change
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Faulkner wrote, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”Anyone who has tried to heal a family wound knows how inconveniently alive the past can be. We bury it, and it comes down to breakfast. We forbid it to speak, and discover that our children have learned its language.Long before we had scientific names…
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You don’t have to remember everything for it to have happened. There are things I remember with photographic clarity. There are other things that exist only as fragments. A feeling. A room. A particular kind of silence. The sudden awareness that something was wrong without having the vocabulary to explain what “wrong” meant. Childhood is…
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There is a particular kind of evil that does not end when the man dies, or when the house is sold, or when the child grows up and finally walks out the door. It survives in the people who learned to call it something else. They learned that silence was loyalty. That protecting the family…
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Sometimes I watch my children in the late afternoon, when the house has gone soft around the edges, and I think about the child I was. They don’t know they are being watched. They are barefoot. Someone is laughing in the next room. Someone is asking for a snack they have already been told they…
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‘You weren’t born to be anything you want; you were born to be something quite specific.’ —Martin Shaw, Smokehole Somewhere along the way I was taught that freedom meant becoming anything I wanted. Build yourself. Reinvent yourself. Curate yourself. Keep every door open until life itself becomes one long hallway of mirrors. But God has…
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My body became a monument to everything I refused to say. For years I searched for what was broken in me, never suspecting it might be my soul crying out. Headaches. A neck so tight it felt like it was holding up decades instead of a head. It is a strange thing, how flesh becomes…
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I spent years running from stillness. The moment life became quiet, I reached for something to fill the space. Drugs. Sex. Attention. Fantasy. Chaos. Busyness. It hardly mattered what the distraction was, only that it kept me from being alone with myself for too long. I thought I was avoiding boredom. Looking back, I think…
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Before the house fully woke up, before the questions and snacks and little feet hitting the floor, I carried my unrest outside like a basket too heavy for one arm. Motherhood with small children has a way of thinning you out. The broken sleep. The constant touching. The noise. The invisible labor of remembering everything…
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Introspection — what better way to start a week. I think this is an interesting question. How do we know what secrets are buried in our heart? Is it pain? Is it mayhem? What stirs beneath my actions? What makes me choose one way or another? What is under my fear? These are the secrets…
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For the next 12 days, we are returning to posts from the past that have been the most popular with YOU! Here’s our 5th post as a nod to our readers. Am I a Murderer When I was three and a half years old, I murdered a woman. I spent the next 50 years retracing…