Life is Your Story

 I’m 16, hopping fences, one backyard to the next. It’s Fall and the air is hinting that winter is on its way. It’s one of those nights when you can smell everyone’s dinner cooking. It’s dark out, earlier than the previous month and the kitchen lights are on. I can see entire families seated at the table, eating, talking, enjoying the end of another day together. I see single people alone, watching TV, eating slowly, stepping outside of themselves, wondering, when this became their nightly routine and how they ending up alone. I reach my house and enter the back door that we keep open because I am always losing or forgetting my keys. There are meals prepared for the week by my mother. My parents are both working, and my brothers are nowhere in sight. I warm up some chicken and rice and I am just about to chow down when the phone starts ringing, back in the day when everyone had a “land line” and if you were talking and someone else was trying to reach you, well they got a “busy” si...

(Mont Tremblant, Quebec - Winter 2009) It's 2AM. My mind is in a spin. Thoughts are racing so fast that I can't catch them. It's 3AM. I've left the house the way you leave when you don't know where you or going or why - just that you had to get up and go.  I am driving down a country road. It's a crisp, chilly evening that smells like winter. My mood is jagged and sharp. I taste blood in my mouth from an apparent injury I do not remember. The red juice is dripping from the corner of my lips. I find a napkin in the cup holder and I place it over the wound. It's as if I have been kidnapped and gagged and in a way I have. I  pull into an empty lot by a long abandoned sawmill. I turn the engine off and I step outside. I immediately feel the deep freeze run through my bones.  Clouds of smoke exit my mouth the moment my breath makes contact with the air.   I walk toward a bridge and stand upon it looking down at the rushing river. Rivers are mighty. They own what...