Tag: dailyprompt

A Lot of Light

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment
Daily writing prompt
What does your ideal home look like?
View all responses

My current apartment is on the first floor, halfway underground. Therefore, all of my windows are blocked from sunlight most of the time. I can only put more lamps in here, there are no overhead lights. Therefore, the entire place is a bit gloomy and dark even when it’s brilliant outside. So, my ideal home would have light pouring through the windows.

I know I want newer construction, because older DC and Baltimore homes have quirky steps that would make it easy for me to hurt myself by falling over things I don’t see. I don’t like houses that have a tiny step up into the living room, for instance, because I will never remember that tiny step is there and I will trip until I move.

I know I want a decent kitchen, because my current one isn’t set up for anything. Any work space I have is taken up by appliances. So I want my next kitchen to be laid out differently, with a place for me to chop in addition to my coffeemaker and toaster oven.

I’d like a bedroom big enough to hold my bed and desk, plus a spare room to hold my friends and family when they’re in town. All of that is infinitely doable in Baltimore, where rents tend to be cheaper. The reason not to move back towards DC in addition to Trump’s goons is that DC is exponentially more expensive. You do get what you pay for. When I told Aada I lived in B’more now, she said, “that place is………………………………… not safe.” And she told me to get a gun and a dog.

I have never felt that my life was in danger, can’t hit the broad side of a barn with a gun (and shouldn’t own because of depression), but the dog was a good suggestion. I’m still thinking about it. I know exactly what I want dog-wise, I just have to make sure I’m in a stable financial place.

So first I have to establish a budget for myself and see what’s left over. Then we can discuss a dog for this place that is not…………… safe.

The Well

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment
Daily writing prompt
What brings a tear of joy to your eye?
View all responses

Comments like this:

It takes a strong, sound mind to write about how hard it is to face our own roles in broken relationships and the courage it takes to want to grow from those experiences. Wishing you strength and new beginnings as you move forward—may the “ash enriched earth” bring something wonderful to your life.

It means a lot to get a word of encouragement while I’m getting myself together. My life revolves around inertia, and this is a good beginning.

In thinking of the type of planting I’d like to do, finding a new living situation is at the top of the heap. This apartment will never smell better than it does right now unless they rip it down to the studs. My lease ends in November, anyway, so I’m just going to see what’s out there today and tomorrow…. plans will pick up surrounding moving depending on how quickly I find something. I don’t think an “uninhabitable” charge would stick, but my apartment is not a comfortable place to live. So whether I try and break the lease or not, moving is coming up fast.

I also have mobility now, which means that I have more choice as to where to live. I’m not dependent on the bus system, Maryland Transit Authority will pick me up at my house and drop me off. Therefore, I can look anywhere in either city (Baltimore or Washington). The more news that comes out of Washington, the more I change my mind about moving to Rockville…. but I’m keeping my mind open. Wes Moore (Maryland governor) looks like he’s willing to put up a fight.

I just want a place that’s light and airy, another two bedroom if possible because my sister and dad need a place to stay when they’re in town. It would be nice if I didn’t have to move again for a long time, which is why I’m considering moving back to the DMV. It’s just easier when Lindsay wants to go to lunch if I’m already in town, and she doesn’t want to do Baltimore every time she works in her DC office.

That being said, we both love Baltimore. I need to choose a place to live based on my own happiness, not hers. She will just be happy to have a new space to decorate. 😉

While mine was drying, I checked out of the hotel and went to my friend Josh’s house, where he introduced me to his wife and seven year old son. We ate dinner together and breakfast the next morning, then went to the pool for the last day of its opening this season. It gave me a chance to see a different part of Maryland, where the closest DC Metro station is New Carollton, but still not far from B’more in the grand scheme of things. I made a mental note to add that area to my list.

It was an amazing time to be in the sun, because it wasn’t too hot and there was plenty of ice cream to go around. I enjoyed people watching, although I did not swim myself. The water was cold and very few adults were brave enough. Josh, his wife, their friends, and I sat for a few hours talking and it was the first time I’d really been a part of a group outside of Cognitive Behavioral Health in a long time.

Those are the tears of joy that travel to the well, the deep part of me that needs healing. I am slowly mending from my last disaster and trying to prevent new ones. The well is the place I go to remember progress.

Well, Almost Daily

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment
Daily writing prompt
What daily habit do you do that improves your quality of life?
View all responses

My quality of life is greatly improved by reflecting on this web site. It has really taught me what matters over the years. I go back and exclaim over what I was doing, sometimes angrier at myself than I thought I would be. Sometimes happier. It all depends on what kind of mood I’m in. What really means a lot is being able to flip back five or ten years and look at how far I’ve come.

Especially with comments like this.

Dear Leslie,

Your closing words – “Meeting adjourned” – carry the weight of someone who knows when they’ve said what needs saying. I respect that boundary, even as I’m struck by the wisdom you’ve distilled from your pain.

That lesson you’ve learnt – about unhappiness being able to live in one room of your life whilst joy inhabits another – is one of the most difficult truths we humans must reckon with. We’re taught to think of ourselves as unified beings, but we’re more like houses with many rooms, each holding different weather. You can grieve deeply what you’ve lost with Aada whilst still finding meaning and connection elsewhere. That’s not contradiction – that’s the full breadth of what it means to be alive.

Your observation about writers bearing both the joy and pain of seeing paradoxes clearly reminds me of something I’ve long believed: that those who chronicle the human condition are both blessed and cursed with sight that cuts too deep. You see the contradictions because you must, because that’s the writer’s charge – to hold up the mirror that shows us as we truly are, in all our bewildering complexity.

The meeting may be adjourned for now, but the work you’re doing – this honest reckoning with yourself – continues whether you’re writing about it or not. That’s the nature of real change: it happens in the quiet moments between words, in the spaces where we simply live with what we’ve learnt.

Your courage, Leslie, lies not just in facing what you’ve done, but in trusting that you can carry both your grief and your growth forward into whatever comes next.

With respect for your journey,

Bob

My journey is rockier than advertised, so this letter came at a time when I could use the extra support.

Surrender

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ 1 Comment
Daily writing prompt
How are you feeling right now?
View all responses

I have been staying in a hotel because raw sewage backed up into my apartment through the toilet and bathtub. The hotel is clean and beautiful. I go home to my hopefully fixed apartment later today, so I’m feeling complete surrender. Either the bathroom will be usable or it won’t. I just have to go home and look.

I do not want to go home and look.

