Posted to Stories on the topic of Breakups on
6 August 2008, with 1 comment so far.
by Mark—Age 30—Astoria, OR
The bridge I see from my window rises quickly from Oregon and crosses a river so wide it could be confused for the ocean it feeds.
Bridges occupy a piece of real estate in Sarah’s brain. She’ll spot them on trips and make me pull over. Covered bridges, short steel trussed spans bridging creeks and the Art Deco jobs with turquoise lights.
“Take my picture,” she’d say. “But make sure to get the bridge.”
I remember, years ago, leaving my first girlfriend for a family trip during the summer. I thought about the nights we had spent under the shadow of the rusting water tower near my house.
Her name was Natalie, and she didn’t care about bridges.
She had that sixteen-year-old skin. Her vanilla perfume would hover near her collarbones like a necklace.
When we were apart, I carved a piece of her out of the air and looked at it too long. When I returned, she was just a stranger walking through the high school halls.
Years later, relationships later, I met Sarah. She has tide pool hazel eyes with purple and blue anemone speckles clinging to the edges of her pupils.
We’d make love in the morning and nap. After a while, I’d look up, and she’d be gazing at me with those eyes.
We’d drive over the mountains and past the jagged lava fields or west to the coast, the dunes and the juniper trees. She was always scanning the road ahead or searching the side roads for a river or creek. Water meant a bridge was close by.
And now, Sarah and I are separated by work and geography. There’s a thousand rivers and a hundred bridges between us.
The hulking bridge framed by my window runs four miles across the river bar and ends in a different state. The land on the other side is similar, but if you look close, you can see differences. The ponderosas seem flatter, just as the bridge is flat after its aerial leap from the south bank of the river.
I wonder if Sarah will still be looking for bridges if we ever reunite. Maybe she has tired of them. Or maybe, tonight, when the lights of town boil out toward the middle of the river, I’ll reach out the window, grab the dust-green steel tresses of the bridge before me and crush them with my bare hands.
(Photo: Estherase)
Posted to Stories on the topic of Autobiographies on
5 August 2008, with no comments so far.
by Milly Strelzoff—Age 29—Hattiesburg, MS
As a baby I was never aware of my toes. I might have sucked on them but I don’t know. If someone sits down and cares to tell you, you have babyhood. Even that is impossible if no one noticed. No one counted my toes out for me so I learnt my numbers even later than most kids.
I always thought I had two toes.
As a child I became painfully aware of my ten toes. I had to cut out the fronts of cast off shoes because I had to make them fit, had to make them work.
I amused myself at school feeling around with my toes and in summer I could tell how hot the day was going to be by how the ground felt the second my toes landed on them. I would touch the surface of the ice on the lake with my toes and I would know when the snow would melt, would know how many days to fall, how many days to wait.
As a young woman, while courting I hid the calluses under my toes and eventually settled for someone. I have never let him touch my feet, not consciously anyway. He loved every part of me but he never knew my feet, never knew my toes. I always wore stockings to bed.
As my marriage limped along, from time to time I would not be able to see my toes however much I bent over. Those were the nice parts. As days went by I would see less and less of my toes till I saw them no longer and a day would come when I even would not care. This happened three times.
I have three beautiful children.
I began to see my toes again but then I began to sit longer and longer in front of a circle. That circle, my plate, became my refuge. Now unfortunately I can’t see my toes again.
When no one is around, I will sometimes take off my stockings and walk on surfaces, wood, concrete, linoleum, carpet, and tile and sometimes in a rare moment I will walk on the hard ground and she will receive me like a mother.
(Image: kygp)
Posted to Stories on the topic of Compulsions on
27 July 2008, with 1 comment so far.
by Maureen—Age 23—New Haven, CT
Five weeks into my third semester at my second attempt at college, I padded down three flights of stairs on a Sunday morning in my slippers and PJs. In one hand I carried a coffee press, full and hot, as well as a coffee mug with a carton of half-and-half precariously balanced inside of it. My other hand clutched a pack of cigarettes, a lighter, and a copy of Imperfect Science: Gender Ideology in Molecular Biology, by Bonnie Spanier.
Once outside in the gazebo 50 feet away from the back door of the dorm reserved for smokers and other degenerates, I settled myself into something of a routine, quietly sipping my coffee, absorbing myself in this treatise by Spanier on her trials as a molecular biologist. Barely noticing the other kids that came and went, I sat in the gazebo until my ass was numb and the leftover coffee started to get cold. This routine had been repeated on other mornings, in other locales, with the inevitable results that I started a day relaxed, informed and appropriately caffeinated.
In middle school my friends and I would trade off, reading in tandem and racing to the ends of books simply to show that we could. I became the fast reader, finishing the complete unabridged Les Miserables in record time despite having it confiscated for a day for whacking someone in the head with it. In my later years books moved away from being my actual weapons to being figurative ones. My bookshelves, once simply repositories for the weekly “pick up the books off the floor and dig them out of the mattress” sweep, became my allies in the war to be cool, intellectual and attractive. Shakespeare, Plato, Burroughs and Lakoff took the ultra-visible top-shelf positions, proving to the world at large that I was, all at the same time, intellectual, artsy, ultra cool, and politically active.
In public, while I sit outside with my coffee or discuss politics in my living room with the intellectuals that New Haven seems to be constantly teeming with, I am super reading woman. I read Shakespeare, and long complicated political histories. I quote Burroughs in witty bar conversations and coyly reminded guys that I flirt with that I read In Cold Blood before Philip Seymour Hoffman was up for an Oscar. My top shelf is full of books that I feel I should be reading, or am proud of having read, and signify my ever-present devotion to bettering myself, to expanding my mind and vocabulary, and, let’s not forget, to looking cool.
(Image: Steve Keys)
Posted to Uncategorized on
25 July 2008, with no comments so far.
…I’ll announce that I have a new personal blog up at katherinesharpe.com.
It’s the usual blogginess—thoughts, photos, overheard tidbits, and comments on what I’m reading. There’s also a professional component: an ongoing list of my published clips.
Feel free to have a gander, and of course, if you’re feeling generous, I never met a link I didn’t like!
