, and her poetry has appeared in The Bond Street Review and Philadelphia Poets and the Decades Review’s IX issue. Her creative nonfiction piece, Presently in the Past, is in Volume 20 of Thin Air Literary Magazine. Her creative nonfiction book Three Decades and I’m Gone (Creeping Lotus Press, 2014) details her struggle with learning to live with the death of both her parents.