Black and Blue

Your children make it impossible to regret your past. They're its finest fruits. Sometimes the only ones.

Maybe when you were a kid you were so unsure of yourself that every school year was a time of reinvention; maybe only adults were stupid enough to think they knew exactly who they were.

He had not colored the leaves in yet, and the trunk and its branches looked for the moment less like a tree and more like a great brown river, the Nile, the Amazon, the Benedetto and Flynn river of blood, and there at its isthmus was this one child, so that it seemed that all of these people, from Poland, from Italy, from Ireland and the Bronx and Brooklyn, had come together for no other reason than to someday produce Robert Benedetto, in an event as meant, as important as that one in Bethlehem that he had learned about in catechism class at St. Stannie's.

Doesn´t she have diarrhea of the mouth?

Count your blessings, my father always said. It shames you, to count yours by the hardships of other people.

The cold in her makes cold in me.

I hid my wounds because I was ashamed...but now I know that I was also afraid of being reduced..

Words, words. They mean nothing, less than nothing. I know.

...there is a piece of me missing so big that the pain doubles me over, clawing at my gut...

She wants to be someone else, somewhere else, and I can't blame her.

There are ways and ways of dying, and some of them leave you walking around.

...I had enough of real life everyday to last me forever.

Sometimes you say a word so many times that it loses its meaning...

stayed because I thought things would get better, or at least not worse.