Linda Kovic-Skow
Jun 3, 2016 | Memoir, 1st pages
Part One
The Dubois Family
1
“Je suis américaine. Je ne parle pas français.”
It took equal parts sign language, broken English and even more broken French before I understood the train attendant in Paris. Two more transfers? You’ve got to be kidding. Cursing my high-heeled shoes, I dragged my luggage down endless platforms before boarding my final train. An hour later, just as the sun set over the Loire River, we pulled into Songais. Only three other people disembarked and went off on their separate ways, hastening around me as I wrestled my suitcases into the station. Filled with both apprehension and excitement, I surveyed the room, looking for Madame Dubois, but no one there fit her description. Wandering over to one of the tall arched windows, I pressed my face against the pane, peering left and right.
The Songais train station sat on a narrow cobbled street, lined with one white stone building after another, each attached to its neighbor. The structures varied in height, either two or three stories, their rooftops gabled, some with severe peaks. A few buildings presented Juliet balconies trimmed in black wrought iron, their built-in flower boxes filled with raspberry-red geraniums. Seeing no cars or people in either direction, I refocused my attention inside the building.
As I waited, a million thoughts jumbled in my head. How would Madame Dubois react when she discovered my lie? What would I do if she refused to let me stay? Was there a train back to Paris tonight? Even if I could persuade her to let me stay, what about her husband? The longer I waited, the more agitated I became, startling whenever I heard the slightest sound. A woman entered the station, her heels tapping a steady beat on the linoleum floor. When I saw she carried a suitcase, my heart rate returned to normal.
“Avez-vous du feu?” I flinched as a handsome young man leaned toward me. Fumbling through my reference guide, I found the word feu, which meant fire, and tried to make sense of his question. Convinced this was a come-on, I glared at him and refused to answer. His shoulders slumped and he shook his head as he walked away. A few minutes later, it occurred to me he merely wanted a light for his cigarette, but by then he had vanished.
“Bonsoir, Mademoiselle Kovic.”
I spun around and saw a tall, statuesque woman, far advanced in her pregnancy, walking toward me. A burst of adrenaline surged through my body. With each step, her dark blue wool coat opened, exposing a large belly. Stopping in front of me, her lips forming a thin smile, she extended her hand in one swift motion.
Melody R. Green
May 25, 2016 | Memoir
Introduction
Thank you for picking up your copy of Beloved, I Love You So… A 40 Year Love Story Told in Letters — a book born out of enduring love.
This book was created organically, out of a need for me to express the love I continued to feel for a man who played an important part in my life, and who I was never able to forget. Over the course of 40 years, I continued to remember him, often wondering what he was doing and whether he was thinking of me.
In the early days of our love, much of our communication was played out in letters sent back and forth over the miles — so when the relationship ended, writing letters to him became a way for me to continue to communicate with my beloved across the distance of both physical and mental space.
The letters contained herein were originally intended as a way for me to process my feelings, but as I began to show the letters to friends, it became clear that others profoundly identified with my story. Eventually, a friend encouraged me to share the letters publicly, both as a way to continue to process my own feelings, but also as a way to help others laugh, cry, and heal from their own journeys through the ups and downs of love.
It is my hope that by reading Beloved, I Love You So…, you’ll find something that speaks to you, and that you’ll be able to identify with the many emotions, feelings and messages you may have wanted to send to that past or present special person in your life. It fills me with joy to think about helping others through the simple act of publishing my own story.
Whether you’re a regular letter writer or not, may Beloved, I Love You So… offer you those heartfelt love letters you’ve always wanted to receive.
Letter #1
Beloved,
I've loved you such a long time.
Sometimes joyfully, sometimes resentfully, and sometimes painfully.
I’ve loved you in meetings, trysts, holidays, and letters.
I’ve loved you in times together and times apart.
I’ve loved you as you’ve travelled the globe and I’ve stayed put.
I’ve loved you in the sunshine and in the rain.
I’ve loved you close up and from afar.
I’ve loved you as a young girl and as a mature woman.
I’ve loved you in tears, happy and sad.
I’ve loved you under the sun and in the wistful night sky filled with moon and stars.
I’ve loved you in all of my body.
