The constant motion kept her sane, kept her from feeling just how heavy her heart had become…
Even the most anodyne of hearts has its faultline, as soft and tender on the inside as a baby’s arm.
The circumstances have changed so can you really expect me to keep all my promises?
I went fishing for opera trout on my day off and had excellent luck, catching a quartet by noon; one did sing a little off-key, however, so I threw him back.
Laying in bed with him, all I can see is the swirl of ink across his neck, and I realize that everything is… wonderful.
“A lot has happened since then,” he shrugged and looked over at the man he used to call a friend, “it’s hard not to change....”
She always cared fiercely for him, and I know he loved her, though he could never bring himself to say…
Having found out once and for all that she could do nothing right, she decided to do everything decidedly wrong.
Let the paint peel, let the grass grow, the windows will fog, the pipes will rust, the world will pass us by, and as long as you’re here with me I am happy.
Someone asked me tonight whether I had ever been afraid of anything and it was the absurdity of the question that made me look away and chuckle, because the assumption that people have about others who give an outward impression of confidence and sublimity is that life roles off of them like water off of a duck’s back, but the fact is and what I tried to make clear with my one-word answer is that fear is sometimes what drives people to perceived heights and that the confidence others see is often being displayed on behalf of the person projecting it rather than anyone else who might see it due to the projector’s keen understanding that the abyss always sits immediately in front of him and inside of him and, therefore, yes, ‘Constantly’.
In the end, neither of us backed down: I, who had stopped listening to her truth, left her key on her vanity; she, who had stopped looking at my truth, left my key on my old speaker, and we never crossed thresholds again.
Stephen and I once had a running competition about funny ways we could express our depression; he won by answering the phone one day, “I just took my head out of the toilet long enough to say hello.”
In response to his declaration, “I’m not a complete asshole,” I was forced to reply, “No, you are merely the creamy center.”
The Social Anxiety Support Group had only one member show up, and she came drunk.
we walked through the storm until our feet left the ground and our futures weren’t the only thing up in the air.
In the personal diary that would one day be referred to as Death So Sweet - The Bundt Cake Murders of Helen Perkins, Mrs. Perkins wrote: “Murder is not so unlike marriage, in that both require immense patience and an understanding that there will be many times when an unsavory act must simply be tolerated for the greater good.”
In my immediate future is a walk through bruising levels of heat and humidity, a lunch seasoned with habanero sauce and a margarita strong enough to fell an infantry division; all this will either render me into a paste, suitable for spackling drywall, or it will cure me once and for all.
Don’tcha wish we could just all have a big Scrine group hug?!
Danielle was uncertain about kicking her smoking habit because she wasn’t sure what non-smokers did after sex – have more sex, probably – and, truth be told, she enjoyed the nicotine more than she did the lovemaking.
Mickey swore that he named his series of janitor robots after “Hay-sus,” the one-eyed super-janitor who used to clean the corporate headquaters, but I knew that was just a PR story made up after the fact to quiet down the outraged Christians; secretly Mickey thought it perfectly appropriate that after cleaning up people’s figurative crap for a few thousand years, a real army of Jesuses (Jesi?) should do it literally.
Pretty they may be, but how many flighty, overly pretty people do you trust?
Mencken enjoyed the nightlife
And was once asked by a stripteasist,
To coin a word for her profession,
He came up with ecdysiast.
Madison’s idea of living dangerously was ordering tacos from a sidewalk vender who cooked on a battery-powered hot plate and a cart stolen from the IBM warehouse around the corner.
I love almost everything about my French teacher: her pixie haircut, her giant hand bags, her sense of humor, her graceful hand gestures, but she is so painfully thin that I just want to feed her salami and lard sandwiches until she can’t hide behind a broom handle anymore.
The foods I like best are simply venues for salt.
