Bodies float alive on the Dead Sea. The Atlantic is an opaque ocean of dead bodies, and I’m gasping for breaths in between. Twenty three, the therapist diagnosed me. And there’s pills for that, he said. So I became an island nestled between salt and a hard place. Western medicine dehydrates my faith in humanity. …
A Guilty Pleasure
Girls who pull off camo Bummin' cigs off Cheeto Barnes & Noble Seth Cohen Eating pasta with my fingers Not wearing shoes in the summer Winning a car merge Running away: The soles of my feet are callused So my heart doesn’t have to be. As a rule: Before I drown in …
You are a customer lying face down on the floor during a bank robbery. Describe the robbery from this vantage point.
Now is probably a bad time to ponder the carpet selection, but honestly I’ve been lying down on this thing for some time now, and though I’ve personally never taken the time to really observe this carpet, (I don’t come in here that much. Just my luck, right?) someone did obviously take the time to …
What is the place or object from your childhood that you most think about when you think about home?
When I was seventeen, I was told to hunker down. I was in an acting class and had just spent about fifteen minutes improvising a scene played out on a tightrope between the life I was living and the one I’d just created for my character. Real Life Improv - that’s what my teacher called …
Rewrite your college application essay with today’s point of view answering the question, “Is there anything else we should know?”
I misinterpreted most things by choice at seventeen; I couldn’t define good riddance; I chose not to know the difference between stay and go, but played the victim like a champion. You should know we’re fine, and you should know things got worse. In my college essay I wrote about accepting loneliness, leaving out what …
The Art of Love
"They're just broken bottles" she said, sucking all romance out of finding weathered glass in the sand. I said, "Help me find them," and she bent down, her eyes skimming shells like the local she'll never be as I placed the tiny pieces in her hand and adjusted my wording. "Help me hold them." Budweiser …
I Was Not Sorry
Hey kid - it's me. Just called to see if you’re around tonight. I could use a friend tonight. It’s after Labor Day, and I'd been thinking the summer crowd leaving would make breathing easy, but aside from the drowning, I don’t think I’m sleeping and - Hey kid - you there? I’m back now. …
She Was Crazy That Way
It was 2014, after dinner but before Thanksgiving when I sawed off the head of a deer. We were in the back shed surrounded by the thick scent of fresh death, and I was just a guest, an outsider when it comes to survival. “This should get us through winter,” the father said to his …
Your First Breakup
By late August, we'd exhausted our summer nights with the sort of innocuous chatter that in hindsight can only be defined as endless foreplay - coyly beating around the inevitable. Chris would park his car outside my house, just barely seventeen, a shiny license tucked into the wallet kept safely in one of the deep …
Where Do You Go To Escape
Oh wondrous outlaw waving at bandwagons as they pass, Shackled not by this century's elusive systems, Nor blinded by false definitions of success, Tell me: Where am I to go but venture into the valleys Of creative souls to pick at the well-edited scraps Of former gold mines untapped? I am a modern day Mary …
