SHORTSHORTS

Bohemian

On a frigid autumn evening in Prague, I wandered the nearby hillsides, gathering inspiration for dances yet unwritten. The sky made no earthly sense. Mountainous clouds drifted through a blue so deep it seemed painted there. The sun hung bright as an August moon, yet somehow every star burned behind it, and somewhere beyond what my eyes should have been capable of seeing, Saturn wore its rings. Songbirds carried their melodies through the cold while caterpillars feasted on fallen leaves. I pulled the shawl I’d knitted by hand tighter around my shoulders and kept walking, awestruck by the beauty before me, losing all sense of time.

Since losing my beloved Griffin, most things have stood still. Our wedding day remains lodged inside my dismantled heart—the last place in me untouched by war. We dreamed of filling our cottage with children’s laughter, but agreed to wait until the blood-stained battlefields of the Franco-Prussian War had healed. Nine months of war came and went. My Griffin never returned. The cottage remained. The children did not. The warmth we once imagined lives only in the life we never got to have.

Empty and alone, I sometimes struggle even to walk the Bohemian hills surrounding me. My cottage is my only shield against the bitter winter nights; without it, I would not survive. Yet there are nights I am not certain I want it to. Penning memories of what might have been has become my means of survival. I write. I wander. And within nature’s embrace, I dream of dancing with Griffin once more.

This evening, as I sip tea on a wooden bench before a crackling fire, I glance over my shoulder at an unknown man asleep on the cot between the front door and the kitchen. It still astonishes me that I welcomed him inside, yet something in his weariness stirred my compassion.

With our backs to one another, I hear his deep, labored breaths and recall the exhaustion in his eyes when he arrived at my door. He hadn’t managed a word before I stepped aside and offered him shelter. He thanked me in a foreign tongue, but our shared language of kindness was clear. I gave him a bowl of stew, and he devoured two. After stoking the fire and laying a blanket and pillow upon the cot, I returned to the dishes, only to find him already fast asleep. Now I sit quietly, listening to him breathe and wondering what life he fled.

He is broad-shouldered but gaunt, his face aged beyond his years. What remains of his Turkish uniform hangs from his body in faded, tattered pieces, its once-bright colors dulled by hardship. A soldier, I suspect. Perhaps a deserter. Perhaps simply a man who has seen enough and is trying to find his way home.

Staring into the flames, I imagine his family. A wife waiting for his return. Perhaps children. A table with an empty chair no one has been willing to put away. For one terrible moment, I envy her. She might still get him back. Seven years have passed, and some stubborn part of me still aches to believe Griffin might one day walk through that door. Yet I cannot help feeling for this young man, carrying his own sorrow beneath each shallow breath.

When I look back again, for the briefest moment, I see Griffin sleeping soundly in my arms, his rhythm pressed against the melody of my heart. Why can’t this soldier be my husband? Why has the world delivered somebody else’s beloved to my door while refusing to return my own? The questions hover unanswered between us. And still, this stranger has made me feel less alone. For one night, his presence has returned something I had nearly forgotten—the quiet comfort of another soul beneath my roof.

Before dawn, I gather what little I can spare: a few canned goods and a jar of well water, placing them beside his cot. I pull the blanket softly around his shoulders and bid him a silent farewell. I do not wake him. I do not need his story.

When morning arrives, I step onto the porch and find the stranger’s footprints pressed into the frost, leading away from the cottage. My thoughts follow them over the hills and through distant woodlands carpeted in fallen leaves—paths I have never dared follow myself. I do not know his name. I do not know what he has survived, what he has left behind, or who may be waiting for him beyond those hills.

But in my heart, I know he’ll find his way home.

Past Life Regression 

Center Peace

My favorite city park in my old neighborhood is filled with ancient trees and bordered by a music hall. Sometimes musicians sit beneath the boughs, their melodies drifting through the leaves. Back then, I visited almost daily with my puppy, Holiday, wandering among the trunks as the seasons shifted. On days when my heart felt heavy, I leaned against a tree and simply sat, listening to the distant song of singing bowls.

After a week of storms, Holiday and I returned on a sunny autumn morning. I knew the ground would be scattered with fir, pine, cedar, and bay leaf branches, and I needed a few for my annual solstice table decoration—a ritual passed down from my grandmother.

As a child, my grandmother and I roamed forest floors gathering what we needed to frost-protect tender shoots, winterize the garden, decorate ancestral graves, and make holiday centerpieces. We never spoke aloud to the land or called what we were doing sacred. We simply knew not to take too much.

