I am sitting on the train in front of the saddest men in the world. They’re businessmen, salesmen from the sound of it, straight out of a piece of theater. Salesman One enters stage left with a jovial laugh and takes a window seat. Salesman Two ent

Five years ago I went dancing at a club and a boy talked to me. He was attractive enough, and we seemed to have people and things in common, so I talked back. Emails were exchanged and a few weeks passed and the topic of meeting up came up. "It

there's a neverending pile of papers on my desk and I needed a sugar fix so I went to the corporate vending machine and got some m&ms. without even thinking about it, like a trained monkey, I looked at the wrapper to see if there was a prize

If you know the future, you can leave the ghosts behind. If you know everything will work out in your favor, that contentment, if not happiness, is just a few days or centuries down the road, then the ghosts stop haunting and evaporate into memories.

1 ~ Sunday, 1:00 a.m.I’m sitting at the edge of the skate bowl, watching men in baggy pants and long hair and boys in pegged jeans and dirty t-shirts drop over the rim again and again. The same people skating down into the same space, with only sli

...there's ghosts in big cities too, he'd written, paraphrasing me. A conversation we'd had where he tried to explain how he was haunted by his small hometown and I tried to explain how I was too. New York wasn't big enough. A sprawling, teeming city

The Long Blondes' "Autonomy Boy"because sometimes wry black humor and a staccato punk beat are all you have.plus The Rakes' "Terror!" just because.thanks Jeff.

you are hopeful and positive and forgiving, so you want everything to be okay. for it to be settled and over and better, so you try and think and act and bury and bargain and ignore and wait...but things are not okay. now what do you do?

I started drinking at 7pm on Friday and I didn't stop all weekend. It had been awhile since I'd been out so late so many nights in a row. Months since I'd been able to move from glass to bottle to shot for so many hours. I'd lost my tolerance quickly

in may 2004 there was a boy and there was a leaving and there was a misunderstanding about intentions, and so i wrote something i thought was true. i didn't post it then, afraid it was too specific, revealed too much, would be misconstrued. then tim

If he could be dismissive, she could be dismissive. If he could be past it all, onward and upward, looking only forward to the future, so could she. Her list was longer after all, the list of things she wanted to do, all the dreams she knew she'd wi

scribble faster was meant to be a way to write more, to get in the habit of scribbling down all the little things that make a life and might make a larger story. sometimes it works, and lines and phrases spark ideas that lead to other stories. but so

for the last week the song has been going through my head, bolstering me and hinting at the hope of finding a new perspective, of finding a new way in or out. I only know one line, and even that I remembered wrong, leaving off the last word. but th

"Promise you won't leave yet," he said. "That you won't move until I move." It was the first flush of romance, with stars everywhere, so I promised. For three years I wanted to leave New York. The first time I started looking for

on repeat...austin mike's ode to the roller rink...dismemberment plan's "what do you want me to say?"...the postal service's give up...chinua achebe's things fall apart...this modest mouse anecdote...the thermals, always