thoughts on water
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…we built and we built and we built
and the housatonic knocked them all down
and the boys got mad
and they yelled at the river
for acting like a river
Dropping in
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The thing about skateboarding is, you can master almost any trick with a combination of repetition and fearlessness. Having nothing to lose is also a good substitute for fearlessness. Or maybe it’s the same thing.
Read MoreOn writing
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It tapered off slowly, the writing. I’d find myself starting a new post with the bemused observation that it had been two months since I’d last written. Then it had been three months, then five, and now I might write twice a year. The last post was for her birthday. January. The only post this year. It’s been a crazy year, this one. But still, I wonder what happened to time when I passed it all writing. Where did I find it that time? What did I ignore or neglect or simply cease to notice while I was writing? How is grief so all-consuming and then one day… it’s not?
Read MoreThe journal
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I sat with it on my lap, my hands resting on the cover, my eyes closed. My throat closed up and I felt tears sting my eyes, all from touching it. This journal has become a visceral talisman of all those emotions that are too big for me to hold inside of myself. So they live here. Safely tucked away, but still with me.
Read MoreWhat it's like
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These questions remain, hanging: Where would he have sat at Thanksgiving? What costume would he have worn for his first Halloween? (a ghost, he was going to be a ghost, just as his sister was her first Halloween). Who would he have become?
Read MoreThe alternate universe
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Hi! Last time I saw you, you were pregnant, and you must have had the baby! Congratulations! I signaled back with a grimace and gesture at the phone to indicate that I was on an important call and couldn’t talk right now. After our run-in, Jill was still walking around in her version of reality in which my daughter was alive. Our wordless interlude had given me a glimpse into an alternate universe — the one I wished I lived in, in which I had a phone full of photos of my soon-to-be toddler. The one in which people’s faces light up when they run into me on the street.
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