Childhood
I Haven't Spoken to My Twin
THE MYTH OF TWIN CONNECTION 🔗 Everyone who learns that I have an identical twin sister immediately says some variation of "that must be so amazing, you must be so close, do you feel each other's pain, can you read each other's minds" and I smile and nod because the alternative is explaining that I have not spoken to my twin sister in five years and that the bond everyone assumes is magical and unbreakable broke under the weight of differences that our genetic identity was supposed to prevent but that grew wider with every year until the two people who shared a womb and a face and a childhood could no longer share a conversation without it ending in argument, resentment, and the particular pain of being hurt by someone who looks exactly like you 💔
By The Curious Writer6 months ago in Confessions
I Read My Dead Mother's Diary 📖
THE BOX IN THE ATTIC 📦 Six months after my mother's death from pancreatic cancer I finally gathered the courage to sort through her belongings, a task I had been avoiding because touching her things made her absence concrete in ways that simply knowing she was gone did not, and in a box in the attic labeled "personal" in her careful handwriting I found seven leather-bound journals spanning from 1987 to 2019, thirty-two years of daily entries that documented her inner life with a honesty and depth that she never displayed in conversation with me or anyone else in the family, and I sat on the attic floor surrounded by dust and old furniture and read my mother's secret thoughts and discovered that the woman who raised me was not the person I believed her to be 😢
By The Curious Writer6 months ago in Confessions
The Playlist He Made
How a Stranger's Music Healed What Therapy Couldn't TRACK ONE: THE DISCOVERY The playlist appeared on my Spotify account on a Wednesday afternoon six weeks after my divorce was finalized, a collection of thirty-seven songs titled "For the Girl Who Forgot How to Sing" shared by a user whose profile name was just the letter M and whose avatar was a photograph of a piano in an empty room, and I did not know anyone with this profile and I almost deleted it as spam except that the first song on the list was "Skinny Love" by Bon Iver which was my favorite song, a song I had listened to on repeat during the worst nights of my failing marriage when I would sit in my car in the driveway unable to go inside because the silence between my husband and me had become more threatening than the loneliness of the car, and the odds of a random spammer choosing this specific song as the opener of a playlist addressed to a girl who forgot how to sing seemed too coincidental to dismiss.
By The Curious Writer6 months ago in Confessions
Observations On An Ancient Childhood. Content Warning.
Introduction I do find it amusing and odd when certain things inspire me to write but I suppose that is just the way my mind works. This morning I went out to pick up my weekly deliverance of two pints of milk from McQueen's Dairies and that started me off for this story.
By Mike Singleton 💜 Mikeydred 6 months ago in Confessions
