Django lives with me for 18 years and five months, in a myriad of settings, alongside a dubious host of characters, and then, one day, before getting in a truck and driving away, he sits me down in front of his piano. “I have a song for you,” he tells me. “It’s called The Farewell.” […]
It’s because she is young, epically speaking. Or at least not dead, anyway. Also because the phenomenal display of life feels really a performance, her performance. And she figures her performance may as well delight. Also because none of it seems to carry with it the quality of being quite real. She can’t track when or how […]
It’s been forever since I’ve written anything, and now I have this desire to sum up particular aspects of the last couple years of my life and get on with it. Though perhaps not without proving I learned some things first. I certainly can’t allow myself years that meant nothing. In that vein, my first […]
It’s Christmas in the year 2017 and I’m in two-bedroom suite in a tall hotel. Outside the the snow falls, which makes my son happy and therefore makes me happy. I sit with my morning coffee next to the window, beyond which a gondola runs the length of a mountain’s incline. I find the gondola’s […]
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 […]
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 […]
Last night I notice that my 14-year-old son has posted a new profile picture on Facebook, where he claims to be a 20-year-old simply to gain access to what he terms an outmoded world. The photo is from the last day of summer, on which we summited a 14,000 foot peak, climbing up the backside and endangering our […]
This summer, I take Lovey and Django on a three-day car trip across four states. A sixteen-year-old boy, now an equal part of our eclectic family, also joins. Somehow, it’s in this spinning of wheels and endless road that I have historically seen my kids the most. They unwind for me. Show me who you are, I silently invite. My heart […]
my delusions 