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Romantic Love
Maggie Fever
I turned slow circles in the night, raked with chills, unsure which door would open. I thought of bolting off. Then I began to savor the moment, this tiny half-beat interlude before Maggie and I came face to face. It was like being perched at a swing’s highest backward point, waiting to rush the air.
October 2005
A Year Like Any Other
How long will it be, after you die, before the last living person who knew you also dies? And when there is no one left living who remembers you, what will your life mean then, after all of the noise?
September 2005
I Will Soon Be Married
I will soon be married, though it’s nothing I would have believed, nothing for which I’m prepared. The bride is asleep across town, and she and I have made no real plans. We’ve scarcely discussed it. Yet I feel a pang of anticipation each morning. I feel that same ache now while I sit with my guitar across my lap, drunk and trying to stay conscious at four in the morning.
September 2005
Remote As The Moon
I was fucking a near stranger in northeast Chicago when my mother died. His name was Jonathan. He was tall, long-limbed with enormous hands and prematurely gray hair, an activist who lectured on “the struggle” so genuinely I almost believed him: that we would win this, whoever “we” were, whatever it was.
August 2005The Last, Hateful Word
The day I met Harry, he was drunk and desperate. We were in a bar with a group of work colleagues, and he was ranting about how a woman had mistreated him. There was something about fumbled sex on a beach, and a long train ride, and a wound to the heart. His tone was dramatic, misogynistic, and self-pitying. I thought he was the most obnoxious man I had ever met.
May 2005
And Passion Most Of All
Her eyes were hard. I knew then that she was going to be relentless and wouldn’t give up until I acknowledged the truth.
April 2005
The High Heart
Keith had had a plenty rough day, most of it spent with his girlfriend, Bonnie, in an abortion clinic just outside of Pittsburgh. You could see how frayed he was: skinny as hell and that big head of electrocuted hair, smoking one cigarette after another, the blue veins in his forehead like hot wires about to rupture.
February 2005
Prayer Wheel
A few days after our mother entered the hospital, my brother and I left for summer camp. Our mother, who could still sit up in bed, wanted us to go, and our father did too. We’d been looking forward all summer to sleeping in tents under the stars, rappelling down the sides of cliffs, and hiking along streams.
February 2005
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