I’ve loved you with my mind, my heart, and of course my soul.
I’ve loved you even when I haven’t wanted to, when I’ve pushed you from my heart and mind (or at least tried to).
I’ve loved you when I’ve pretended not to.
I’ve loved you openly, longingly, willingly, and not.
I’ve loved you when I thought I had no more love to give, and when I closed my heart to loving you.
I’ve loved you when you’ve travelled the world to see me and when you’ve gone away.
And here I am about to start my late mid-life, not yet crone and not wife . . . and still I love you.
I’ve stopped judging me for loving you.
I’ve stopped trying to figure out why or how I could.
I’ve stopped calling you and me names like fool.
I’ve stopped asking for loving you to be gone from me.
I’ve stopped running from all our history, real and imagined, present and not.
I’ve stopped trying to be with you and not . . .
I’ve stopped . . . I’ve stopped . . .
It’s when you stop that magic happens.
What is . . . is.
I love you. That is all.
Dear Beloved, love is all there is between us.
Love is everything. Everything is love.
Love is all.
I accept without wishing, wanting, hoping, desiring anything.
I accept I love you, dearest Beloved.
That truly is all.
And my heart is full and deeply grateful to experience this love for you.
Beloved, I love you so . . .
Mindy Caron
May 25, 2016 | Memoir, 1st pages
Chapter 1
I think I’m having a stroke
I grew up as most little girls do… Hoping and dreaming about that guy on a white horse that would somehow slide that glass slipper on my foot, and we would live happily ever after. I write this and laugh thinking about how independent I have always been.
How in the world did I think those things could ever happen when I refuse to let any man pay for my meal on a date? I have my dad’s voice in the back of my head, and I can see his face. “You don’t owe any man anything.”
I am so blessed in this area of my life. I have this incredible man who took the job of being my dad when it wasn’t his responsibility to do so.
Yeah, I have a “step dad” but if you say that in my company you will get “the look.” We don’t use words like “step” or “half” in my family. I was raised that the people who step up, and love you without condition are your family-period. That whole “Blood is thicker than water” deal does not apply here. I could write an entire series of books on the relationship I have with my dad, and how he saved my life many times over, but I need to keep this just about the other man in my life, the one that promised me the glass slipper, but somehow got sidetracked….
Don and I had been dating for a few months, and we both knew that this was going to be what forever was. There was this kind of instant connection that made it feel as if we had known one another our entire lives. That being said, there were some serious “red flags” that I kept seeing pop up, but I was at an age in my life that I figured we all have this baggage to deal with one aspect or another, right?
T M Raskin
May 18, 2016 | Memoir, 1st pages
CHAPTER 1
THE FUNDAMENTAL YEARS
Born on March 23, 1967, I was the second child of a twenty-six-year-old woman and a twenty-two-year-old man. When I was ten months old, my mother and father divorced due to my father’s drug addiction and my mother’s inability to handle her own emotional problems.
My story begins with my first memories, which depict the prevailing mood of my upbringing. A group of pigeons owned by a man in the apartment above us formed my earliest impressions of wildlife. Although the pigeon I remember most was the one which was smashed by a car in the alleyway, its guts and blood oozing from its flattened body. As I went to see it up close, I remember the smell of decay being rancid. I was angry with the man upstairs for not caring for his dead bird. He let it stay there, decaying for weeks until its remains became a part of the asphalt.
Chaos was a constant in this small, inner city, town just outside of Chicago. We lived in an apartment building, on Rockwell, which was full of low-income tenants and single women with children. Across the alley from our apartment was some kind of a convalescent home. On hot summer nights, when our windows were kept open, moans and occasional screams could be heard as if they were coming from the other room. If the sweltering heat did not keep me awake, my imagination of what was happening next door would.
One afternoon, I was drawn to the window facing the front of our building where there was lots of commotion. Looking down, I could see one of the neighborhood boys had put his arm through the plate glass door of our building. Blood. Screaming. He received over one hundred stitches inside and out. The next day, when he went out to ride his Big Wheel, he busted them open and had to be rushed back to the hospital.
