Posts from the “Doldrums” Category

“I’m On My Way”

Posted on November 12, 2019

She sits across from me as Ariana Grande music videos plays on the wall beside our table. How many songs does this girl have? And why? And how? “I’m used some sort of game going on,” I say. “But it’s Monday afternoon. Not a lot of sports going on at this time.” When one video ends, “Bulletproof” by La Roux plays. Not too long after it begins, it begins to fade into another Ariana Grande song. I actually like La Roux. I’m not a fan of Ariana Grande whose whole career it seems is built on her brown-facing. And didn’t she lick a doughnut or something? None of that matters, but I start sputtering off the movie references made in the “Thank U, Next”…

Categories: Personal

Tagged: Marble Tea, Relationships, Shawn Wasabi

“where we’ve been through time”

Posted on October 15, 2019

Spent the last few days looking over my shoulder, staring at the past. Moments lost in indecision rekindled over a small conversation. The excess baggage I chose for this trip scuffs as it rolls down the street, dragged behind me. A load too heavy to shoulder alone. Four walls make a house, but the empty halls echo like a tomb. On the fridge, a magnet reading: “Depression is my copilot.” Scrawled beneath it with childhood magnetic letters: “My other plane is anxiety.” Chain mail letters promising futures etched in ink. Looks better on paper. Folded airplanes dashing through the air, crashing and burning on impact. I smoked love letters over coffee. Never promised you a rose garden while promising you the world. White picket…

Categories: Stream of Consciousness

Tagged: Anxiety, Depression

Airing Laundry

Posted on September 18, 2019

Sometime after the 9/11 attacks, someone started a blog. In this blog, they wrote about someone they lost. Someone they loved. Someone stripped away from them. Each day, they wrote about this person. Maybe my memory has romanticized it, but I believe it was a widow writing about her husband. Or, just as easily, a widower writing about his wife. A mother about her child. A child about their parent. None of that is the point. The point is, this person, this stranger, who lost someone they loved, decided to write a poem a day. I don’t know when the blog started, and I can’t remember when it ended. This was years ago. And any internet searches lead me to dead ends. And it…

Categories: Personal

Tagged: 9/11, Death, Family, September 11

Disjointed Text

Posted on September 5, 2019

We’re told to write what we know, but what if all we know fits comfortably in the torn pockets of tattered, unpressed jeans? What if all we know is scattered by the wind, blowing through the streets of familiar cities in unfamiliar territories? What if all we know are faces of people whose names we don’t recognize? The final chords of a ballad, but not the lyrics? Handwritten journals, but not the pens we used? Or the words we spoke? What if we remember the first dates, but not the last nights? Or the last kiss, but not the goodbyes? What if all we know is the abandonment, the pain? What if we can’t remember the words our fathers spoke before they turned their…

Categories: Stream of Consciousness

Tagged: A Gallant Gentleman, Death, Father and Son, We Lost the Sea

“The lovers that went wrong”

Posted on August 28, 2019

“Shaun thinks she’s your girlfriend,” she said. “Just something to think about.” I. In the parking lot of some fast food joint—maybe it’s Dairy Queen or Whataburger, but the details are foggy; this was nearly five years earlier—I walk out with a girl and her son. As she puts him in his car seat, I stand off to the side. The chill nips at my skin. My ears, despite the beanie, are cold. Don’t get me started on the ruby red skin tone my nose had taken. She closes the door and heads around the car and pauses when I approach her. Without so much of a thought passing through my mind, I touch her face, lean in, and kiss her. It’s our first…

Categories: Doldrums

Tagged: Daughter, Depression, Jeanna, Jenny, Relationships, Selina, Shaun, Virginia, Youth

“It’s Getting There”

Posted on August 1, 2019

First time I killed my father, I’d just turned 20. In some whirlwind of inspiration fueled by Denis Johnson’s Jesus’ Son, I penned a short story I’d later call “David.” He died again after writing an incomplete story about a man getting dressed for his father’s funeral. And again, later that year, about a man who remembers his father moments before he receives a phone call with the news of his passing. Oddly, both stories were titled (the first being a working title) after Bob Dylan songs. A few years ago, during the throes of depression, I started planning a story about a man who returns home after his father’s death. I might have drafted the first few chapters, but nothing came of it.…

Categories: Personal

Tagged: Bob Dylan, Death, Denis Johnson, Father, Jesus Son, Jonathan Tropper, Not Dark Yet, This Is Where I Leave You

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