I understand that differently now. Through meditation, ritual, and simply paying closer attention, I have learned to move through the natural world with more awareness of what I take and what I leave behind. That morning, I circled the park first, greeting trees and plants I had not seen in months and breathing in the crisp, storm-washed air. Then I sat on a bench, quieted myself, and explained aloud why I had come. I asked permission to gather what the storm had already given.

A little squirrel appeared and watched Holiday and me with bright eyes, chattering as it darted between the trunks before racing up a tall oak and sending brown and gold leaves trembling onto the path. We followed its ridiculous little dance until I came upon a handsome fir branch lying on the ground. I picked it up and, in exchange, placed some dried alfalfa I had grown the year before beside the stump.

We continued through the park, gathering only a few branches and picking up litter and stray droppings along the way. Oddly, some of the finest sprigs seemed to be waiting beside discarded wrappers, beauty and carelessness occupying the same patch of earth. I remained mindful of why I was there, taking only what had already fallen and leaving the rest alone.

Finally, we reached a holly tree, its scarlet berries catching the sunlight. Nothing had dropped beneath it. I considered asking permission to cut a small spray, but chose instead to leave it untouched. Wanting something, I had learned, did not make it mine.

Then the squirrel reappeared, fluttering around the trunk, and there among the fallen leaves lay a single perfect holly branch. I laughed, whispered my thanks, gathered it gently, and knelt to scratch Holiday beneath her chin.

Back home, I arranged the branches with care, using only enough to cover the plate. Fir, pine, cedar, bay leaf, and that single spray of holly. Holiday curled beneath the table at my feet while candlelight moved across the needles and scarlet berries. It was the most beautiful winter decoration I had ever made, not because it was perfect, but because I knew where every piece had come from.

My grandmother taught me the ritual long before I understood what she was teaching me. Take what you need. Leave what you don’t. Pay attention. Give something back. Sometimes wisdom arrives through generations, sometimes through stillness, and apparently, sometimes through a squirrel named Chirp.

With special thanks and dedication to Dr. Conny.

Remanence

A summer breeze moved through the house when he appeared from the shadows, drunk again. His eyes were glassy, his body listing from one side to the other as he made his way down the hall. I knew the walk. I knew the look. More than anything, I knew what came next.

I ran to my bedroom and climbed beneath the covers, pulling them over my head before his footsteps reached my door. I closed my eyes and pretended to sleep. His steps grew heavier as he came closer, each one landing hard against the floorboards. I could tell where he was without seeing him. Children learn these things when they have to.

He lurched into my room and caught himself against the doorframe. A string of words fell from his mouth, too slurred to understand. Stale liquor and scorched tobacco reached me before he did. I lay perfectly still beneath the covers, my heart hammering so hard I was certain he could hear it, begging him silently to leave. Eventually, he did. His footsteps moved back down the hallway, heavy and uneven, until his bedroom door slammed shut. The house went quiet again, but the smell remained. So did I, beneath the covers, waiting until I was certain he wasn’t coming back.

Then I cried. “Oh, how I wish Mommy were here.” I said it into the darkness because there was no one else to hear me. Nights like this had become routine since she died. Daddy had become somebody I knew and didn’t know at all. Whatever part of him had once made me feel safe seemed to disappear with her, buried somewhere behind grief and liquor and the things adults never think children understand. But I understood enough. My mother was gone. My father was still here. And somehow, I had lost them both.

At school, I disappeared into the windows. I watched whatever moved outside while teachers spoke somewhere behind me. When the final bell rang, I took my time walking home, dragging out the distance between school and the empty house waiting for me. There had been a time when I would burst through the door and smell my mother’s chocolate-chip cookies cooling on the counter. I could still remember that smell so clearly I sometimes imagined it was there. But memory can be cruel that way. It gives something back just long enough for you to lose it again.

Her photograph still hung on the wall. I looked at it often. Sometimes I spoke to her; sometimes I didn’t have to. I would curl into the couch and stare at the ceiling, remembering ordinary things I hadn’t known were precious when they were happening. Her voice. Her hands. Cookies cooling on a counter. A house that felt like home.

As daylight disappeared, shadows stretched across the ceiling. I found her in them because I needed to find her somewhere. Eventually, I fell asleep on the couch imagining a different life for my father and me—the one I thought she would have wanted us to have.

The front door woke me. Daddy. I heard him before I saw him, but for once, I didn’t run. I sat upright and watched him enter the hallway, his shoulders slumped, his body barely holding itself together. Everything in me knew what to do because I had done the opposite so many times. I had hidden. I had gone still. I had waited for him to pass. This time, I walked toward him.

