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47. Trying to Do it All Alone, Still at Twenty-Three
Do you believe in destiny? Do you believe that there is one path and that whichever decisions you make are the decisions you were made to make? What happens at the end of along the way the paths you never chose? the paths you chose not to choose? I am on a train to East Grinstead. I slept three nights…
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46. Trying to Let the Dishes Pile Up at Twenty-Three
Recently I watched, in the cinema, a movie called Thelma. Thelma, in conversation with her friend, struggles to understand why anyone would want to spend their last days in a care center; she begs to know whether he doesn’t feel suffocated by choicelessness and smothered with unsolicited concern. Her friend says something sad and quite sweet, something about how his…
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45. Trying to Sit Side-By-Side at Twenty-Three
Last night, we were two sirens whose somehow singular gravity center pulled with enough force to deafen even Nikola Tesla’s cousin’s great-grandson. When you and I sit side-by-side, I vibrate higher and sink deeper at the same time; I get so wonderfully lost in the vision we become, like a fully embodied desert mirage. There is a street in Tallahassee…
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44. Trying to Write A Letter to The Person Who Burglarized My Car This Morning at Twenty-Three
To whomever it may concern, The officer asked me if I wanted to press charges and I wanted to ask whether you had a family to feed but instead I just said, Yes because, well, it seemed like there’d be extra paperwork if I wanted all my questions answered. My first thought when I realized what you had stolen from…
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43. Trying to Pack the Dishwasher at Twenty-Three
I have always expected more from the dishwasher. I used to watch, dumbfounded, as the adults in my life scrubbed the dishes clean before arranging them onto the racks of that lazy and sparkling silver appliance. And one day I finally did it. I asked the question that marked the beginning of my becoming a person: “Why would I wash…
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42. Trying to Indicate Right at Twenty-Three
As I sit stationary at the red light just north of Tennessee street, my hand hovers under the indicator before I remember that I am not heading back to my apartment, that I don’t have an apartment anymore; despite what my bank lists as my billing address, I no longer live across from that biscuit company just off the edge…
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41. Miscellaneous Break
some (intensely unedited) words from my recent past that just put me on the verge of tears: WHAT’S CRAZY is how standing under a big tree during an evening shower, being hit with raindrops on delay, raindrops whose lifetimes were extended thanks to the leaves of this big tree; is like looking up into the night sky, seeing into the…
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40. Trying to Come Full Circle at Twenty-Three
It’s hard to explain but I recently encountered a younger version of myself. She was exactly sixteen and she was crying in her childhood bedroom, a bedroom which was recently obliterated to bits by some indifferent man on an indifferent bulldozer, by someone paid to destroy what was in order to make space for what will be. And her tears…
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39. Trying to Let the Thing Be the Thing at Twenty-Three
Have you ever fit so particularly snuggly into a moment of yesterday that you could not help but wake up today not eager to expand into something larger but insistent upon shrinking back into the exact perfection of yesterday only to be disappointed, albeit not surprised, to find that yesterday’s perfect fit could never possibly be today’s? I tend to…
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38. Trying to Cool Coffee at Twenty-Three
Imagine for a moment, dear reader, that you left home in June of last year. You boarded a plane, teary-eyed after kissing your loved ones hurriedly outside the terminal; you remember walking to your gate, gasping for air, tapping your pockets as if it is some thing you are leaving behind. You remember concocting a story about the airport policeman…