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 […]
I don’t wonder what he is to me. Nor what I am to him. It’s glaringly obvious that I am a fantasy object that he believes would make his life complete, and absolutely wouldn’t. Elusive happiness, and one’s rabid attempt to find it. Nonetheless, I’m lured by the storyline he’s created for us. Not as […]
Around the age of 13 I was sent off to live with the Westons, the result of Mum deciding I was too much to handle. Which isn’t a slight to Mum. I actually was. Like, even for myself. I’d taken to hanging around with a strange group of friends. Strange in that they were kids, […]
I’m not sure what it means when something unknown and unexpected feels familiar instead. For all my livelong life, I’ve been propelled by some strange conflagration of nervous energy. A certain run-and-hide dynamic that leads me, time and again, into the arms of safely dangerous men. Which is perhaps where I’ve found myself again, except […]
He says she’s guarded, that she’s got armor. But that doesn’t sound like her. Her words are more like . . . Poise. And subterfuge. She’s perched in his windowsill, writing. The house is old. It’s early morning and there is spring snow falling, uncertain in its descent. She left the house early for coffee. “Lie […]
Django and Lovey are thirteen now and smarter and just overall better than I was at their age. This week we go to a haunted hotel and spend a night together there. We luck out and there’s even a terrifying thunderstorm. It grows dark and ominous, and the rain pounds hard against the window […]
So it’s on Facebook this morning that I find out Stevan’s brother is dead. And it’s one of those moments that doesn’t make contact. I read the post several times, trying to make sense of it. But it’s too sudden and I’m not ready. I’m not ready for my childhood friend to have lost his brother. […]
Lovey is twelve and living with her substitute family the day her period comes. It shouldn’t be a big deal, but it is. “Should we cancel the trip to the river?” Delilah, her substitute mother, asks. “Are you feeling blue?” Lovey is occasionally morose and Delilah has developed a regimen for it, in which she […]
Mr. Shafroth, my year eight history teacher, stands in the kitchen of his campus house with my field hockey coach. “Are you kidding me?” she shouts. He is lucky she doesn’t have her stick. “What could you possibly be thinking? Bringing her here?” I sit quietly in the spare room, on a mattress platformed by […]
because. because. because. because the momentum was there. and so was the alcohol. and so was the sense of complete despair and the conviction that nothing made a wrench of a difference, anyway. i don’t remember those days much anymore. but when we first started hanging out again, it all came stampeding back to me […]
my delusions 