Brooke Hamilton Benjestorf
Bio
I am an unpublished writer and a ravenous reader. When the sun is up, I am a 33-year-old, stay-at-home parent of two small boys. They are maddening and glorious. In the evenings, I write, soaking in the silence and filling it with words.
Stories (2/0)
Waves
It is dawn. I am standing in the arched passageway to The Great Room, looking in at the floorboards, which are swirling like the ocean, spiraling inward to the very center of the house. I see my two small daughters on the other side of the room. I approach them, and as I walk across the shifting slats, I see that I myself am a young girl. I continue. When the girls see me, they stop talking and look at me with wide eyes of concern. “What is it?” I implore with my expression.
By Brooke Hamilton Benjestorf3 years ago in Fiction
I Am Somewhere Else
I’ve always had a fairly healthy imagination, I think, but at the height of the pandemic and the stay-at-home orders, I began going somewhere else in my mind. And the habit has not let up with the viral stats. It seems to have settled in, taken root. I don’t even have to close my eyes to leave, barely have to flick a switch in my brain. I feel it pulling when I so badly want to stay present, to listen to every detail about Harry’s pet dragon-tyrannosaurus-unicorn on the way to preschool dropoff in the morning. But I can feel myself slipping. I have created a dangerous and seductive exit. I know that it is selfish, that the people I love deserve my full engagement, especially in the little, in-between moments when slipping away feels so natural, so good. But then I defend it: is it simply survival? I have convinced myself that escaping has saved me from losing my mind, maybe for good, more than once. When the ugliness of the world opens up and we are able to peer into it, the deep rotting chasm, are we expected to take it all in and walk away unshaken, untouched by that sinister side of our collective truth? I think, with eyes wide open, we have to cope in order to survive. The answer may be as simple as that. But I still feel guilty.
By Brooke Hamilton Benjestorf3 years ago in Psyche
