Will they ever find out that Mike is a fraud?
No, not Mike my husband. I’m talking about Mike Ross, attorney at Pearson, etc.
I really worry about Mike, even though he’s not real. Actually, I worry about him because he’s not real. There’s almost no plausible scenario that would put us in the same circles. No, I only care about him because some screenwriter got the formula just right.
My husband and I owe a great Mike and his colleagues on Suits. Over the last few months, their high stakes corporate takeovers, epic spats, and captivating wardrobe choices have been like a trip to the spa (even better than “mudding”). Because absolutely no one on the show has children, it packs an even more satisfying escapist punch than Game of Thrones.
But then, there was the episode we watched last night - dead parents, infidelity, professional betrayal, fear of being alone, Catholic guilt, and being found out as a fraud. Messy, human stuff that you couldn’t tune out after a five-season investment. So much for escape!
This is what stories are supposed to do, you see. They’re supposed to be addictive excursions that open us to experience terrible, wonderful, tantalizing things. When the fear and pleasure centers are triggered, the brain honestly doesn’t know the difference between fiction and reality. That's why stories make us care and cry and even change the way we think.
And the ending of this particular episode was devastating. Usually, of course, autoplay would do its magic and we’d only teeter on the cliffhanger edge for a few moments. But it was a Tuesday night, and husband was feeling strong and virtuous, so he clicked the TV off.
Here's the thing about story addiction: when you don’t get your next hit, you just might have to feel something for a while.
Both of us sat there staring at the blank screen willing the clock backward so we could dive deep into this pinstripe sea and put off real life for another 44 minutes. In this silence, I felt the swell of unbidden emotions. My husband sensed the rush within me - it’s quite easy to hear your partner’s ragged breath when it’s not competing with “Previously, on Suits…”
All those lawyer problems had triggered my own doubts and fears, and though the details are as different as a Hyundai and a Bentley, the pain was universal enough.
In this binge watching culture, we’ve denied ourselves access to the real power of all these stories. We revel of the abundance of “more good TV than one could watch and still have a job!” and deny ourselves the divinely unsatiated state when we see just enough to feel something real.
I prefer mountains of laundry to mere hillocks. So, when I enter a marathon sorting and folding session, I know there will be plenty of time for introspection.
“Mom, does every story hafta have a bad guy?”
The forecast was bad. Boston didn’t know it yet, but it was halfway through the snowiest winter on record and Valentine’s Day was bringing more than roses and the chocolate. We were hurtling along the MassPike right into the not-so-candy heart of a blizzard.
If you wanted to flatter me when I was twenty, you would ask you to help you analyze a poem. Yeats and the handful of Irish women poets who found their voices at the turn of our own century were my specialty.
Glasses clink and voices rise and fall. Sudden laughter startled the toddler whose trying to sleep hours after her bedtime.
It's a family gathering, and though too many of us are missing, it has its own perfection.
Yesterday while I was drinking tea – my morning ritual when life isn’t too chaotic – a sudden flutter of shadows dappled the wall. I jumped up and turned to the window to see a huge flock of birds settling in the trees outside, their noise audible through glass and wood. It felt like a revelation, like a benediction. Things are on the wing. Change is coming. Good change, I think. If I had lived in another time, I would have been an ornithomancer. I study the flights of birds for wordless messages, their calligraphy etched dark against the winter sky.
“Oh, Marisa!” exclaimed a new client. “We worked together so long ago, but I have had your name filed away in my mind. When I saw one of your Strong Stories I knew that I had to call you.”
Midday on Super Tuesday 2008 we were still undecided. I paced in front of the Vassar library on my lunch hour, flip phone pressed to my ear.
We’re a football family, but I feel there should be an asterisk beside our names.
At our house, there’s a love for the game and even for the hype. But there is also a whole lot of ambivalence.
On the drive to Sunday School I count the cars in the local restaurant parking lot. It’s a nice place with creative food, but there are rarely more than one or two cars. The hand scrawled “Brunch” sign looks more forlorn each week.
“Does it feel like a good sign or a bad sign that the dealership uses your old plant as a carpark?” 
Stories don’t generally emerge from self-discovery style writing prompts. At least not directly.
“
It went on for pages. Exacting descriptions took the reader minute-by-minute through the entire 28-hour process. Though the story was written over several weeks, the narrator would tell you she remembered every detail because she'd been exultantly present in every moment.
We lived one hundred feet from the fastest flowing river in Europe. At least that’s what the guidebooks said. 
“You look like you’re in agony, dear one.”
He left. And then he came back.
In the midst of it all, we survived on wholesome, fresh food an the stuff from back of the freezer. We wrote notes to say how we missed him and we FaceTime'd every night. We counted sleeps 'til he came back - even the that were nights so disrupted it felt as if no one slept at all.
A teacher of environmental biology asks her two questions at the start of each semester.