I slipped my hands beneath his arms and tried to steady him. He protested, rasping that he didn’t need my help while leaning almost all of his weight into me. His skin felt rough. He smelled of the same liquor and tobacco that had sent me beneath the covers. But somewhere inside that broken man was still my father. I remembered his voice before grief changed it. I remembered when he had been the one holding me up. So I held him.

We made our way down the hallway slowly. He stumbled, and I steadied him. Neither of us knew what to say. Then he cried, and I did too. There was no grand forgiveness. No sudden repair. My mother was still dead. My father was still drinking. I was still a child holding up a grown man who was supposed to be holding up me. But for a moment, we stopped pretending we weren’t both broken by the same thing.

By dawn, he was gone again. I woke to another quiet house, not knowing when—or if—he would come back. 

The Drift Pool

To the stranger in a sun hat.

Some weekends unfold almost perfectly. Ours was one of them—hot summer days, golden sunsets, a full moon hanging over the Oregon desert each night. We were at Kah-Nee-Ta, tucked among sage, stone, and the river, with my three daughters, two granddaughters, two sons-in-law, and me. We slept in a great canvas teepee and spent our days in the water. The kids played until their cheeks were sun-kissed and their eyes burned from chlorine. At dusk, the laughter quieted, and the low call of a great horned owl carried across the land. By night, everyone collapsed into sleep, exhausted in the way only summer can exhaust you.

Everyone had a role. One daughter and her husband tended to their children. My other daughter, though child-free, moved easily between her own life and ours, helping when needed while still free to disappear into her own evening. And I had Taelor. I always have Taelor.

She is my eldest daughter, and she requires continuous support to move safely through the world. I know the shifts in her face before they become moods. I know when excitement is tipping toward overwhelm, when hunger is becoming hangry, when she needs the bathroom, when a sound is becoming too much, when to move closer and when to give her room. I know what she needs before she can tell me herself. After enough years, that kind of knowing stops feeling like something you’re doing. It becomes the way your body moves through the world, day in and day out.

Taelor loved those pools. God, she loved them. I don’t think I had ever spent so many hours in water. The kiddie pool was too cold, so we found our rhythm in the warmer pools and the lazy river, circling again and again through the mineral-rich water. We swam from daylight into darkness. Taelor never seemed to tire. I did. But this was her vacation too, so we kept circling.

At some point, a woman in a sun hat drifted toward us. There was something immediately gentle about her. She smiled and said, “You two look like nice people. I want to give you this.” She held out a floating device—a swimming noodle attached to a net chair. “You can sit in it and drift.”

She offered it to Taelor, who grabbed it happily. I helped settle her into the net, adjusting her body until she was comfortable. The woman watched us for a moment and then said, “Just pay it forward.” We thanked her, and she disappeared around the bend. It was a small thing, except it wasn’t.

Within minutes, Taelor was finished with the float. Something else had caught her attention, as things often do, so I took it and turned it into a makeshift buoy, letting the net trail beneath me while I continued swimming beside her. When we eventually passed the woman again, her face lit up when she saw that we were still using her gift. We laughed, she laughed, and then the current pulled us apart again.

Around and around we went. After a while, I spotted an empty chaise lounge and suggested to Taelor we take a break. The suggestion was mostly for me. Taelor wanted nothing to do with it. She was happy, energized, completely in her element. If you know, you know. So around we went again. And again.

Eventually, the woman in the sun hat approached us once more. “Excuse me,” she said, apologizing for not introducing herself earlier, before telling me her name was Ruth. Then she said something I wasn’t expecting. “If you’d like to take a break, I wouldn’t mind staying with her and watching over her while you do.”

My first reaction wasn’t relief. It was embarrassment. She had heard me asking Taelor to rest. She had seen that I was tired. “I wouldn’t dare ask you to do that,” I told her. “I’m really fine, but I appreciate it.”

Ruth didn’t make a fuss or insist. She simply smiled and said, “I truly don’t mind. I can only imagine that a pause is needed more often than it’s given.”

And there it was. Not pity, but recognition.

I thanked her and declined again, explaining that my daughters and I take turns. We left it there, and eventually the water carried us in different directions. But her words stayed with me because Ruth spoke a language I recognized. There are things about caregiving that are difficult to explain to someone who has never lived inside it: the constant calculations, the scanning, the anticipating, the way you can be laughing, swimming, traveling, eating dinner, standing in a beautiful place—and some part of you is still on duty. You learn not to expect anyone to notice.

