Tag: past
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Pillow Talk
You cannot escape truth when talking across a pillow. Delirious comfort leaves no space for fear. If there was a banking system for time, an exchange rate for moments, for getting back what we’ve lost, I would invest all these empty hours I bleed out introspectively on the page for one morning spent volleying whispered…
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Talking in My REM Sleep
In another life and with another brain I would have made myself pupil and master of language. Instead: I tiptoe on the precipices of residual memories that spill out from suppressed synapses. I desire nothing but the nine-minute intervals between hushing the waking bells I’ve fooled my mind the night before into believing will penetrate…
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Bagel Bar
After that first night not sleeping, they went for breakfast sandwiches at the cramped bagel joint overlooking Main Street. The two of them ordered at the counter, but Clyde waited for the tray of food to be prepared. He took the tray and approached the empty stool next to her hoisted bottom and dangling legs.…
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Burning the Tracks
A red glow washed over the amorphous designs on the table. Thin, bent tubes housing neon bordered the metallic siding. She sat in the hollow space carved out by the fish tank wall wrapping behind their customary booth. He hadn’t answered her question, the question she had asked him her to pose. She knew he…
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Temperance of Permanence
She met him when neither of them could stand to be alone. They remedied this by getting together. Now they’re face to face and he’s trying to tell her how now he can’t seem to be with anyone. The tightrope walk between being available and being alone is an act he’s made his own. Acrobats…
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Purporting Romance Mythically
Romance is an exercise in myth building. When a new relationship is on the rise, budding rosebuds are gathered while the wilted are buried away. We pull together moments and save artifacts and write a history for our lives as newly paired duos. We destroy, to an extent, our former lives. We become revisionist historians,…
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Undeveloped Film
When you take a picture, be aware of what it leaves. In the years before taking a picture was as simple as pulling a thin, rectangular device out of your pocket and tapping a certain spot on its glass, people would buy these little plastic cylinders that housed this stuff called film. Those canisters were…
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Attic
All day I have been hearing jazz faintly playing in my room. It does not seep through the wall nor does it rise from the chambers below. The riffs are generated within my mind. My ears glimpse phantom sound waves—unseen, invisible. Their nonexistence will startle me any longer. For I am a music box of…
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Flies Dance in the Floodlights
It had now become a ritual that after every break-up he would go for a walk in search of a baseball diamond. If there were bleachers there, he would sit and wait for a pickup softball game to begin and he’d watch it to completion. There were seldom others spectating at these low-stakes games, and…
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Recognizing Strangers
Today, on the shuttle that serves as the ankle on the last leg of my morning commute, the one that goes from the subway to the office, I saw this girl I know. She wasn’t on the shuttle bus. She was driving a small SUV next to it. My window seat pulled up next to…
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A Cabinet of Coffee Mugs
My father was a quiet, weathered man. Ignoring conventional rules you find in writing manuals, it would be accurate to use the old cliché that he was akin to a closed book. He was reclusive, but pensive. He had been places. More accurately, as he used to tell me, places had visited him. He did…
Sophisticating the Rudimentary 