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When I told my sister, my mother, and my friends that the voice was real, they said I was wrong; it wasn’t possible. Their disbelief was hard for me to take. It scared me. I stopped talking to them.
By Carroll Ann SuscoOctober 2003A second is how much time it takes a .50 caliber bullet to travel six hundred meters, and what a lot of people don’t know is that there is a momentary ghost image as the bullet disrupts the air in the focal plane above the target. It’s just science, but I could see it through the scope, and it looks like a soul, a soul that departs the body before the bullet strikes.
By Otis HaschemeyerOctober 2003Saucer-shaped rocks, a bicycle-courier business, roller skates
By Our ReadersJuly 2003When Wendy murdered her father in her dreams, she used a coat hanger or a wood-handled kitchen knife. She always stabbed him right in the heart. She dreamed of killing him so many times that when he finally died for real, her whole life felt like a dream for a few days.
By Liza TaylorJune 2003Memory is the enemy of wonder, which abides nowhere else but in the present. This is why, unless you are a child, wonder depends on forgetting — on a process, that is, of subtraction. Ordinarily we think of drug experiences as additive. It’s often said that drugs “distort” normal perceptions and augment the data of the senses (adding hallucinations, say), but it may be that the very opposite is true — that they work by subtracting some of the filters that consciousness normally interposes between us and the world.
By Michael PollanMay 2003Part of the problem with panics, Gene taught me, is the very sense that there is a problem. This creates a bogus responsibility for either oneself or someone else to solve it. If the patient can’t solve it, he is not only panicking; he is a failure. If he passes the responsibility to a clinician, he loses power and gives up the right to direct his own life.
By Richard GrossingerApril 2003Boarding school is like purgatory, or prison — being sent away to wait. That’s mainly what I do: wait for time to pass. There are five more hours to supper, and I’m hungry already. I’m up here in an empty classroom, writing in my diary when I’m supposed to be studying, ’cause it’s one week till finals. Three more long weeks, then home, home at last.
By Doreen BainganaMarch 2003It’s 6:30 in the morning, and Maria is still asleep. I’m awake before the alarm goes off, but I don’t move yet. I just stare into her auburn hair. Her back, with its thick pale scar, is pressed against my chest. I have to be careful when I get up. If I move too quickly, Maria will startle awake and want me to stay, and I can’t miss another day of work. We can’t afford that. I want to get inside her now, but I resist.
By Stephen ElliottFebruary 2003Personal, political, provocative writing delivered to your doorstep every month—without a single ad.
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