Routine Healing
Routine Healing

Putting myself back together was a boring, organized process. A 1,000-piece puzzle left on the coffee table for months, or in this case, years. Finally sitting down to frame myself in sky and earth. Painstakingly searching the jumble for all those matching hooks and crevices. After the chaos of him, simply paying the bills on time was a cathartic experience. Routine was my remedy. Work away the day Monday through Friday. Come home when it’s dark. Stop at Walgreens to purchase a bottle of wine and pizza rolls. Cigarettes if needed. Home to one-and-a-half glasses of wine and the allowance of one orgasmic cigarette. The order was important.

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True StoriesGuest Userabuse, domestic violence, Women, women storytelling Comments
A Field Guide To Loving
A Field Guide To Loving

I didn’t want to meet Tim at first. I’d just been burned badly by a man who said we were exclusive, and then I found out he was dating around six women at the same time. I’d gone back on the dating apps more as an act of rebellion, an action to prove to myself that my horrible experience with Jeff wasn’t going to define my experience with dating and love. But I was leery. Oh, how I was leery.

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True StoriesKristina Buschlove story, relationships, online dating, romance Comment
The Time The Pruned Finger Beckoned to Me
The Time The Pruned Finger Beckoned to Me

My friends and I share six-word memoirs, which are supposed to be a story in a nutshell. This was the one I wrote yesterday: “Naked, I paraded through the jimjilbang.” I sent this stingy, six-word sentence out to them with no further explanation. Let them wonder. But for you, I’ll flesh it out: I recently visited a Korean bathhouse, and here’s a crash course in all things jimjilbang.

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True StoriesKristina Buschself care, health, bathhouse, beauty Comments
The Hexen of Stendahl
The Hexen of Stendahl

Today is my grandmother’s 86th birthday. I met her for the first time only a few days ago. The lonely tripod that is my family in America suddenly expands and wobbles as I gain more relationships. My mother and I have travelled to a town about a hundred kilometers west of Berlin where my mother’s mother lives in a Soviet style Neubau apartment.

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True StoriesJulia Nusbaumfamily history, FamilyComment
I Knew You Would Understand
I Knew You Would Understand

My mother slips her hand into mine as we walk toward the elevator in silence. Tears slide down my face, hidden under my mask. My ten-year-old son and I are flying back home, only I don’t want to leave. At eighty-four, my mother has had her first stroke. It’s hard to figure her out again. While the stroke was not physically debilitating, it scrambled far too many files on her hard drive and erased that many more. Words she once knew disappear at random.

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True StoriesKristina Buschmotherhood, illness, family Comments
The Impermanence of Happiness
The Impermanence of Happiness

Thirty minutes from home, raindrops splattered on the windshield of my car and increased in intensity as I drove seventy-six miles per hour along the interstate. I knew the weather was supposed to turn severe later in the evening, but I thought I’d have time to make it back from my dentist appointment hours before any precipitation fell from the sky. The semi-truck ahead of me in the left lane kicked up additional water, so I flicked my wipers to high and focused my eyes on the road.

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True StoriesKristina Buschhappiness, family, life lessonsComment
Planting Holly
Planting Holly

I married my ex-husband in the early ’90s, and despite being a feminist and a working professional, I took his name. It wasn’t a difficult decision. In fact, I don’t really remember it being a decision at all. We had decided to become a family and I wanted a single, family name to unite us and the children I expected we’d have.

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True StoriesGuest Userself love, self care, names, divorce Comments
Into the Wilderness
Into the Wilderness

Dead asleep on my bed—helpless and susceptible to the dangers of the night—a bright flash of harsh light slices open my eyes to two strange faces.

The two faces command, “Wake up!”

I hear in the background my mother’s whimpering voice and then my father’s weathered voice.

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Selena RaygozaComment
Juicy
Juicy

On the dock beneath a Wolcott summer house, you show me how to cast. I flick my wrist and it goes nowhere near as far as yours. By means of sarcasm we agree it’s not the most vegan thing to do. Later by the fire, you hear the splitter splatter in the water as I roast a marshmallow in the din of our friends’ chatter and guitar tunes.

“They are taunting me,” you say of the fish, “can you hear them?”

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True StoriesKristina Buschlove, relationships, lossComment
The Soundtrack of Fury
The Soundtrack of Fury

“Why do you always play the same songs?” I’ve seen her iTunes library; there are hundreds of MP3s. The overplayed list explores grief beyond the Lilith fair trope. Some get mainstream airtime like “Drops of Jupiter” and “Meet Virginia,” others obscure, folksy lesbian coffee shop artists. She glances at me for a second before returning to her screen. “I’m making the soundtrack of us.”

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True StoriesKristina Buschlove, LGBTQIA, relationshipsComment
Bluebeard’s Last Wife
Bluebeard’s Last Wife

In the Bluebeard fairy tale, which enjoys variants across time and cultures, a boorish, rich, and mysterious man with a bluish countenance woos and takes several wives. After each whirlwind courtship and marriage, the new wife is given a key with which to breach a forbidden room. She’s instructed not to, but does so anyway, and discovers carnage; the bodies of Bluebeard’s previous wives whom he has beheaded, chopped to pieces, and/or hung from rafters or hooks.

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True StoriesKristina Buschabuse, fairy tales, marriageComment
Si No Sanas Hoy
Si No Sanas Hoy

Sana, sana, colita de rana. Si no sanas hoy, sanarás mañana.

My mother and I, along with my children, have come to visit my Tía Eva. She is my mom’s tía, my great aunt, but I have only known her as Tía. It is what I told my children to call her, as well. Just as her name hasn’t changed, neither has her house. Even though I haven’t seen her in years, I walk the same cement steps leading up from the side of the house into the wood panel living room cluttered with memorabilia. Sit on the same floral upholstered settee sofa amid the photos and porcelain figures (myriad bells and keepsake boxes), crochet doilies like the crosshatch sugar crust of conchas, on the various coffee and end tables.

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True StoriesKristina Buschmotherhood, religion, storytelling, culture Comment