Submitted by: Rickie
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( 3.1 / 100 )Thanks, Benjamin, for being such a dick. You helped me to stop loving you. I needed to. For too long I wouldn't let go. Then I did, had to, and opened myself up to meet someone I'm much better suited to. So I mean it: Thank god you committed to acting like such a mean-spirited, ignorant baboon. Thank god.
Submitted by: Sandra
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( 3 / 76 )Thank you for letting me smell the perfume on your wrist. I've been high ever since. Lady, I'm nuts for you.
Submitted by: George
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( 2.9 / 82 )I had a birthday party for myself. Most of my friends planned to come. One woman, Ellen, also came. I don't know her well, but I've always liked her. Some of my close friends showed up late, didn't bother with a gift; one of my friends forgot the night altogether. I tried not to be bothered by all this; birthdays come fast at my age, but I couldn't help notice that Ellen showed up early, helped me set up, and then later in the night gave me this great, really thoughtful gift. It made me feel special. It was unexpected. Thank you, Ellen, for taking a moment to think of me. You made my birthday.
Submitted by: Mary
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( 3.2 / 98 )I've been sad for some days. I can't say why exactly. The reasons shift, but today something changed. Maybe I slept well. Maybe I ate better than usual or maybe it was just time. I loved life today -- everything about it, even the subway. I loved it all and I'm grateful.
Submitted by: Anne
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( 2.7 / 94 )Rebecca:
We had agreed you might come to visit this October for your birthday, but then we let it slide. I got so caught up in work. I’ve had so much lately, too much, and so I took a much-needed break from the city and my apartment, from me. I wish I had not run out of gas so utterly, and more I wish I had contacted you to tell you how I’d let the magazine run me down, but I was caught up, dealing with the nonsense, all the deadlines and egos, and then the race for the finish line and some version of calm. So I rang you on your birthday to tell your voice mail I missed you and that I was sorry we’d not made the trip happen. I’ve not heard from you. That’s the way of distance, of lives lived separately, of inertia. But today on the subway platform one of your songs came on in a shuffle on my Ipod. There was your voice, its fine, clear pitch and texture, its beauty and feeling; and there was you there behind it, breathing there. You were performing, taking chances as you do, and because I know you, I could hear you despairing in turns and rejoicing at others. What singular songs you’ve written, lovely Becca, never mind all your poems and prose. I wish your father was not ill and in that faraway world. I wish I could make you feel as we did in graduate school, make you laugh about that woman contorting me in ungodly positions on that old tanning bed all for a simple leg wax. This is all to say, I’m awfully grateful that you’re in my life, even if you’re not at hand. I’m grateful for the ways we still know and love each other even after all these years, after all this distance. I remember you.
Submitted by: Amy
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( 2.9 / 98 )I was so sick, with a virus. I had a bad fever. I had terrible aches and pains. I live alone and though I'm young I didn't feel that way. I tried to get to the pharmacy to pick up a prescription but felt dizzy en route. My neighbor saw me struggling back up the stairs and went to the pharmacy for me. Unasked, he also got me zinc lozenges, miso soup, ginger ale and more. I tell you, it made me cry. We've never been really close. We say hi, exchange pleasantries, but when I needed someone, he was the one who stepped up.
Submitted by: Andy
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( 3 / 70 )How did he do it? Coming on sixty years ago, a Frenchman wrote a story, rooted in 18th- an 19th-century farce but focused on the then threatening landscape of interwar European bourgeois society, and filmed it. The production features what is now called an ensemble cast and is mostly talky, with a only few scenes of mild action -- a rabbit hunt, a climactic shooting, and also a pillow fight and an amateurs' stage show. But somehow, through its words, its dramatic convolutions, its all-seeing camera, and its insistence, made explicit, that we all have our reasons for both the noble and the inane things that we do, those recorded sounds and flickering shadows convey a moving warmth and indomitable hope for even the darkest of times. Part of that triumph arises from the magic of cinema itself. It's from the lambent depths of THE RULES OF THE GAME (LA REGLE DU JEU), though, that layer upon layer of elemental humanity emerge, inspiring and reassuring this viewer still. Merci, Jean Renoir.
Submitted by: D
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( 3.1 / 77 )I was anxious. I was thinking about bills, how long it's been since I got away, work, work, work. I couldn't sleep. So just before 5 a.m. I got up from bed, left my family, and went walking in the city until first light. I had never seen it at first light. It was a new place. It was glorious.
Submitted by: Robert
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( 3.1 / 71 )When I get this tired, this depleted, I cannot imagine I can make new or better efforts. I do not believe I can overcome what has been lost -- love, people, dreams. But then I hear your voice on the phone; or I see you -- old love, old friend, family, you are all these -- and I feel a jolt; I feel life there after all, a willingness to try again and again and again.
