Sometimes I don’t make the smartest of decisions. Take last Friday for example. There I was enjoying a perfectly lovely dinner comprised of two perfectly charbroiled breasts of chicken and one scrumptious baked potato at a fancy restaurant with perfectly dim lighting, when I decided to act perfectly stupid, and shove a brimming spoonful of leftover horse radish sauce into my mouth, and swallow it. (Note: There is a GOOD reason horse radish sauce is served in SMALL quantities, and consumed in likewise MINUTE portions.) Why? Because I was dared to. Because, really, sometimes I am not smart. And because, in the shadows cast by the perfectly dim lighting of the fancy restaurant, twenty dollars sure looked a fine trade for the “meager” spoonful of horse radish.
The look I was attempting to procure with my ridiculous horse radish consumption: fearless, impulsive, fun, and of course, iron-stomached. The look I succeeded in rapidly obtaining and sporting for the remainder of the evening: nauseous.
After swallowing the contents of the spoon I spent the next fifteen minutes in the perfectly vacant bathroom of the fancy restaurant with perfectly dim lighting, attempting to make my perfectly stupid self be sick, and, hopefully, thereby alleviate the strong cramping sensation overwhelming my stomach, and the painful burning sensation now taking residence in my throat and nasal cavities. But alas, I have never been able to pay homage to the porcelain king, unless forced by circumstances beyond my control. So, try as I might, the horse radish stayed comfy cozy in my tummy, and I, I stayed clammy pale, burp-ridden and generally ill for hours afterward.
On the up side, I was extremely appreciative that our waitress, after refilling three glasses of water I rapidly guzzled in a desperate attempt to dilute the sauce, didn’t give me a strange look, and in fact, acted as if it was a perfectly normal request when, after she asked if any one of us would like to order from the dessert menu, I fought back the gurgling in my throat and asked, not for dessert, but for a large piece of plain bread.
I posted a picture of him for a silly Instagram-related game and found him waiting for me in my dreams, something which occurs so rarely it still explodes solidly-constructed dams inside me each time I see his face, mustached and smiling at mine just the way he always did, just the way I always remember him. As usual he didn’t say much, not anything I could hear or remember, but he was there and I knew it, and when I → Read more...
I have words washed out to sea. Words ushered quietly from my lips to my fingertips, waiting patiently for the right tide, for the moon to bring my stories alive.
I have words being reviewed, words accepted and words rejected, and I’m clinging to my favorite lines, fighting for them, and it feels strange and new and exhilaratingly infuriating, this tug-of-war of wills and how the slightest bit of caving can make me feel like I’m flirting with abandoning the sanctity → Read more...
[Alternately titled: Story, The Second: The Girl Who Moved To Washington State]
It began simply. A direct message on Twitter first, followed by texts; those texts, in turn, begat plans. With those plans came anxiety and apprehension – I didn’t know you, not your face or your voice or anything else, and I wasn’t sure I was ready to – but also something exciting, a strange and unexpected hope hovering quietly on the horizon. And then we met, conversed and laughed → Read more...
Stories I said I had. Tangential stories and life-changing ones.
Until today I haven’t known where, exactly, to begin. And so quiet this space has mostly been because some beginnings are tricky. Sometimes it’s quite impossible to denote where something ended and something else entirely began.
I’m not going to be able to tell you everything, but then the best stories never really do, do they?
(That’s not a trick question. I promise they don’t.)
(Unless the story was penned by Henry James, in → Read more...