Terrible

If I'm honest with myself, I'll admit that sometimes late at night when I'm awake and restless, I'll think of the men I've known romantically. Sometimes, through the sly modern method of friend-of-a-friend internet sleuthing, I'll pick up the trail from where we left off. Many of the men I've dated are now married or in long term relationships, often with women who they met immediately after me.

The wasted effort of emotional fragility and hypercritical outbursts on these men...did my past judgment make them better or are other women less punishing in their loving? I'm a diving board; on a hot summer's day, a man will eye me down the ways along the water's edge and run madly towards. Don't stay forever, jump, jump.

Stories By Others

A man rides a taxi late at night. Watching the Manhattan skyline, the lights diminish as they cross the Triboro bridge back to Queens. There is a coldness that settles in the unoccupied seats.

At his stop, the driver says a few gruff statements, the man returns a few more, and then the scarcity of words is cut by sound. An outpouring. In the difficult chronology of lives, neither can say in detail how it occurs. "Tell me more," the man says.

The driver tells a story of family, of love. Of distance and a space filled with prayer and longing. I could not tell it here.

The man who tells me this story is crying as he tells me this. He remembers the hand on his shoulder of the driver. "Remember always," the driver says. "For both us, remember."