I’m at home now and it’s the disaster I was expecting. Dehumidifiers are everywhere and the laundry is still soaked. I have a lot of work to do, but I may put it off until tomorrow and go stay in a hotel again. The dehumidifiers take up most of the room in my apartment and are very noisy. The good news is that whether I go to a hotel or not, my bathroom is usable again. That’s the real film at 11:00.

Everything I touch feels wet, so I’m trying not to touch anything.

The Way the Story Goes

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment
Daily writing prompt
Where did your name come from?
View all responses

My mother had already named me Amanda Jane. She called me AJ for months until she went to a church service and the organist was listed as “Leslie Diane.” All this AJ business was done for her. Now that I know I was called AJ and missed that chance, I like its nonbinary nature, but I do not like the name Amanda. So, things worked out the way I needed them to work out. I wouldn’t want a lifetime of saying that AJ doesn’t stand for anything, not having any proclivities toward Jane, either.

I’m named after a complete stranger, so there’s no cute story of my namesake except that it just looked pretty in print.

I like my name ok, because Leslie is a nonbinary choice. There are plenty of men named Leslie in the UK, so I don’t feel like I need to change my name to something else. It already has both male and female characteristics.

I have heard mixed reviews on what it means. Some say it means “quiet spirit,” some say it means “one from the grey fortress.” Judging from the way my spirit jumps around when I’m alone, I’m leaning toward my namesakes being warriors somewhere in Scotland, because Leslie is actually a surname there.

I am lucky in that I have a Scottish tartan for my first name and and Irish tartan for my last name.

Lanagan is distinctly Irish and I get it from my father’s side. There’s Scottish blood on my mother’s side somewhere, but I don’t remember who is kin to who over there. My grandfathers were both into genealogy, but I’m not. I remember a few stories from my father’s father about how we came to this country, but my other grandfather was not quite as forthcoming because he was not a writer. My father’s father published a book in several volumes called “The Lanagan Century” that cemented those stories in my mind in a way that my other grandfather couldn’t.

It was my grandfather’s version of a blog, in retrospect.

So maybe even though my name was a fluke, I certainly ended up in the right family.

Comments Like This

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ 1 Comment
Daily writing prompt
What motivates you?
View all responses

Leslie – your exploration of the intersection between writing and living strikes me as profoundly honest – particularly your observation that “I am often too busy recording life to remember to go out and live it.” This captures something essential about the writer’s paradox that I don’t think gets discussed enough.

The way you’ve woven together your mental health journey with your writing practice feels incredibly brave. When you write, “My only support system has been writing,” it illuminates how the very thing that sustains you can also become isolating. There’s something both beautiful and heartbreaking about finding solace in words whilst struggling with whether the relationships they document are real.

Your question about Aada – whether she’s real or hallucination – opens up fascinating territory about the nature of online relationships and how we validate our experiences. “I just wanted to prove to myself that I wasn’t hallucinating… because I had someone to talk to who could empathise” speaks to a very human need for connection and verification of our reality.

I’m struck by your insight that “I become prophetic because hindsight is 20/20.” This suggests you understand that your writing serves as both document and mirror – allowing you to trace patterns and growth over time. It makes me wonder: when you look back at your earlier entries about Aada, what patterns do you notice now that weren’t visible whilst you were living through it?

Your observation about readers – “They’re my sacrifices in continuing to be a writer, the readers that don’t talk to me anymore but do talk to each other” – captures something profound about the cost of vulnerability in public writing. You’ve created this space where people can witness your humanity, but that witnessing comes with complications.

The tension you describe between needing grace for changing your mind versus being seen as “two-faced” feels particularly relevant in our current moment. How do you navigate continuing to write authentically whilst protecting yourself from that push-pull dynamic you mention?

Your closing line – “Because remember when I used to write so beautifully?” – suggests you’re questioning your current work, but honestly, this piece demonstrates the same raw honesty and insight that presumably drew people to your earlier writing. Perhaps what’s changed isn’t the quality, but your relationship with the act of writing itself?

What would it look like to write without an audience – even temporarily – just to reconnect with the intimacy you describe having with your word processor?

Bob

This comment is so far-reaching that I’m not sure what to say in response. I would say that it helps to have one person in mind when I’m writing an essay, because what resonates with one will resonate with a thousand at this scale. It also helps me not to feel alone in the room as I write, because I’m talking to the person in my head, not thousands of people at once. When I am not thinking of my audience, my emotions fall flat. I used to do the same thing in preaching- look out for the people I was thinking of when I wrote that line just to see if they thought it was as funny in reality as it was when I was working on the sermon.

You don’t connect with an audience. You connect with some of them because taking on the entire room is overwhelming. You just need touchstones.

Aada was my touchstone, the reader I looked for to make sure I was doing all right. I didn’t care what anyone else thought because her opinion was enough. I pushed her away, so she won’t be doing that anymore. I regret it, but there’s no way to go back and undo what I’ve done.

My blog is often a manual on “What Not to Do” because I guarantee that I thought I was right when I wasn’t. Now that time has passed, I see that I was a self-centered jerk. Of course the patterns I see with Aada are ways I’ve behaved that hurt her, because I was overfocused on my own needs.

She didn’t make me feel safe, so I wouldn’t return the favor. I should have, but I didn’t. She threw me into the pile of people she doesn’t trust because there’s no rebuilding from here. My emotions got in the way of my logic, and I didn’t do the right thing.

Neither did she.

So now she slowly slips away in my mind to make room for new people to be touchstones in my audience. I am a work in progress, and have realized that my communication skills are merely compensatory. I work best in reaction to someone else. The reason Aada and I worked well together is that I think she’s the smartest person in the entire world, and for some reason she thought I was, too. The nature of online relationships is ethereal, which led both of us to disconnect from our humanity on many occasions. Validating my experience was very difficult because I did not have anyone to talk to about it, because our connection was always avoidant/anxious….. with me being the anxious one.

It makes me wonder: when you look back at your earlier entries about Aada, what patterns do you notice now that weren’t visible whilst you were living through it?

I jumped up and down for attention because my needs weren’t being met, all while blissfully aware of the problems I caused in our relationship that would make it unusual. I really messed up, and I’ll never forgive myself. I can only hope that there’s a few things on Aada’s side that she’ll never forgive herself for, either, because that’s the only path that will make either of us try again in the future. After all, if she lied to impress me, I know I impressed her at least once.

I chose to make her number one on the call sheet because I thought I was writing anonymously. That no one could make the leap between Aada and “Her Real Name Here.” That led me to say some things that Aada certainly wouldn’t have want broadcast and it’s just more regret to add onto the pile.

