Working led to questioning of the promises lingering, not quite upheld, and with no end in sight.
Present
The Long Way Home
Fatema visited. I stood at the window, while she stayed about two meters away. Eesha didn’t know. It would have been wrenching, if she came and I couldn’t hug her. Or would she understand? She was seven after all and wanted to learn everything.
What is quarantine? She had asked. She would still call every day, and ask the same question: when would I go home?
We All Yearn for Defenestration
“If we’re going to do this, I kind of need you to do something first. Or during.”
“Like what?” I leered at him, trying to make my voice sexy.
“Throw me out the bedroom window.”
First and Lasts
Until high school, I want to be an eye doctor. Writing bubbles on the side but doesn’t occupy the center of my mind. But as a freshman, my English teacher, Mr. Kelly, gives me my first A+ on a paper, and the first one awarded to anyone in the class, he announces. He doesn’t say my name, but everyone knows. When I’m a junior, he tells my parents to buy me a copy of "Writer’s Market".
The Comet Year (Novel Excerpt)
Carl had been staying at the house longer than any other visitor ever had. At first, I didn’t realize that he was Carl Ferriman, the writer, the enormously famous writer whose first novel had become such a cultural phenomenon that even I, never much interested in books, had heard about it, probably because it involved hippies, a wounded soldier who had fought in Vietnam, a road trip across America, guns, drugs, sex, and a quest for a mysterious stranger who may have been God’s lost son. Or something like that. In any case, I had never read it and even if I had a copy, it wouldn’t have helped me identify Carl because he wouldn’t allow his picture to be printed on the book jacket. I had heard that, too.
Learning from Leonard Cohen
Reading that final stanza, I began to understand that the last line of a poem is the most important part of the whole structure.