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For twenty-five years I lived an unsettled life in a city abandoned by history. Successively occupied by the Ottomans, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the Germans, and the Soviets, Bucharest was slowly transformed from a cosmopolitan Romanian capital (the “other Paris,” it was nicknamed in the 1900s) into a Stalinist Disneyland.
By Florin Ion FirimițãAugust 2005Outside of a psychotic who attacked me a few months ago (I stuck his head into a snowbank until he promised to leave me alone) and a middle-aged fellow who drives around town shouting obscenities from a riding mower, there is not much happening here in Middlebury, Vermont.
By Poe BallantineAugust 2005Today is four years since the accident that nearly took my daughter’s life; four years since the phone call that yanked me out of my Sunday routine, my idiotic notion that the day would go the way I wanted it to. It was a car crash. It could have been a bolt of lightning, Zeus showing off.
By Sy SafranskyJuly 2005Like Sherman, I have burned Atlanta. Or maybe Atlanta has burned me. Either way, I’ve been blackballed from every bar I ever frequented, and it took only a dozen years. Now I find myself married with child, sober, and moving on. My wife, pregnant again, wants to live in the heartland, Kansas City, where her family waits and I can stroll the streets in recovery without people whispering.
By Thomas BoydJuly 2005On our way to the Maumee River Trail, my boyfriend, Lenny, asks me if I want to go to Albany with him in two weeks. He has found a really cheap Airstream trailer for sale on the Internet and wants to check it out.
By Theresa WilliamsJuly 2005Walking around the block after sunset in pj’s and bathrobe, hoarding corks in a million-dollar house, trading wedding crystal for a minitoilet
By Our ReadersJune 2005Later, I didn’t listen to the radio as much. There was less music and more announcements. Again they began to use the insect words to refer to us. My father used to say, “When they no longer speak of you as people, it means they can kill you.”
By Mithran SomasundrumJune 2005Before leaving, I had vowed I would not go looking for Jim Morrison’s grave. The idea of making such a pilgrimage at my age struck me as vaguely ridiculous. Yet there I was, on my last morning in Paris, wandering mapless in the sprawling necropolis, looking for the tombstone of a singer I had barely thought of in almost thirty years.
By Irene SveteSeptember 2004There was a great longing and loneliness inside me. And as I delved into this loneliness, I asked, “Is there an ultimate freedom?” I would eventually walk some thirty-five hundred miles of back roads in the United States and Mexico. Having left behind everything I knew, I had nowhere to go, nothing to do but die into this question. I’d never really wished to be an explorer, yet this inquiry moved me to let go of all that was not entirely new and alive. So my walking journey began.
By Jeffrey SawyerJune 2004Vera piled the thin, silvery black fish on my plate. Their beady little fish eyes kept staring at me. As a distraction, and for revenge, and because I was hungry, I focused on the technique of eating them: first pinch the head between my finger and thumb; then take two precise bites — one on each side — and a few nibbles to steal all the meat from each.
By Kent AnnanSeptember 2003Personal, political, provocative writing delivered to your doorstep every month—without a single ad.
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