Years earlier, in Venice, I learned that lesson differently. Taelor and I had just arrived by train and were making our way toward our Airbnb. She was overwhelmed and crying. I had luggage, a backpack, and Taelor’s hand in mine when we reached a crowded set of stairs. A friend who knew us well stood at the bottom. She watched. She didn’t offer to help.

I remember telling myself it was fine. We were all tired. I could manage. I always managed. That’s another thing you get good at—managing.

Then, in the middle of that tourist-clogged stairwell, a woman I had never seen before turned around. I braced myself because I knew the look strangers sometimes gave us when Taelor was struggling in public. But she wasn’t staring. She was seeing. She offered to help me get Taelor down the stairs. I declined, politely and gratefully, and I have remembered her ever since.

That’s the strange thing about help: sometimes you don’t even have to accept it for it to matter. There are moments when accepting help is harder than doing the thing yourself. Your routine is already wound tight around another person’s needs, and handing even one piece of it to somebody else can require more energy than you have. Sometimes you don’t know how to explain what needs explaining. Sometimes you don’t trust easily. Sometimes you’ve simply been doing it alone for so long that “I’ve got it” comes out of your mouth before you’ve even considered another answer. But being offered help still matters. Being seen matters.

Ruth didn’t know my life. The woman in Venice didn’t know my life. Neither needed my history, an explanation of Taelor, or a lesson in caregiving before deciding to move toward us instead of looking away. They simply noticed.

I think about how many people we pass every day who are carrying something we cannot see. A daughter caring for her mother, a husband guiding his wife, a sibling watching another sibling closely, a parent whose eyes never quite stop scanning the room. Sometimes the kindest thing we can do is pay enough attention to notice when another human being could use another set of hands. Not rescue. Not pity. Just hands.

I never took Ruth up on her offer. I never accepted the woman’s help in Venice either. Funny, then, that I still carry both of them with me. Maybe that’s what paying it forward actually means—not returning the same favor or keeping score, but allowing somebody else’s kindness to change the way you move through the world.

So, Ruth, wherever you are, I remember you. I remember your sun hat. I remember the ridiculous little floating chair. I remember going around and around that pool beside my daughter until my body was begging me to stop. More than anything, I remember that you noticed. And to the woman on the stairs in Venice, whose face I can no longer see clearly, I remember you too.

You both entered our lives for minutes, yet years later, you’re still here. That is the remanence of kindness. And when my turn comes around, I always pass it on.

Honor

For years, she thought there was something wrong with her. Her voice trembled when she needed it most. Words she knew perfectly well inside her own head scattered the moment she tried to speak them aloud. Her throat tightened. Her breath shortened. Her body exposed every fear she was trying desperately to hide. So she learned to say less. To rehearse before speaking. To read the room before entering it. To shrink the parts of herself that might draw too much attention. Silence wasn’t peaceful then. Silence was survival.

Time passed anyway. It always fucking does. Then came another reckoning. The face in the mirror began changing. Skin softened. Lines stayed where they once disappeared. The body she had spent a lifetime negotiating with started telling its own story, without asking permission. And somewhere inside all of that came the fear she didn’t particularly want to admit: What if I become invisible? Not dead. Not gone. Worse, somehow. Still here, but no longer seen.

She had spent enough of her life believing her value could be measured by how the world received her. Pretty enough. Thin enough. Young enough. Interesting enough. Good enough. Quiet enough. Never too much. Never too difficult. Never too old. It was an exhausting fucking way to live.

Eventually, something had to give. She began sitting in silence, but this time she wasn’t hiding there. Meditation didn’t save her. It didn’t make her enlightened, erase fear, or turn her into someone who floated through life untouched by ordinary human bullshit. It simply made it harder to lie to herself. Without the noise, there she was.

And some of what she found wasn’t pretty. There were jealousies. Regrets. Anger. Vanity. Grief. Things she wished she had said and things she desperately wished she could take back. Years spent worrying about opinions belonging to people she wouldn’t even ask for directions. There were choices made from fear and others made because she wanted desperately to belong. There were pieces of herself she had abandoned because somebody, somewhere, might not approve. She had to look at all of it. That was the beginning—not becoming better, but becoming honest.

She stopped treating perfection like something she had somehow failed to achieve. She stopped declaring war on a body that had carried her through every version of herself. She fed it. Moved it. Rested it. Sometimes loved it. Sometimes didn’t. But she began to understand that reverence isn’t the same as worship. You can honor something without pretending it doesn’t hurt, sag, scar, ache, age, or eventually die. Especially then.

