mental-health
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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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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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They underestimated what you could do, who you are. The first attempt happened before you could speak. You wouldn’t remember it. That was the point. By five, you had already learned to watch people’s faces before listening to their words. By eight, you understood that love occasionally packed a suitcase. By twelve, betrayal had introduced…
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Perhaps the cruelest thing God ever did was remember everything. Imagine eternity with no locked doors. No unanswered questions. No accidents. No wrong turns. No lovers who leave before morning. No death waiting somewhere beyond the candlelight. No possibility that the thing standing in the shadows might actually hurt you. You know everything. You are…
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Opinions should only come from people who are living the life you want. Everyone else should be a spectator. But spectators are rarely quiet. They sit comfortably in the ruins of their own choices and shout instructions across the fence about how someone else should rebuild theirs. Turn left. Leave. Stay. Forgive. Walk away. Try…
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People no longer cease to amaze me in the worst way possible. Maybe that sounds cynical. It probably is. But cynicism is merely optimism after it has been mugged in a dark alley enough times to recognize the footsteps behind it. There are very few people left who aren’t looking out for themselves first. I…