O metal bird of non-blinking whatnot, I’m going to use this arena as an outlet because I’m 5 days away from defending a thesis and my advisor just told me that my argument, which is soundly based on math and science, YOU JACKASS, is baseless, which is only going to make me more correct during the defense and I think she knows this because she’s remarkably intelligent and wily in that way that makes you nervous, but that’s not the point, no, the point is that I feel like the time has come to do what I’d mentioned in a recent comment and follow Mr. Mencken’s advice and ‘raise the black flag...’, even though I realize ‘mouse is a lawyer and may end up prosecuting me for what follows, but what the hell, anger with no outlet leads to reality TV and that’s totally unacceptable, so here goes...If I was the kind of 16-year old in a 35-year old’s body willing to teepee someone’s house, I’d totally do it to my advisor’s hizzy, only instead of toilet paper, I’d probably use a flame-thrower, and instead of soap, I’d probably use napalm, and oh by the way, f*ck you, Auqa Man, for never destroying Sea World and freeing your watery brethren, yes, it’s a tangent, but I figured while I was getting things off my chest, I may as well be thorough about it.
“ring ring, hello twelve-year-old, blablclinton, blablabama, demobla, alreadyvoted, yada yada anybody, on a scale of 0-ten what would i consider the best possible life for me, wait, life? best possible life? wait, how satisfied am i with my health? or my health care? how satisfied am i with my personal life?? WHO IS THIS ANYWAY???
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the time of iPods and hip real estate acronyms, it was the time of handwritten cardboard signs and street corner regulars, it was the time of demise, the time of failing language, the time of false promise and useless hope—it short, it was the time of precarious balance, when looking the other way became the drug of choice, the only thing that kept the balancing act from collapsing under the crippling weight of its own imagined brilliance.
“Here, Fate, here, Fatey, Fatey, Fatey, Fate - I’ve a great big Biscuit of Trouble-Brewing for you!”
Once out of the ex-boyfriend’s apartment and ensconced in a hotel room near the L’arc de Triomphe with rose petals in the bathroom, my vacation seemed to be guided by a genius hand that had me drinking mulled wine while listening to jazz on a bridge by Notre Dame, walking into Sacre Coeur to hear a chorus of nuns sing, enjoying a heavenly tea at Mariage Frere, and redefining the term “room service” with a very cute french staff member at my hotel; I went to Paris looking for happiness and found something more important, that I am still capable of great things, all while leaving a wake of heartbroken men in my path.
You say ‘tomato’; I say, ‘shut up bitch.’
This morning all the clouds in the sky were in streaks converging at a single point, which, thank God, was not in the direction of Bethlehem (since I’m low on frankincense and plumb out of faith) but was actually in the general direction of Salem, Oregon.
You may have your own Personal Jesus, but I have to share Jesus the one-eyed superjanitor with the rest of the people in my office building.
She had nothing he wanted when he was sober; he had nothing she wanted when he was drunk--so she poured herself a double and smiled.
Wanted: Something to fill the emptiness and stop the pain.
When a driver whose car already has a dent in the rear fender would like to move into one’s lane, one should let him in.
Self perception can lead you to believe you are functioning on full power, when clearly this is not the case.
“I’ve never eaten a mango.” [Keith]
Jeremiah was a certain green amphibian with whom I was in close aquaintence...he was quite difficult to comprehend but his taste in alcoholic drinks was quite impeccible.
Having not drunk any alcohol for nearly 20 hours, Juan found himself staggeringly lucid and vowed to foreswear sobriety and remedy this unpleasant turn of events at the earliest possible moment.
It saddens me to think that in solitude most find only loneliness.
be perfect, nor should I have been perfect...mistakes are in my human nature, for I am human...So why is taking responsibility for this so hard...Is is because I should be better than everyone else, because that pristine pedestal you had of me shattered, or is it because, even though I thought I was doing what I thought was right only to find out it was a horrible mistake, you got hurt above all others?
If anyone has seen my cheerful attitude and sunny, optimistic disposition, please return them tonight while I am asleep—no questions asked, reward.
Capture it before it goes, the wind, his thoughts, his smile, the moment, the memory, the last time she ever spoke your name, the way she kissed you and held your face, capture it before it’s gone, before you say goodbye.
Pain that is kicked out of one’s muscles by liberal oral application of tequila is sure to come back about 12 hours later, duller, sodden, very pissed off and dead-set on taking up residence inside one’s skull.