The Retrospective Writings

On Homelessness Pt2 A prequel to my “The Hardness of the Homeless” post             “Yo man, you can’t sleep here. You gotta get up.”             I took the tarp away from my head and looked up to see Becca standing over me in her park ranger uniform. Tiny droplets of rain fell on my face as I squinted around to get a better look at my surroundings. Off in the distance, more rangers were waking the others, yelling out “Good morning! Time to get up!”             “Oh, hey Ryan,” said Becca. “It’s morning. You gotta get moving.”             I reached to my pocket and grabbed my cigarettes. The pack was soaked, hopefully from the rain. I shakily put one to my lips.             “No smoking in the park,” ca...

Chapter 2 The saying still rings true, I suppose, except now I’ve just given in; the “can’t” has come sooner than expected. My cynicism and disparagement in life comes with the territory. It started back when things were simpler, before the shakes and the seizures. The doctors told me that when they started, the alcohol was weakening my immune system. When paired with the chronic smoking, it all just gave me a greater chance to meet the reaper through the exact same hand my father had been dealt. Having never been that great at poker, I chanced my life with a bluff, and bet it all into the pot of gold that was part of the delusion that the disease reflected at the bottom of each bottle that I drank nightly and with each hourly cigarette. Eight years later, now at forty two years old, the doc handed me some papers with eyes that said, “I told you so.” I’d be dead within a year. My father, who had actually never smoked a day in his life, cursed God for the deceptiveness of the fort...

Life In Death “Death is not the greatest loss in life. The greatest loss is what dies inside us while we live.” -Norman Cousins Chapter One             My brother and I sat in the near-bare hospital room and watched my father breathe his last living breaths. Months before this moment, the doctors had told us all that there was nothing to stop the cancer now, that there were no more lung snippets to take without suffocating the man I had grown to respect. Weeks later, he made this hospital bed permanent, shrinking into it like a deflating blow-up doll. Minutes prior to his final living breath, my father spoke his last words, which were simply, “It’s about time.” We sat there now, waiting for the flat line, and the answer to our long awaited question.             It finally came, and the high-pitched tone of the machine was deafening. We bowed our heads in respect ...

Ohh the anxiety-ridden, all-knowing teenager  years. This is one of the first writings of a memory I wrote years ago.  Here, Have an Egg – Written 5/21/15             At the very beginning of my rebellious days as a teenager, one of the first acts of proving my solitude and the transition into manhood was learning to sneak out of the house, successfully. I was well into my first year of high school and my girlfriend at the time—let’s call her Liz—yearned to partake with me in this mischievous task so that we could both “hang out” more intimately. Not seeing any other way around it, and being the eager fifteen year old that I was, I succumbed to my pubescent urges and complied.             My parents were three years divorced, and at the time, lived in the same city still so that it would make it easier for my brother and I to travel back and forth from each...