Six months into our seven year relationship, I had to break up with B and send him back to Kansas. The whole spectacle was like some 90s hair band love ballad video. The bipolar drive to the bus station, B’s arms flailing in the air like some Evangelist, begging me to let him stay. That […]
Tag / addiction
Saying the Names
I remember John Flanagan. He had a head of red hair and a mouth full of over-sized teeth that seemed to get even bigger if you stared long enough. Despite the can of Bulmer’s in his hand, he was just a kid. That night, the only night I would ever be in his presence, he […]
To Write Love On Her Arms
B was passed out in a ditch full of fire ants some place in Austin, Texas while I was in an ICU in Akron, Ohio. When I woke up I wouldn’t ask why my wrist had four inches of staples or why my brain felt rearranged. I wouldn’t greet my mom or my ex boyfriend […]
The Peak of Crazy
The sun rose above the night’s chaos on the third day of a meth bender. B and I had listened to every CD we owned prior to playing frisbee with them. My usually neat writing room seemed evidence of a natural disaster, all paintings and poems created in previous days destroyed by slashing and crumbling. […]
The Eight Ball
It started with an eight ball, not of cocaine, but the plastic toy you ask a question, shake, and turn over to see the answer. We were checking out at Primo’s Deli when B grabbed it from the counter and handed it to me, the tips of his fingers bridging mine. Memory paints the December […]
The Struggle is Real
“Diet pop, diet pop, diet pop.” All three of my daughters are singing this, not together, exactly. It sounds like that stupid row your boat song that I was forced to sing in kindergarten, where I would start the first line and then someone else would chime in, off tune, and then another person and […]
The Best Moment
Whenever I travel, I wish to find a place that I can inhabit for a moment, curl up like a cat, a smudge of a foreign city that resonates in my bones as the truest possible representative of that very place and very time. I remember this night in Paris. The candlelight, a lopsided table, […]
No, Charlotte, No!
“You wear your heart on your sleeve,” people tell me. The writer in me wishes they would find a more interesting way to say this. The addict in me starts to brainstorm a garden of ways to prove them wrong. Don my bicep in a skull tattoo. Take up MMA fighting. Tell them I went […]
Paintbrush and Trigger 