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: sobriety
the story and The Story
Long before I set out on a spiritual path of recovery, I felt some sort of kinship with some great beyond. Even as a child who had little interest in Sunday school and no discernible relationship with God in a religious sense, I prayed all the time. I prayed out loud before I went to bed…
Unmapped
"When you're getting better, it's a jagged line." -Jenny Lewis Maybe it's just what happens in your mid twenties, but shit, I highly doubt it - there was this black jumprope I had tangled up with the wires of an old Nintendo 64 shoved deep into my closet, and for a year I imagined it…
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…
Squeaky Clean
I can remember the first time I felt truly clean, and I think I went off and wrote a poem about waterfalls and the color blue. Nerd. I was trying my best to express what it meant, that feeling of a freshly scrubbed inner space. Like linens washed in lavender water, or what I imagine a…
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…
