My therapist says I remind others of what they want and believe they can’t have, so they deny my true self, in other words, my existence, to avoid feeling insecure and nonexistent themselves, and I tell her maybe I’m just an acquired taste, but that she’s right, maybe with my generous work/life balance, and single, …
You’re Used
The kind of love you know you need you don’t see in the world, not even when you’re not searching. All there is to do is imagine love, or try to love God, or some other object of belief representing all the ways you’ve neglected yourself. What is touch? The last time you felt it …
Depression
reminds me of the time I ran away from home, when I was seven, and how, sitting on some nearby train tracks and staring down them, the birch and maple on either side of them seemed to grow as silent and pensive as I felt about my mother’s condition, which seemed to arise out of …
Brave
I used to worry about the fact that, because I chose not to drive, and by the time I was 35 everyone in my immediate family had either died, moved on, or been tactfully estranged for safety reasons, almost everyone my age I knew, or could know, who was trying to build and take care …
Images
The brain was having difficulty managing all the input and was in danger of exploding. “Slow down the images,” the doctor said. The assistant fiddled with the dials and said, “They’ve been slowed to one image per second.” “Mr. Stan, I’m going to need you to increase retrieval speed to three memories per second,” the …
Comatose
Often, in the morning before work, I’ll sit in my chair, and a part of me will start to feel like it’s fading away. I can feel a kind of comatose coming on, and I worry I’ll either bite my tongue off in a seizure-like middle place between sleep and waking, or just straight out …
The Mallard Lover
The soon to be ex-husband never came back. Priscilla and I lived a long and happy life at the house on Willow Lane. Little Josh grew up and got a job at the local Walmart as a manager. And Priscilla and I had a lot of fun over the years. She was a really great …
My Poety Place 