life
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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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There was an agreement once. Older than the people who signed it. Older than the beds they shared, the children they raised, the names carved into courthouse paper. No one remembers writing it. That was the clever part. It passed from hand to hand without ink, disguised as love. The masculine would provide. The feminine…
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He was the confessional without the collar. No stained glass. No wooden booth. No priest waiting patiently on the other side of a little brass screen. Just a telephone that was almost always on speaker and a man who could never keep his sins inside his own mouth. Behind closed doors, they poured out. The…
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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.…