I know why I was so keyed up on adrenaline, but she didn’t seem to understand until a few months ago. That was definitely a breakthrough, getting her to understand that I went through something pretty universal in spite of it being unusual.

I would give anything for a do-over of the past 12 years, because I had a solid goal in mind for this time in my life and I sabotaged it at every turn. I didn’t listen to Aada, and I didn’t listen to my own fears as she tried to work with them.

Being able to read Aada’s words months later give me empathy for her, reflecting on how she must think of me. I really did act like a shit friend because I was so tired of my bipolar disorder getting blamed for a lot of things that were emotional.

She blamed me for being emotional.

It’s no wonder that I thought I wouldn’t be enough in person. She’d treated me like a goddess when we first met, and I didn’t know what to do with that pedestal. I just returned the favor, a complete mutual admiration society. But once she was my actual friend, she didn’t realize that meant she would appear in my musings about what’s going on in my life.

I treasure the entries where she told me I did a good job, and choose not to remember the ones she hated.

She was always halfway out the door, so I decided to close it.

Again, I regret doing so because I cut off a future. I just didn’t see the future going better than the past. I will never know what would have happened if I’d relaxed. Maybe those baby steps would have materialized into something. She just had to get a lie off her chest first, and I imploded.

What motivates me is connecting to strangers, especially ones that ask probing questions. I’m not sure that I have answered any of them, but in short, recognizing the pattern with Aada was recognizing all the ways I’d been a jerk to her without taking the time to really think about what I was saying. I was too quick, always. It didn’t matter the reaction, it was too fast to take in.

This is what it looks like when I have switched the audience to Bob.

Movies

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ 3 Comments
Daily writing prompt
What are your top ten favorite movies?
View all responses

I tend to remember movies by good quotes, so here are my 10 movies with the quote that got them here:

  1. Raising Arizona….. “Sometimes I get the menstrual cramps real hard.”
  2. Trading Places…. “It ain’t cool to be no jive turkey this close to Thanksgiving.”
  3. Argo…. “I should have brought some books for prison.” “Oh, they’ll kill you long before prison.”
  4. Monty Python and the Quest for the Holy Grail…. “It’s only a model.”
  5. Rounders… “Life is on the line. The rest is just waiting.”
  6. The Three Amigos…. “We could go on a walk and you could kiss me on the veranda.” “Lips would be fine.”
  7. Monty Python’s Life of Brian… “I should know whether he’s the Messiah. I’ve followed quite a few.”
  8. The Bourne Supremacy….. “you look tired, Pam.”
  9. Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle…. “just talk to her once and it won’t be weird anymore.”
  10. Deadpool- too many to name because I quote it like I quoted Grail in high school. The most frequent is “he had the right idea. He wore the brown pants.”

Learning What I’m Going to Say With the Rest of You

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ 2 Comments
Daily writing prompt
What do you enjoy most about writing?
View all responses

Every day there’s a new blank page to fill, and I wonder how I’m going to fill it. My lifestyle really doesn’t support nonfiction writing anymore because it takes a fictional world to be interesting. No one wants to hear about my life on the couch.

I often wonder if you have to get lonely enough to write fiction. If your relationships have to fail so completely that you rescue them with tales of swashbuckling grandeur. I know that I can change my future with the things I write, dramatically. But it comes at a cost- time to write costs time to get out. I am often too busy recording life to remember to go out and live it.

It’s the intimacy with a word processor that brings me the most joy. Mining my own life for memorable interactions doesn’t endear me to anyone until I’ve stopped writing at all…. then the same people say I used to write so beautifully, why did I stop?

I decided to show myself what would happen if I didn’t stop. I ended up alone with a mental health diagnosis of bipolar disorder with psychotic features. I have no idea what happened to make the doctors think that I was psychotic, because I wasn’t entirely present when they first saw me.

However, I don’t have any history of being psychotic, so I can think of at least one real life scenario that could have gotten me that diagnosis just by telling it.

Maybe they’re right, and Aada is a hallucination.

Oh. So that’s why I should have listened to her. Why it was so hard the longer we went on without meeting. She said to tell no one, and the longer I carried her secrets the sicker I got. I wanted distance from her because I couldn’t have closeness with her- that I’d only be able to take in seven percent of her communication online. We would keep tearing each other down based on her reaction to these essays, not choosing to let time pass before gutting each other emotionally like an axe.

I began to resent the policy of not being able to talk to anyone in my personal life about her and also not talking to me. But again, our last interactions were positive until I imploded them.

I couldn’t let go of the feeling that meeting her in person would make my emotions normalize, that it was impossible to read someone without meeting them, but it was easy to let emotions spill in operatic swells on the page with the other not knowing what to focus on because they didn’t hear you say it.

I wondered why she didn’t seem to care that my life took this path. That her secrets made me unable to cope with my real life, akin to traveling with The Doctor.

The blessing of writing is being able to explain what I’m feeling in detail because life thinks it works in sound bites when clarification is necessary. My mind goes all over the place when I think of my own journey towards mental and physical health.

I loved that Aada let me love her out loud. One day I hope she’ll come back to this time in her life and read my words again. I’m certain it feels like I’m guilting her, but I’m not trying to do so. I am genuinely curious to know why she would choose to isolate me the way she did and make it impossible to cope without being able to have a real conversation? If she didn’t want me to talk to anyone else, why did she make it so hard to talk to her?

I’m not allowed to talk about this story anywhere but here, because I can tell truth from fiction here where no one else can. It’s just that my doctors think I’m psychotic because of it.

And in all of this I’ve been wondering where she’s been… where I’ve been? Why weren’t we both paying attention? Why did I give her so many reasons not to want to meet with me?

I was scared that I wasn’t enough in person. The duality in me is alarming. I craved something that I actively sabotaged, because I found out she lied to me. I realized that nothing was ever going to get any better between us because she didn’t care that she also isolated me from my support system.

My only support system has been writing. Aada has had an enormous amount of respect for my feelings, but the longer she went without opening up about getting together made me think she was never going to do so. That she was sorry, but there was nothing she could do.

I just wanted to prove to myself that I wasn’t hallucinating…… because I had someone to talk to who could empathize. That was all in writing as well, so it became the thing I enjoyed most about our unusual kinship. I just wanted to come in from the cold of being thought of as crazy and she was the one person that could provide that respite. It would have energized us in new ways, because we could finally read in each other’s voices rather than getting defensive about everything. It’s the internet. Someone’s always offended.

