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 / sobriety
Nazi Time Machine
It was over a Sausage McMuffin with egg that the manifestation of what I believed to be a brilliant idea birthed itself in my brain. “Let’s eat mushrooms and go to the Van Gogh Museum,” I said and then took a sip of my coke. “Okay, let’s do it,” Jacquie said, sitting across from me […]
Grief’s Interruption
For Amy I’m driving my minivan down the street, my three fatherless daughters buckled in their seats. We are almost home and the DVD they were watching is over. I switch to the radio and Unchained Melody is playing. B has been dead for over two months. Suddenly I feel as if I am in […]
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 […]
Elegy: Part One
The writer is rarely in the now. Hemingway couldn’t write about Michigan until he was in Paris, but I don’t have the grace of time and distance. Today I can not pick up a pen. It has to be a chisel. I want to be Michelangelo. Let me chip away at my marbled block of […]
A Series of Bad Ideas
The itch of restlessness is no stranger to me. Before drugs played a role in my life, I often scratched this itch by putting into play some really bad ideas. My earliest memory of feeling this way was preschool. Ohio heat stuck to my skin through my corduroys as I sailed through the air on […]
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 […]
Paintbrush and Trigger 