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Growing Oldexpand_moreI don’t want fiction. What I want is truth. Or someone’s version of it.
A gravely ill man was waiting for me in a village ten miles distant.
Human language, Winston thought, was not adequate for spiritual union.
I shoved them one by one, easy as pie yet with care, just shy of mercy.
How welcome my birth must have been to the raw soldier.
I used bravado to protect myself when we lived in poverty.
I wanted to ride this day down into night, to smooth the unreadable page.
Our house sits alone out in the country, seven miles north of town.
In a way she enjoyed the slow, sad feeling of letting it go.
She remembers that golden ocean, the promise of a whole new land.
She remembers that golden ocean, the promise of a whole new land.
We are going south where I know that my father is going to die.
It’s there and then it’s gone, just light through the window.
Since I am in my seventies, it is now or never, and I know it.
Since his mother’s fall, Ali had been stopping by every week to help out.
Water the boxed dirt, and up she’ll push, rising in red-streaked blossoms.
If everyone’s lost on the roads, you might as well fly. Enjoy your life.
For one hundred years I followed old people to learn what I was in for.
‘Isn’t this great?’ she said. ‘A bit of peace for ourselves?’ ‘No one could go into a cafe on their own on Christmas Day.’
she was sixteen, and swimming. she was seventy-one, and soft.
I have given everything at the wrong time, to the wrong people.
Tobacco and dirty wool, rank alcoholic sweat. I liked him right away.
I lost my medicine bag from back when I believed in magic.
I was all alone in a little room, nothing but that big gun in my face.
I wanted from my father what I had never wanted or sought: his advice.
A collection from San Franciscan photographers Eszter and David.
My father stood up, unable to choose which one of us to kill first.
The bank had stated that emphatically. They had to sell and sell now. It was as if Hank had aged twice as fast, and he couldn’t stand that truth.
My father was neither kind nor strong in his bruising.
I fell asleep wondering to whom the tree might have been writing.