Perforation Problems

Losing someone is bad enough The immediate gap The empty places The missing words and hands and– Self I look around me and everything becomes Before or After This was when we were happy This was when we had no idea This was when things went wrong This was when things went on anyway But I think what's worse than the Missing is the Never again The total finality of it all The reminder that everything is leaving Everything is going away Even right now Everything is changing

Ryan Butts was my first boyfriend. Since we were third graders that didn't mean much. I don't think we even spent any time together beyond chasing each other around during recess. But I do remember my hurt feelings when he decided to be boyfriend and girlfriend with my friend Jennifer, instead. Standing atop the wooden castle parapet on the playground at Winterset Elementary School, I yelled down at him, "I don't care what you do, Ryan BUTTS." When we came inside I got a talking-to from my teacher, who told me it wasn't nice to make fun of people's names. Then in seventh grade I "dated" Andrew Thomas. I remember catching him looking at me in social studies and feeling a warm, pleasant anxiety in my stomach, like life suddenly held a whole bunch of possibilities, and I wasn't sure what to do with them. We passed notes back and forth with an intricate coding and folding system. We didn't use names – instead I was a turtle and he was a l...

I should be working this morning – I've got a long list of projects marked ASAP and URGENT with exclamation points – but I'm tired and sleepy and not really feeling much of anything. Also I know these projects are not really ASAP and URGENT. It's not like I'm helping get homeless people off the street or feed starving children. I'm revising copy for websites. So I thought I'd take a moment and try to write a bit. Feeling creative has been hard and writing hasn't come easily lately, even when I take time out to do it. My words don't seem to come out right at the moment. I guess the muscle is getting weak, which is all the more reason to fight my way through it. I spent last week in New York City and had a couple moments, as I usually do in new places, where my fingers itched for a pen. Sitting on the bus from LaGuardia I wanted to describe the man sitting next to me, in his pinstripe pants and wool blazer, a fedora perched on his head as he read John ...

It's raining today, the kind of rain that makes you understand why people use the word "downpour." I've got the back door open to the smells and sounds, even though water's starting to speckle the floor inside the screen and I know Michael would close it, if he were here. Sometimes it's nice to feel like you're in the middle of a rainstorm. When we were young my parents would take us out on the front porch to watch the rain, to count the seconds between lighting and thunder. I loved it, being surrounded by the storm and yet (mostly) safe under our house's roof. Clyde has disappeared – I finally find him at the top of the stairs, where it's quieter. I sit down next to him and he rolls over so I can pet his belly. He's kept close to me the last couple of days. We're not following our normal schedule. It puts him on edge. Last night he kept staring at me and wagging his tail. "What? You already had dinner." Ears perk up. Slap, ...

 Sometimes when I sit down to write I feel like my body is wound tight, like all the doorways that should be open to creative thought are sealed shut. My brain refuses to engage in the kind of thinking I need – the abstract, reflective, slow & ponderous, weighty, wonder-of-words contemplation that sucks you into each moment and holds you there so you can ignore everything else going on around you. Instead I'm flitting around spasmodically from thought to thought to thought, anxiety to anxiety to anxiety. I just can't. sit. still. Mentally. It seems like writing ideas always come to me when I'm in the middle of something else, when I couldn't possibly stop and write. Maybe that's because I'm not stressing out about writing at that moment – there's no pressure. My head is relaxed. Whatever. I think I maybe need to accept that I'm failing at writing. And it's entirely my own fault. Am I going to do something about it? Or am I going to give in, ...

She was beautiful – caramel skin, slender limbs, the kind of fashion sense that immediately made you feel dowdy and out-of-touch. With a golden stud nestled delicately in the dip of her nose, my coworker wore brown oxfords and tights in a way that somehow made her seem New-York-City-cool, not Little-Girl-Pretending. She also never wore a bra. At the time, I was near my largest weight, trying to figure out what to wear to work now that I wasn't a teacher and lacking any real awareness of what's fashionable. And I would never, ever, let my DD+ chest out in public without being properly restrained. So droopy! So floppy! So obscene! And yet. She was not small chested – she might have been nearly as big-in-the-boobs as me. But she didn't seem to care. And neither did anyone else. It was all just a part of her general aesthetic. I chalked it up to her being cooler than me and skinny. Skinny people can get away with a lot that fat people can't. Fast forward 7 years or so...

"I like how productive we are when we're together," Sarah says. "We decide we want to do something and we do it."  We're sitting at Lulu's Coffee + Bakehouse on the northside on a sunny Thursday afternoon, Sarah nursing a hangover and me trying to figure out what spices are on the spiced walnuts in my salad. They're delicious. It's the third new coffee shop we've visited this summer in our tour of new writing locations. So far we haven't written as much as we'd planned, but I've certainly had a lot of lattes.  We've just resolved to stop checking Facebook until Monday. It's the result of many a discussion about how addicted we are to the platform, how it encourages narcissism, how you can get lost in your Facebook feed and not notice an hour's gone by. I use Facebook just as much as any normal person in 2016, and I wish I didn't. I've got especially negative feelings towards it at the moment because an o...