After my grandma died, my grandpa put new siding on their house. Now the small house is grey, instead of red. This bothered me. I didn’t know why. Navy kids kind of grow up as vagabonds: they are untethered wanderers bouncing around from place to place. At least that felt like my experience while my dad was in the Navy. Like most Navy families, we moved often enough that it seemed we never had time…
The other day I found a list I had written a couple years ago of some of my favorite good things. I still like all those things very muchly. I guess I haven’t changed much. Or they haven’t changed much because they are still good. And because good things are good, I thought I’d share them in list poemish form: A List of Good Things Kitten sneezesand the way the kittenalways pauses in wonder after…
“In some remote corner of the universe…” I found 10 pens lying on the floorwhen I cleaned the houseafter midterm.I put them neatly in my book bagto signify that next weekI would be organized.Then I pulled out Platoand turned my mindto understanding rhetoric anddialectic and the semblanceof truth and whatpulls us to this. But I was 10 again when my friendsbrought their bikes to my house and we rode in the dark,hands frozen to handle…
All grief is a form of love. That realization has helped me process grief as nothing else quite has. On the one hand, the pain of grief must be felt bare and ugly and it seems a betrayal of the one we grieve to try to find a redemptive aspect to their loss. But on the other hand, to feel grief as love is to feel grief at it’s truest. There would be no pain…
If I hadn’t been holding back, I would have been ugly crying when my young nephews sang This is Me at their choir concert. They sang in all the innocence of their limited experience of the judgments and betrayals and abuse which the world throws at you and that makes you want to not just hide your light, but to extinguish it so that there is nothing left for the world to try to snuff…
I’ve been hiding for 10 years. Not behind a bush, but metaphorically. I wish I were a hide and go seek champion or something fun like that, but no… my hiding is just because I’m someone who has long been afraid of taking up too much space and long been afraid of not just rejection, but also connection… because rejection is straight up painful and connection is not only just something with which I’m not…