There's Only One Path In Life. The Path Of You.
I didn’t know my family was abusive until I was well into my teens. When you don’t know something is abnormal, you can’t develop defenses against it. You just absorb it as the way things are. How relationships work and what family means. You build your whole understanding of human connection on a foundation of … Read more
My father would take a bus from New York to New Jersey and arrive at the stop several blocks from our apartment at around ten in the morning. My older brother and I would be there to meet him. Then we’d go get burgers, sometimes go to a movie. Occasionally do some shopping if we … Read more
There’s an assumption you don’t even know you’re making until something forces you to examine it. For me, that assumption was simple and seemingly unassailable. Being human meant being part of some religion. That’s how the world worked. Everyone was Catholic or Jewish or Muslim or Hindu or Buddhist or something. You didn’t choose whether … Read more
I was sitting at the front of the church with a couple dozen or so other kids who’d survived Sunday school with me, and I had the body of Christ dissolving into mush in my mouth while trying to figure out how to discretely spit out the Son of God without anyone noticing. The communion … Read more
The promise was simple, repeated so often it became background noise. Be obedient. Be pious. Follow the rules. And you’ll be rewarded. Maybe not on earth, because earthly happiness (which was perhaps not even real or just a delusion) was trivial compared to eternal salvation, but certainly in the afterlife. Heaven for the good, hell … Read more
The Hospital (Part 1) I was twelve when my father finally died, though “finally” might sound harsh to anyone who didn’t spend nearly a year watching someone deteriorate from the inside out. He’d been diagnosed with throat cancer about a year earlier, the crystal-clear result of smoking at least a pack of Kent brand cigarettes … Read more
Part 1 – The Uncle-In-Law’s Relative’s Place It didn’t happen exactly on Christmas, but it was definitely around the holidays on a Saturday night, and I was ten years old. I’d been dragged to some family’s home for a holiday dinner. They were friends or relatives of my uncle-in-law or something, one of those strange … Read more
I was nine years old and sitting at a lunch table in the school cafeteria having some meaningless kid conversation with another kid when they abruptly asked me a question that would lodge itself in my brain for years. “Why are you so strange?” he said. Not with cruelty or mockery, but genuine confusion. Like … Read more
There’s a specific kind of panic that can only exist in elementary school. Not the abstract worry of adult life like bills, relationships, or mortality. Something more immediate and physical and utterly consuming. And when you’re six years old sitting in a first-grade class with a bladder screaming for relief while a woman who terrorized … Read more