Here it is, my latest confession. Most days, my body feels weighted, like an anchor stubbornly dug into the ocean floor; my head, a leaden slab of heft, nearly impossible to remove its impression from my foam pillow. Atrophy embodies my limbs, dragging, defunct like stumps of once fruit-bearing trees. …

Not the beam of the overhead fluorescent lighting, nor the smell of burnt charcoal-flamed burgers, not even the static conversation of others in the booths around us was going to ground me, give me the comfort I needed. …

This is your brain on drugs. The Partnership for a Drug-Free America must have thought themselves quite clever with that public service video from the 1980’s, yet all it looked like to us was a delicious egg frying in a pan. We didn’t make the connection. In fact, their efforts…

This one took me years to reconcile. Still haven’t fully. Others like it still hang in the balance. Bureaucrats in positions of power supplant the relentless bullies of my youth, whose redirected sexual and emotional ineptitudes, like tiny grenades — lopping off a finger here, an earlobe there — would…

From the bottom mattress of my bunk bed — the one I slept on as an only child until I was 14 years old, the one which, when pressed for an answer as to who the top bunk was for, my mother glibly replied, “Nobody, one of you was enough!”…

I open the box brimming with old cassettes; most are clearly labeled with familiar half-legible scribbles, the style of which I chose when I was old enough to do so, in revolt to those who cracked my knuckles with a ruler if my cursive wasn’t up to snuff. Other tape…

The claustrophobic walls of my 12x12 bedroom are forcefully squeezing me out tonight, like my pores to the abhorrent acne that would take residency in and scar my yet-to-be-tainted adolescent face in 2 years. I’ve just finished dinner and flipped through my latest subscription of Circus magazine — October 31…