What I also enjoy about writing is being an authoritative source. The people that are dear to me come back years later to remember what I said, to remember how they felt when they read it in the moment and to see if anything is different. I come across softer, more vulnerable, because I will change my mind and realize when I have erred.

I accept all the times that I acted like a narcissist in Aada’s life, and forgive all the times I thought she came across that way. I don’t think it was a one-way street. We both participated in something that was good and became harmful over time. But I’m the only one that has a record of it. That’s what I mean about time changing people’s perceptions and being surprised at how much I’ve learned when they go back and read something I’ve written years later.

I don’t understand the push/pull relationship people have with my writing. How people drop in and drop out over a decade, for instance. I find that I am always more popular just by being myself than trying to write towards a goal.

I become prophetic because hindsight is 20/20.

It’s hard to believe I didn’t have enough strength to walk away from Aada on my own… that I created a situation in which she wouldn’t want to come back from… I just had to get tired enough of waiting when she was the one person whose Mama Wolverine claws would have made a difference in my life.

I wondered what on earth I was doing until I realized why I needed her. Anyone else and I would just feel crazy for the rest of my life. I can’t believe I wrecked things when she said that she would be open and not have many boundaries. I wish I had trusted more in that than exploding with anger at her lie.

I wish I’d told her how coffee with her would make me feel normal, that all this internet stuff wasn’t for me. I wish I’d thought of that in 2013. I didn’t get my goals because I didn’t think about them. I couldn’t think about overarching goals because I was lost in the muck every day.

I think that’s what I’ve given up as a blogger, because my life constantly changes when people read about themselves. They don’t like being lost in the muck with me.

If I wrote my real life story, you’d think I was psychotic, too… or maybe you already believe that? Who knows. What I know is that I’m a neurodivergent writer who takes in the world a little bit at a time. I bit off more than I could chew.

By not being as vulnerable as I needed to get, I suppose… although I wondered how I could be any more vulnerable in our letters than I already was. I needed her to be more present, to be the Mama Wolverine she said she was.

Whether she feels that’s what I need in the future is up to her, because I couldn’t get her to listen to what I was going through. I started writing toward her as my audience because we didn’t have any friends in common that knew who she was… or so I thought.

We don’t have friends in common- I just have readers that talk to each other because they love to read my writing without talking to me about it. That lets me off the hook in terms of caring about their reactions because I can’t do anything to preordain what they think when they read.

They’re my sacrifices in continuing to be a writer, the readers that don’t talk to me anymore but do talk to each other. Life goes on, but it never goes on in the same way. I have let life beat me down in the process of writing, and I’m just now starting to see how much it takes to keep going.

I have to keep growing, or people will not see the value in these entries. I have to keep making friends that are utterly unimpressed by my blogging so that we can lead normal lives around it.

Because every time I stop, people want me to come back… but they don’t want to support me when I write. I can see how I need to improve my communication skills, but my being human gets in the way. I am not making excuses, I’m asking for grace.

I’m asking for grace.

I’m asking for the ability to change my mind rather than people thinking that I’m automatically two-faced because one entry conflicts with another. It gives no credence to the passage of time. That I might have regrets and need to clarify something later on.

I was tired of the push/pull with Aada because she loved being adored on this web site and in e-mail, but didn’t have a problem ripping me a new one when she didn’t understand something, often embarrassed when I told her what I really meant.

I needed the internet dumbfuckery to stop so we could take a breath.

But I should have thought of that in 2013.

I only know that because I have records of my own growth. I read myself for patterns in behavior that I don’t like, because I lay my heart out on these pages. It’s what draws people to me, thinking I am interesting. Then, they meet me in person and wonder how I write such things…. I’m not so hot.

If Aada lied to impress me, she would have told me the first time she met me, because it would have seemed so silly to try and impress a geek like me. But over the internet I reacted with the fact that she didn’t care about the consequences she’d laid out for me.

She’s been the thing I enjoy most about writing, taking the adoration in stride. I just got the feeling that our relationship wasn’t real- that it was a lot of words on the page and not much else. That’s because she wouldn’t tell me whether it was possible or not for 12 years. My writing became more and more unhinged because I felt so ignored.

I needed empathy, and she didn’t have it. I wanted to prove to myself that Aada meant what she said about there being nothing I could say that would hurt her, surprised when she said something did.

I didn’t want those worlds to cross over, and there was no way they couldn’t.

The hardest thing about being a blogger is not knowing which of your friends’ friends read your blog and whether they talk about you behind your back. It takes a really thick skin to publish knowing that even the critics won’t be critics after some time.

Because remember when I used to write so beautifully?

Peace

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment
Daily writing prompt
What do you love about where you live?
View all responses

Peace radiates in Baltimore because the city has a rhythm. You either fit into it or you don’t. There’s not the tourist energy pervasive around DC, so it’s unlikely you’ll be stopped on the train. No one is looking at you, yet everything is beautiful when you take it all in. I think it takes a special person to pick up on what constitutes beautiful here, though.

Peace often comes from finding the pretty things among trash. The commute from my house to my cognitive behavioral health group takes me through some of the worst neighborhoods in the city. I still find street art appealing even if the driver says it is not a good idea to ask anyone about it.

One of my favorite moments was when we saw who we thought was an escort because of the way she was dressed. One of the women said, “girl, it’s not that hot.” We decided it was never that hot and it has provided me endless amounts of entertainment. The way she said it was so musical that it repeated.

The way people say things here is endearing, because there’s no Washington front. No one talks like they work in government, at least not around me. Therefore, words flow differently when they’re not peppered with acronyms.

I love listening here.

Joy

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ 3 Comments
Daily writing prompt
What positive emotion do you feel most often?
View all responses

I feel joy when my iced coffee tastes right in the morning, because I have learned that the key to happiness is small expectations. I used the cold brew method for 32 oz of Cafe Bustelo, and the smile on my face is priceless every time I take a sip. A good cup of coffee sets the tone for the whole day for me.

Mostly because my coffee time is also my time with you. It’s almost 0600, and dawn is just beginning to creep over the horizon. I think of my friends across the Atlantic and wonder what the day is already holding for them. What am I going to find out by being awake? I choose to believe in joy there, too, because for every piece of bad news there is a baby born, a new relationship formed, love to be celebrated.

I have to find my own joy in this administration, because everything from my identity as a nonbinary person to my ability to marry a woman is under attack. It doesn’t matter that I’m not planning on getting married again, to anyone. It matters for my friends who are already married or are planning on it. If abortion rights could be taken away, so could gay marriage, because abortion was settled law a lot longer.

