Severance

breathed down his neck his entire life, casting doubts on every decision, disparaging every move, and now what the family has on its hands is a stunted, unmarried thirty-five-year-old man.

Because a second chance means that you

have to try harder. You must rise to the challenge without the blind optimism of ignorance.

They say that if God hates your guts, he grants you your deepest wish.

For most of my childhood and adolescence, my mother was my antagonist.

Sitting by her bed in the last days of her life, I didn’t mention any of this. A part of me wanted to remonstrate with her, to list out all her infractions in a final accounting, but the last days are for relief, not for truth.

the dividing line between them membranic.

Read some fiction. Leisure, the problem with the modern condition was the dearth of leisure.

Read some fiction. Leisure, the problem with the modern condition was the dearth of leisure. And finally, it took a force of nature to interrupt our routines.

wanted to hit the reset button. We just wanted to feel flush with time to do things of no quantifiable value, our hopeful side pursuits like writing or drawing or something, something other than what we did for money.

if moved by unconscionable suffering, erupts into a moaning—or something more primitive, a keening. It cycles through again, various iterations of despair, frustration. Then silence again.