hope
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sometimes I wonder where love will find me. in a city this vast, how do two lives ever touch? it’s endless: faces, voices, people brushing past without knowing. and still, I keep hoping for one pair of eyes to finally meet mine and stay. maybe on the Q train at dusk, or in the slow…
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I live with a dual diagnosis: depression and substance use disorder. that’s the name for it. but what it feels like is living on a hinge: leaning toward one world, pulled by the other. one world is made of steady hands and gentle hearts. the soft echo of my mother’s voice from another room. abuela’s…
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last night, my mom went to her high school reunion. she stood in front of the mirror, adjusting the straps of her dress, tilting her head the way she does when she’s deciding if she still belongs in a room she hasn’t yet entered. she does. she always has. her Spanish beauty, unchanged. the same…
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last night I sat cross-legged on the floor of the small Brooklyn apartment where I live with mom and abuela, guitar in my lap, a song in my head I haven’t finished yet. outside, the city hummed its usual lullaby — sirens, wind, someone yelling too far away to understand. inside, just me, chasing chords…
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four days a week. almost every week this year. I’ve added up the minutes — over 3,000 of them so far — in the recovery support group, in the chair across from my therapist, in the waiting room at the clinic with its flickering light, the hum of an old vending machine, and an odd…
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in group we tell each other you can’t recover if you don’t know what you’re recovering from. I don’t know exactly what I am recovering from. hurt, maybe? hurt is almost always telling me a truth. all this week I was thinking about the times I stood on the toilet seat holding the stall door…
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when I was little, this straight-laced little kid, I sang in church all the time. the choir loft at St. Veronica’s seemed very near the sky. singing enveloped me. there was no sense of performance or judgment. no pressure. I just sang. I was aware of religion. I can’t say I understood much about practicing…
cookie nieves 