Allure; tenure

I’ll teach in my thirties. She meant it. Her professor once told her she had a mirthful wisdom that shone in her face. She knew he would have believed her if she said she had just left a parent teacher meeting rather than a bar. I’d say high school and college. Students need encouragement and creative nurturing, you know, something to hold on to. Give their dreams a heart. A steady beating heart. Or maybe it’s only writers that need that?

She didn’t know what passion was until she sat across from her new lover at lunch. She felt it when there was no space between them. Understood it when she told friends it wasn’t sex. It was love making. An affair that kept her legs crossed at the table.

Glancing at his sandwich. Slowing eating her soup. Their hands coming together – the way they did many times. He was talking. She was eating. Checking her phone for the time. Observing his facial expressions that pleaded with her. Love me. Believe me. Say you love me.

Looking past his face she caught glimpse of the restroom. He could make October feel like June inside her. Make the dark afternoons light again. It wasn’t the light. It was the heat from the light she wanted. Eyes squinting, beads of sweat. On her back. On her chest. On her neck. Her face.

It’s October and it’s cool. Lips to her skin. Sweater to her back. He’s large and warm. Under sheets like a tourist. He was like a tourist. She, on top like a tour guide. A historian for a country. A case. A culture.

Holding him tight, pulling at his shirt because he didn’t know the way back to her job. She held his waist. Remembered what it felt like. Touching him. No clothes. No sheets. The heat from the light. With her right arm she moved his body left then right to cross the street. Let me show you the way, she said. He looked at her. Ready. And said: you’re good at leading.

on friends/ships/lovers/rum that smells and tastes like cake/saying you love someone out loud for the first time/looking in a friends eye/while she talks about her happiness/while she encourages yours/while she tells you to pursue love/leave another alone/looking at her tell you that you let her down/disappointed her/she thought you wouldn’t show up for her birthday/apologizing/feeling intense/eyes watering because you’re getting older/because she was there when you were embarrassed about the size of your breasts/now she says stop giving men love/for they go crazy/growth/letting in/being happy because your friend is happy/12am/saying happy birthday/let’s rebuild/

blogs that make you feel a certain way.

models eat ice cream.

Traces of herself were scattered in the world. She saw the book she had published, held open by hands she would never know. -andre dubus

@animalbehavior_ always shows up to the bookstore with gifts. makes coffee.

“I decided to commit $1 billion to the Peter G. Peterson foundation—the vast majority of my net proceeds from Blackstone. Why so much? Kurt Vonnegut once told a story about seeing Joseph Heller at a wealthy hedge-fund manager’s party at a beach house in the Hamptons. Casting his eye around the luxurious setting, Vonnegut said, ‘Joe, doesn’t it bother you that this guy makes more in a day than you ever made from Catch-22?’ ‘No, not really,’ Heller said. ‘I have something that he doesn’t have: I know the meaning of enough.’” -Peter G. Peterson on donating $1 billion, via Newsweek

Lately I’ve been taking it slow. Trying to make it to the party before the guestlist close.

things that mean the world.

“Again” is the way I feel about someone right now. Your stories are short and beautiful not too much to get lost in a full book of fiction. I love it. It’s great. I was going to save it for when I was on my way to school but I couldn’t wait. You are very talented. The stories feel like thoughts I’ve had and also you can interpret them in many ways. Art in word. Thank you for sharing. I hope you continue to. I love blogs and I always make it a point to stop by to see if there’s anything new. Again, thank you for bringing thoughts and words and sounds that I’m sure everyone feels to fruition.
-Semora, reader

Download From Jump

September 22nd

The second she closed her eyes she heard the front door unlock. This was the Bronx: There was the main lock, two dead bolts, and a chain she managed to nail on herself when she moved in–her mother always put the chain on the door growing up. She was used to chains and locks and being careful. She’d lay in bed for two hours without closing her eyes until she decided to count to sixty then try to get some sleep. Hungover from the night before. It had been a long time since she drank hard liquor. That was Brooklyn, a brownstone party. Made her rounds smiling with different pretty drinks in hand each time. A man in a button-down Polo asked what she was drinking. “I don’t know. But it’s pretty and it’s strong,” she said. She thought her answer was off-putting, but he seemed even more interested as he smiled and asked about her day.

