Harboring Ghosts

-There are certain places that harbor ghosts, they keep them, but don’t allow them free reign. This is why, as I look out the window and I’m turning right onto DeLacey, I see her. Not her, not as she ever was, but the only way I can see her now. A sense of her perhaps, or the only part of her left with me, quickly fading, so that as I sit at the very top of the parking structure, the one her and I came to years ago, I worry about the name I should give her memory or what […]

End of Smiles

-He remembers her eyes, as if they were windows to her soul, more than that, as if they were her soul. Who’s to say that the soul lingers in the heart, in between pulsations, is it not more fitting to believe that it remains in the eyes, where it cannot be seen but can be felt. He felt her soul that night, and perhaps, that is why all he remembers now, are her eyes. It was there, amidst the flood of tears. And to see her cry was like watching his own tears fall, a reflection. She wrote letters to […]

Railway

-She stands on the platform, her hair flowing, sunglasses covering the brown of her eyes. She fusses with a cell-phone but it’s useless and she puts it away. She looks around and walks up past me and waits. The train arrives, yet only her image is present in my mind, the glasses, her shape and her fair complexion. And they’re the remnants of childhood. I walk up past the door to the rail car in front of me and make my way in her trail, entering and passing, where she is now seated. She scoots over, toward the aisle, a […]

Absence

-“It is exceedingly difficult to maintain a sense of absence without turning that absence into some kind of presence” -Mark Epstein He wakes in the dull morning, the light filtering in through the window. He stares at the ray of light that slices through his room. Putting his hand in its stream he watches the light fill the creases of his palm. ‘What does it say,’ he wonders, remembering a co-worker he once had who always insisted that everything about you is written in the palm of your hand, in exactly those little creases that sometimes disappear in the sunlight. […]

Like Molded Clay

-Some people make you think. You watch them and somehow can’t wrap your mind around their existence. That they exist. It makes you consider existentialism and philosophical solipsism. Are they really carnal manifestations? I was walking home the other day and as I passed an alley I heard a soft pounding against a hard surface and I couldn’t keep my self from looking. As I turned I was able to see a man in his twenties pressing himself into a woman, somewhere around the same age, their lips wrapped around the other’s. As I watched, I started to wonder if […]

Nothing Else

-Our feet collapse the snow as they fall heavy and create our path of footprints. The winter has stopped its tears as we stand feeling the cold breeze bite into us. The lighter’s flame is quickly snuffed and it’s orange hue freezes into the pale winter blue. Parts of the city have been erased by the fallen white. The lighter jiggles in his hand as he sparks the orange hue, again. The cigarette ignites with a crackling and he inhales deeply, his stare, into the dissipating cloud of smoke. His hand falls before him, the cigarette dangling, reminiscent of a […]

Autumn

-Can you control love, the waves of time? Is it so easy to say one moment I love you and the next to change what it is you feel as if it were some on off switch. And when I looked into her eyes, the tears flowing lightly down her cheek and falling onto the pillow. She covered her face with her hands and every time I tried to remove her hands she asked me if I liked to see her cry. I told her then that love is like the ocean, it comes in tides and ours was at […]

Quivering

-“It’s not a big thing,” she says, her lips quivering as her eyes fall from her solid stare into me. “Sometimes it’s nothing, I mean, when I feel there’s something in me and I feel like something, then it may be something and it may bother me. But sometimes, and I feel this more often, I feel this something’s left me and I feel nothing, I feel like nothing and then it’s nothing,” tears, now, shaking themselves from her hazel eyes. As I sit there, across from her, her eyes turned to the ground, tears cascading down as the strands […]

Looking Back

-Do those who leave ever look back? There’s a question in his head that he can’t answer. It bounces around and resounds, so that when the phone rings, he loses all concentration. He ignores the ringing and tries to stop the echoes of the question, and the memories they drudge up, of a past that’s long been lost. In this attempt, as the echoes lose themselves in the memories, he starts to wonder if what he misses are the people who etched themselves into his memory or if in fact the memories could have been created without them. It makes […]

Bliss

-I sit, the cold wind, uncomforting me, and you, shivering. The words carried away, we’re left in silence with nothing but gestures and stares. You half smile, as if trying to salvage something that’s already been lost. I can’t smile back, not even faintly, and it hurts. I know that’s all you want, a reply. To know that like you, I will dig deeper, even if in vain for a finite ephemeral moment of bliss, but I know it’s not there. It goes, with the long passages of time that disappear before me and suddenly I realize I’ve gotten older […]