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Sometimes Healing Means Turning Your Life Upside-Down

September 6, 2021June 7, 2024 by RasmeniaNo Comments

Trauma is an unpredictable and sneaky thing. Most of us have those experiences in our personal backstories that have left us softer in some places, harder in others. Maybe we get a little twitchy when a particular name or song evokes a painful memory. In the current parlance, we get triggered.That kind of trauma, though, that wound you can take a good long look at and assess just how much damage it's done to you, that's one thing. It's something you can reckon with, maybe show it to someone else who can sit you down and help you staunch the bleeding. Dress that wound. Get you back up on your feet again. You're wobbly, stumbling around, and you fall on your face now and then, but you're moving forward again.But what about the damage you don't see? What do you do with a splinter that's lodged in your psyche, causing you to do all kinds of uncharacteristic shit when you...

Why I’m No Longer Mad at Boulder, Colorado

October 7, 2020June 7, 2024 by RasmeniaNo Comments

You can't go home again. That's what they say. Which is weird, because the truth is that you never really leave. Regardless of how many years or miles pass by, there's always a part of you trapped in that place. A splinter of home is forever lodged in your psyche.Home is a complicated thing. It isn't just a place. I'm not talking about those corny plaques that everyone's grandma has hanging in their kitchen that says something like, "Home isn't a place, it's a feeling." Or even worse, "Home is where the heart is." That's all too simple and trite. Especially if you've had many homes.One of those places wasn't my home at all. I never lived in Boulder, Colorado. And yet, I've long had a thorny relationship with the place.Curled up on the floor of my cramped bedroom in a little trailer park in Indiana, I drew one enormous picture after another of mountain scenes with my fat Crayola...

Resurrection Through Fiction

February 3, 2020June 7, 2024 by RasmeniaNo Comments

Somewhere in northern Colorado there's a dingy gray duplex sitting on a cul-de-sac near the railroad tracks. Behind it is a dry, yellow field where grasshoppers and mice keep busy.One half of the duplex is occupied by my mother and a version of me at 16 years old. The other half is occupied by another single mother and her 16-year-old son, Shawn.My friend Shawn.We call one another "Neighbor Boy" and "Neighbor Girl."We call the duplex "Our House."There are shenanigans. There's trouble and fun. But life is always fucking with things, flipping them upside down, changing them into something new and almost unrecognizable.People drift apart. They move away, have adventures and things happen to them.By the time we turn 19, Shawn is a quadriplegic due to a car accident and I'm in Florida, acquainting myself with the redneck bar scene.I soon flee back to Colorado, and from time to time, I run into my old friend at a party, a mutual...