The story of your life is a series of well-told lies delivering a feeling of truth. No different than the lives we live. It isn’t the truth, but a sense of it we want. As readers, as travelers through this life, memory is one thing but the feeling it conveys is another.
It is the best day of my life when I get a call from the editor asking me to report on a town meeting and submit a thousand words. Even though it’s just a weekly it’s my first time published, my name in print.
Looking back on your life is like looking out of a plane taking off or touching down. Trying to make out familiar places below, or leave it behind.
We’d sit out there in the late afternoons as dusk came on and the thin windows beaded up with condensation, forming jeweled patterns in the corners. With the glow of the lights and the heater it felt cozy, like looking out from the inside of a gingerbread house.
The first thing I had to do was quit drinking. I’d left my job, moved to Europe and stopped doing yoga. There was no congruence between doing yoga and getting drunk. One was a union of body and mind, the… Read More ›
We are in Michael’s boyfriend’s apartment getting into Michael’s boyfriend’s bag. Michael is gay before anyone else in Pittsburgh. He wears scarves and earrings and looks beautiful but doesn’t act like a priss. People talk behind his back but he doesn’t care because he’s not insecure, it’s just who he is.
Mornings were clear on my walk to work that December, those last few weeks I worked at Starbucks. The walk took an hour but was mainly downhill and for the return route home I took the bus. Half way down… Read More ›
I yo-yo around the yard occupying myself, for the soul needs a reminder that there’s more beyond itself. And if the soul is elastic, will the stretch marks show when all of this is over?
It takes a long time for the street lamps to turn off now. In the morning the only sound is the thrum of the interstate off the valley walls or the geese flying away. The interstate cuts through the land… Read More ›
The acts of being and pretending are one and the same through an artful delusion of self. That form of delusion is how people with big dreams make them a reality: by not letting reality get in the way.
