Difficulties With Intimacy

“It must be exhausting being you. You spend your whole life looking out. You watch how people look at you. You are so concerned with what people think. You don’t live your life. All you do is wonder if you’re crazy, if anyone is thinking that. You're not crazy. Or you are, but not in the way that you think.”

The loneliness is palpable.

Like Father Part Two

"To have a love affair, a true love affair, it has to be with someone that holds apart of you. They have to get inside you. They have to matter," he tells me.

How did we start talking about love?

"Why do you think people who are the most talented are the most crazy?" I know I asked him that.

"Writing is painful work. It costs you. And there's the desire to create your whole world, to change it and have things work out how you want to, and therein lies inherent danger. If your time in the real world drives you to create your own, that's mystical and so all encompassing that you have to live within it, that's very dangerous, if you ask me. It is exhausting and if it's not tiring, you aren't doing it right. You become whole other beings. You are not who you're living inside. That'll make you crazy. There is nothing so lonely as being a writer. Every writer is crazy."

Did he say it like that? There's always more poetry than I remember.

But that's life isn't it?

Monster - Short Story Excerpt Two

The new moon rode high over the modest golden fields and bruised skyline. It is too hot for sleep. Tangled in sheets and sweating, I left the bed frustrated, wanting for sleep but unable to find it. I have decided to take a long walk. The space I create cutting through the thick air is cooling, and when I am far enough from James I can breathe again.

Since he proposed marriage, my hair has been falling out. All around the house I see it, like small golden chains, littering the floor. No matter how much I sweep I cannot clear them away. The strands seem to multiply each day. They are little lightning bolts made of my dead skin that mock me and remind me there's a reason that actresses wear wigs. I wonder if a bald bride is still a beautiful one.

My mother died last year, bald. I believe that we were very much alike, but due to our sameness, could never relate. But we understood each other, silently. I miss her much. I think now that she was faced with this same decision. She chose to marry my father.

I wonder if it cost her her life; the cancer sprouting everywhere it could, seeping into her bones, punishing her for lying. If she were still here and not underground, I do think I would ask her what to do. I am not the type to stand at her grave and ask advice. It is ridiculous to believe a dead person can hear you when their ears have long rotted off their face. She wouldn’t tell me anyway.

When I was a small child she would leave for hours at a time to visit with friends that I knew did not exist. There was Mary her friend from church, who never attended when I did, forever busy with ‘Obligations!’ as my mother would say. There was her doctor Mr. Green, whose office I tried to look up in the phonebook when I was fifteen to no avail. And there was Mrs. Merriweather, the sick old widow that mother would bring dinner every Saturday night, to an address that did not exist anywhere in Texas.

I don't think my father knew she was lying. He was not a monster like she was, and could not smell the dishonesty. But I am her kind, born with a keen nose, always aware of her indiscretions.

I now lie to James. I tell him I am seeing a psychiatrist when really I cannot think of anything more pitiful. For three hours every week I drive as far away as I can before I have to turn back, giving my face a break from it's metaled mask.

I walk home through such blackness that I cannot see two paces in front of me. I dread each step closer to the cabin knowing I will not sleep tonight. There is no extra blanket for my wooden mattress.

Allow me to reintroduce myself.

Jesse Patrick

I look at him and wonder what he’ll be like when he’s older.

He’s not interested in me right now. I’m long hair that he’s not allowed to pull. I’m his mother being distracted by adults. I’m words he doesn’t understand and loud laughter that bugs him when he’s watching Treehouse. He’s interested in little boy things; Thomas the Tank Engine, kicking stuff and yelling. He likes men. He likes my Dad, my brother and his Dad.

“Hi Jesse! Can I have a kiss?”

He looks at me blankly. Sometimes he'll oblige to be charitable.

“Jesse, do you want to watch TV?”

He doesn’t answer. My sister feels bad that he’s not interested in me.

“Jesse, go hug Aunt Katie.”

“It’s okay, Rejane. He doesn’t have to.”

