I come from a rather strange family. I always felt something was off, though I couldn’t name it as a child — only that everyone around me seemed duller, simpler, smaller than the picture a kid likes to paint of their own family. My grandfather, for example, owned exactly two… Read More
People come and go in everyone’s life. Sometimes they seep in over weeks and months, others rearrange everything around us in a single explosion. Some of them stick around for a while. They become friends, lovers, maybe enemies, rarely partners. They’ll be with us for a summer, some will spend… Read More
When you get entangled in your memories, sooner or later you arrive at your great loves. That’s what happened to me. I recently wrote about the first one, the real one, the breakthrough that showed me how wonderful it is to belong to someone. Which made me realize what a… Read More
I’ve said before that my first real girlfriend wasn’t the “girl next door,” but the most beautiful, most popular girl at school—the one who always stood in the middle in photos because everyone looked at her, whether they wanted to or not.What I haven’t written about is that I had… Read More
I was talking to an old friend the other day. I hardly have anyone left from my past, and most of them I don’t really miss. To be honest, I’ve only ever had one true friend. He died when he was nineteen, and I never went looking for a replacement…. Read More
A few days ago, Facebook threw one of my long-forgotten contacts back into my feed. I hadn’t seen her in at least thirty years. She’d aged—like all of us—but still… there was something about her. Something that made me stop scrolling. She was still attractive, with that quiet beauty she… Read More
I often marvel at how my 12-year-old son doesn’t have any kind of “defined” musical taste. I, on the other hand, fell in love with rock music at the age of 10, though, to be fair, it wasn’t exactly hard back then. Many people—including myself—see the ’80s as one of… Read More
I have quite a few stories where I no longer remember the names of the people involved. Not because they didn’t matter — they did, very much so — but because their names were the least important thing about them. It’s as if the mind deliberately smudges out the trivial… Read More
At eleven, the cinema was the only place where we could truly vanish. Not from the world – from ourselves. Darkness had a peculiar weight back then, a kind of layered significance. There were days when we rushed out of the 3:30 screening straight into another cinema for the 5:45,… Read More
It was April 1986. Springtime. The year that changed my life. I won a math competition, got accepted to the math program at a prestigious elite high school, and was even well-liked at school. By then, I’d had some fantastic concert experiences: I’d seen P. Mobil, Iron Maiden, and Depeche… Read More