The words catch in my throat. I am squeezing my stomach, squeezing my neck, trying to force the air to pass through my body. Trying to force the words to pass from my brain to my mouth to tell them what I am. Who I am. They take another bite of bagel in the silence, looking out onto the street. People walk by and the late morning breeze makes the sunlight dance on the sidewalk through the leaves o...

it's better to have loved and lost, than to never have loved at all, you say

you, i say, have never loved enough to be

shattered into

a thousand

tiny

feeling

pieces

like a carpet of broken teeth

in a cold wind

your words

betray your

unfeeling

loneliness...

It's been almost a year since she died, and yet I can still hear the Great British Baking Show playing softly on the TV inside. I open the door, and a her-shaped depression in the couch vanishes, the dog somehow falling confused back to the cushions as though something lifted and dropped her. I actually don't remember when she died, exactly. I never really had a chance to process her passing becau...

Always the god dam man in the closet. Sometimes no eyes, no face, no nose, always waiting in the closet. Always with a smile. The way the kid described him the ear to ear grin was something out of a Stephen King novel. Something mundane and horrifying and otherworldly all at once, like a lamppost that eats children or a notebook that brings your dreams to life. But this is real life, and when a ch...

“Love breaks things. Maybe it’s a stupid thing to say, but it does. When it first happens to you your world shatters into a million glowing splinters, tearing back the veil and making everything feel new all over again. When it ends your world shatters again, but where there was magic before there is blood and tears in the wreckage.”

~Anonymous

I am in the library, watching her choose a book. Her...