It is okay. I know we’ll be close later. Mike will buy him booze and talk to him about sex, but I can teach him about women, and love, and his mother before he was born.

I picture us talking a lot about before he was born. I’d be curious, too.

...

“So, my middle name is after him, right?”

“Yeah. Patrick.”

“What was he like?”

“Great. Funny. Spirited. You would have liked him. He was great... the best.”

“What was it like after he died?”

I’ll consider if I should be honest. I’ll decide I should be.

“Fucked. Pretty awful. Your mom was really sad.”

“Like how sad?”

“Like...done sad. But then she had you.”

“Do you think she’s still sad?”

“I don’t think she’ll ever be...over it, but she’s very happy now.”

He’ll look sad.

“Don’t look so sad, Jess. Life is strange and bad shit happens to good people but they’re still okay. Your mom has you. We’re so lucky that we have you.”

It will be weird to grow up being his whole family's consolation for a man he’s never met. Patrick is no part of him, but the absence is so heavy that he’ll feel it. He’ll piece together ideas of what he was like from our stories and memories, but the dead can’t talk to anyone.

“Am I like him?”

“You’re a lot like him. He would have loved you.”

“So they really loved each other?”

“So much, Jess. I’d never seen love like that.”

Maybe by then, I’ll have been in love like that.

“Were my Mom and Dad in love like that?”

“Yeah,” I’ll lie.

Then I’ll think that maybe it’s not fair to tell a son what his mother was like before he was born. He shouldn’t know that he saved her life. A dead man’s weight is too heavy for a little boy to carry. Still, every time I look at Jesse, I see Patrick.

So I guess I misspoke. When I look at him now, I don’t only think of what he’ll be like when he’s older.

I see the future, the past and the dreadful wonder of this world.

Twin Soul - Personal Essay Excerpt Two

I go to see a psychic in Belfast. Psychics frighten me. I’m always nervous they’ll tell me something I don’t want to know, that once I hear it it's destined to be true. I decide I’m safe if I tell them upfront that I only want to know about Caitlin and I.

The woman has so many lines in her face. When she speaks I watch the lines move, how they dance together, how her skin is sewn and pocked by the life she lived.

“I’m only here to talk about one thing,” I tell her.

“That right wee girl?”

“Yes. I just want to know about my best friend. I’m writing about us.”

"You write a lot, don't ya? I see words all around ya."

Then she looked away for a long time. When she looked back at me I could tell she wasn’t seeing me, that she was watching something I couldn’t.

“Yous been friends since yous were wee. But she’s not wee, she’s tall.”

I laugh.

“Did we know each other in a past life?”

“Depends. I think all lives are at once, so they are. But yes, there’s a real connection there. She’s a sister more than a friend. Your lives are becoming more and more different, but yous’ll always feel the same, so ya will.”

“Different how?

“I’m happy to tell ya only about her, but if that’s what ya want, we have to stop here.”

“Why?”

“Well, there’s a lot of change on the horizon.”

“How so?”

“You’re with a fella here now?”

I nodded but didn’t speak. Every organ took a sharp inhale and stopped working.

“There’s not a lot of Northern Ireland in your future.”

The Summer I Lost My Mind - Personal Essay Excerpt Two

As summer continued on, people noticed I wasn't quite myself. One of Webster's Dictionary's definitions of insanity is, "being utterly foolish and unreasonable." My new utterly foolish and unreasonable self got mixed reviews. Friends asked me if I was okay, why I felt like I had to act out. I remember feeling often persecuted, doubly angry.

I was angry at them for being surprised that I'd want to let loose. For making me feel bad that I was having fun for once. Couldn't they see it was exhausting being the way I was?

I was angry at myself for holding myself to such impossible standards my whole life. Who was to blame that people were surprised?

My mother and I had never been on worse terms. Growing up with an alcoholic father, she hates drinking and hasn't had a drink in over thirty years. But it went far deeper than that. My mother and I are two of a kind. We are connected in a supernatural way, like one soul in two bodies. The way we love each other goes beyond mother and daughter.

