I sleep, seeking peace, and I think that I’ve found it, until I dream of you. Although I want my dream to be a kind of…

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"Just make something up," I chided myself, "even if you don't have a thing to say, because having something to say, anything to say, is incontrovertible evidence that you are still here, still enjoying a pulse."



But it was impossible and hopeless. I had nothing to say, not a glimmer of a thought, not even a broken fragment of a sentence. I dove in and immediately felt myself begin to sink, to drift down,… Continue

An imperceptible line runs between love and not love, and it is a gray, ambiguous territory on either side. Sometimes we tread one side, sometimes the other, as if unknowingly crossing and re-crossing an unmarked border.

As Richard pulled his car up to the front of the restaurant to pick her up, Lola opened the car door and gracefully slipped into the passenger… Continue

Immediately following her session with Jackie, Lola met Richard at their favorite Chinese restaurant, in Santa Monica. It was more than both of them could afford, but Lola promised herself at least one good meal, "out" per month. So maybe the Crawlin' Dragon, wasn't the greatest Chinese food, in LA, but it was really good, and the waiters remembered her name whenever she appeared there.



After dinner, their waiter left Lola and Richard with two fortune cookies, one for each. While… Continue

Lola looked at Jackie, “I was so young, and it was so long ago…back in Boston, when I was still a ‘girl’, still in college. During the first few years of school, I must have dated 35 boys, but all of them were idiots, emptier than a bucket with a big hole in it. By my junior year, I’d stopped dating, completely, because it was a totally futile exercise—a little like Sisyphus pushing a giant bolder up a hill, only to be run over, again and…

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In Jackie's office today, Lola settled back into her 'analysand's' chair, which, as she imagined it, felt like a recliner on the first class deck of the Titanic. Lola relished the undivided attention she received in therapy, and she liked the way it made her feel when she talked about her struggles--her doubts and fears---with an intelligent woman peer, even though she knew she couldn't tell Jackie quite EVERYTHING--that would be disasterous.



"I keep dreaming about this man...well, a… Continue

Something flowed through you, poison and pitch, nothing at all the color of blood. I spent the better part of a life trying to flee the damage you'd strewn about my childhood. Years later, when you were 20 years in, you had no idea how close I came to you on visiting days. I'd drive out there, and about a half mile from the gate, I'd get out of the car and stand still as stone, as if I were waiting for some unspeakable atrocity to happen again, relieved when none did. Just out of sight of… Continue

Buck turned off his car’s engine, and gazed for a moment at the red tile roofs that seemed to predominate the bungalows in Jackie’s Melrose neighborhood. A strange uneasiness began to cast a shadow over his previously chipper mood---at least his father would have called it ‘chipper.’ He found himself wondering if Jackie felt entirely safe conducting her therapy practice out of her home? What kind of woman would regularly invite the emotionally troubled, the…

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Lola angrily tugged the sheets off her bed and crumpled them in the corner, as if they were trash to be discarded, rather than merely laundry to be washed. She fleetingly thought of Richard, and then, momentarily, about her column at LA 29.

Lola then unfurled a set of new, clean sheets, which, like a topsail, gently descended over the naked bed that lay before her, quiet…

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