She had spent that day at her apartment with a man she met a year ago. They stayed in bed for most of the sunlight. She did not like this part of making love. Staying in bed and asking questions, recounting fond childhood memories. Though it was nice, outside was where the world existed. Her apartment, just a resting stop. They met in Manhattan inside the subway station on 63rd Street. For a year they made love–good love, she thought. His scent, his controlling nature. The text messages. Emails. Flowers. Sounds of love. When she gave him the key to the apartment, she said it didn’t mean anything other than convenience. In bed he gently touched her stomach as she stared out the window. Thoughts dancing around about things to come. Things changing. She was growing. She knew she would be a woman one day. Comfortable living wouldn’t last. She knew there would be a moment. There would be a chance. In one heartbeat, she’d grow up.

After countless pretty drinks, a handsome taxi driver made a fuss about driving to the Bronx. The gentleman in the button-down Polo handed the driver a stack of cash and told her to call him when she got home. Maybe she said thank you.

The last dead bolt unlocked. She rose from the bed. Maybe it was a friend. Or the architect she spent the day with. Or perhaps she left her keys in Brooklyn. She couldn’t think safe. Could not play this moment with caution. Someone knocked on the door. “Can I come in?”

“If you have no intention to hurt me.”

The door opened, more quietly than she had ever opened or closed it on a lover. She didn’t recognize the grey shirt. The dark bluejeans, the sneakers. Sleepy eyes made way to his face. He was not her lover from the day before or the gentleman who put her in a taxi from Brooklyn. She looked at him. Her eyes tracing his frame. His lips. His fingers. The grip he had on her keys. Her Barnes and Noble rewards card dangling from the key ring. Thoughts dancing again. She spent the last two years silently in love with this man who stood before her. A quiet torture. Every time her legs were apart it was his face she traced as she did now standing in her bedroom. Quieting her heart, her face full of questions.

“You left your keys in Brooklyn. I thought I’d drop them off. You weren’t answering your phone.”

“You could have left them. Why come all the way here?”

“I always wondered what it would be like to have you.”

The window again. She stared out. This was the moment. He was already in; she would not have to open her doors for him. Her heart she would. Her legs she could.

She stood close, in front of him. “This is unsafe,” she said as her fingers locked in his with her keys between their palms.

From Jump. September 22nd.

from The Vision Board Monologue

The Vision Board Monologue, From Jump, September 22nd.

You love it or you hate it. It moves you or it doesn’t. It’s just a feeling for me.

There are a million horror stories I could tell, but it’s not even worth it. There are things you have to go through and steps that you have to take. You learn from anything.

Go here to read 106th’s Music Is For Life Interview with Marsha Ambrosius. It’s his first interview/Q&A. Say congrats !

On From Jump

It’s my mixtape. I always say to friends, I should be a rapper. Flood the internet with music, Z-share links, interviews, photos and anything else people will post, or retweet. Maybe that’d be easier?

Than being a writer. Releasing a PDF of short stories. Heavy in content. Realism. Words about family love and sex and heartbreak and breakdowns and confronting loneliness and intense love affairs and thoughts on having unprotected sex then pulling out.

I thought of making Maria the opening piece. Ha.

From Jump contains stories posted here on the site in addition to pieces that have not been published. It’s not a diary. More like this.

That’s all I’ve got for now. Maybe I’ll post more about it, in video or something. But you know, let’s take it a day at a time.

From My New Favorite Short Story Writer

It is not hard to live through a day, if you can live through a moment. What creates despair is the imagination, which pretends there is a future, and insists on predicting millions of moments, thousands of days, and so drains you that you cannot live the moment at hand.
- Andre Dubus, from A Father’s Story