I went so long without seeing him. Forever really. Long enough, I speculated, for us to become two entirely different people, and unrecognizable. But there he is, when I enter, sitting up in bed with his reading glasses on, hospital gown backwards, chest exposed, and looking just as erudite and handsome and savage as […]
You get the news about your sister in that time of night that is so late it’s actually morning. You have just finished having sex, have just finished brushing your teeth, have just finished donning the pajamas assigned to you. You’re some weird combination of empty and full, and right as you climb into bed […]
So my son and I, in keeping with things we do best, check ourselves into a hotel, and tonight, muscles all a-spasm from the scaling of a 14,265 foot peak at dawn, break into the spa and fold back the cover of the small, salt-water pool. “Um, are we supposed to be here?” my son […]
I’m so tired sometimes, like I’ve seen it all, lived it all, before. Twice. Maybe three times. And I’ve always been one to just drift with the current, I think, as it has never made much sense to put so terribly much effort into trying to build something, trying to control the result, while intimately […]
Every day now, I take my sister to receive brain radiation. She gets locked into a mask and affixed to a table, a box is lowered over her head, and she squeezes her eyes closed while a searing light steals what’s left of her cognition. And in turn, perhaps, extends her life by a few months. […]
If you really want to know about my sister, we have to go so far back. It’s why I have this resistance around mentioning her. Ever. Quiet observation tells me that there was never a more complicated story: the Pandora’s box, the inescapable Labyrinth of my sister’s very life. Trying to make sense of it—to […]
I got like all cut up again, like inside, a few weeks ago. All this many recovering days later, the blood still trickles out of me, when it wants. Reminding me that it happened. But I don’t recognize it anymore as belonging to me. I’m detached from all the private betrayals. Using up what I still […]
It is winter and I am holed up in a hotel room, writing. More and more lately, this is where you can find me. There is both a good and a bad to this. I’ve long known this was the life I was supposed to lead. I tried really hard to set up a home and be that […]
You don’t know why you dream about the writer. Seems like probably just because you fell asleep reading My Struggle. But there’s a lot going on in the dream, and it feels significant in the way that some dreams do. Not in their storylines, perhaps, nor their imagery, their host of characters. But rather in waking up […]
We were vacationing on the coast the night that Dad died. And when we came back, our things had all been packed up. Arrangements were made for us to live for a while in the mountains, in a pair of rooms bestowed on us by Mr. Craig, Dad’s former boss. Just for a year or two, while Mum got […]
my delusions 