Sometimes, the best cure for loneliness is to actually be alone. Which is actually kind of hard to do, considering there are something like 6 bills people on the planet. You have to actually try.
Alone is different from lonely. Alone is a choice. Lonely is a sickness. My sickness has lasted two years, six months, eleven days, and I'm to the point where I must get better, or die. So I put on my black "fuck off" jacket, and put my headphones in my ears, and I made a choice to be alone. And I walked. I walked all...
I looked out over the masses. Between me and my goal milled hundreds of the worst sort of pedestrians. Tourists. Somewhere across the piazza a girl, and her girl, waited.
This date...more than any other...I could not fuck up.
I started across the sunstruck stones, their heat searing even through my shoes. The picnic basket in my hand no longer seemed so grand an idea as I sought to twist and push through any gap that presented itself.
Didn't these fools know that I had someplace I needed to go?
Every yard of progress seemed to cost me more time...
Her joints screamed as the winter chill ran through her veins and iced her skin. It was so cold out and this blizzard was never-ending.
Julia huddled around the oven pumping heat into the 500 square-foot apartment, something her mother said to never do but it's not like the heat worked.
"Why the hell did I go out there?" Julia said aloud to the appliances.
She threw Ryan out for a reason but months of anticipation made the actual act much harder. She wasn't even sure if it was going to be today, but in the end it was. He...
If we never speak again, there will be so many things I've never said. There will be no record of the thoughts that have been chasing each other around in my head. There will be no reason to remember me. You will never know the truth about what could have been - what I wanted us to be. I will never get to make you understand. If we never speak again...
"Wait!"
A paradigm shift: when you entire worldview changes. When something reaches into your mind and bends the part of your brain that had decided this was how you were going to live your life. You came across something that makes you think. It's impossible to get out of your head and all of the sudden you realize that you are not who you were before; that your life is not going in the direction you wanted it to, but you're okay with that. In fact, you find yourself preferring this new way of looking at life. You realize that the...
I remember when I was a kid. I sat on the edge of my father's car, waiting for him come home from his walks. I would go there to think sometimes, puzzling over my day. But today, 18 years later, I sit in silence.
I'm not waiting for anyone.
I'm thinking, though.
About my father. He's dead.
He doesn't go on his daily walks anymore, never will. I climb in the car, embracing his scent, closing my eyes and taking it all in. I live alone, no wife, no children. But they won't meet their grandfather.
I loved him. He...
Absent. That's what mom has been for the past three years since the day the front door slammed shut on her and the four carrier bags of belongings. That's all she took, her makeup and her best pair of shoes. Crocodile skin. Horrid looking things but they seemed to mean more to her than the family.
Kathleen, the youngest still kept an eye on the front path most evenings just in case mom returned. Rest of us knew that very unlikely as her latest boyfriend had been very rich and mom had always been a gold digger.
We lived with...
Daring to be noticed for the first timein her life, she pushed her chair back and stood up.
The room fell silent as she began to speak croakily at first and with a slight tremor in her voice. But, as she continued, her words became clearer ad sweeter by the second. He was transfixed at the way her eyes began to sparkle. They were bluer than he remembered and the delicate flush in her cheeks added much to her delicate beauty. In all the weeks thay had been attending the group he hadn't realised just how lovely she was. He...
I couldn't sleep, so I went out for a late-night walk around town. When I got to the bridge, I stopped to look out at the bright lights in the city.
Suddenly, a woman came up to me and gave me a hug. Not wanting to be rude, I hugged her back as we both looked off in the distance. I'm not sure why, but she began to move her hand lower down my back. I tried to hint that she was making this even more awkward than it already was by moving my arm up, almost to her neck,...
She opened the envelope and screamed.
This was not the day to be squeamish. This was the day her daughter would be returned. Unharmed.
The finger was the wrong size and shape. John, when he overcame his initial shock, told her it was plastic.
They had both made the decision not to tell the police, followed the kidnapper's instructions to the letter.
So why was the envelope sent? A reminder of what could happen or was there something else going on?
Whilst Megan was making a cup of tea, John wondered whether to tell her about the tiny photo he...