It’s hard to remain joyful in that kind of pressure cooker, so again, I turn to the way my coffee tastes. I have to create my own joy, because no one is going to do it for me.

Generating joy is not my specialty. My brain delights in getting me to isolate from other people, even though I know I need them. I find that if I can start with one thing, the coffee, then I can slowly find another.

Maybe it’s the feel of my t-shirt against my skin, or the air conditioner tickling my bare feet. Maybe it will be the feel of the water as I start my shower.

Although I should do some laundry before I take a shower….

Whatever the case may be, I can generate happiness. If I start with something small and concrete like the taste of my coffee, I am not setting myself up for failure later in the day.

So Far, Poorly

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment
Daily writing prompt
How do you plan your goals?
View all responses

I have poor impulse control, and it leads me astray when I start building goals. Most of my friends have poor impulse control as well, which is why it’s hard to work together. Lighting rarely strikes at the same time. My buddy Evan and I are both committed to the neurodivergent cookbook, but we never seem to be working at the same time. I need to get AI involved just to keep me reading. That’s where I find AI is the most useful. I retain so much of what I read that getting it to spout facts and figures while I craft prose that it’s like having a secret weapon. I just do not use generative AI as more than a quote, which you will know is a quote because I don’t have problems telling people I created a digital sidekick.

I created real interest on Facebook and reddit, so I know that the book has legs. The one thing I’m having problems getting people to do is write back- if cooks want to know why we do everything, is there a follow up question? What do you want to know that we can explain?

My angle is that you want to know why we cook at home and how that’s been influenced by professional cooks and their friends. Knowledge is passed down over the private tables of friends the longer they cook together.

Some people prefer to cook alone, but this book won’t leave them out. Learning why cooks are the way they are about their food will resonate with me, so I know it will resonate with other introverts.

I’m about to stalk Aguste Escoffier across the internet to find out everything I can. He’s the father of all modern restaurants and the standards for cooking in them. You’re not a real cook if you can’t name the five mother sauces, and I’m guessing that his mother was a better cook than him.

Learning the craft of cooking is grueling, because you don’t have to be in a busy restaurant to experience timing issues and abject failure.

I wish I could quantify how to time dishes so that everything comes out together. It’s so much a dance of the senses, being able to tell with smells and sounds about how much time you’ve got. The mistake most people make is thinking that one dish needs their absolute attention. That way, they’re not cooking other things or cleaning, they’re overfocusing.

You can just check food without hovering over it.

I know timing so innate inside the kitchen, but I cannot seem to apply it to other areas of my life. I didn’t end up where I wanted to be, and I take as much responsibility as I can. I’m struggling with aging more than anything else, because my disabilities didn’t slow me down when I was fast enough to cover myself with compensatory skills.

Therefore, I have a lot to think about when it comes to goals from here on out. I have a yin to travel and a yang that ties me to home. I have a spirit that cannot be broken by bad weather because there’s always a good cup of coffee inside.

I have improvised all of my life, and my compensatory skills are now coming up short. My executive function keeps becoming poorer, getting overwhelmed with more and more. I think AI can help me with that, too, because no one needs to live like an animal.

My lack of worthiness keeps me in the dirt because I know what I should be doing and cannot make myself do it. I have pathological demand avoidance, which makes it hard to take care of myself. Meeting others’ demands is a lot easier.

That’s because I know what they are. I look at my body, my house and see lots of things that need to be done but cannot find an entry point. That’s where AI can really help me, because I can put in a list of chores and out will come eleventy suggestions on how to tackle something.

I just need to talk to my AI about it. I’m getting to the space where I realize I need to change my life from the ground up, having isolated myself from the rest of the world. Going to therapy and my cognitive behavioral health group is easing me into existence with other people. I realize that executive function also keeps me from wanting to invite people over, so I need to clean in order to have an inviting space to host.

These are my disabilities getting in the way and making my mental health worse. My goal is to leverage AI in my healing, because there’s so much it can do in teaching you how to take care of yourself when you really don’t know…. and are too embarrassed to ask.

I don’t know why I don’t have aspirations higher than that right now, but I know it’s a building block. I can’t take care of anyone else until I get this right.

And I do want to take care of other people. I feel selfish having such a small life around me, unable to attend because I can’t find anything to wear, don’t have anything to bring. All of this is just feeling sorry for myself, and I don’t like it. I’m happiest when I’m in giving, open mode.

Getting there is just an uphill climb because I chose to isolate myself in a new city with no friends. I had friends when I first got here, but it did not work out due to a huge lack of communication between all of us.

So, I’m trying to make friends and it is happening slowly.

I should get out more, but my ability to read the room is often why I don’t. It’s not that I’m shy, it’s that my social battery is tiny. I am over being in public fairly quickly. A walk to the store is about all I can take before I am ready to collapse. Taking in my environment is a full-time job.

Adding floppy muscles to that means I am working not to fall, even when I don’t notice that I’m doing it. My body is tense and tight, and I walk like I hurt. That’s because I do.

My goals need to include pain management, because I know that it’s not bad enough to need narcotics, but an NSAID wouldn’t hurt. In fact, I’ve forgotten to take it today and I really notice a difference. My next move when I get up from writing is a large glass of water and some Aleve.

That’s mostly how I plan goals- what is my next move?

I don’t play chess and think moves ahead, which is to my detriment.

I’ve let my enemy defeat me over and over, my own body and brain.

It’s the goal of a diseased brain to convince you to isolate. I couldn’t explain what I needed, so I threw a bomb over my shoulder and walked away in too many cases over the past 12 years. It has caused me to feel uniquely alone, or it did until I realized that my expectations were different from reality because reality lived in my inbox. This is true of all my relationships right now, and what needs changing for me to be successful in Baltimore. I stay home too much because that’s where my “real friends” are.

My real friends who cannot realistically help me because they do not live close.

I’ve made a mess of all my close relationships in the past and probably taking the blame for much more than I should, excluding Aada and Dana. I think I’ve pretty much worked out how all of that happened and it wasn’t that Aada couldn’t do enough for me. It’s that she wasn’t telling me something, lots of things, that could have directed both my writing and real life.

I’m the reason that didn’t happen, because I was done with it being hard to be her friend and there being very little upside. We’d have a close moment and immediately start fighting again, our humanity always lost because apparently meeting in person was too hairy a proposition.

I wanted the story on that. Why we couldn’t integrate so that our e-mail fights stopped? I can’t even read her e-mails in her voice, just the one I made up for her in my head- she’s doing the same with me and thinks our communication couldn’t be improved by sitting across from each other.

