After a friend hadn’t been able to contact 55-year-old Roger Perkins for days, the friend finally asked police to check on him. Inside Perkins’ home — which is about a mile from where I live in Leeds, Ala. — they found him dead, apparently from natural causes. He was last known to be alive sometime in March. The coroner’s office is seeking family members to whom his body can be released. Stories such as this one are chilling to me, because I also live alone and have no family. The fact that this story is about someone who lived so close to me makes it seem especially real. I just wonder if his outcome might have been different if he had lived with someone who could have called for help. Nobody needs to die alone — and I’m not so sure that living alone is such a good idea. Everybody needs to be with someone who loves him.
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Did you ever play Angry Birds on your phone?
I’ve never spent time playing serious video games, but I enjoyed that silly casual game when it first came out for the iPhone and I kept playing new levels as they were released for several years. Until this weekend, I hadn’t launched the game for a long, long time, but I played it for a few minutes Saturday.
Playing the game made me feel nostalgic and it put me in the frame of mind of that time in my life — around 10 years ago — when I was still playing it. It reminded me warmly of playing Angry Birds and Train Yard with a girlfriend who loved me to bring my iPad to her apartment so she could play, too.
I smiled warmly until a thought suddenly wiped that smile off my face. Thinking about those games and that part of my life made me realize something I had never consciously realized. I used to do something to that girlfriend which annoyed her — just to tease her — and I can’t believe that was me.
We’re neither friends nor enemies, just strangers who share the past
Society needs storytellers to help make sense of a changing world
My bad teen poetry suggests I’ve always hungered for missing loveLoss of everything you value can be a new beginning, not the end
“Do you understand that I love you, not the things you do?”
That’s how I started my sales pitch. I didn’t have time to think about how to make my case, so I was just speaking from my heart. But I felt a lot of pressure, because I knew I would lose the woman I loved if I didn’t make my case effectively — and only she would decide whether she believed me.
I’ve been trying for days to figure out how to explain this dream. It’s too complicated to explain all the pieces, but it feels too meaningful to ignore. For weeks, I’ve been having complex dreams which played out bits and pieces of a story, but the unexpected turning point came in a dream earlier this week.
In the earlier parts of the dreams, she and I had been working on repairing a house. It was a beautiful house where we were going to live together as soon as we married. The house seemed both literal and symbolic. It was to be our home and it also represented the work we were doing to be emotionally healthy together.
But in the latest part of the story, her life completely fall apart.
‘This path leads to somewhere I think I can finally say, I’m home’
When love finally dies, it’s like a fever breaks and the pain is gone