Independence isn't simple. You want freedom but it's scary relying only on yourself. The loneliness I experienced knowing that my mom didn't approve of the decisions I was making, of the new girl I was, was terrifying. I didn't know where to turn. I wanted the closeness, the simplicity of your parent being your hero, but it wasn't so black and white anymore. And so, I felt like I'd lost half of myself.

My father is good in a crisis. I think he knew that if he also openly disapproved of me that it would do no good. Instead, we were pals. I didn't see him often, but when I did, he didn't make me feel stupid for being different. We'd watch American Idol together. Sometimes I'd cry on his shoulder, but mostly the conversation stayed surface. And I was okay with that.

That summer brought my brother Michael and I close in a way that we'd never been before. I'd spent my whole life sheltered from bad decisions and the people that make them in a way that Michael never was. He'd seen the gray in life way earlier. Smart people do fuck up and I'd never known that, in a lasting way, before I was the smart person who was fucking up.

Michael never once condemned me that summer. In fact, he was my saviour. He was there for me every time I needed anyone. He never got frustrated with me for still being heartbroken or for wasting my time. For the first time ever, Michael was the one with it all together. I went to him for advice. I needed him to guide me.

I took him out all over the city and paid because he was eighteen and poor. So many nights we'd fall asleep on the couch downstairs, laughing ourselves stupid. We'd wake up and go for hangover breakfasts.

He showed me a kindness that I have never been able to show him. I realize now that even if I was crazy, at least then I really made time to be with the people that loved me.

I can't say the same anymore.

The One You're With - Personal Essay Excerpt Two

We had spoken only a few times since he left my house saying that even though he still loved me theoretically, he couldn’t literally. We met for coffee over Christmas.

“What do you want?” I asked him, lining up.

“Oh, I don’t like coffee.”

“Why’d do you want to meet here, then? Do you want a hot chocolate? We can go somewhere else.”

“No, it’s okay. Yeah, I’ll have a hot chocolate.”

When we sat down to talk it felt awkward. We caught up on surface things; our families, our friends, work, school. I felt like he was wanting to say something but I couldn’t draw it out of him.

“So, how is she?” I wanted to be mature. I always want to be mature, for no reason other than pride. That's not really mature at all, is it?

“We’re fighting all the time.”

“Really? Why?”

“I don’t know. I’ll say something, nothing really, and it will offend her, and then we’ll get into a huge fight.”

I nodded and stayed silent.

“I just don’t remember you and I fighting that much, Kate,” he said.

I looked at my coffee. He had made this bed and now we both had to lie in it.

“That sucks,” is all I said.

As I left we hugged, without affection, without intimacy, with pats on the back and space between.

“So, I’ll see you on Christmas Eve?”

We both went to St. Aidan’s midnight mass with our families and had for years, even before we were together.

“Yeah, I’ll try,” I yelled, my back already turned with my hands in pockets.

Someone told me long ago that the worst sort of misery is having been happy once.

Ballad of a Thin Man

I think of us like an old film photograph. The images in the foreground, what you can see right in front of you, are crisp, beautiful and affecting. Just behind fades into increasing blackness, with shapes and clumsy ghosts crowding the frame.

Things between us were clear. Things behind us, things around us, were always blurry.

We were good with what you could see. We were good in front of other people. We were good day to day, filling time and space in the way people do. As things got blurry, with ideas of the future and what couldn’t be seen, so did we. There was no connection beyond us and into any other realm.

It felt like agreeing to live your life without colour.

And when the darkness comes let it inside you.

Eat Your Heart Out - Blurb

"Eat Your Heart Out is a collection of short stories about dreamers, losers and love-lost souls. Thematically, its about heartbreak. The array of characters (from a sixteen-year-old autistic savant who’s sleeping with his best friend’s mother, a tattooed beauty dealing with a sudden death, to a newspaper man forever changed by a tender drifter) all have one thing in common; they’re lost. With unsentimental prose, ironic dialogue and fragile relationships, the collection looks at why people love how they do. The stories address issues of courage, compassion, belief, hope and the absolute loneliness of the human condition. Bold, poignant and affecting, Eat Your Heart Out is a clear-eyed exploration of youth, life, love, sex, death and God."

