Hooked up to machines and pipes, I lay here, hearing my hard breathing, my hard heart beating.
I hear the beeping of a machine. I hear the sheets of my bed move together and I shift my weight from my left to my right. I hear my joints grind.
It is so loud in this room. So many things making so many noises. I can't stand it. Someone just come in here and make some actual noise. Something that an old man can be distracted with and not focus on the frivolous.
The frivolous things such as the time I...
"No. I won't go back."
I listened, expecting and shoring up my supply of reasons in advance.
"I tried. I really tried."
Around me, the contents of my storage facility. I would rather die than let them use that label on me. So, yeah, I had no running water, no electricity, no nothing except the contents of my closets and drawers slung everywhere serving as a multipurpose couch/bed/cocoon. Yeah. I'm that person. Rehab had been so not for me.
The streets - my arms are too scarred for tattoo ink. This, this is slightly better than the alternatives, of which...
"Well, I'm sorry if I led you on." My voice is sarcastic and bitter and a little more harsh than I'd intended but I can't take it back now so instead I use the momentum to carry my forward.
"Yeah, well, you did. Why did you have to go and stomp on my heart again, huh?" I can feel the hot blood burning in my ears.
"Too bad!" I scream as loud as I can. My throat is sore but I don't care.
"You know what? This conversation is over." I can't believe him.
"Fine!" I just want to get...
I hated the fairy picture. Instead of feeling at peace, secure, happy I always had sleepless nights. Mom sleeping on the floor near my bed, comforting me when I cried out. No matter where she put the picture, in another room, even in the trash, it somehow once again appeared somewhere in my bedroom. Once it was inside my Nancy Drew book, another time under the mattress. The worst time was when it floated from the ceiling right onto my face! I screamed the house down even though I didn't at first know what it was.
The parish priest blessed...
Shape. Whatever that means. Forms. You can study the symmetry of symbols we use in written language, words. Formless, shadows, we count them, bend our fingers around, call them dragons, call them dreams. Non-euclidean. Shapes that can't exist. Memories, shapes our minds have been forced to hold. Thoughts, shapes our minds create to deal with hope and fear, which... which perhaps I have a difficult time distinguishing between. Angular, curvature, some caricature of what I thought I'd be at 24. 24. Two shapes, angular and curvaceous.
"Tell me what you did. Tell me what you did yesterday."
She was at the bottom of the stairs in her own house. She was alone, but she knew she wasn't. The lights were off and it was dark.
"I was home. There was nobody there, except him."
She put her foot on the first step, and slowly pulled herself up. When she reached the second floor, she put her hand on the railing to steady herself.
"I felt like I was going to pass out. It was because of him."
She walked into her bedroom, looking nonchalant though there...
"I has a bus! I iz in it!"--written in black sharpie on the pink paper. The torn end of it soft and frayed, the grocery list on the back now outraged with the bleedthrough of the ink.
"Wait, shouldn't it be like, E-E-N E-E-T?" Linda said, her glasses dangling just off her bottom lip.
"Wait, what?" Sarah replied, she stared hard at the pink paper, not wanting to look at Linda or her stupid retro horn rim super thick shiny blue metallic glasses hanging from her lips. She knew Linda thought that looked cute but it just looked gross and...
The lamp wouldn't turn on. "Shit," Mel muttered. "Jerry!"
Of course, he wouldn't come. He was in the tiny bathroom, savoring the one amenity included in the rent, his head bowed under the shower's heavy, erratic spray.
Mel moved over to the dusty window. Rocking back and forth with Ollie on her hip, she pulled the curtain aside and grabbed at a cloth sitting on the sill. Not caring what it was, she wiped at the windows and tried to see out. Somehow they never seemed to stay clean. Mel was amazed at the amount of dust that always seemed...
The words from the poem mirrored the scene in front of him.
"Two roads diverged in a wood," he recited aloud.
"Which one should I take," he thought as he stood at the junction of the two paths in front of him leading down the dark forest.
He had come out for a walk to clear his head. He closed his eyes and took a step forward and another and another...
Half an hour later, he stood in front of a giant tree. He looked up into its branches and a large pile of snow fell on him. He grabbed...
There was blood on my pillow. I flew out of bed as soon as I noticed it, but I could not remember where it had come from. I began to panic as I stared at it and tried to think about what I had done.
Was I attacked?
Was I drunk?
Was I a party in pillow-related homicide?
These questions whirled through my head until a sudden noise nearly knocked me over with fright. The phone was ringing. I worried about who might be calling, and simultaneously tried to collect myself. "Hello," I said, "Who ith thith?"
These words alone...