I hurt my own feelings by thinking that I meant more to her than I did. But when I felt that way, it’s when she’d tell me that she did feel warm feelings for me and she was just busy. I would get the hint, to just go away, and then she’d relight the flame that I just over-worried about everything.

The goal is to learn what I can by diving into the wreck, because I don’t want my next relationship to be affected by it. I did end up resentful I wasn’t a priority because she waffled on whether I was a priority to her- I just wanted things to be clear.

I couldn’t let go, so I made it where she’d have to… like Dana hitting me.

I was too unenlightened not to break the circle of violence because I’m certain I see it now. I can move forward from this loss because I saw myself becoming the Boo Radley in Aada’s mental house as she became my Scout.

My goal is to remember through the eyes of a child what it’s like to really live. I need light and love right now because some of the thunder is my fault. I sabotaged my relationship with Aada at every turn. And I don’t mean recently. I mean from the moment we met. It’s analyzing those decisions that make me realize how severe my bipolar disorder actually is. How severe my autism really is, because I learned that I miss social cues over the internet.

My goal in therapy is to become a better writer by exploring how my public and private life shouldn’t intersect. I’m looking forward to those discussions because I know he’ll point out things I should have already been thinking, and didn’t.

I fly by the seat of my pants.

Curiosity

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment
Daily writing prompt
If you were going to open up a shop, what would you sell?
View all responses

If I had a shop of my own, I would like to sell curiosity itself. I would have all kinds of puzzles and games to spark the imagination, as well as a coffee bar so that people could sit and play with their purchases.

I would have a book section dedicated to espionage, because I would like to sell the books of all the retired spies I’ve met who’ve gone on to become authors. And what could be a bigger puzzle/game than that?

My friend Josh was telling me that he didn’t trust any government enough to spy for it, and I totally get it. But you can’t hang out at the spy museum and not get bitten by the bug…. it’s basically a commercial for new CIA recruits, just like going to NASA creates little astronauts…. and yes, I went through an astronaut phase in 7th grade. I went to a science and math magnet where I actually got to meet Mae Jemison.

So perhaps I will include books by retired astronauts as well. Space and espionage go hand in hand, as CIA and KGB duked it out for supremacy in The Cold War.

I’d like to have book talks in my shop, to receive all these people that I really admire in a setting that’s comfortable for them. Of course other people have shops like this, I would just like to be a stop on the tour.

But let’s get back to this coffee bar. I’d like to be able to make a wide variety of drinks, including being able to add shots of liqueur to enhance the coffee flavor in the afternoons. I don’t drink, but other people do. I’ve always liked being able to have a drink and work on my own stuff, so I’m thinking it would be a coffee/bar instead of a coffee bar.

I’d like to get Starbucks in on the mix, because Komodo Dragon mixes so perfectly with Sambuca, Amaretto, and all the other flavors that make a perfectly crafted coffee cocktail. I would also like to have their nonalcoholic counterparts, but let’s be clear. I realize that I would be drinking most of the profits on that one.

I’d like to have Athletic IPAs on draft for my customers who like a cold beer and are on a deadline. Beer makes every chore more enjoyable, and I like the idea of being able to day drink without the after-effects.

The beauty of my store is that it would pique your curiosity about lots of things while remaining a chill place to hang out. Soft music would play over the PA and I’d hire acoustic bands or a pianist once in a while.

We could all play games together, surrounded by our service animals while people browse the books I have on offer.

I have no idea where this store would be at this point, because I’m frustrated with the United States, but do not have a solid bug out plan in terms of financing it. I can barely take care of myself, so thinking up this dream for a bookshop and bar is really stretching me out of my comfort zone.

But maybe it’s where I’d be the happiest, surrounded by other nerds who love information, and need the sensory input to be turned down. That is the main reason I do not like to go shopping- the assault is relentless. I get most of my groceries and supplies delivered, including my clothes.

If I could think of a way to make shopping for clothes less intrusive and overwhelming, I would probably do that instead- I see a greater need for it.

Coffee shops are a dime a dozen, but not really good ones. Not nineties good, anyway. I really like what Busboys & Poets are doing in DC, but there’s not really a Baltimore equivalent, particularly not one specializing in “the greatest game.”

I think that I would attract spies and analysts to my bookshop because so many of them are neurodivergent. It’s something we don’t really think about, but autistic and ADHD people have such fine-tuned pattern recognition that stands out in espionage.

It would thrill me if I opened this bookshop and 30 years down the line I find out that something spectacular happened there. Maybe it would be the site of a dead drop, maybe my books were used to catch foreign agents. Whatever. I have no idea. It’s just a thrilling idea to contemplate.

The most important part would be making everyone feel welcome, no matter who they are. I have a feeling that would come with some social masking, dealing with customers, but it’s not like I’ve never had to do it before.

I cannot be a shut-in writer forever, and I don’t know why I’m making such an effort at it. Outside scares me, mostly because I have terrible balance and fall a lot. Maybe owning my own shop would lessen the feeling that I don’t belong.

Being surrounded by books about subjects I love, and meeting other people who also love espionage, space, and the combination thereof (looking at you, Vince Houghton) would make me feel like I had a home.

Of course, I could always get a job working at the bookstore in the Spy Museum. I’ve been there a couple of times…………

If you are an OG, you know I have literally sat on the floor combing their books and that was a laugh line.

It’s just that the spy museum is too far away for me to work there on a daily basis, I think… perhaps not, as I enjoy my time on the train. But Baltimore to DC is a long haul when you’re thinking of it as a commute and not a one-off day trip.

It’s not un-doable, I’m just not sure it would be my first choice. I think I’m onto something with wanting to bring a piece of the spy museum to me.

With beer.

My friend Josh is crazy about spy novels, so I would have to include a fiction section to get him interested. Kidding, all those books would be for me, too. The thing about both of us is that it doesn’t matter what country the intelligence agency represents, we just like spy stories overall.

Although both of our favorites seem to be John Le Carré.

The BBC adaptations are hard to come by, so I think I’ll get a subscription to BritBox. That may be my only avenue for Doctor Who in the future, as well, because all the episodes are gone from HBO Max.