Sympathy for the Devil - Personal Essay Excerpt Three

It had to be the most fucked up Church in the city of Toronto, crammed with alcoholics, geriatrics and these kids with face tattoos of skulls smoking cigarettes. Yet somehow upon entering, I felt at home. Even as an agnostic, there is something comforting about a Church. Its the quiet. I feel God not when the Priest is speaking but in the silence before.

I didn’t know what to do when all the regulars were speaking amongst themselves. I looked up at the stained glass window next to me and there was Jesus, in His technicolour glory, staring directly at me.

"What do you want with me? Why can't you just leave me alone?"

He didn’t answer.

The topic of the sermon was obedience. I’d never liked the word. Maybe it was obedience that made religion so hard to swallow.

Maybe you should shut up and listen more.

The priest, a kind man with a Filipino accent, said one thing that stuck, one thing that made sense.

“We always mistake our part for the whole.”

Halfway through the service, we all joined together at the front of the Church and prayed silently and out loud for things we wanted.

“I pray that more people come to this Church,” a woman with a Jamaican accent said.

“I pray that my niece who is struggling with alcoholism finds help,” said a well-dressed woman in her eighties.

“I pray that I get better,” said a woman even older, who must have been beautiful once.

The woman next to me, middle aged with a sad face, held my hand. Her hand was warm and by the end of the prayer session, mine was, too. That fall Sunday morning, I got religion for the first time. I felt close to something bigger than me. When we do communion, I drink Jesus’ blood and eat his body.

I say a prayer for a secret.

Before I leave, seven people come up to me and tell me to come back next week, that they need more young people. I nod and smile. They are so human that don’t have the heart to tell them that I won’t return.

That’s the thing about God; once He touches your life, you see Him everywhere you look.

Synecdoche

"a figure of speech by which a part is put for the whole (as fifty sail for fifty ships), the whole for a part (as society for high society), the species for the genus (as cutthroat for assassin), the genus for the species (as a creature for a man), or the name of the material for the thing made (as boards for stage)"

...

Pink turned grey outside. I felt the polyester against my skin. It wasn’t comfortable but I couldn’t picture ever moving.

“Do you think if something was true once, it stays true forever? Like, it never goes away?”

“That’s how you know something’s true. You see it everywhere.”

“Like reflected in everything?”

“Yeah. You can see everything through it.”

Then, later.

“Time doesn’t exist, not how we’re told it does.”

“Yeah, even this, with us. It didn’t start years ago and end -”

“Tomorrow, whenever.”

“Right. It all happened at once. Its all happening, still. And that’s why that movie was so brilliant. That is exactly what time is like, you feel years ago as if it was yesterday.”

“I know, it feels that visceral. The one part that stuck with me was -”

“The end is in the beginning?”

“No, but...actually, yes.”

You realize that no one’s watching and that no one ever was.

"Do you want these potatoes?"

Later, still.

I could hear wind but from the wrong side of the room, where the wall was paved.

“Do you hear the wind? From over there?”

“Not from the window?”

“Yeah.”

“No. But I have before.”

The world tilted sideways. An arm grew out of my chest and reached across the mattress.

“Did you think you’d be like this at your age?”

“I really never thought this far ahead.”

I am constantly stuck feeling relieved, but it’s the weird relief, the kind you get after narrowly avoiding sleeping with someone you really didn’t want to, or when you get back from a trip with someone you wish you’d never seen on the road. Its the melancholy feeling of being disappointed by the wackiness of the world.

I am always convinced I don’t contribute to it, which is as lonely as it is comforting.

Mama - Short Story Excerpt Two

“Why can’t you forgive her?” asks Ben.

It’s springtime, the year they got together. They’re happy. As happy as they know how to be.

Cheryl has just started talking to Mama about him, and he’s the first person ever she’s wanted to be honest with about it. She thinks she loves him, how she knows to love, anyway. She’s younger, far less aged than she is now. Her heart is inexperienced, not yet worn in like a baseball glove. Not misshapen and sagged. She’s tender with him.

