Damn I wish I had more kombucha

He didn't mean to do it, but he did it.


My ankle hurts hurts hurts and I take to my bike anyway. I can no longer stand all this stillness.

I ride and I ride and I ride and my lungs burn and they burn and they burn. I have forgotten my water bottle.



It has been a long seven weeks.


When I was six years old, I had an ant farm. 




I think We all know one of the reasons I work so much and one of the reasons I run so much is because when I stop working and running I start thinking about it. Of course by "it" I mean all of it.


Case in point this week I cannot run, as I have not been able to for seven weeks now, and this week I have worked less than I have in at least five or six years, and here it all is. I do not sleep without the assistance of drugs. I write down story ideas every 20 minutes, it seems, and I write and I write and I worry about the news and I think about you and I regret and I ache and I doubt and I am afraid it's going to kill me I remember I remember I remember I remember


Here I am listening to Carrie and Lowell and even though I've heard that Sufjan is kind of a douche and even though he does look like kind of a douche, frankly, in that yellow frat-boy hat, it is making me cry like it usually does

I am picturing taking flight again. It is a 14-hour drive to Oregon and 24 to PA. I need to change up my life, again, because long ago I made a promise to myself that I would never spend my evenings watching TV and also because I am queer and he will not talk about it; he's afraid I will leave him for a woman

What I can no longer abide is making myself smaller for someone else's comfort. 

What I regret most is not taking the time to define what love means to me.


Meanwhile he goes to meetings and tells everyone he knows that I am a love of his life.

That love can be so easy, and so hard, is one of the many things that confuses me. The man in the live video recording says, I had this anger problem, but I was only ever angry with my intimate partner. Never with anybody else. Just her.

I am the him and the her and the anger and the intimacy.



I am embarrassed of my googling, a private window for my private inquiries. Only they may not be private; only they consume me sometimes such that I cannot breathe; only I do not know how to tell you that I miss you so that you hear it

We watch Brokeback Mountain and he weeps and he weeps and he weeps. Here is the flesh and the blood and the fighting and the salty tears. I cup his temples in my palms and I stroke his sweaty, curly hair. I feel such tenderness as I cradle him. And still too I am wondering: How many men have I held in my arms? And will I ever be given a turn to be the one weeping, and the one embraced?


Suddenly fall arrives.

Of course it has me homesick, as fall always does, that breathless sickness for both the woods and farmlands of Pennsylvania and a vague something that leaves me wanting. Fall is my season of yearning.

This explains partly why I took to my bike yesterday, and it is nearly all of the reason why I will ask my physical therapist at tomorrow's appointment when I can run again. He will remind me, as he did on Monday, that I have asked him this question repeatedly, and that it will still be quite a while before I can take to the trails. This is painful to me. I am trying to get somewhere.



One of the things I remember is how you smiled the first time we dropped down in that pirate's ship out of the sky.

One of the things I remember is how he speculated tenderly on top of me on that quilt in the dark night Maryland grass.

One of the things I remember is having sex on the futon in the upstairs of my parents' house, climbing on top in that long, blue dress.

One of the things I remember is smoking weed in his parents' house and staring at the seaside screensaver, swearing that I could see the little surfers dashing across the waves. The image of that room forcing me to confront, every time it appears in my mind's eye, that I am a survivor of every category of abuse.

I am working to integrate this. Here is another sentence.


I have let the arugula go to flower. It is for the butterflies and the bees.


I am drinking room temperature water out of a giant plastic beer stein. 


You are 5.5 miles into the backcountry when you hear your ankle snap.

Bathtub gin

"The fact that I am writing the scenes means I survived them, and that fact alone brings comfort." 

--T Kira Madden 





My writing is percussive.

Yesterday I walked for the first time in five weeks. I took maybe 20 steps in the physical therapy clinic, probably less, and I wobbled the whole time. I held my arms out at my sides for balance and I focused all of my might and I walked.

I am not done with the crutches; or rather, they are not done with me. But this morning I woke up and after brushing my teeth in the bathroom I stood in the entrance to the main room, handed over my crutch, and walked all by myself the five feet to the couch. This is something.


The large man on the collapsible camp chair tried to mask his shock as the 29-year-old blond man sat on the lap of the 29-year-old brunette man and asked him if he could rub sunscreen into his back.

I ask him if he is a local and tell him I've just adopted a dog from his town.


She runs alongside me as I crutch through the cemetery. I am not supposed to be crutching this far, least of all alone. But she has laid so steadfastly by my side as I have prostrated myself and willed my body to heal, and she is bored, and I do not want her to think she has been adopted into a cage. And so I let her run off leash around me, and whenever she charges more than 50 feet or so ahead she turns of her own accord and waits until I have propelled myself to her side. The only time she leaves me is when another dog appears on the path above her. She charges up to greet him before she remembers that the voice calling her back is saying her name, that she has a name, that the voice is mine, and that she is beholden to me. She sprints back to my side and grabs a stick, flinging it into the air.


 I have eaten too many grapes and my belly hurts.



I have been manhandled in the security lines. While one woman screamed the other grabbed the pack on my back and yanked, and here I am on crutches nearly toppling backwards. By the time they are through with me I have tears streaming down my face. As I exit the station a kind man named Russell asks if I am okay.


I don't think I have cried in public like that since I was 11 years old and furious with my parents during an outing at the Wisehaven pool. That time I sobered up quickly and switched from tearful to unbelievably pissed, stalking the pool grounds for all purposes looking like a cherubic sociopath. This time it took me a little longer, because I was taken by waves of flashbacks for the rest of the evening, and there is not much I know how to do with those except sit them out and try to remind myself that here and now I am doing okay. Now these eight days later the anger is here and I will fight for the people who cannot walk, and who are treated less than for being that way.



Honestly if you do not know how to be kind then you are probably wasting my everyone's time.


Because I have not been able to walk I have been watching hours and hours of American Ninja Warrior. I imagine my body along with theirs, willing it to remember what it's like to leap, twist, grab... hold on. Willing it to be ready when I am capable of moving again.


I vacillate between acceptance and not wanting to be here. Never resentment of it having happened, never why me. Just frustration with watching my quad return to fleshiness, my calf withering away inside the brace. Just the dread of knowing what's to come. He instructs me to press backward and my whole leg shakes.



I chew on gluten-free flax crackers and drink Stevia-sweetened, no-sugar ginger ale to settle my stomach. Tomorrow I will drive myself to the pool alone, the first time since the injury, and I will clasp my legs around the buoy and swim with just my arms for 40 minutes without stopping.



Wilson is reclaiming his cuddle time. He crawls atop my chest, and when Hanna tries to crowd her way in he reaches out a paw and baps her right across the face.


Already in the mornings he is putting on a sweater before stepping outside.

I have written something that matters to me.