More on: friendship

The nurses took off the sterile white net,
tied your hair back from your beautiful face,
and detached the machines to let you die.

People need more than just practical support, but things to feed the soul, to brighten the gray of limbo and the toxic boredom of being in between one life and the next.

Through eight drafts over six years, John was my cheerleader. With each new revision, he would tell me how the play had grown, how a character had been fleshed out, how the story was becoming clearer, how I’d finally solved a certain scene. The acerbic John of early days was gone; he was my advocate, my encourager. My Samwise.

I ask her about all things millennial, and she tells me how to take decent selfies, how Tinder works, explains online etiquette and edibles, Venmo and UberPool. She asks me what it’s like to have a kids and a husband, to be “settled.”

I know you don’t believe in God, which is only strange to me because you feel like proof.

Our solitude turns out to be crowded. The writer’s tiny hut is filled with ghosts; the painter’s chilly studio is populated by unseen rivals; in the poet’s hard-won hideaway, invisible influences lurk. Others are always already there. So much for the romantic myth.

On the road before sunrise, so none of us were citing Homer, Keats, or Dickinson during the drive to catch my flight. Only after I’d asked did Sean and Jens mention the anaconda they had found once in Sean’s cattle pasture. From time to time someone spotted the height of egret whiteness crossing daybreak’s blaze…

THE CARDIOLOGIST SAID Max Wody’s heart was hard as iron and that’s what killed him. It shouldn’t surprise you that these words offended his wife and three daughters. Two of the girls—really I should call them women—mentioned this in their eulogies. I always knew he was a good man, but to hear what they had…

Piero della Francesca’s Madonna and Child with Two Angels For half an hour we had the painting mostly to ourselves, and the longer we stood there taking it in together, the more the people drifting around us seemed to disappear. We spoke quietly when we spoke at all, as though trying not to discomfort the…

Mark 2 Meaning, not the fey name of a coffee shop cheekily named, but me and the sinners (not “mixed” as in unlike things commingling, but rather the “meh” of our behaviors or consistent confusions, contradictions like breaking news ongoing, over and over with little new to report…) as I was saying, me and sinners…