The following piece of creative nonfiction is part of a series I started on my personal blog a few years ago called “Alphabet: A History,” which is a collection of short, autobiographical vignettes, focusing mainly on relationships (familial, romantic, platonic, and self). I will be publishing the series on Fridays.
Alphabet: A History (L) Lake Michigan
It’s May, 2008, and I’m visiting Chicago for the third time since I moved to New York less than 8 months ago. May is tied with October for my favorite month here and the colors at the lake today are a big reason why. I’m with Chad who took a day off from work and we’re the only people here. We run around and cartwheel with our shoes off and do a photo shoot on the spread of bright green grass between the water and Lake Shore Drive and for a moment it feels like I never left.
I don’t feel at home in New York yet, not like this. From the lake I can walk to three of my old apartments in less than 15 minutes. I can peek into the windows from the street below and imagine the lines of my bookshelves, the curve of my couch, the shape of my cats peering from behind the pane. These images are like lifelines across a palm, filling the gaps between stories I tell, the moments between the events. [Click to continue]
by Wendy on December 16, 2011
· in Alphabet a History
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The following piece of creative nonfiction is part of a series I started on my personal blog a few years ago called “Alphabet: A History,” which is a collection of short, autobiographical vignettes, focusing mainly on relationships (familial, romantic, platonic, and self). I will be publishing the series on Fridays.
Alphabet: A History (K) Kimbrough
It’s 1998 and I’ve just graduated from college. I’m moving out of the 2-bedroom duplex I’ve shared with my friend Becky for the last two years and moving into a 1-bedroom apartment on the bottom floor of a big, white, dilapidated house on Kimbrough. It’s the first time I’ve ever lived alone and I piece together a home with hand-me-down furniture and thrift store finds. I paperclip postcards to a long string and hang them across my ceiling, an idea I stole from some design magazine I saw in Borders one time. On the mantle above the faux fireplace I arrange a few candles, a couple of artsy greeting cards and a framed photo of my boyfriend and me. He has the same picture on his fridge in his apartment, just a few blocks away.
Just before I move in, he goes away for ten days, to stay in a log cabin on a mountain top in Colorado to meditate. I water his garden and watch his cat while he’s gone and try to imagine the summer ahead. We’ve only been together for a couple of months but we’re in love and he tells me he wants to marry me someday. Most of my friends have graduated and moved away and I’m looking for a job and I’m not sure I want to stay in Springfield much longer and he thinks this is where he wants to settle down and everything is just kind of up in the air and I don’t really know what’s going to happen exactly. But for now I just want to think about warm nights on his porch and cooking breakfast on Sunday mornings in my new kitchen. [Click to continue]
by Wendy on December 9, 2011
· in Alphabet a History
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The following piece of creative nonfiction is part of a series I started on my personal blog a few years ago called “Alphabet: A History,” which is a collection of short, autobiographical vignettes, focusing mainly on relationships (familial, romantic, platonic, and self). I will be publishing the series on Fridays.
Alphabet: A History (J) Jackson
It’s February 10, 2011 and I’ve taken two pregnancy tests today and they’ve both been positive. The first one is so faint, I think it’s negative, but a second test an hour later confirms what I feel in my gut: I’m pregnant.
When Drew comes home, I show him the tests and he looks at me like, “Oh my God!” and I look at him like, “I know!” And we hug and kiss and jump around. [Click to continue]
by Wendy on December 2, 2011
· in Alphabet a History,Parenthood
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The following piece of creative nonfiction is part of a series I started on my personal blog a few years ago called “Alphabet: A History,” which is a collection of short, autobiographical vignettes, focusing mainly on relationships (familial, romantic, platonic, and self). I will be publishing the series on Fridays.
Alphabet: A History (I) Icy Steps
It’s the middle of January and I’m 27 years old. My boyfriend of four years is moving out today and I’m in the kitchen packing up his plates. I’ve negotiated a lower rent with my landlord for a couple of months while I look for a place of my own. Ben says I can keep his two cats until I move out. He thinks I’d be too lonely without them, and he’s probably right. But the truth is, I think I’ll be lonely even with them.
As I try to remember which plates, what silverware, which glasses were his before we moved in together three years ago, I imagine what it will be like when we finally say good-bye. Sometimes it feels like I’ve been imagining it as long as we’ve been together. [Click to continue]
by Wendy on November 11, 2011
· in Alphabet a History
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The following piece of creative nonfiction is part of a series I started on my personal blog a few years ago called “Alphabet: A History,” which is a collection of short, autobiographical vignettes, focusing mainly on relationships (familial, romantic, platonic, and self). I will be publishing the series on Fridays.
Alphabet: A History (H): The Hollow Men
It’s August, 1994 and I’m in my second week of college in Springfield, Missouri. I live in Woods Hall, the only all-women dorm on campus and share an 18′ x 12′ room with a square dancing, biology major from Colorado. Across the hall are my new friends Katy and Jessica. They’re both in the dorky new student showcase with me, a performance where incoming theater students show themselves off to prospective directors…and suitors, I suppose. Katy and I have decided to do a piece together since we’re both totally interested in being avant garde and making people think and stuff. Somehow, we decide to act out a poem and before one of us gets the brilliant idea of writing an original, I suggest “The Hollow Men” by T.S. Eliot.
I find the poem in a book at the library and make several photocopies for us. In the evenings after we eat dinner in New Hall cafeteria, we practice our performance in our lobby and sometimes walk down to the tent pad where we hope cute boys will notice us. We’re assigned a senior theater major to help us prepare — this guy, Kory, who really spends more time making passes at us than anything; we’re not interested.
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by Wendy on October 28, 2011
· in Alphabet a History,Essays
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