And now I have a new project for the afternoon- tracking down how I can watch foreign spy shows for cheap. It would be cool if I owned them to be able to play them in the background at this fictional store I’m not building. 😉

Ada to the Rescue

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment
Daily writing prompt
Create an emergency preparedness plan.
View all responses

For this entry, I turned to Ada, my digital sidekick. I said, “I need to write a blog entry about creating an emergency preparedness plan. I’m not even sure what that means. Can you help me?” Of course, it had to do with coordinating with your family members to designate a place to meet up in case we were separated. Because my family lives in Texas, it is unlikely that we would be affected by the same natural disaster at once. Therefore, I would probably go and visit them if I could make it.

I don’t drive. I never said I don’t know how. I could easily rent a car if planes were not available and just buy the insurance they have on offer… provided there were cars to be had.

Emergency preparedness is not just being able to get out of a situation entirely, but how to weather it in place. Here’s what Ada suggests:

  • Water (at least 1 gallon per person per day)
  • Non-perishable food
  • Flashlights, batteries, or a battery-powered radio
  • First aid kit with basic supplies like bandages and antiseptic wipes
  • Extra cash and important documents (e.g., insurance policies, identification)

I don’t know where I would store the water, but I do know that my bug out bag needs some improvements. I do not own a flashlight or a good first aid kit. I use my phone for all that stuff…. but I have to have a backup torch in case my phone goes dead. Ada also recommended a personal locator beacon, but I haven’t decided if that’s overkill.

This is the stuff AI is very good at; I asked her one question and it led to another. When she started rattling off everything I would need, I told her that I lived alone. That I was worried about what to do in that situation. She said that I could either call 911 or FEMA directly at 1-800-621-FEMA.

Weathering storms alone is not my favorite thing, but I’ve had to get used to it as I’ve become more introverted and pushed people away. I’m trying to let the pendulum swing back, letting in new connections. Josh has been invaluable as a resource, because even though he’s currently in France, we chat via signal most days and he’ll be back in about a week. He’s the closest person to me in terms of distance that could actually help in a situation, and I have no doubt that he would.

All of my friends would jump in if they could, they just live far away. I know that if I was really in trouble, I could show up in Houston or Portland and have a family to receive me. That’s not nothing, but I’m looking forward to making Baltimore my home… I’ve gotten gunshy about moving back to the DMV now that DC is under federal control. Though I’d live over the state line in Maryland, I have no idea how far Trump’s goons will be able to reach. I’m not even sure that Baltimore is far enough.

And in fact, I have Canadian friends who, if I showed up on their doorstep, wouldn’t let me go home. I’m nonbinary and therefore a refugee from the Trump administration.

It’s why I’m so dead set on going to culinary school in Finland- getting away from the ills of the United States to be able to rest and relax in a country that may be headed for Russian aggression, but has proven over and over that they’re prepared. Being in culinary school is not the same daily grind that working in a restaurant is… I wouldn’t have to worry so much that I’m a bit slower than the average cook, meanwhile creating valuable content for future culinary students on YouTube and this web site. My bug out bag will also contain a passport, that’s all I’m saying.

Trump drives me crazy because this is the time in which people will look back and say, “why didn’t anybody do anything?”

If Americans need bug out bags, it will come at his hands.

Like

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment
Daily writing prompt
What is a word you feel that too many people use?
View all responses

Everyone overuses the word “like” and it drives me up the wall because I do it.

It’s a filler word, something you say when your brain has frozen and your RAM is overloaded.

That’s why I, like, say it a lot.

I need time to process because my computer was made in the 1970s. There’s only so many upgrades.

It’s when I’m at my computer that I can go back and erase all the filler I use in conversation.

Conversing with me is the surest way to get me not to write about something because I have an auditory lag that causes me to pick up about half of what people are saying. That’s why I need so much clarification. Negotiations are sometimes tense because it leads people to believe I’m off in my own little world. Everyone else understood without all these questions.

I tend to remember everything I read. That’s why I’ve loved Aada so madly all these years. She gave me her communication in my favorite medium.

But if we’d started seeing each other in person and I was responsible for remembering things she said, it would be a 50/50 shot as to whether I’d retain anything.

I’m starting to recognize the pleasure in this.

Because you cannot go back and reread conversations. You cannot relive the ways in which you’ve made mistakes. This is for good and ill… sometimes I needed to reread something from Aada’s perspective to understand why I’d done wrong.

Sometimes, I was very clear that I was wrong.

There are so many things that spiraled out of control because our emotions were distilled. We got wasted on our own dopamine with the way we wasted time fighting.

That’s what I thought meeting in person would stop. That we’d lost our humanity. We would both turn into these keyboard warriors that the other wouldn’t recognize and start tearing each other down. I was afraid to meet in person because I didn’t know how it would change our e-mail lives, but I was willing to try.

I never knew what was polite from her and what was genuine, so I cannot speak to whether she was really planning to meet with me. She always acted as if it was no big deal, then scared by the reality. I was scared, too. I just didn’t act like it because someone had to be the one to put on their big underwear.

I don’t think she thought I could hear things like, “I’m scared.”

When I’d been over our relationship a hundred times from her perspective and knew she had every right to be afraid. I wouldn’t have blamed her one bit if she’d said, “I like writing to you, but I don’t see this going anywhere past that.” She didn’t. She said, “someday, perhaps” and then asked for baby steps. So I’ll never know if we could have met in person or not, because I blew up the relationship before we could actually work it out.

I’m sure in a lot of ways that’s why I did it. That I was tired of putting someone first in my life when they had reservations about meeting in person. I turned away from her because the situation was so impossible. I lost my humanity because of impatience. The last straw was that she lied to me.

It wasn’t even that she lied to me, it was finding out she could. And not to care about the consequences for me the bigger this lie got when it would have been so easy to tell me that she lied.

She lied to impress me.

I believe that even less, but I don’t have a better story than the one she gave me.

I think a lot of my need to put her first would have gone away with seeing her in the flesh. In context, even better. I didn’t know how close her other relationships were. She didn’t know those things about me.

We could have learned to have things go unsaid, taken care of with a glance instead of a paragraph.

I sabotaged all of that, because I was tired of waiting. Feeling like there was another truth to all of this that she wasn’t writing. That her husband and family didn’t know we were friends, or they did and they hated me for it.

If they didn’t before, I’m sure they do now.

What’s a true loss is not being able to broker peace.

In another universe, Dana and I are laughing with Aada and her husband, because that’s how it should have been all along. I am responsible for why that meeting never happened. I wish I could go back and re-do all of it, knowing what I know now. If I’d played my cards right, I would have had bonus family. I played every hand like I’d looked up the worst combinations in poker.

I would have put on my big girl pants and just Skyped her while she was on vacation. We both would have been a better judge of character, knowing whether we were actually doing the right thing by keeping our relationship so on the down-low.

