"Do you believe that people can change?"

I answered quickly: "People do change."

Later, my response shamed me with a sort of poignant despair. How many of you could attest to my hypocrisy?

It was more than a feeling of obligation, I think. At least I hope it was. I hope it was my own missing piece. If it was, I didn't know it right then, just as you don't know what you're looking at when you reach for the funny gray shape behind the sofa cushion, you don't know what you're looking at until you turn it right side up and recognize that ( Read more... )

"There are different kinds of feminine blushes. There is the coarse brick-red blush which romantic writers always use so freely when they let their heroines blush all over. There is the delicate blush; it is the blush of the spirit's dawn. In a young girl it is priceless. The passing blush produced by a happy idea is beautiful in a man, more ( Read more... )

They tell me that searching my face is like trying to find the spot where the river becomes ocean or the dusk becomes dark: not quite absent, and not quite present. I do try.
And then this haircut...this cute angled bob of a thing that belongs to a shorter, cuter woman with a whimsical name. I have to smile all of the time just to keep up with it.

So there we were, lying side by side, our desires suddenly appearing brazen, maybe even foolish, in retrospect. I felt grateful for his weight just then, for the physical certainty of him, the way he filled my bed. I didn't feel much like a helpmate, but I turned to him anyway, smoothing my hands over his eyes, his mouth, around the back of his ( Read more... )

I've always thought of grief as like living underground. All spongy and muffled like that. You're not yourself. Maybe you even do things you don't know you're doing, like throwing things that shouldn't be thrown, or talking to people that don't want to listen. But then a day comes when the unbearable thing isn't the first thing you think of. It's ( Read more... )

There is a sort of monastic simplicity in so-broke-buying-isn't-even-an-option ( Read more... )

Riding in the car, he reaches over, grabs the largest part of my leg and shakes it (jiggles,really).

Me: Are you jiggling my leg fat?
Him: No; I'm confirming our love.

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