The message arrives in the middle of the night. I rifle through my cosmetic bag, trying to silence the alarm before I wake him. With my back to him, I can see the serpentine arrangement of our day on the floor. It is time to go.
-
I feel my way down the stairs, one hand on the railing, the other applying pressure to my throbbing forehead. It occurs ( Read more... )

What happens when, despite all your best efforts to sabotage your life, you finally follow your heart?

I guess you could call me a dualist. Not exactly in the Descartes sense, but in a less-philosophical, trite sort of way. I’m talking, of course, about head and heart. The separation of my church and state. It’s often impossible to realize one’s ( Read more... )

You know what can happen. You work their hours and sometimes it pays off, sometimes it doesn’t. Usually you can’t tell how it is going so you give it just a bit longer. You set yourself a deadline to be somewhere or something by a certain time but you don’t tell anyone, so you can shift the parameters and no one knows whether you have failed. If ( Read more... )

Where once I aged bitterly, begrudgingly, I find I now go gracefully. The surrender to my inevitable mid-20s brings an unprecedented relief: I’m relishing the novel absence of burdens I’ve been schlepping my whole life.

I’d say I deserve it, that it’s about time, but those are useless thoughts and one-way streets. The real truth is, I’m not sure ( Read more... )

i believe we are poets.
in love not with each other,
but with our words.

i believe we are paupers.
begging at the window,
for crumbs.

We write these letters to one another, with no idea how to address them, or how to close them. My “hello”is gaping and blank, like the twelve long years before it came.

I am careful not to ask too many questions or appear to need anything. I am sidestepping one thousand landmines, explosions that go like this: how could you leave me, do you ever ( Read more... )

It took me exactly twenty three minutes to realize why flocks of tourists with knee socks continued to approach me in awe-I was perched in front of “Colossal Head: 2,” its large, stone ears floating behind my shoulders like wings.

I met Miss O on 15th street, but I could see her blocks before that. She walked with her usual grace, somehow ( Read more... )

I’ve been living in the minds of my old friends. One song after another.

I’ve been listening to mixes from roadtrips, relationships, and summers away. Some of them made by me, and others made by old boyfriends, old friends.

I live far away now, and I lost most of these friends and lovers along the way. Wrong things I did or said, millions of miles ( Read more... )

I’m climbing the stairs at Big Hunt thinking to myself, Remember that time last summer you were here with Victor and Makeen? I start remembering a whole string of events, one after another, and then I realize I’m thankful. I have memories here. That makes it a little bit like home. I have a past here, and friends who’ve moved away.

But I couldn’t ( Read more... )

i'm sunburnt. sunburnt to all hell, with the evidence of a scoop-neck, cap-sleeve T-shirt--which i believe belongs to my former roommate--emblazoned on my otherwise pale irish skin. it's a rotten feeling soothed only by sucking on frozen pineapple chunks and watching trashy daytime television. i love few things more than i love pineapple, or more ( Read more... )