More tender than she ever should have been, not knowing that her heart would soon only count seconds and pump blood.

“I just…can’t.”

“Do you miss her?”

“I don’t miss her, no. I miss what I never had. I’ve spent my whole life missing something I’ve never had.”

“Do you ever want to forgive her?”

“Yes.”

“Then why don’t you?”

“Because she’s never going to change.”

He nods.

Then after awhile, he speaks again, only softer and slower this time.

“I just think that you only have one Mom, and one day she’s going to be gone…and you’re going to wish things were different.”

She nods.

Maybe, she thinks.

“No. I won’t.”

Maybe, she thinks again.

Maybe.

Nightfall

I dreamt once that we were twins. You looked like me and I looked like you, but everything was opposite, mirror images.

I walked down streets in a tiny town. You weren’t there but I felt you near me, dreaming too. I saw old faces and they recognized me. I couldn’t remember their names.

"Mavis," a man said and I felt stupid.

There was quiet where usually there’s noise. Cars moved silent down roads, like clumsy ghosts. My footsteps were noiseless, too. I was floating. But air moved past my ears like jet planes and I thought about what we hear and what we can’t.

I had a dream within the dream, and that's where I found you. You were taking a bath in my blood.

“Why are you doing that?” I asked.

“To get to know you.”

The red was pretty and silly on your skin. You looked kind. I didn’t need it anyway, so I sat down next to you. I stretched my bones out of my skin.

“Thanks,” they whispered.

I woke up next to you still.

When we're walking later, without dreams, I looked down at my feet. I heard them, like tap shoes, but the air hid. I saw my shadow. She waved at us.

You missed it.

When'd you leave Heaven? Why'd they let you go? How was everything up in Heaven?

Like Father

He spends his days quiet, reading mystery novels, without company. He often acts differently in front of people than he is, to shock them or seem like a real nut, as if they'd need help drawing that conclusion. He doesn't wear underwear or socks. He doesn't drive and won't learn. He rides his electric bike, very slowly, all over the neighborhood.

He knows everyone but there is not one person I would consider his friend. He keeps parts of his past secret. I have wondered if he behaves the way he does to keep people at bay. He doesn't need people, not really.

I'm scared. I'm becoming more that way.

I sit with him on Thanksgiving morning, talking about my brother.

"Mike needs more confidence," I say, like I've always said, now a parrot in sweat pants talking to no one, just the walls.

He laughs.

"Nobody's confident. No one you know is confident. Are you? No. There is not one guy in the world who is confident. Any type of confidence is just bullshitting. People'll say, 'Oh, that guy, he's really confident.' No, he's not, he's just a better at the bullshitting game. It's all game. And the lower you are, the better you got to be at that game. Confidence is a bullshit modern day myth."

I laugh, too, but the person inside me wants to jump off the couch and touch him.

I can't make the leap.

Thicker Than Water

His heart was undone.

More, she had undone it, with her smiling eyes and auburn hair. He’d undone himself, too, but that was a longer process, one that had taken years.

“I live my life like a book. I try to find the most interesting characters.”

Over eggs and coffee, I remember all the things we’ve done over eggs and coffee; laughed, cried, co-existed how siblings do. Looking at him, his crumpled clothes and young face, I think I'll never love anyone as much as I love my little brother.

“Sometimes I feel like the whole world is moving and I’m standing still,” he says.

“Maybe it’s that you’re moving and the whole world is standing still.”

“Maybe.”

“Why’d you two break up?”

“I think the same reason you and Glenn did.”

“What’d you love about her?”

He thought. I liked watching him think, the fireworks exploding in his blackened eyes.

“Her potential. I always fall in love with potential.”

“I’m a victim of my own optimism,” I nodded.

“That’s a sad thing to say.”

“With men. I am with men. I love what they could be, not what they are. And I don’t even realize I’m doing it until it’s too late, until the fiction looks like fact, until the character looks real.”

“We both live our lives like novels, then.”