There isn’t a day she doesn’t remember. Flashbulb memories, her psychology professor calls it - the vividness of that one moment or moments. Smells. Sights. Sounds. Tastes. Touches - what she would give to forget, or at least to move on. Maybe repression would have been better, or if she hadn’t fought back and kept her mind so sane when she was ( Read more... )

She doesn't tell her mother that the reason she refuses to sleep is because she's afraid of what comes in dreams and nightmares and even now, daymares - that even arguments and heated concern and all that nonsense of insomnia and therapy aren't going to heal this. She remains awake hiding because it's better than the alternative - no matter how ( Read more... )

Last week, I found Coco dead on the edge of the woods in my backyard ( Read more... )

“Mama?” she said. The word cut through every layer: the dark house, the late hour, the deep sleep, the gin still polluting her blood, the dream still spinning whimsically. All of it sliced away as if with a scalpel by her daughter's voice on the telephone ( Read more... )

February 14 ( Read more... )

He’s trying to sew her heart back together, but what use is sewing when what you need is welding?

She thinks she understands now - the feeling of empty. Sitting before keyboards full of potential and absolutely nothing. Watching people go about their daily lives, and having nothing to say for it.

My father was tortured, she confesses. He was taken by the local gang to a faraway place. They raided our shop, the neighbors all knew, of course, but they couldn’t do anything. They watched them go in and take him away. The baskets, the counters - nothing was overturned, nothing changed - except my father no longer was. We hid upstairs, in the ( Read more... )

She watches her family’s income run dry. Her father in the hospital. Mother in a shallow grave somewhere perhaps. Hungry ( Read more... )

She watches him forgetting day after day. Watches the memories slip away in the lingering pauses before he speaks. While he speaks. After he speaks. Hands touching her face, having forgotten how he once had ( Read more... )