Stories tagged loneliness

Bookworm

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   They met for coffee almost every afternoon. She liked to talk, he liked to listen. He pretended her voice reminded him of wind chimes. He knew it was an ordinary voice, but it resonated in his loneliness, and sometimes he heard her in his sleep.    “My…

public apology (or, why most people hate monks)

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I want separate twilight a room with no candles, plates, phones or music a glass ceiling to smash when my head's full I want tiny hand-

A Girl More Still

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Lena jumps in Tungi’s ride, a busted Cutlass with chrome wheels and booming stereo. She hugs him, presses her chichis against his. He’s wearing too much cologne, but Lena’s glad he’s trying.

Box

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The box was large enough to hold a refrigerator. Or a child's coffin.

Infinite Things All At Once

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That winter, I stayed up late and wore slipper socks and filed articles I’d read and liked about Zen meditators who learned to focus their minds so well they could unfocus their minds whenever they wanted.

The Virgin of Last Resort

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In a little dirt church at the end of the world stands the ikon of an unrecognized saint.

Fade

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I can take you away, away, away.

The Only Cow I Would Have Run Away To Paris With

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In my dreams - Bo clusters with whole grain oats, a touch of honey, and I wake up knowing that she was my health, my sanity, and this was the only cow I would have run away to Paris with.

Lost

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That was why his face looked like a mole's face - the kind of face I could love and the only kind of face that I could talk to.

Fourteen Days In November

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The fantasies expand. With a small fatherless daughter I might finally become the rebel and the outcast I was always meant to be.

I Beat Myself at Chess (revised)

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There we sat, myself and I, at a small folding table in the middle of the lab beside the main, l-shaped workbench. The lab was empty - always was - except for the two of us.

Can't You Tell When I Get Lonely?

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“Can't you tell when I get lonely?”, she asks. “No”, I say. It gets awkward because she wants me to know when she gets lonely. I don't give her the attention she wants without realizing it. She moves away and stares at me for…

Socializing is Agony

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We sit in a circle and eat the salmon that we caught less than a week earlier. Things are said and they flutter around, subjects passed from person to person until I feel a breeze and the conversation lands on me. I can't help but to say the wrong thing and feel a small…

Your Old Untrue Love

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This is how we catch up. I write something down, and you read me quietly. In a year's time you will remind me, though I would have forgotten. I check to see if maybe you have put up a new song, every once in a while, but you don't sing as well as you used to.What has…

The man-faced boy

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And so the man-faced boy grew alone, knowing little of kindness and love. As he grew, he explored the limits of his cold world; crawling in dusty nappies, toddling in hand-me-down rags, at last walking on worn sandals, haunting the edges of human life loo