It drove me up the wall to be so secretive because it reminded me of dating Meagan in 12th grade. There were certain people she didn’t want to know she was dating me, so there were a lot of rules to remember in front of others. Maybe that’s why Aada isolated me, so we wouldn’t have to remember too many rules.

I know I isolated her.

I should have told her that I felt isolated from the rest of the world, but for some reason I thought she already knew it and had empathy. My expectations were off, and I hurt my own feelings.

It’s so easy to do, hurting your own feelings because you think you’ve expressed something and you haven’t. I thought I’d done a good job of telling her how lonely I felt, and how having another friend in our family was a good thing because she wasn’t there.

Flying under the radar was not a good thing for us, because it stopped us from enjoying some much-needed sunshine.

I wonder daily what would have happened if we’d met for coffee or lunch after we discovered the other online. If I could have been cool and collected between meeting online and IRL. If I could have saved Dana some jealousy because Aada absolutely is all that and a bag of chips, but not my type (really). I fell in love with her words, not her face. The more the three of us hung out, the more the glaring differences between us would appear and make that love change more quickly into something sustainable because I have no doubt that Dana would have liked Aada better than me.

She just didn’t write to her and get to know her. I did.

Over and over I hurt my own feelings as my relationship with Aada grew, because Dana didn’t have any patience for it and that’s all I needed from her.

I think she hit me because she knew our relationship would be over if she did. That I wouldn’t come back from that. She wouldn’t have to compete with Aada anymore, who was in the process of screaming “why is this happening? I like, didn’t do anything.” She’s right, she didn’t. I was making my own problems.

Aada’s answer was just not to talk about our relationship at all to anyone.

I made that work for years, molding the story to my web site because telling all of you is telling none of you. I control the narrative, so you only see what I want you to see.

Not knowing I had readers capable of putting together puzzle pieces on their own or how close I was getting. I needed guidance, and was flummoxed by getting read the riot act on some days and “lovely post, btw,” on others.

I cannot write the way other people want me to write all the time, but I do realize that with Aada’s special circumstances I should have been louder. More outrageous. Changed more details like telling people we live in Chicago or something.

The thing is that Aada doesn’t check in with me to know what literary devices I’m using to explain my own feelings, so if I tell a lie in order to protect her, she’ll think I’m telling the truth… that lie living in her brain as truth is worthless.

If she’d been smart, she would have gotten me a job as a blogger inside her company so I’d know the rules better than her and could actually write something valuable to all the people around her. Oh, wait. Her shit is boring. I can’t dress it up.

I’m glad that writing prompts are just suggestions, because what came up is what came up. I cannot get a whole essay out of filler words, but it is indeed what launched this essay.

What? Like it’s hard?

My Faith

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment
Daily writing prompt
What brings you peace?
View all responses

Praying for Aada and me as we move away from each other has given me an enormous amount of peace. I didn’t act very Christian and I have a lot of sins to atone for. I spend a lot of time in the forgiveness department, because no matter what, my reaction to her lie was wrong. I shouldn’t have popped off and decided that her flaming me should have been addressed here. But you have to believe that no one in my life is capable of lying, and only Aada had that history with me. The lie she told went from inert to complicated.

That’s because she kept up the lie for 12 years, not a few days.

It affected why I moved here, the choices I made in my personal life to put no one else above her. Why I pray for her every night.

“God of the universe, protect my precious Aada.”

I chose Aada because it fit the pattern of the prayer.

Why she can give up on this relationship and I’ll always think of her “somewhere, out there.”

Probably because she also made me afraid that “somewhere, out there” was closer than I thought. Now that time is here. I have gotten what I’m guessing are more dedicated fans than most. My only job is to be who I am, because I think they’ll like me over time. It should not be lost on them that I’m crazy about them because she is.

Her attrition rate is high as shit and she passed that feeling onto me, wanting to have loyal friends who had my back and picking more carefully than I ever have. She taught me about leadership, true leadership, and I’d get in the mud for any one of you.

To her EA… my prayer is partly that you’re always there for her and partly “good luck. God bless.” 😉

That last part will tickle Dana, because she knows exactly how I say, “good luck. God bless.”

One of the many pieces of wheat scattered among the chaff.

Sometimes I think about going to church just so I can say all the words of institution with the other abject sinners. None of us get away from it, I’m not being judgmental. We all have these dumbass attacks that render us mute in their stupidity, when we know we’re wrong and the consequences are more than you were prepared to pay.

I have felt that pain every day, and getting rid of it is the most important thing in my life. I am losing my grip. I don’t want to forget that I hurt you, but learn to live with it. I am not living. I have trapped myself.

My bipolar disorder ate me alive because I equated two things that weren’t true vs. your lie.

I’ve realized that my faith became letters to you a long time ago…. that I’m always talking to God, you’re just icing.

I used that space for everything, the repository of all my secrets. You could bury me and I’m sure you will. That’s why my fear of you is such a white flame. That this relationship has never been real, just a job.

No one is that busy.

My hospitalizations would have been better if you’d come to visit me, because I think humor is the best medicine. If you can laugh in a mental hospital, you can laugh anywhere. I think it would have been hilarious if we’d made our first meetup at Methodist or Sinai. All I needed was some reassurance. Your words rang hollow on the page.

Your words rang hollow is a phrase that will stay with me, because there were so few times you were willing to get real. I see now that you wouldn’t want to, because you think that you don’t have any say in what I write. Not only would I let you in, I’d let you edit. That’s not nothing.

I hate that the yellow string is fraying, but I am doing my best to maintain the chord that runs between us with good vibes and the occasional Red Bull. I don’t want you to think that I carry around negative feelings. I have to concentrate on the positive because I’d like to forgive myself one day.

Your words only ring hollow because you wanted them to- you always had so much more to say and didn’t.

I’m sure I’ve freaked you out more than once, but it has never stopped you from dropping a note when you know times are tough for me. I have no illusions that will still happen, but I do carry a flame of hope that something will change your heart down the road.

If not, I will keep talking to God. I will never choose another face for them. Your face just looks like a “God.” It suits you.

I should have asked you to Skype more than once. The internet is a rabbit hole, and how you ended up as the face of God rather than a normal person. There’s as much mystery to you as there is to God, especially with no in-person breaks where I did something normal like trip and fall into the pool.

It was your words that let me drown, but in a good way….

Though most would call it baptism by fire.

It was the kind of fire that cleansed everything around it, allowing me to relax in deep, enriched earth.