creative memoir writing...

Last week my class started. So far I'm loving it. I thought I'd share with you my first assignment. We had to list five devastating, tragic, or embarrasing things that happened to us in our past and write paragraphs about two of them. Below is what I wrote.

"before the last good-bye..."

That was it. After he threw his cigarette butt out the truck window, I decided I was never going to see him again. I promised myself, I would tell him once we got back to his place. Why had I hooked up with him in the first place? We’d been broken up for nine months and in those nine months I had found peace. I’d become a yoga teacher, had a meditation practice - I was flying high on self-love but thought perhaps too high so I decided to ground myself – by sleeping with him. It doesn’t get more mundane than having sex with an ex you are not in love with.

When we got back to his apartment before I said my last good-bye, I checked my messages in case there was news. I had one message. As I listened and watched him light up another cigarette disappearing into the toxic cloud, I realized it was the message I’d been dreading and secretly hoping for. “Good thing you’re a yoga teacher because I doubt you went out for drinks after leaving my office. Your test turned positive. You are pregnant,” my doctor said.

I hung up the phone and cried tears of joy and sorrow.


"broken valentine..."

The tulips, the card, the uneaten chocolates, the necklace with the little heart that he had given me lay strewn across my dining room table like relics of possibility. Gifts that were meant to bring happiness to two people in love on Valentine’s Day now brought mourning. It was the morning after and before this moment, before seeing my dining room table littered with tokens of love I thought it might not be true. I laughed at the absurdity. Everything was here as he had left it except one thing. I rubbed my ring finger with my thumb as I often did. My ring - the ring that symbolized our promise to each other was gone. The one thing he didn’t leave behind. How had it happened? How did we get here?