Submitted by: Shorty
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( 3 / 70 )Thank you to my best friend, the man I call Gandhi (a nickname). He sticks with me. We say people are bad, basically, but my friend is not, not even remotely. Some of us are indeed bad, all or partly, but my friend is so loyal and believes so hard in the best for me, for him, for you, that he creates balance just by walking around. Thank you, Gandhi. Thank you for your faith. May I be as good a friend, as good an example.
Submitted by: Andal
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( 3.1 / 80 )Life is hard, and I'm grateful to those people out there, from writers to pundits, holy men to cartoon characters, who remind us that we can't personalize all that goes wrong for us. Stuff does, despite one's best efforts, despite all the wishing and hoping and praying, and will go wrong. We have to fail sometimes, and we have to accept it as part of the human contract, not as a defect or terrible sentence. Along these lines, there was a series in Newsweek recently that collected brief essays from accomplished women. Many of them said that failing was the necessary step or several steps before (and often in tandem with) success. Most of us are not taught this -- to allow ourselves to fail, to try, even if we don't or won't succeed. We creep around avoiding mistakes, avoiding unpleasantness; we live with so much fear. I shake free of that sometimes and am also grateful. A poem put me in mind of all this today. It's by Jane Hirshfield. It reads: "Even now,/decades after,/I wash my face with cold water--/Not for discipline, nor memory, nor the icy awakening slap,/but to practice/choosing/to make the unwanted wanted."
Submitted by: Dolores
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( 3 / 73 )I thank the People's Republic of China for granting me and my husband permission to adopt our absolutely wonderful, strong and lovely daughter, Faye, and for giving us the opportunity to be parents and a family together.
Submitted by: Susan
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( 3.1 / 83 )I would like to thank my wife for loving me through tough times, when she didn't want to, for forgiving me for forgetting love is about endurance, the long view.
Submitted by: Jeff
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( 2.9 / 70 )There was this bird on the sidewalk. It was a city sidewalk. Night was coming on and it would have been easy to step on it -- moving as fast as we do here, in the city, I almost did. I stood by it for a time, making sure no one would. The bird was young; it had more fluff than feathers, and it would not move no matter what I did to cause it to. A woman came upon me and saw the bird. We agreed it was in danger (more than one kind, it seems). I asked if she had a napkin or something so I could pick it up and move it (I remembered warnings, trustworthy or not, from all sorts of people about not touching birds; that our oils, our hands are a threat to them). She had a plastic bag full of stuff. She dumped the bag out on the sidewalk and handed it to me so I could use it as a glove. She didn't even hesitate; her stuff just poured out. The bird trembled in my bagged hand but didn't resist. It was unbelievably tiny and fragile. I could have crushed it. I put it in a planter, made sure it had its footing, and then I returned the bag. I wanted to hug that woman, but she was getting her stuff together and probably would have found it odd that I was so grateful. But we saved that bird for a time and she was so willing, understood my need to help so perfectly. Like I said, she didn't hesitate, and that bird was so tiny.
Submitted by: Grace
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( 2.8 / 62 )My friend Sam: I need to thank everything that is everything for her. She's been a shock of pleasure, joy, chaos, and comfort in my life. She's known some challenges, and though she wasn't blessed with the most loving mother, she's learned to love and live with such intensity, ingenuity, and grace. I'm not kidding. This woman puts that nurture thing to shame. She's created herself and does so every day – she's got her eyes on life as she'd like to see and live it, not as it was doled out on the sad soup line. I wish you knew her. She'd make you laugh and cry.
Submitted by: Colette
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( 2.9 / 85 )PG-
Thank you for going out to dinner with me after that awful movie.
You are the loveliest thing around.
Submitted by: Coyote
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( 3.2 / 83 )The guy at my local coffee place, a friend and a stranger both, was kind to me today. A song was playing about the most beautiful girl in the world. Maybe it was a Prince song; I could only hear the high notes over the din. He said, "That's your song; that's about you." Yes, he's a practiced flirt, and I'm sure that's a line he's used on any number of women today, but I needed it this morning -- I was tired and lonely and the weather has been too heavy and unpromising for October. Once in a while every woman likes to think for a time -- for the length of time a compliment and its afterglow lasts -- that she's the loveliest thing around, that someone might write a song just for her.
Submitted by: G girl
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( 2.9 / 76 )I want to thank New York City -- it's a big, bad, beautiful place. It smells and it shines. It offers so much and it takes so much. It works you, but it lets you work it too -- it can be a dirty old miracle-maker and because its citizens know that, we all walk around full of expectancy, some dread, but really with hope popping through us. It can happen here. It does all the time. It's happening right now.
Submitted by: Your city neighbor
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( 2.9 / 67 )
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