ByMichelle Adam
Have you ever written a letter to your father, or someone, with no intention of sharing it? I did, many moons ago, on Father’s Day, as I lived in my parent’s house in New Jersey, healing from physical and emotional pain. “It’s strange celebrating Father’s Day with this silence between us,” I wrote. “Your silence, your temper,…
ByMichelle Adam
“There are so many times you have been with me, and yet I have not seen you. I feel touched, moved, overwhelmed inside this little heart of mine by the guide you have been so long—an angel so present on this earth, so alive within me, so much a part of me,” I wrote from…
ByMichelle Adam
I was angry at my father inside my dream of almost 20 years ago. In that nighttime journey, I had discovered sculptures of Italy’s Renaissance artist Michelangelo below a pile of ice in a freezer. I was angry at my father for directing conversations toward rational conclusions that had nothing to do with the emotions…
ByMichelle Adam
“Love spreads her ashes on my bed tonight, the nightingale calls a sound of surrender. The feelings in my heart are distant cries, unavailable to myself,” I wrote eighteen years ago in my journal as I lived in my parent’s New Jersey home at age thirty, inside that place we perceive as stuck, when, in…
ByMichelle Adam
“Every human being at some time had tragedy enter his life; at that moment, God challenged one to confront Him and to answer His question: “Why dost thou cling to an existence so short and so filled with suffering? What is the meaning of this struggle?” I wrote down this passage of Paulo Coelho’s The…
ByMichelle Adam
Struck by these lines from The Last Temptation of Christ movie I watched almost 20 years ago, I wrote them down: “The dual substance of Christ—the yearning, so human, so superhuman, of man to attain God…has always been a deep inscrutable mystery to me. My principle anguish and source of all my joys and sorrows…
ByMichelle Adam
I woke up this morning with baby fresh skin—or that’s how it felt. The crumbling, old layers of skin, fraught with fear and uncertainly, shed themselves in my sleep after hours of writing chapters in my novel last night. I woke with less pain than I had had for days, and I attributed it to…
ByMichelle Adam
“Those guys there are not moving,” my father said to me in a dream I had while living in my parents’ New Jersey house, healing from immense hip pain and writing my novel. “They are just floating in space and will never get us home.” I dreamed I was on a blanket—yes a blanket!—floating in…
ByMichelle Adam
“A stillness was born yesterday, wanting everyday more,” I wrote as Christmas approached in my parent’s small home in New Jersey. I continued to write my novel, and search for that place within that struggled to show her face while trying to walk again. “Where are you going with all this time on your hands?”…
ByMichelle Adam
“The last rays of autumn, before winter’s claustrophobia, force me to find hope elsewhere,” I wrote in my journal almost twenty years ago in my parents’ house in New Jersey. It’s ironic to look this far back into the past and track my writing of a similar season as now, here in New Mexico, where…
ByMichelle Adam
Another month passed by in New Jersey, with the highway noise bleeding into the background of my consciousness as I unraveled this person I had been. And almost every day and evening I wrote, adding sentences to my novel from an unknown place. “Writing this book is hard,” I scribbled in my journal. “It’s hard…
ByMichelle Adam
The summer rain came and went; the cars on the nearby New Jersey highway hummed incessantly; and the fast paced East Coast life continued as I lived with my parents in an effort to heal the pain in my hip. I found work as an assistant editor and writer for an Irish magazine whose offices…