When I sit down to write fictional stories, the setting is always the same, and the setting is way out west in California. I don't know other places well enough, and even if I grow to, which I might now that I live in the Midwest, my bones quite literally grew to their capacity in…
Tag: friendship
Mother Shower
I had a dream the other night about a brand-new mother in some nebulous ancient culture being showered with immense love, affection, celebration, and tender care. Flowered garlands and feet massaged in oil abounded. Certainly, attention was also paid to the small child, but much of the community in this dream was tending to the…
And I Will Tell About It
What do we share when we stop hiding ourselves away? This is, of course, the internet, social media, the shame over guilt culture of appearance and perfection, and in these realms we skirt the truth, muddy it up, maybe forgo it all together. What happens when we decide, I'm going to share it? We're free.…
New
When I was seventeen, I got black out drunk on New Years Eve and found myself in a precarious sexual encounter with a man who I thought was my friend. I went numb after. It was 2003. Endless tequila shots by the wet bar before the party, to steady the nerves. I was toast. My life…
The Circus
"This is the circus. Everybody's trying to not go home." To be human is to be a social creature, and it is an endless adventure and collection of lessons to interact with other beings and establish relationship. I have learned over time that relationships can work like a drug - we get so high on…
Cool Shoes
Sometimes all it takes is a pair of shoes to shift everything. In fifth grade, my supremely cool step-mom took me to see Clueless and then proceeded to whirlwind me around Westside Pavilion on a shopping spree to mimic the far out fashion of the film. We're talking plaid skirts and knee high socks, patent leather…
love, enough
[fiction short] An hour before I am supposed to leave, I start crying. I've had that fluttery, controlling, rigidity-soaked fear for two days now, and underneath that there are always two forms of grief - the actual grief, which hurts, and the tender grief about being so hard on myself, that the New Age Buddhists call radical…
To Thine Own Self, Be True AF
My guess is that if Shakespeare were alive today, he'd be all about not giving a fuck what others thought. (You know, in the healthy, anti-codependent, non-sociopathic way.) Let me declare, just to gain even more credibility here, that I used to be sort of obsessed with astrology. Give me a break, I was fifteen. And though I…
Transportation
Nothing transports like a song. Nothing evokes such memory. Like Proust's famous madeleines, the hearing of one song has transported me back twelve years and sixty-two miles away, to a world I no longer inhabit, to best friends and lovers I no longer know, to places I will probably never see again. At nineteen I bought…
The Inside of Loneliness
I have come to find that the feeling of feelings is the first step in surrender and moving toward growth and change, from whatever it is we need to surrender to, grow toward, and change from. Spilled tears, gasping sobs, clutched knees and calls to friends are part of the deal. Moments of self-pity, complaint,…
A Full Life 