Aging stopped feeling like something being stolen from her and started feeling like evidence. She had fucking lived. Every line had arrived honestly. Every scar had a before and after. Her body wasn’t betraying her by getting older. It was keeping the record.

Death remained death. She didn’t need to romanticize it to stop running from it. Knowing this ends became precisely the reason to stop postponing herself. Wear the thing. Make the art. Say I love you. Leave when something is slowly killing you. Stay when staying is the brave thing. Laugh loudly. Apologize when you’re wrong. Stop apologizing when you’re not. Tell the truth while you’re still here to tell it.

Somewhere along the way, the woman who was afraid of being seen became far more afraid of reaching the end of her life having never truly shown herself. That changed everything.

She still gets scared. Her voice can still tremble. The mirror can still catch her on the wrong fucking day. She can still want approval, compare herself, question herself, and occasionally hand far too much power to someone else’s opinion. The difference is that she notices now. And again and again, she comes back to the woman underneath all that noise. Not perfected. Not healed into some untouchable version of herself. Not finished. Herself.

Perhaps that is what it means to honor a life. Not to conquer it, perfect it, or even understand all of it, but to inhabit it while you have it. Every beautiful, ugly, aging, frightened, ecstatic, unfinished inch. And refuse to disappear from your own damn life.

Self-reflection

POETRY - spoken and otherwise.

worth more than it showed

I carried your name like a coin in
my coat—small and warm, worth
more than it showed.

Time tried to spend it, but never
got far. Fear couldn’t buy what
lived in my heart.

I got turned around in the storms
that we made, called it “freedom”
when I was afraid.

I learned how to leave before
learning to stay, mistook running
for finding my way.

I kept all the things I was scared
to say, folded like letters I
couldn’t send away.

To those long and silent nights we
used to know—may they lose their
hold, and finally let us go.

Let us go.

Featured in the short film All This Time.

the fuck out

Romanticize the fuck out of your life.

It’s yours for the taking.
Only yours.

I spent enough years waiting
for the hard parts to pass,
for the beautiful part to begin.

Turns out,
I was already in it.

Fall in love with the darkness of winter.

Sweat beneath the unbearable heat of summer.

Drink the nectar.
Swill its sweetness.

I have known days worth keeping
and years I would gladly give back.
I’ve watched beautiful things disappear
and ugly things stay far too long.

Still, life kept happening.

Morning light across the floor.
Music drifting through an open door.
The first bite of something delicious.
A hand reaching for mine.
A place I had never been.
A story waiting for its time.

None of it erased the ugly.

It wasn’t supposed to.

I have seen things go so bad
they could rot you,
bury you alive with one hand.

And still—

something grows.
Something reaches for light.
Something in us reaches with it.

So taste it.
Touch it.
Notice it.

Love what you can.

And when the current pulls hard—

swim.

Swim.

before the sun beats

Smoke hangs low over morning,
blurring the edges of everything.

My coffee is hot between my hands.
Cats purr beneath the covers,
bodies pressed into mine
like they’ve got nowhere better to be.

Above us,
the fan turns its familiar circle,
pushing the same breath
around the room
with its low, vibrational hum.

The child next door is still sleeping.

For now,
no one needs anything from me.

This is my meditation.

Before the sun beats against the windows.
Before the heat swelters.
Before doors open,
phones ring,
engines turn over,
and everybody starts needing something.

Somewhere beyond my window
lives a neighborhood coyote.

If you blink,
you’ll miss him.

He slips between houses
with the swagger of something wild
that refuses to be tamed,
his body carrying proof
of midnight battles
I’ll never know.

An ear torn.
A scar.

A hind limp.
Maybe hunger.

Still,
he returns.

Ducks cut across the distance overhead,
finally making their way north.

Crows bitch from the power lines,
breaking through the smoke-hazed sky,
carrying on about something
only they understand.

Everywhere I look,
something is coming from somewhere.

Something is going somewhere.

The coyote has his battles.
The ducks have their north.
The crows have their grievances.

Even the child next door
will wake soon
and need grub and more.

There are journeys in every corner,
stories in every cranny,
whole fucking lives unfolding
right alongside mine.

And for a moment,

I get the choice.

Coffee cooling between my hands.
Cats breathing against me.
The fan making another round.

Nothing extraordinary.

Except
it fucking is.

Soon,
I will rise.

The covers will fall away.
The coffee will be gone.
The cats will scatter.

The sun will climb high enough
to burn through the smoke,
and morning will become
whatever the day demands.

But not yet.

For now,
the world can keep moving
without me.

I don’t need to chase.

Still breathing.
Still watching.
Still here.

And if only in my mind—

still.