My father was a ghost in my childhood. I knew he was there because I saw him sleeping, heard him get ready for work, and was warned not to wake him up. More than forty years later, only fragments remain. Some banal. Some painful. I have what I have.
Browsing Category Memoir
First-person stories drawn from lived experience, including work life, relationships, personal history, and self-examination. These memoir pieces focus on emotional truth, uncomfortable honesty, and the ongoing attempt to understand a life as it unfolds.
Good Riddance |
An Ode to Unremembered Losses
Some things leave with a bang. Others simply disappear when you aren’t paying attention. A phone number. A friend. A little hearing. A little certainty. A version of yourself. You rarely recognize the last time as the last time. Mostly, you remember having something. Mostly.
There Was Cake |
A Stranger's Birthday
A photograph insists I was there, but memory has other ideas. A boy at a birthday table, candles, sisters close by. The room is familiar and strange, light stuck in its own insistence. Time slips, identity wavers, and the past just won’t let go.
Practice Cuts
I didn’t start cutting people out of my life as an adult. I learned it young. This essay explores how childhood divorce, forced self-reliance, and emotional withdrawal slowly morphed into a lifelong habit of distancing I didn’t recognize until much later.
The Wrong Play
I’ve spent my life pretending to be someone else — an engineer, a writer, a version of me that fits what others expected. But when I write, I feel the edges of who I really am, even if the words don’t make sense. This is what it means to question your memories, your past, and your place in the world — and to keep writing anyway.
Two Black Eyes
A moment from my childhood still follows me—the day a neighbor’s taunts turned into a sudden blow I never saw coming. I didn’t understand what I’d done, only that the impact and confusion stayed with me for decades. This story explores how one strange afternoon shaped my sense of guilt and memory.