... There was a party being held in the apartment at large, beyond the crack in the closet door. The noise kept me in that half-awake, half-asleep place -- I remember hating the noise, hating the Florida weather, hating living in an unventilated closet sweating so hard it felt more like bleeding. I remember an enormous light flooding the world, all ( Read more... )

... I walked to the bathroom with my pants still around my ankles; I was too scared to pull them up, afraid that they'd end up covered with blood. Just the same, I was too scared to actually reach behind and feel just how bloody it was -- it's strange to talk about it, because it seems so morbid, when at the time it was just a matter of being ( Read more... )

... The sequence was up-ended; it only added to my fervor. The hospital had decided to do an HIV test only after finding the sole housing option required contagion. So, they pulled the blood and I waited -- for two-and-a-half days, I was left alone with the idea that at this moment, in this God's universe, by this God's doing -- it was better to be ( Read more... )

To be fragile but not valuable -- a snowflake
Self-aware between being and ending;
Having lived needlessly, and died pointlessly,
Exhausting all her life merely being

I have filled three notebooks this year in mental hospitals. Large portions of them are rewrites of ideas that were already retreads -- simply things to pass the time. Larger portions yet are pointless transcription or stat-mongering: records of Scrabble games, diagrams of Connect 4, game theory diagrams and charts. I was calmer when I had a pen in ( Read more... )

... Honestly, the justification is bullshit. It really does become pinning oneself to the cross. This is the family that put me out years ago -- a very real reaction to an ideological war. I talk about staying for the sake of my sister, but she's ... 16 now? She can fend for herself. He can fend for himself. She my mother won't ever leave for real ( Read more... )

... It would be unfair to say that my perspective changes with my mood. A 'change in perspective' is an after-effect; it's attaching a reason we can't measure to an event that we can. There's an innate requirement of _change_ there before you can even be so haughty as to say that you'd taken a different take on things. Nothing ever changes for me; ( Read more... )

... what did they lose, that night, when they all became would-be murderers? In effect, I spared them the 'worst' repercussions -- in my living, they avoided prison; in my living, they avoided judgment. What did they give, though? What does it cost oneself to prowl in the dark, to hunt with baseball bats? I lived, but they took a piece of my life ( Read more... )

... wondering how culpable I was, the empty-handed bottom hand; the unwilling accomplice and unwitting partner. The option, admittedly, had been there -- to ask if he was married beforehand, to walk away when I saw the ring ... he, though, had the option of taking it off before he arrived ( Read more... )

... “If you keep taking what they put inside of you, that's all you'll have. It'll keep piling up until you're more them than you, and then that's what you'll be ( Read more... )