ASSIGNMENTS:
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Amy
Connecticut, USA
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REPORTS:
PREVIOUS NEXT
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My mother went into labor when she was in church. I was an atheist for most of my life.
My best friend had a speech impediment. Her mother wanted her to "say it right." I told her "She was saying it right, you're just not listening right."
When I was ten years old I thought I would be a famous writer. Everyone stared at my deaf sister and I was jealous even though she didn't want to be looked at.
Arbitrary laws about parking in my hometown used to make me angry.
I talked to trees on the playground. Augusten Burroughs did something similar, which I read about years later, and it soothed me.
I was riding my bike to school when I was sixteen, and was hit by a car by a woman who later sent me flowers. My left knee was swollen when I tried on my periwinkle blue prom dress. I went to the prom with a boy who danced comically and bravely when he was on crutches.
I was often depressed, but sometimes looking at the moon or crocuses gave me hope.
My best friend and I went to a used bookstore in Niantic on Senior Skip Day where cats roamed the buildings.
I went to college in New Jersey, and met a friend who would gladly listen to my half-asleep incoherence.
Listening to Diana Krall's "I've Changed My Address" or reading Emily Dickinson poems or Jeffrey Moore's The Memory Artists often gave me comfort. When I was a child warm towels and Louisa May Alcott were comforting.
I went to Prague with my mother two years ago. We joked about nuns in the plumbing of our hotel and ate cream puffs I would sell my cat to eat again.
I was infatuated with a woman who offered someone the socks off her feet. I never told her.
I'm afraid of bees, elevators, flooding elevators and the number seven. I'm afraid I'm pretentious and I'm afraid I'm not as smart as I pretend to be.
I heard Kurt Vonnegut speak publicly twice.
I spoke to an employee at the CN Tower who was afraid of heights.
My father is a brilliant, witty, reticent psychologist.
My mother gets angry at televised Republicans. She makes me tea precisely when I need tea. I don't know how she knows. I like her version of "While My Guitar Gently Weeps" better than the original.
I worked at a library for years, but never felt comfortable there even though libraries generally feel like sanctuaries to me.
Now I work for UPS, and fantasize about hitchhiking to California, and painting my old high school dark purple, and spray painting lines from Louise Gluck poems on chain stores.
I've connected with more people in the last two months than I had during the previous twenty two years.
I eat frozen corn while it's still frozen.
I am only able to cook tacos well consistently.
I used to go camping in the Adirondacks every summer. There were three small islands on a lake I used to canoe and kayak on. I named the islands Gull Island, Rock Island and Tree Island.
I brush my teeth in bookstore bathrooms.
I'm going to an art museum with my mother in half an hour.
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