mental-health

  • Native Son, Still Awake

    Native Son, Still Awake

    It’s 3:40 in the morning, and I’ve been here before. More times now than I care to remember.I wake up maybe a little before, open my eyes, stare off into darkness and think I can make out shadows within the stark black. I bring my hands close to my face and check—I can’t see them.

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  • crack

    crack

    Some people are addicted to chaos because peace is unfamiliar.—Unknown The calendar circles something close. I don’t mean to wound—only to tell the truth: we’re speaking across a distance we built, one line at a time. You said, “We need to have a conversation.” It lands like corporate speak, a eulogy before the body’s even

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  • Imposture

    Imposture

    A fraud, they said. But to be a fraud one must first know the real thing.I never got the blueprint, only the ghost of a house.This rope, not hemp but memory, knots me to myself.I dream of Houdini-ing out, each kiss from my wife a lockpick made of breath. I was married once. I think

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  • “Some loves don’t end, they just run out of places to go, and so they sit—quietly collapsing under their own weight.” me and maybe you. I’m hiding behind words again because the television saw through me, and reading is just another trick to get my eyelids to surrender. At my age, closing them is no

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  • Matchboxes and Milestones: A Collector’s Confession

    Today’s Prompt: Do You Have Any Collections? I’ve collected things, sure. Baseball cards, once. Matchboxes, briefly, though I’m still not sure what possessed me to start that one. Maybe it was the smallness of them, easy to gather, easy to lose. Like most things that felt important once and now sit in some dusty box

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  • What the Mirror Cannot Hold

    What the Mirror Cannot Holdfor the one who stays This morning, again,I looked into the mirror.Not to admire—but to assess the damage.A wrinkle deepens by my mouth.My skin forgets its old light.A tenderness in my jointssings its low, persistent song. The world does not mourn this shift.It sells creams and knivesand digital masks.It tells me—I

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  • Calling Out, Because Why Not?

    What’s my favorite quote? We’ve all got a few go-to quotes—those trusty, timeworn lines we pull out like Swiss Army knives when life starts to wobble. Some are wise, some are funny, and some just prove we’ve watched Nacho Libre one too many times. But the best quotes, the ones that really matter, are the

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  • The Bird in My Hand

    The Bird in My Hand

    Prompt: Write about a time when you didn’t take action but wish you had. What would you do differently? Financial decisions come to mind. A relationship I held onto longer than I should have. Another I didn’t jump into when the moment opened. Business opportunities I let pass. All of it. Each choice—or lack of

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  • Great Depression 2.0?

    Great Depression 2.0?

    What Makes Me Nervous? Oh, Just the End of the World as We Know It As a construction business owner with a few degrees under my hardhat, I’m no stranger to stress. But when I read headlines screaming, “DOW headed for worst April since the Great Depression—yes, that 1932 debacle, not the Great Recession we

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  • Scrolling Isn’t Breathing

    I use social media the way I use salt-just enough to taste, never enough to live on. bb grey It’s Easter Sunday. I was woken not by an alarm, but by a quartet of birds playing something between a minuet and a dream—somewhere between Debussy and the dripping hush of a new morning. It’s easy

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