• Contemporaneous: A Living Novel

    Contemporaneous: Chapters 65 – 67

    65. The one thing I note now is the reappearance of certain memories – being held back by the teacher during recess, the inexplicable bouts of melancholy as a child, being a pariah as a teenager as anxiety compromised so much of my life socially, and then there’s something new, something dark, and I can’t unearth it, I can’t remember it, but it sits behind these things, a secret pulse that has beat all my life and gotten buried under more and more and more shit; and then it’s little things that I’ve dismissed, like bartending early in my twenties and a handful of short, unfulfilling relationships, and then the…

  • Contemporaneous: A Living Novel

    Contemporaneous: Chapters 40 – 41

    41. I don’t sleep much that night because I worry what would’ve happened if I forgot something meaningful. Like how to write? Or how to edit. Given I have no recourse, I wouldn’t be able to do anything else. Obviously, it didn’t happen, and I can cover that friendship with Peta. It doesn’t look like I’ve lost anything I need with her, and I can rebuild the working relationship, but I can’t shrug off the threat of something that seemed so whimsical meaning something more. Come the morning, I struggle to haul myself out of bed, and am just eating a bowl of bran for breakfast when my phone rings…