Tag: writing
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No One Makes Money at Landlocked Bars on Holiday Weekends
If I only knew the time, he thought, I would know it all. Standing behind the bar on a slow holiday weekend he would wax philosophical. Something outside would catch his eye and the thought would skip away. Like how the awning of the place retracted with one of those poles you slipped through a…
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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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Surviving Suicide: What I’ve Learned After 10 Years
10 years ago, I attempted suicide. On a summer night in 2008, my parents drove me from the house where I was raised to the emergency room in an effort to save the life of their 21-year-old son. My action was built on several years of mental turmoil and anguish, of unchecked thoughts and words…
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Landlines: One Reason the ’90s Were the Best Decade for Elementary School Romance
Chivalrous courtship, (in the elementary-school-aged-male sense of the word) isn’t dead, but it took a major hit during the latter half of the first decade of this millennium. It started when households began doing away with their home phones and choosing to exclusively use cellular phones. With that one decision, the family itself lost a…
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Forgiveness
You’ll reach a point where you cannot blame your mistakes on your parents’. In the early years of your second decade, you’d determined they were the reason you wore a hero’s mask over your villain’s face and fought for both sides. A double life, your father called it. When you were alone you spat at…
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Memory Wormhole (An Opening)
The falsities I signify as memories lie in stacked planes, pierced by a needle, threaded taut at the most peculiar points; each day is an involuntary setting off of previously lived remembrances, bounded in touchstones I’ve symbolically mythologized in my psyche. One past moment bounds into another: full submersion in a wormhole of past occurring…
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Planes of You
Most of us do not remember the first time we learned our shapes. Until you budded into my life, I thought that I knew all the circles, squares, and rectangles – the rigidly defined personalities, those with a set number of sides, those who are predictable, parallel, familiar. I look back on the cast of…
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Headache (Killing Trevor Pt. 1)
The rain pounded on the metal roof of the car. It smattered against the glass. Filtered by those creeping droplets on the windows, the streetlight shadows animated the surfaces of the couple’s still faces. Cynthia, her thinly plucked eyebrows raised, looked at his hands as they gripped the steering wheel. A nervous tick of his,…
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The Sieve Bored Holier
“I am the place in which something has occurred.” — Claude Lévi–Strauss What is here labelled as “something,” must be aggrandized. “Something” is too broad a descriptor. So, is it more direct to say I am the place in which many a thing has happened? Is this a better means of explaining in a single…
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Conviction
I fell in love with a girl named Conviction. We are inseparable. When I walk, I walk with Conviction. When I speak, I speak with Conviction. Before her I was faithless, with her I believe.
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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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Cinematic
It is a little-known fact that when you look at the back of a movie poster you see a mirror image of the picture on the front. The same goes for how the images look when you stand behind the movie screen itself. Spend enough time in the seats of a cinema, and you will…
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Inkwell Reflections for Miss Dickinson
White dress white dress how softly compressed prismatic coordinates printed over a spectrum of threads matching sheets covering the little table and chairs in the upper room of consciousness. White—no color or all the colors at once? All the bright or all the dark the stark dark hair and the pale face pale arms pale…
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Invoking the Blank Page
I am looking to you, Blank Page, for help. I awoke today with Worry. While I was able to slough off the morning blanket, Worry persisted its shroud about me. An invisible source secures a tight hold around the top of my head. It clamps the innards of my chest. The cinches have been there…
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The You Not Looking
Something’s been holding back the words. It might be the version of me that’ll read these lines one day. Winding me down back roads toward a painted horizon, as fabricated as one on the set of an old western. Pulling my eyes from the one I’m driving towards. Still, something’s been holding back the words.…
Sophisticating the Rudimentary 