The Boy Who Said Love Wasn’t Real

Love is the only thing that is real. A friend recently told me, full of conviction if not a bit wounded, that love does not exist. “But it does,” I insisted. “For example, you’re a total butthead and I still love you.” He grimaced. It wasn’t a compelling argument. I understand feeling cut off from…

Life’s Surrender

My God, am I grateful for what hasn’t worked out. Imagine if I had gotten my way always. Imagine if exerting my will on my life, on others, on the institutions and organizations around me had come out according to my plan. I promise you, that would have been the most self-centered, disastrous implosion of…

Boxes

My life is a series of shelves on a wall. On each shelf is a carefully placed box, tied tightly with a ribbon. Some boxes are disheveled, duct tape holding their flimsy frames together. I’ve had these boxes a long time. They are tired and torn and the shelves sag beneath their weight. They are…

365

My mind drifts back sometimes these days to a year ago. I mark the dates off in my head – this day I was out of surgery, I was in pain at hotel, I made it home to Montana, I was life-flighted to Seattle, I was enduring torture at the hospital, another day of hell…

The Chair

Things I’m learning as I sit: In a relationship, two halves do not make a whole. Broken does not mend broken. I want to believe there is good in the world – sometimes I do nice things for other people just to prove it to myself. You absolutely cannot give what you do not have….

Happy Birthday

This is the first birthday, the first year that will click over into the year I outlive her. I was holding onto 38 feeling like we had both at least made it that far. When I almost died from bleeding out in the hospital this April, a year and two weeks after she passed, it…

Allemande Left

Well, I wasn’t expecting this. I’ve been cared for and looked after by Tom for over five years as I ebb and flow from this medical peak or that depressive valley. I’m still fresh off my last stumble and fall from a surgery that turned into two surgeries and then sepsis. And yet, here we…

Again

It’s time to write again. The hurt, the triumphs, the work it takes to bridge the gap. It’s true, I’ve lived a melancholy life. I’m trying to do something different. My future has lied to me; it has hurt me, twisted me into mystifying, excruciating shapes. But I want to reclaim some land, some space…

Babe

I am known best for my authentic, vulnerable, soul-searching writing. That’s a fair assessment. But also, I sometimes take the shortcut. Like today. Today I want to be a babe. I want to feel like, and objectively earn, legitimate babe status. I’ve been walking the perimeter of the issue for awhile now, and I’m just…

Depression Is…

Depression is silent. Depression is trying desperately to cry out for something to hold on to but not being able to make a sound. It is the excruciating experience of not having the language to convey how much you are struggling. It is watching the divide between you and the ones you need grow wider…