brain on vacation

The baby is playing with a leaf

On a Seattle-like, wet and cloudy day.

An autumn breeze—the first day in a long while

I’ve thought of a coat.

Is it like this on an Alaskan cruise?

I choose to believe so.

And life really isn’t all that bad.

I can eat a spoonful of peanut butter,

hear a long-forgotten song,

read any book I want,

and go to bed whenever I’d like.

Yes, I can delight in every moment

of my life.

My brain on vacation

for five minutes at a time.

depression, ya?

Even when ya know how,  

it’s hard to swim  

with a rifle  

strapped to ya.

Life isn’t easy,  

but sometimes it is—  

like drinking cold chocolate milk  

and loving puppies and kittens.

And sometimes it’s a long,

loaded barrel

pulling ya down  

as ya struggle  

to breathe.

quintessence

She had a habit of keeping her eyes open while she kissed. Maybe it was strange, but seeing the other person’s face always turned her on. She liked looking at their lips afterward, slick with saliva.

Most of all, she liked it when the other person kept their eyes closed: the flutter of their eyelashes, the furrow of their brow. She was so close she couldn’t see much, but what she could see was enough.

As a girl, when she attended church, she always peeked during prayers. She glanced left and right at the bowed heads, the closed eyes, the reverent appeals to an invisible god who granted wishes at whim.

She liked making out. It made her feel young again, fourteen and in the driveway, exploring some neighborhood boy’s mouth with her probing tongue. She could get off just grinding her hips against another body—no sex, if they let her.

As she got older, the pattern repeated. In one relationship after another, what she liked was overruled by what they wanted, which inevitably meant sex—and her staring blankly at the dead-white ceiling until they were done with her.

It shouldn’t have surprised anyone that a sexless marriage had come to appeal to a girl who had craved nothing but physical connection to another human being her whole life.

Nothing was better than what everyone else eventually gave.