Rafael Torch

Ebb and Flow: Part Two. The End. No More. Finis.

by Rafael Torch July 13, 2011

I sit on my hotel bed and say some kind of prayer, an eight word utterance I’ve imagined seemingly out of nowhere in the last few days in order to keep at bay the worst I can imagine. I say it when my body seems to fail me with a grand fatigue and deep depression [...]

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Ebb and Flow: Part One

by Rafael Torch July 10, 2011

In the great applauseless, 3 a.m., early gray of suburban Maryland, there’s just the steady drone of the streetlights outside my hotel window. I’m only an hour ahead in time zone but I feel miles and hours away from home and Emily, who has stayed behind because she can’t fly because the baby will be [...]

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I’m No Preacher

by Rafael Torch July 5, 2011

I’m no preacher nor am I a teetotaler, but I know that the fourth step of Alcoholics Anonymous states that after “we’ve admitted to being powerless over alcohol”, and after we came to believe in a Power greater than ourselves, and had made a decision to turn our lives over to It, however we knew [...]

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Scene From A Marriage: Bobby’s Plight

by Rafael Torch July 3, 2011

“I’m afraid of dying.” She moves over to me and rubs my bald head, bald from the intensive, 21-day experimental treatment I’ve undergone to try and choke my deathless cancer. “I don’t know when I got to be so afraid again, but here I am.” “Things have changed, right? I mean, things have changed. Our [...]

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Love like all the stars in the sky

by Rafael Torch June 18, 2011

My mother told me just this morning (Friday, June 17, 2011) that I should write something about how my affliction with cancer is really an affliction that the whole family has in some way. I believe her. I believe it. She says, “You should write that because we’re all affected. Maybe I’ll try my hand [...]

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Everything’s got the shine. That’s been my point.

by Rafael Torch June 16, 2011

I was telling someone that my current experimental treatment was like the experience of being in a car crash. It’s the only way I know how to describe it. Sometimes I think it’s not even the crash itself but the treatment I just had was like the moment right after collision and right before the [...]

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The Strange Half-Life

by Rafael Torch June 8, 2011
chandelier

It’s all vague dreamless nights. Nights when dreams are squashed by the intensity of sleep, a forced sleep brought on by pharmaceuticals and anxiety. Mostly, if they come, dreams haunt me before sleep befalls me — in the weird space between the closing of eyes and REM; and then there’s a long quiet nothing as [...]

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A portrait of boredom and boredom’s agents

by Rafael Torch June 6, 2011

The boredom. It’s the boredom of disease. I stare at the objects of my room to no end, until they hurt my eyes. Like I think my eyes may have grown sores on them and have broken and pussed or have broken and are bleeding. Like even closing my eyes hurts and so, hence, my [...]

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