transformation

  • Changes

    There is a particular kind of silence that arrives before something changes. Not the empty kind. Not the silence of abandonment or endings. This one feels occupied, as though something has been moving quietly behind the walls while everyone else carried on believing the house was asleep. For a while, there were only pieces. A…

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  • The Ones Born Under the Moon

    There comes a strange hour when the mathematics of loss changes. You stop counting the people who left and begin considering what left with you. The room looks different from that side of the equation. There will always be replacements. Another name saved in the phone, another body sitting in the chair, another person learning…

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  • Keep on Keeping On

    Somewhere after the shadow work, the awakening, and the stripping away of everything you once knew to be true, life gets strange. People you swore you could not live without become names you rarely say. The things you thought you needed find other hands. Even memory begins betraying its promises. A face you were certain…

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  • Ghost Story

    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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  • By Definition

    They say doing the same thing over and over again is crazy. Some of us call it consistency. Consistency looks crazy to people who have none. The rest of us keep on keeping on because it is what it is. There was a shop at the end of a narrow city street that only appeared…

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  • The Beginning of the end.

    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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  • Killing Zombies

    The headset goes dark before the world appears. For three seconds there is nothing. Then the floor vibrates beneath my boots. Rain. Cold, silver, artificial rain falling through a city that doesn’t exist. I can smell wet concrete. Nice touch. The abandoned street stretches ahead beneath broken neon signs. Cars sit crooked across intersections. A…

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  • The Reader

    Some people are merely reading the chapters of their life as they are exposed, not everyone can be a writer. There is something unsettling about realizing you have been holding the book upside down. You thought the blank pages meant you were supposed to fill them. You thought the pen belonged to you. It never…

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  • Satan Stepped Aside

    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…

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  • The Field Between Omens

    When I drove past the black dog with black eyes standing at the corner I knew it was the sign that everything was going to be alright. Which makes absolutely no sense. The dog didn’t speak. It didn’t move. It didn’t lift one paw and point dramatically toward my future. It simply stood there. Black…

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