I often find myself telling people I have a terrible memory. I mean that in two ways: 1/ I don’t remember anything well, and 2/ What I often remember are the terrible things that have happened.
There have been times over the last eighteen months that I knew without a doubt that my purpose was over, that my time had come. Slogging through that and pulling myself together enough to do something as simple as brush my teeth was difficult. I am fortunate in that I have exquisite friends who, at times, fell over each other reminding me that I am not the story another person made of me.
Now, what name did I want to reflect me? What name did I want to represent “me” to the outside world?
To be, or not to be, Smith or Jones. That was the question.
For a long while, truth will live inside me like a secret. It will pace back and forth along the edges inside my body to learn the space and depth of its confinement.
The weeks leading up to my Bipolar diagnosis were some of the most agonizing moments of my entire existence; dissociations, delusions and absolutely no chance of sleep.
My mother searched for release in a man. In many men. The only place she thought she could find it. The only place her world allowed her to search.
I wanted to wail, to have my body wracked with sobbing, but as it was, my crying was making the ultrasound picture blurry. I tried to calm my body but the tears wouldn’t stop.
At the time, this seemed a cool but token title—why would we need to steward liberty? At the time, it didn’t occur to me that all six of us “Stewards of Liberty” were white.
When the nurse wakes me, the woman is gone as are most of the other patients. “Would you like a wheelchair for the way out?”, she asks, no longer using a voice that suggests we’re peers.
“No,” I lie, trying not to lean too obviously against the wall while I wait for my fiancé to bring the car around.
I make my husband crazy sometimes (a lot of the times) because it seems things are always, always going wrong. Before this years-long bout of depression, I often cooed, “It’ll be okay,” and he glared back and ask “how?”
By Amy Fowler Several years ago, my mom started existing in a parallel but alternate reality. Her interdimensional trips…
Unlike actual gay people, you really did choose to make your life more difficult, to let us say those things about you, to hide so much of your life from so many.
I am suspicious of the moms who tell me that being an empty nester is the best thing yet. They have huge smiles on their faces and I know they mean to reassure me when they say they often don’t even bother cooking dinner now.
It’s funny how much time is spent on forgetting until someone says consider the female orgasm in fiction or some such, and the world opens up, and you are struck, again, by all that dew and possibility.
