fromthemouthofmoi

All you had to do was arrive and eat. Maybe say something charming sprinkled here and there. That’s all you had to do. It was Christmas Day after all, that season of goodwill and cheer. The day we suspend our grief and rage and hold it still until the New Year. That’s all you had to do. But instead you sat at the other end of the table from me, just out of earshot, pretending to hold court like Jabba the Hutt, like you cooked a feast for eight, like you gathered everyone to my home for festivities, like you owned the place. You decided that this might be a good time to rage against Obama, and The Blacks, the Pakistanis and some other unsuspecting group of people who were lucky to be absent. You moaned about your housekeeper, the one I procured for you. You don't know this but you have been placed in the Never Darken My Doorstep   Again  pool of people I’ve known. Yes you and that tired old queen who arrived late —from the waist up looking like an ancient sophomore and a pe...

It is not often that I find my skirt being lifted. Most of the time it sits still smothered and weighed down by disappointment. Left alone I am never bored but rarely does what I overhear compel me to drift closer. I see things of beauty, of course, and hear interesting things from time to time, but rarely do I find myself presented with all my stimulants in one package. The handsome primp the beauty; the thought provoking, like me, seem disinterested. And then came him. I do not know him. He doesn’t even live in the same part of the world; he could be my son. What I find myself dallying over is his honesty, his directness, how he manages to gently say: I like you, Moira.  How he knows I’ll be there. It’s not a swoon that I feel, it’s more along the lines of a simple pleasure, like knowing something sweet awaits me in the kitchen or being in the presence of someone long known and worn to comfort. I feel joy in his youth. I feel love for his struggles. I’m startled by how wonder...

Yesterday I had a text conversation, at the most 10 lines, with a former teacher of a school I once attended. I was inquiring about the death of a former student. The conversation ended when after he suggested I might find a relative of hers on Instagram, I wrote: No, not really interested. She hadn't been very kind to me back then. My mother's theory about why my classmates seemed all L'Enfant Terrible was that they were first born children and that I was the youngest of five, a configuration not otherwise seen in my class. I am not sure why that would have made them especially horrid but horrid they were. One young girl punched me in the stomach each time, under the teacher's direction, I was allowed a drink from the water fountain with a reverse alphabet going first; rather than lining up from Z-A. Another kid, when invited to my home in the Dyckman Street Projects for a sleep over, threw a hissy-fit and demanded to go home when she saw that there was no doorman ...

Snapshots In Transit A Bus I am on a bus going up First Avenue in New York City. I'm reading a book. I can hear, without looking around, that someone is sniffling up what sound like a lot of snot. I continue to read and the sniffling becomes regular, and begins to sound as though buckets might be needed. This goes on for about ten minutes. I look around to see who is generating such a factory of mucous when I notice that other riders have already spotted the culprit. It is a young man, late 20's, in a white T-shirt and khaki pants. His nose is a full blown scarlet coloured gin blossom. He looks as if he has had a cold since birth. His chest is concave and he is a healthy shade of paste. Just the way he looks causes those nearby to erupt in titters. The tittering, I have to assume, embarrasses him, and I imagine he interprets the laughter as a suggestion from strangers that he blow his nose rather than sniffle. So out he pulls a handkerchief with the dimensions of a twin-siz...

I spoke to you yesterday for another two hours. My feelings went from upset, to calm, from loving, to: please, someone make an appointment with a neurologist and find a better cardiologist. I go to sleep waking frequently from the heat. Arlo begins his howl, begging for release of some kind at 4am. He is right on schedule. Never missing the times he has instinctively set up to punctuate the life he lives. I didn't have enough time with you. I've returned still unsettled. We are not done yet. I'm having a difficult time separating me from you. Maybe it is not me from you but rather we are in this thing together. All things are a form of life. I wake up with William Faulkner's, As I Lay Dying seared on my corneas, which instantly brings me back to Jim Case and his comment about Faulkner and the term stream of consciousness. I take the book off my shelf, thumb it, and place it back. I come to my computer and search the book title's meaning and, voila! A piece is ...

INTRODUCTION I have wanted to write this entry for years; I just never got around to it. When I toyed with it I just felt that I wasn't qualified to write about therapy. Too I felt that had I anything to say I should remain silent because I imagined my path shouldn't be pushed upon or cause influence to others. But I have come to the realization that too many people have no clue what the therapeutic process should look like so I write from a place that shares my own experiences in an attempt to inform those in need. The very real problem with finding a good therapist is that we seek help from a vulnerable, sometimes desperate starting point. We are troubled, depressed, or in some sort of crisis that can leave us blind to details that are crucial to finding a good therapist. So how do you find a therapist when you are not yourself, when you feel as though you are falling apart at the seams, when you're desperate to talk to someone, -- you imagine anyone- And there is n...

If You Knew Ellen Bass What if you knew you’d be the last to touch someone? If you were taking tickets, for example, at the theater, tearing them, giving back the ragged stubs, you might take care to touch that palm, brush your fingertips along the life line’s crease. When a man pulls his wheeled suitcase too slowly through the airport, when the car in front of me doesn’t signal, when the clerk at the pharmacy won’t say Thank you, I don’t remember they’re going to die. A friend told me she’d been with her aunt. They’d just had lunch and the waiter, a young gay man with plum black eyes, joked as he served the coffee, kissed her aunt’s powdered cheek when they left. Then they walked half a block and her aunt dropped dead on the sidewalk. How close does the dragon’s spume have to come? How wide does the crack in heaven have to split? What would people look like if we could see them as they are, soaked in honey, stung and swollen, reckless, pinned agai...