letting-go
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You wake up one random day under the sun and finally take the advice of someone born ten years too late, unless you were the one born ten years too early. Time has a strange sense of humor that way. It will send the right person through the wrong decade and still expect you to…
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Eventually, loving them begins to require something crueler than staying. You let them go. You stand at a distance and watch them dance with their devil, recognizing the steps because you watched them practice for years. There is a hollowness behind their eyes that you once tried desperately to reach. You stop trying. Not because…
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New Orleans is different before dawn. The drunks have mostly surrendered. The tourists are asleep beneath hotel sheets they will complain about at checkout. And the dead finally have the streets to themselves. I had one thing left to do before I left. The cemetery gates were still locked when I arrived, which felt appropriate.…
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The woman in Jackson Square told me I had brought someone with me. I smiled. Of course I had. He had been with me for years. New Orleans was sweating through midnight, all perfume and rot beneath the balconies. Rain still glistened between the bricks. Somewhere down Chartres Street, a trumpet was playing something slow…
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The road had no name, which was probably why she trusted it. Named things came with expectations. Destinations. Promises. Graves. She had learned enough about all four. She left before sunrise with one bag, half a tank of gas, and nothing in the back seat worth turning around for. For the first hundred miles, she…
