my careless contagion

    It's an odd sensation to walk through your days in a daydream state. I know my mind is just protecting itself from further trauma. If only my heart could do the same. I see that girl as a dream because she's long gone. The time I spent with her doesn't seem real anymore. My world is a drudgery that marches to the sound of a dirge. I can hear Ed Sheeran's "Perfect" slow to the pace of a waltz, then distort, then turn to static, and now I just hear the rain. It's somebody's wedding right now, and that song is playing. My heart goes out to them. What happens when all you have is love for the memory of someone but the memory keeps fading? Well, you panic. Then you have to accept it because none of us can bring anyone back once they start to fade. Somone's in the darkroom of my mind, and they didn't mix the developer right; everything's coming out light and faded. I keep telling them to get it right, but they keep...

My parents in 1984 surveying the house they were having built. I have this memory, but not because I actually remember it. I was too young to remember it, but the story was retold often enough by my mother that it seems like I actually have the memory.  I was very young. It was the mid-1980s. My parents had a house built (which went wildly over budget) in 1984 on Happy Hollow Street in a little town in the Southern Black Hills in South Dakota. Parents raised their kids a little differently then than they do now. There was also the matter of finances, which meant that a babysitter wasn't always possible. My parents had a colleague leave their company and start up a competing business across the street. In order to compete, they were putting in 100 hour weeks, both of them. This continued for years.  My mom didn't want to work, but my dad was the boss and women were working a lot in those days, so he said she should too. She started out as the bookkeeper, setting ty...