Tag: depression
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Kintsugi
The pottery bowl that sits on my desk contains markers of my identity: black leather wallet with driver’s license, house keys, Covid vaccination record. The father of a childhood friend made it, spinning clay on a wheel in his garage a short walk from the house where I grew up, my hometown’s name etched on…
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Oyster Mood
Everything is an irritant: a grain of sand I cannot locate rubbing against my sunburned thighs. Coffee on an empty stomach. Hunger without appetite. A cough that dislodges nothing, not even a shimmering pearl.
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First Beard
My first attempt to grow a beard was when I was hospitalized for cutting my wrist with a knife. After some days of patchy growth, I saw myself in the mirror of the psych ward’s common bathroom and decided to shave it off. Closely monitored by a nurse, I used a razor on my face…
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“Keep Moving”
My 90-year-old grandma said when I told her I was bereft after my first wife called it quits. This was almost ten years ago and even now what comes to mind is a nurse shark on the seabed slowly scoping their feeding grounds: a sluggish but deliberate motion to keep a vital flow of oxygen…
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The Path Ahead
Guidance for the Path Ahead There is no guarantee of safe passage. Security is a flimsy veneer, a fiction we agree to less each day, that papers over the brambles and wolves. In times like these when thorns outnumber fruit and as night falls the pack starts to close in, do not forsake your wits…
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Root Beer
Lips pursed around the straw for the first sip, my gullet floods with bubbles and sugar. That sassafras-flavored beverage also brings me a dose of caffeine. A few slurps later, I feel effervescent. Like an ice-cold soft drink in a plastic cup, my elevated mind begins to fizz. Thoughts occur unbidden. Ideas burst. It is…
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Change
When the hammer strikes against a metal sheet and leaves its mark on the tranquil flatness now forever changed sculpted into a new shape so it is with certain events and the impact they have on life such as the sudden loss of someone close – not like a rock thrown in a pond whose…
From the Firefly Galaxy 