Do you ever find yourself in such a rut that you have nothing new to say?
I repeat stories.
I repeat the pictures of my past to new faces as I'm jerked this way and that on the same bus every day.
The bloody bodies of muslims on the streets of Brooklyn as their taxi doors are still flung open in the anticipation of a fare.
The surreal picture of a city under attack and the scar tissue it left behind in my lungs.
The number of coincidences and unexplainable ties between people that mean it must be fate, parallel lives that I deny for a prettier face.
I repeat the stories of my childhood
The hooded figure that made eight of us girls sit bolt straight
The threaded needle that my friend pierced my skin with over and over until the ink and the blood mixed dripping down my leg.
I repeat the stories of galavanting through foreign countries with strangers
My love affair in Rome, in hawaii, in New York
I repeat these stories until they are no longer real.
I go to church to observe delusion
I accept blasphemy and a new nickname
because at the conclusion of my stories my friends exclaim: Jesus!
I repeat these images, sounds and feelings until they become stories.
The experiences are lost in the retelling.
Have I so little faith that sensationalism takes the place of true experience?