There's Only One Path In Life. The Path Of You.
The promise was simple, repeated so often it became background noise. Be obedient, be pious, follow the rules, and you’ll be rewarded. Maybe not on earth, because earthly happiness (which was perhaps not even real or just a delusion) was trivial compared to eternal salvation, but certainly in the afterlife. Heaven for the good, hell … Read more
The Hospital (Part 1) I was twelve when my father finally died, though “finally” might sound harsh to anyone who didn’t spend nearly a year watching someone deteriorate from the inside out. He’d been diagnosed with throat cancer about a year earlier, the crystal-clear result of smoking at least a pack of Kent brand cigarettes … Read more
Part 1 – The Uncle-In-Law’s Relative’s Place It didn’t happen exactly on Christmas, but it was definitely around the holidays on a Saturday night, and I was ten years old. I’d been dragged to some family’s home for a holiday dinner. They were friends or relatives of my uncle-in-law or something, one of those strange … Read more
I was nine years old, sitting in the school cafeteria during lunch having some meaningless kid conversation with another kid when they abruptly asked me a question that would lodge itself in my brain for years. “Why are you so strange?” he said. Not with cruelty, not with mockery, just genuine confusion, like he’d been … Read more
There’s a specific kind of panic that can only exist in elementary school. It’s not the abstract worry of adult life like bills, relationships, or mortality. It’s immediate and physical and utterly consuming. And when you’re six years old sitting in a first-grade class with a bladder screaming for relief while a woman who terrorized … Read more