“There are years that ask questions, and years that answer.” -Zora Neale Hurston
My thought life has always been more real to me than my waking one. Even as my day job fills my lungs and the loss of one beloved after another braids cold moss up my legs, around my waist; somehow, I always rise to the surface again, and gasp on. But this land of stories, of my thought life- sometimes it haunts me, whispering, “what is this for?” All my endless pushing away of happinesses, of rest- it haunts me, staring in with the face of each new failure (rejection slips, both warm and cold; of years wasted; joyless workdays and so quickly growing old, closer to the moss; of our dead (our beloved) baby boy, buried in red pieces under the myrtle tree- as I open my laptop in the dark, and try again. |
Pauline WestPauline West's first novel, EVENING’S LAND, is winner of the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation Award and recipient of the Carol Marie Smith Memorial Scholarship for the NOEPE Center of Literary Arts. Categories
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