My mother worked every day to provide for us, hence we had to be watched by babysitters. Numerous incidents happened while at various babysitters’ houses; my mother went through at least seven. Number one my mom came by, only to find my sister playing in the middle of the street. Number two hit me for pulling on their dog’s wiener. Number three moved away, leaving number four, who, we discovered after the first interview, lived in utter filth. Number five was our depressed, alcoholic neighbor. Leading to number six who was the mother of a little boy named Wolfie. She was a German immigrant’s wife.
While with babysitter number two, I was playing with all the other children until, suddenly, a commotion exploded and everyone was in a frenzy, flocking around me. A toy box lid had collapsed onto my index finger, crushing the tip beyond recognition. I was rushed to the hospital where my mother met us. The surgeon decided to put three stitches on the tip of my tiny finger to close up the hole. As I got older, my finger became more disfigured due to the utter disregard the doctor had for the aesthetic quality of his work. I now lovingly refer to my finger as my “boo-boo” finger.
Another vivid memory I have of our time in the small Chicago apartment was the afternoon my older sister fell directly on top of a sharp stick, which impaled her kneecap. Screaming, blood, chaos… My mother’s boyfriend picked her up and carried her away.
Yolanda De Iuliis
May 13, 2016 | Memoir, 1st pages
Introduction
You may ask, why would you ever set such a task onto yourself? I respond by asking you – when was the last time you ever challenged yourself rather than had someone challenging you? I came across many circumstances and different characters which changed me; consequently I felt that I could never beat these people or tasks unless I began to know how to beat myself. Then I could have the power to beat anything or anyone out there.
Yes, I felt scared to confront all of my fears, loves and daily circumstances, my addictions, loses, regrets, pains, dreams, failures, achievements, ignorance and knowledge. Wouldn’t you fear your own self? I cringe to think that others out there do not truly know. If they did, maybe the world would be a better place instead of a dying world with programmed zombies filling and killing it. You do not need to understand me, or even agree with me, but if you make it through my one year journey, then I hope you feel me, yourself and see life a little differently than before.
These are not writings for someone who does not want to see, it is a book for people who already see and want to take their mask off. What would I achieve by doing this one year challenge? It was unclear for me but I hoped that I would see myself in a completely different way from how I had when I first started. I was motivated each day with the thought of awakening my soul and by all the people who would dismiss my dreams of completion, but the main cause of this project was to observe my daily reactions to my own experiences. Would I repeat the same emotions like a robot or would I evolve without recognising myself by the end of this long gruelling process?
In one year I studied and I researched many different theories, religions, ideas, philosophies, poetry and writers to open my mind and to grow in the fastest way possible, to then present to you my thoughts differently and on subjects which may never have occurred in your mind before. At the end of the book I shall list numerous sources which I came across throughout the year, in case you would like to read or watch what my mind was projected from.
“We must conquer our own mind before delving into other minds, we must know ourselves before know- ing any other and we must remember how little we are within this vast universe that we all share and call home.”
– Yolanda De Iuliis
June O'Sullivan-Roque
May 6, 2016 | Memoir, 1st pages
A Balancing Act
I remember the first time Miss Edna came to our shop. She appeared at the door in a mist that had followed her there. There were, of course many misty mornings on the banks of the Rio Cobre, especially around Christmas time, but the mist seemed to be her mist, and it was waiting for her there at the door, patiently, like a donkey.
Miss Edna always wore somber clothes – shades like grey and beige and ochre, and that ugly color you get when you wash out your paint brush after having used all the colors on your palette. She was tall and had a leaden complexion, and she kept her coarse hair in two braids pinned together in the back with a hair clip. She had a long face, and everything on her face was long. She had a long nose and long teeth, and her chin was about three inches long.
I could not tell what it was that I did not like about Miss Edna and why I was so bothered by her because she had always treated me with kindness, but there was something in her face that made me uneasy, and an indefinable character in her presence that made me dislike her intensely.
Whenever she came, I got that indescribable feeling that you get when the room, which a moment ago was full of bright sunlight, suddenly becomes dark and grim because a big cloud is passing over the sun outside. The only thing was that with Miss Edna, the darkness stayed as long as she did, and that was always much longer than the passing of a cloud. I was ashamed that I did not like Miss Edna, so I kept it to myself.
