Dear Mom,
Do you remember this picture? I do. I remember a lot about those days, when we were a family. Yesterday, I recreated this exact image with my daughter. Tess turned five on Tuesday. She's so excited to start school next month. I'm only scared that other kids will ask her about her family. I don't want to tell her that most of her family didn't want her. I don't want to tell her that Grandma and Grandpa wanted her to disappear.
I have no idea if this letter will make you love my daughter but I want you...
Blue eyes. Everyone here has blue eyes. A woman in the corner has eyes the color of pale winter ice. The girl wrapped in her boyfriend's arms outside of the tiny cafe has blue eyes that look like the muted blue-gray of storm clouds. Her boyfriend looks at her adoringly with eyes that hold at least five different tones of the brightest blue I've ever seen. Little children skitter past me, and I make out in vivid detail, four sets of blue eyes.
I stand here on the old, worn sidewalk with my eyes downcast. My eyes are not blue,...
Balanced on the line, he told her again, "Put it down!"
Regan the vampire could not move closer. For the first time in his long life, he was powerless. The girl tricked him by her unnatural beauty into drinking the potion. Standing on the narrow path dividing the graveyard he could feel his life ebbing away before she had even touched him with the metal spear. He prayed to his god, unanswered as he predicted.
Just before she pierced his heart she whispered 'I love you but I have to let you go'.
He took his last breath and inhaled...
Erring on the side of caution I took two of the smaller ones. Just like breakfast, or a night on the town. My body was made for loving and tingling and vibrating with the eternal cosmic hum. I am old enough now to understand the consequences of my actions and of my non actions. The universe provided me with feet so that I may find a place to put my dancing shoes.
The sound reverberated through the streets. Chant. Gregorian. Darkness illuminated by thousands of candles, human snakes weaving their way through the streets. This was the first time I'd visited Taize but knew it would not be the last.
Simon did not feel the same. Hated being surrounded, enclosed by people. Unnerved, anxious clinging onto me like a child instead of a man ten years older.
I felt at one with the crowd, heard the repetetive words flow through me, part of me for evermore. Tried to shrug away the insistent pulling at my coat sleeve, ignore Simon's shout in my...
Absent.
He sat right at the front, but would never once look up at the board all while knowing full well the snippy teacher would think him rude. He would only doodle inside his beat-up notebook he'd kept since seventh grade, and I would never know what exactly it was he was so intent on drawing.
It's a project, he would say.
He is not here today. He and I do not interact much, but I know he is beautiful. He is beautiful and I have loved him since I laid eyes on him. I have loved him and loved...
It was raining and I had nowhere to be and somehow that Leonard Cohen record was on again.
Today I will vanquish nothing.
Today my triumphs will be small and non tangible, smoke like.
I will start with coffee and end with whiskey, the couch will remain the same.
Tomorrow I will be a better man for having lived today slow, reading, sipping - not struggling or scheming. Just the rain and and the mood and my slight beauaty.
The first sentence of Fahrenheit 451 flashes into my head as my last cigarette is lit. That book made me fear a world where books, where knowledge, could not be free. To me that was a crime, I didn't really think I'd have to die for it though.
And for a second I think about how all this started, all I remember of it is a single phrase,"I aim to misbehave." Well I certainly have at this point
Looking back I should have known I'd be caught smuggling those textbooks into this shitty country and really I almost wish I...
I flip through my old books, looking for more of my old letters, so far I've found one to Santa, in a book about dinosaurs that I've had since kindergarten.
I find an old copy of The Bible, the same one I used to read for my Sunday school work when I was younger and still thought that people were good and that if you were good people would be too.
I find a letter to my wife in our favorite book of poetry and I wonder why she left, she never said goodbye, or that anything was wrong.
And...
Twist and he was dead. Broken neck. Watching the agony in the contorted face I could only stand in my own space of terror. Knowing that no-one would ever believe what happened. Instinct told me to run home, pack a bag, passport, money and take a plane to the other side of the world. I could not move.
Simon's hand touched mine and for the first time since kindergarten, I held hands with another boy. What seemed like hours later we moved and looked at each other, mirrors of incredulity and shock.
John had told us years ago the bizarre...